The following is a conversation with Michael Malis and Yaron Brooke, Michael's third time
on this podcast and Yaron's second, but together for the first time.
Michael is an anarchist, political thinker, host of a podcast called You're Welcome and
author of Dear Reader, The New Right and two upcoming books, Anarchist Handbook and The
White Pill. Yaron is an Objectivist Philosopher, Chairman of the Einrand Institute,
host of the Yaron Brooke Show and co-author of The Free Market Revolution and Equal is Unfair.
Quick mention of our sponsors, Ground News, Public Goods, Athletic Greens, Brave and Four
Sigmatic. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say
that this conversation is a kind of experiment. Both Michael and Yaron are thoughtful and passionate,
united in part by an interest in the history and philosophy of Einrand, but they are also very
different in style. Good conversation, like good food, is often made delicious by pairing of
contrasting elements. For example, someone suggested I try a peanut butter, bacon and banana
sandwich, which apparently is very good. Among the three of us, I don't know who's the peanut
butter, who's the bacon and who's the banana. I'm guessing it's probably me. I'm the banana.
But I hope the final result, the final dish, if you will, is equally delicious. We talked through,
I think, a lot of interesting ideas, sometimes disagreeing, sometimes even, in rare cases,
saying something humorous, including dark humor, especially Michael's case. All three of us are
sensitive to the suffering in the world today and throughout human history. We think about it,
we talk about it, and we deal with it in different ways. Be patient with us. Whether you agree,
disagree, enjoy or dislike the result, I hope you feel listened. You're a wiser person on the other
end of it. I know I was. Mostly, I really enjoyed this conversation because no matter what, Michael
and Yaron believe, underneath it all, they're genuine, kind human beings that I'm lucky to be
able to hang out with and learn from. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here's my conversation
with Michael Malis and Yaron Rook. I've been a huge fan of the two of you for the longest time.
Are we recording now? Is it starting or are you just talking? I'm not recording at all.
I'm not going to compliment this if it's not part of the show. Yes, he does. All the time.
He speaks very highly of me. You, I don't know. Maybe he's being charity. I'm not sure. He only
does this to me on the show. Objectives don't like charity, so don't compliment him. He won't
think it's sincere. There you go. So it's an incredible honor that both of you would show up
here. Let me just ask this profound philosophical question. How well do you think we would get
along if we were stuck in a desert island together? What would life be like? I thought the original
question you had that you sent us this question was how long would it take for us to murder one
another or something? There was murder in the question, if I remember. Listen, he sent us homework,
right? All these questions. I ignored it. I didn't spend four years at Patrick Henry University to
do homework. To answer your question, I think it would be very easy for us to live together in
desert island in terms of interpersonal. I say this because I know a lot of people who have been
the show survivor and I know a little bit about the dynamics. So when you have people who are
intelligent, who are going to have the same goals, and there's space to go away if I'm annoyed at you,
I don't think it would be that hard at all. What's our goals on a desert island? Food, shelter,
survival. Survival, basically. Survival and getting out of it, right? You don't want to stay on
the desert island. So yeah, I don't think, I think that's two of any three, you know,
even semi-rational people who basically share the goal that they want to survive,
they want to thrive, they want to get off of the island. Why would there be conflict?
I mean, there would be conflict, and there can be conflict, but they'd find ways to deal with it.
I don't have this negative view of human beings, particularly not as individuals. It's when they
get into mobs and groups and collectives that ideology can really motivate them to do horrible
things. One of the things that really drives me crazy is how sinister an impact the book Lord
the Flies has had on our culture. I read it in high school. It's a superb book. That's not even a
question, but it's not accurate. We see in many situations where people are trapped together under
difficult circumstances, obviously that book's about children, that very quickly it is not about
conflict. It very quickly becomes about cooperation. Let's work together. We all have the same goal.
This is not a time to worry about other things. It really, the human beings, the animal instinct
that kicks in is the social animal. I'm going to shut up and go over there and stop my feet
instead of arguing with your own because we're really trapped in the situation and we need to
make it work. To the extent that they're bad people, bad people are dealt with. This is true
of all of... How did we survive as a species? How have we survived as a species? We've been on a
desert island in a sense as a species forever. Tribes survived. They survived by cooperation.
They survived by dealing with bad people. Civilization is created by people cooperating
and working together and allowing individuals to thrive within the group. When bad people arise,
they deal with them. Now, sometimes these groups get captured by bad people and bad ideas and
probably from day one that was going on, the whole tribe is probably a bad idea to begin with.
But underneath it all, the fact is that to survive as a species, we need to think. We
need to be rational. If we don't have any respect for reason, then we would all die. We would die
off. That's a hopeful message, but where does that go wrong? With three people,
we might get along. We would focus on the basics of life where similar goals...
Once women are introduced, they're incessant irrationalism and less of their hormones for S.O.L.
Look, if you have a desert island, it would be nice, but without women, it wouldn't be fun.
I'm going to edit out half the things Michael said during the broadcast.
As you know, I used to run the Einrand Institute. She was a woman last time I looked.
Oh, wait a minute. You know exactly what I'm going to say. When Ludwig von Mises or Haslitt,
I don't know who it was. Mises was praising Einrand and I think it was Haslitt who said it to her.
He said, Ludwig von Mises said, you're the smartest man I've ever met. Einrand said,
did he say man? Right? No, she viewed as a compliment.
All right, but she wanted to be clear that he said man. She was excited.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. But she was.
I took it as her perceiving him as seeing her as a full equal.
Oh, I think that's right. I think that's right. Plus, I think the perception out there,
the perception and the culture of man as being rational was a compliment to her.
Because that was affirming that he viewed her as a rational.
Yeah, because Mises' old school, he's an older Eastern European guy. So he would
definitely have these rigid views. Like his wife, I read her autobiography, Margie von Mises.
And basically, he made her his secretary to the point where like he's typing something
or he had something handwritten. She had to type it out. And if she made a typo,
he would tear up the page. She had to start from the beginning. But it's like, that's
this is the role of the man, this is the role of the woman. So for him to regard her,
this was kind of a breaking through moment, not that she was secretly misogynist.
So I think we go wrong when people try to understand the world around them and come up
with wrong ideas. And it's natural that they would come up with wrong ideas,
because it's hard to figure out what's right. So we start with trying to come up with mystical
explanations for the existence of the things around us. And that, I think, very quickly
leads to some people being able to communicate with the mystical stuff out there and some people
not being able to communicate and some people wanting to control other people and using those
pseudo explanations as a way to control. So you always have Rand called it a tiller and the
witch doctor. You always have a witch doctor, the mystic, the philosopher, the intellectual,
the philosopher, you know, king is a unity of the and you have an attila, you have somebody who
wants to control other people who's willing to use force to control other people. And when those
two get together, that's when things go bad. And unfortunately, 95, 98% of human history is when
those two are together. And so the not having them together, having the right ideas and the
right ideas are ones that are not exclusive to those guys and where we don't allow a tiller to
have that kind of physical power over us. That's an exception and that's rare. And that's, that's
what needs to be defended. Stalin's not personally killing people. Hitler's not personally killing
people. Charles Manson's not personally killing people. They need their goons. They need their
goons. But also, they don't, they don't have original ideas. Nothing Stalin says is original
to him, right? He needs a Marx, even Lenin, right? He, they all need a Marx, right? They all, and
Marx needs a particular line of thinkers that come before him that, that set him up for these kind
of ideas. So, so Stalin, both needs his goons, even though he's somewhat of a goon, particularly
Stalin. He has a bank robbery. Yeah. And then, so take Lenin, Lenin, I think is a better example,
because Lenin's more intellectual, if you will. But Lenin needs his goons, he needs his Stalin's,
but Lenin also needs his Marx. And we don't want to let Marx off the hook because Marx knows,
I think, implicitly, that his ideas have to lead to Lenin and Stalin. His ideas are not neutral.
I don't think it's implicit at all. I think Marx very much glorified revolution, blood and terror.
This is not implicit in the slightest. No, absolutely. I mean, there are letters between
him and Engels where they talk about which peoples will be, have to be eliminated, because
they don't have that proletarian thing, right? So, so I think there's certain, certain peoples
in Southern Europe are not appropriate for the utopia to come and will have to be gone.
And Marx also had this concept, which we still see today in garbled ways of polylogism,
which is if you're a capitalist and I'm bourgeois or I'm a worker, you just, your logic is different
than mine. It's literally going to be impossible for us to communicate. And at a certain point,
you're going to have to be liquidated. And they pretend that doesn't mean murdered, but it means
murdered. And very quickly, everyone becomes a capitalist or bourgeois. And then you have,
and then you have, you know, the, the Hall of D'Amore and things like this.
No, he knows exactly what it's going to lead. And this is why, you know, people say, oh,
Marx is not evil. He just wrote books. No, it's the people who write books who are responsible
for the way people, history evolves. And they know, they know the bad guys certainly know
the consequence of their ideas. And, and they need to bear the moral responsibility for what,
what happens when their ideas are implemented. Here's the way, can I ask a question?
Yeah. Because I, I think I know more about Rand and Yaron does. So let's see. Okay.
The gauntlet has been thrown down. Who, who did I ran say is the most evil man who ever lived?
Emmanuel Kant. That's right. Correct. No, that I know. I mean, yeah. So it's a,
it's a big deal that Emmanuel Kant is. And, and most people don't understand why, because
if you read Kant, there's certain passages in Kant that sound pretty liberal. They sound pretty,
he's, he's for the, it sounds like he's for the individual. He sounds like he's for the American
revolution, things like that. But when you, when you actually read his philosophy and what he's
trying to defend and what he's trying to undermine, he's trying to undermine the foundations that make
the revolution possible, that make freedom and individualism possible. He's trying to destroy
the enlightenment. And the enlightenment is, are those ideas that make freedom, individualism
feasible? He's trying to undermine reason. And without reason, we're nothing. We're not, we can't
survive as a species. So, and that's why she thought he was the most evil person, because
his ideas undermine the very foundations of what it requires to be a human being,
reason and individualism. Those are the things she's trying to eviscerate.
I know you've, you've talked about Hoffman before. So Hoffman is a modern day attempt to
Donald Hoffman, Donald Hoffman. Donald Hoffman is the University of California,
Ovine, a neurologist, a neuroscientist, something like that. So I met him once and we went,
at one of these conferences where you do a quick intro, you said, and you do a quick intro,
his introduction was, I've just written a book that proves that evolution has conditioned us
not to see reality. Okay, that is very content. Yeah. And he is basically just presenting pseudoscience
to defend Kant's position about epistemology and about, and about metaphysics. And there's
nothing, there's nothing original there. And he puts up a bunch of equations. And he says,
I ran a simulation and it proves I'm right. So Yaron is a little bit frustrated with Donald
Hoffman's work. Let me... I'm frustrated. I just think it's completely wrong. And it is,
and it's anti-life, anti-mind, anti-evolution. I think he's an anti-evolutionist at the end.
And I think it, you know, anytime you say, look, here's the important point,
anytime you say reality doesn't exist. Or that you perceive it. Well, who are you? What do you
mean by, what do any of your words mean? What does anything you say even mean if it doesn't
refer to something that's actually out there in reality? Let me try to defend this point of
view. Because in a certain kind of sense, I hear it as being humble in the face of the
uncertainty that's around us. Sort of, you know, when you speak with the confidence of
Ein Rand and yourself, that reason can be like this weapon that cuts through all the bullshit
of the world and makes us like have an ethical moral life and all those kinds of things.
You kind of assume that reason is a superpower that has no limits.
See, this is already leading to a murder by words. Yeah. And we've been only talking for 20 minutes.
We wouldn't get along together on an island. We just make him our slave.
We're all going to get along. He's just going to do the work.
But I'm afraid I cannot provide any value as a slave. So this is not going to end well for me.
We could provide value as dinner. That's the problem. I'm trying to get it.
That's a solution.
Okay. But Donald Hoffman says that there is like, he makes an argument that exactly as you said,
that what we perceive is not, is very, very far from actual physical reality. In fact,
we're not able to perceive the physical reality at all. And he also makes the bigger claim that
evolution prefers beings who are not attached to reality. So like evolution created creatures
that are basically functioning way outside of what the physical reality is.
I got this. I got this. Okay. Because there's a lot to unpack here and I ate all of it.
Okay. First of all, no, no, I'm serious. First of all, when you were making that comment about
how reason is a superpower beyond limit, you're being ironic, but it's true. And I'll give you
one example, which is astronomy. If you look at the physical size of the universe, it's literally
in one sense incomprehensible. So he's right in the sense that I do not understand and none of us
understand what it means for 93 million miles away for the sun to be. It makes no, it's a number
on another screen, right? That said, the fact that my mind, and I'm not one of the great thinkers
of all time, is capable, yet there, is capable of appreciating what the sun means, what heliocentrism
means. The fact that you're a math person, that you could look at galaxies and reduce it to 10 to
the 64th power in terms of distance, that shows the unlimited capacity of the human mind and reason.
Number one, number two is if he says that evolution favors those who are not in touch with reality,
and I don't know in what context he's saying that, because that sentence could mean a lot of
different things. Evolution is what guides, reality is what guides evolution. Evolution works
because you are fitted to the reality of the situation around you. It's not that someone is
sitting down and says, well, I'm going to add a fin to this animal, and that fin helps it swim.
I engineered a check mark. It's that mutations occur. The vast majority of these mutations are
against reality. They do not further this animal's life or this plant's life or this fungus's life,
but the ones that are in touch with reality such as, okay, it's really cold here. There's no predators
here. If I could figure out, and I'm using that term very loosely, a way where I could survive in
the cold, I don't have predation. It's really great. The fact that unconsciously and mindlessly,
this process can force the mutation and evolution of the form precisely means that they're in touch
with reality. Now, if he means the consciousness is not in touch with reality, that's another thing
that I really hate. You're referring to the reality as the biological reality of evolution,
but all of that is based on many other layers of abstraction that ultimately has quantum mechanics
underneath it all. And he's saying somewhere along the layers, you start to lose more and more and
more attachment to the actual. I do not, I despise the idea. I say despise. I'm not using this.
I'm not joking. The idea that the reality we don't live in is somehow more real than this.
That is a very dangerous idea to say, well, quantum works in this way, and I'm sure he's
correct and none of us disagree with that. What we perceive macro works in a different way.
Well, that's the real reality and this is fake. Bullshit. This is the real reality.
That is a different type of a subset, but no one's living there. And humanity is the starting
point. It's a subset that has to integrate with this world. There isn't two worlds, one in the
quantum world and one here. They're integrated. Now, we might not have the scientific knowledge
to know how they're integrated, but so what? We know that there's only one reality and that's
this one. He has this difference. He says evolution matches up to fitness, not to reality. And he
creates this dichotomy between fitness and reality, but that's complete nonsense. There is no such
thing as a concept of fitness outside of fitness to what? To reality. Fitness and reality are the
same thing. They're not separate things. So the whole way he sets this up intellectually is wrong,
I think to some extent dishonest and suddenly philosophically corrupt. And it's Kantian.
Again, he's accepted Kant's ideas and everybody pretty much has accepted Kant's ideas for the
last 200 years. And they give it a different facade and he's giving it an evolutionary facade,
but it's just a facade for the same idea. And that is that somehow because we have eyes,
we cannot see because the light waves are going through a medium and that medium necessarily
distorted. The medium changes the resolution at which you see. Like if I take off my glasses,
I'm seeing it a little differently, but the thing is still there. And the thing is still
there in the way I see it because the handle, I'm grasping the handle and lifting the cup.
That's not an illusion. That is a real cup. So do you think some things are more real than others?
For example, money, there's a bunch of things that seem real. This is not an animal farm
reference. Is this going to be about love? There's nothing as real as love, right, Lex?
Love is a fundamental part of the quantum mechanics. Yes. No, no, no, no. Is there some
things that have become reality because we humans in a collective sense believe it?
You can't believe something collectively. Now it doesn't become real.
What does it mean to say something's real? That is, you can, so love, for example,
it loves a good example, right? Love is an abstraction, right? It's not something I
can touch. It's not something I can see, but it's certainly something you could feel.
Not something you could hit. Right? We love differently.
I don't think that's true. I think I'm just honest about it.
You can't love. Love is an abstraction. So is love real? Yes, it's real because I feel it.
It's an existence, but it's not an existence in the same sense as this cup is. So, you know,
abstractions are real, but at the end of the day, all abstractions have to be able to be,
you know, reduced to actual conquests that you can either see.
I really don't like criticizing someone whose work I haven't read second hand. So I want to
take this away from speaking about him personally because I'm not familiar with his work.
But that is a nice guy. That makes me like that makes him like less.
I think now you're back talking about fitness, evolutionary fitness.
I think there's disingenuousness when we talk about the word real in terms of ideas are real
versus the cup is real. And you try to switch back into between those two meanings.
And it's a little bit of linguistic wordplay that is trying to force a point that's not
accurate, in my opinion. Well, I think the issue is what he's challenging is and what
Kant is challenging is do we know reality? And I think the answer is yes, we do. We
know reality. We observe it. Now, do we know everything about reality? No, we can't, for
example, sense what a bat senses as reality, right? A bat observes reality through what is it?
Sona sound waves, right? So it has a different sense, but it's the same reality. It's still a
table. The bats spatial relationship to the table is different than ours, but the object is still
the same object. But how do you know that's true? Are you not just hoping that's true or assuming
that's true? No, that's what no means. No means I have identified an aspect of reality. That's
literally definition of knowledge. Now, if you say how are you certain? Well, that's a whole other
question, but one of the reasons I know it was certain is because this happens. And I know this
is going to happen. And if I tell you if you go downstairs, you're going to see Mr. Jones and
you walk downstairs and I see Mr. Jones, at the very least, something's going on there.
So what about all the things that mess with our perception? For example, we've talked about
psychedelics before, talked about in dreams or detached from this. I mean, there's certain
things that happen to your brain to where you're not able to perceive. So you're not perceiving
reality. That's right. So your brain is creating a different reality. It's not real. That's how
do you know it's not real? How do you know the elves we meet in the? Because I need it because
partially because I need to take a drug in order because I need to take a drug in order to do it
because I'm asleep when I'm dreaming. It's not reality. That is clearly a creation of our mind.
It's not a creation. Hold on. Let's get to the psychedelics. The drug is real. Okay. If you
are, I'm not, I think you're going to be thinking I'm joking a lot more than I am this episode.
I'm going to be the humorous objectivist. He could be the court jester.
In terms of psychedelic, when people are perceiving these elves, these machine elves as
other entities, whether they are, they could either be real or not. I don't know. But the
point is that doesn't go to his broader point because if these beings exist and the only way
to perceive them is to take a drug, they still exist. This is just, it's for example, if I'm
in walking outside in the woods at night and there's a deer and I can't see it,
but if I put on night vision goggles, I can see it, that deer was there the entire time.
It's not that the night vision goggles caused the deer to appear.
You can recreate it not only using night vision goggles, but you can then use
sonar. You can use other mechanisms by which to prove that the deer is there.
The thing with psychedelics is that, now I don't know because maybe I'm the least
experienced with psychedelics here, probably. My guess is every time you take the psychedelic,
you have exactly the same experience of the deer. No. Second, are there other mechanisms,
other scientific mechanisms by which I can find the deer out there other than the psychedelics?
We don't know yet. We don't know yet.
Well, but this is Arkham's razor, right? The simplest explanation here is the most likely,
and that is that you've taken something that's messing with the chemical in the brain,
something is being, that your brain can project. We dream. Nobody's arguing that the dream is real
and reality's not, or if they are, I think they're nuts. The dream is a dream. Your brain is creating
an image of telling you a story. Psychedelics are simulating the same thing. That's probably
what's going on until there's evidence to the contrary.
Well, hold on. I'm going to disagree with you a little bit because let's take Adderall,
for example. No one here disagrees. That's something much more simpler than
unless out of this world. I think what he might be speaking to, I know Joe Rogan talks about this
and other people in this space, is that when you take certain drugs, it changes your perception.
It doesn't have to be otherworldly. It changes your perception of what's around you. And as
an example, what they talk about is that three of us are talking. There's lots of other stuff in
the room. We're only aware of it vaguely on a peripheral level.
So it changes the- Hold on. Let me finish.
No, I don't do that. I'm Israeli.
You're about to start.
This is back to the desert island murder.
No, but he just resolved it within three seconds.
Yeah. There's no punk.
He's trying to get us.
Yeah, it's not going to happen.
Pete, I'm trying.
Exactly. I'm trying to create murder.
No one has asthma. It's going to be fine.
Because if the two of you murder each other, there's more food for me.
There's no-
Just saying.
You're all-
Well, ratings would go up.
Propensity alcohol.
Ratings would go up. You or ship would go up.
Yeah, the ratings, yeah.
But if you take, for example, Adderall or speed, right?
People, like you focus on things, you perceive things that aren't there,
but that doesn't mean those things weren't there to begin with.
There are absolutely ways to change human perception.
Chemically, through glasses, through getting drunk,
none of that changes the fact that the reality underneath it is real
and is causing this effect.
Absolutely. And it has a particular nature, right?
And all it's doing is changing the focus, right?
So if I take off my glasses, I'm seeing the same thing.
I'm just seeing some things out of focus.
And maybe in a distance, I can't see something.
It just, it's gone.
And then I put it on. There it is.
That thing was always there.
It's just my, the sensitivity I have to it has changed.
And it's absolutely not sensitive to everything equally.
And drugs can change the relative sensitivities.
It doesn't change reality.
It changes our ability to focus on reality.
Let me give you one great example.
The microscope, I forget who it was.
His name was with an L, the scientist who discovered it.
He had a drop of water and he's seeing monsters,
the protozoa in this drop of water.
For him, it must have been, it is like a drug experience.
Like, wait a minute, I'm drinking this and there's alien beings
whose shapes are completely crazy in this water.
Those beings were always there.
Those beings were there before any of us were here.
They've been there for billions of years.
But because he had this apparatus,
now he's able to see protozoa.
No one's arguing protozoa are extra dimensional.
No one's arguing the supernatural.
Amoebas are well studied, parmesia, all the other lots.
So if these elves, the machine elves are real,
and the only way to perceive them is through DMT or something like that,
that doesn't contradict the broader point
that they've always been there.
And this is the mechanism for perceiving them.
So here's the word I was looking for.
It's the word actually Greg, Greg taught me this.
So Greg Salamiere.
So it's resolution, right?
So it's resolution.
My resolution changes with the glasses.
My resolution gets finer with the microscope.
So there's probably some bacteria here on the table.
100%, right?
There's no doubt about it.
I can't see them.
So I need a microscope to not see them,
but they're either there or they're not there.
And I have the tools to discover whether they are there or they're not there.
And that's called a microscope.
Microscope, now they could be even smaller beings.
That even with a microscope, I won't be able to define.
But that's completely arbitrary to claim that,
that they're there until I find a tool to be able to discover it.
The same with what you see if you're seeing other beings when you're taking psychedelics.
Unless you find another tool to be able to see them with,
the simplest assumption is probably the truest assumption.
But even the not simplest assumption doesn't contradict the broader point.
No.
Which is, again, if it turns out that there are these
creatures that you can only see with psychedelics,
and there are these creatures that you can only see with psychedelics,
and our resolution, while we're not on psychedelics,
is not fine enough to observe them.
So what?
That doesn't change the fact that we evolved to survive in reality as it is.
What do you do with the possibility that our resolution,
as it currently stands, is really, really crappy?
That basically...
Well, it's not.
But you don't know that.
No, we know it completely.
Compared to who?
Compared to the future possibilities.
Like artificial intelligence.
It is true.
Or us.
It is crappy.
Compared to the future.
Fine.
But that's not relevant.
Much, much.
Like, what is the magnitude of crappy?
No, but here I'll use the standard that Huffin uses, evolution, right?
The reason I know that our resolution is phenomenal,
is phenomenally good, right?
Is, look at us.
We're sitting here comfortably in an apartment with air conditioning,
and in warm Austin with microphones, and it can't...
Where did all this stuff?
We're really good at survival and changing the environment.
Indeed, if you look at the species that we know of,
there's not a species that come anywhere close to ability to deal with reality,
to observe to your reality, to understand reality, and to shape it.
Now, in the future, well, we'll come up with machines that can figure out stuff
that we have no clue about today.
Yeah, but so...
That's only because we're so well-suited to reality that can we create those machines.
And I promise you, in the future, it's going to be much more what you're saying.
That's how it's going to happen.
No, but the thing is, when the creatures from the future look back to the things we're saying now,
what I ran is saying, what you're saying with certainty,
do you think they'll laugh at the level of how much confusion there was, how much inaccuracies?
No, no, no, it cannot let me get this one.
You know what they're going to do?
They're going to do what you do, when any of us read Aristotle,
or read any of these great geniuses of the past.
It's like, these people didn't have electricity.
They didn't have, like, warm clothes or anything,
and they're able to figure out the diameter of the earth,
like the creativity to be, and to get it within, like, a few miles,
the creativity, and to figure out the speed of light when you don't even have a stopwatch.
Like, when you look back, like, a lot of it's nonsense, and we,
but we're at the same, it's like when you're talking to a kid,
you don't, you disregard the nonsense, and when they get something right, it's all, that's you.
So it's never a numbers game, right?
So it's the few that validate and justify the rest.
So when you look at Aristotle, and he's talking about the,
there was one of those causes, which is like time travel,
and it doesn't really make sense.
But you look at the rest of his stuff, or even Plato, or any of these greats,
it's like, oh my, this is an amazing miracle,
and not, I wouldn't say literally miracle, I got you, everyone,
but at the same time, yeah, a lot of these other people had stupid ideas.
You don't care, you care about those great, great minds,
and how they moved us all forward.
To this day, we still study Pythagoras.
Of course, and it's not even just the sciences and the math, think about the philosophy.
I mean, how much is there to learn from reading Aristotle,
or Plato, or Socrates, when you disagree with them?
I mean, how many giants have there been in all of human history
that have had the minds of a Socrates, a Plato, and an Aristotle?
A thousand years where they look back at Plato and Aristotle and admire them?
Absolutely.
Well, they find certain things that are wrong, yes,
but certain things that Aristotle discovered.
Well, absolutely right, and will always be right.
Certain things that Einstein discovered will always be right.
I think a lot of what he came up with,
will some things be discovered to be wrong?
Yeah, you know, that wouldn't shock me.
But the genius and the truth of the we know today is amazing.
It's stunning to be pessimistic about us, because in the future, we'll know more.
Not pessimistic, but more humble.
There's no reason to be humble.
I mean, I really think humility is a vice, not a virtue.
What's it to be humble about?
Look at life.
This is amazing.
But the word humble has different meanings.
No, I know, I know.
OK, OK.
I was going to get it.
I was going to get it.
I mean, humility in a sense of not appreciating the genius and the ability
and the success and all the stuff that we as individuals, I think, in our lives.
But as a culture, as a movement, if you think about movement,
in terms of those of us who respect reason have achieved, in spite of the odds,
we should be proud of that and pride is the virtue.
Humility in the sense of, yeah, I know there's more to know.
I know there's a lot more to know, and in the future, we'll know more.
Sure, but I don't think that's the way.
See, I take humility as the way the Christians use it, which is the other way.
And I think it's a real vice.
It's don't think of yourself too much.
Just because you can think that's not a big deal or just because you can create this.
It is a big deal.
Your achievements are a big deal, and you should take credit for them.
So be careful with the word humility, because the real meaning is the Christian
meaning, which is a very, very bad meaning.
Wow.
Hold on.
Let me be a little pedantic, because there's no such thing as real meaning, right?
So there's different meanings.
OK, hold on.
This is semantics, but here's another real meaning that you're not going to disagree with,
which is the smartest person on earth is ignorant of 99.9% of knowledge, right?
So if I meet someone who is less intelligent than me and less informed than me, it is still
certain that this person has things to teach me.
If I go to a mechanic and maybe this guy is dumb as rocks, I don't know anything about cars.
What he tells me about that car is that I could take it to the bank.
He's going to be in a position to inform me.
So one of the reasons humility is extremely important is very often you have people, and
you see this very much in academia, who think, you know, we're exactly wrong going around,
who think they're know-it-alls.
And they think, oh, I have this degree.
You're a layman.
You've never been formally educated.
Therefore, not only are you dumb and uneducated, and you're wrong.
And it's like, this person might want a great example of this, and this is an example
you never on mind that like, is a lot of times you have these native populations,
and they'll have a better understanding of the animals around them, the plants, the fruits,
whatever.
And you'd have these scientists and be like, oh, they're talking about this monster in
the woods.
Yeah, whatever, this giant ape.
But it was real.
It was the gorilla.
But you dismiss them because, oh, these are stupid ignorant, whatever people.
That's kind of changed to some extent.
But that is an aspect of humility that I think behooves especially highly intelligent people
because there is such a presumption to be dismissive of people who you regard as less than.
But they're often right.
So I agree with all of the concrete examples.
I just think we should come up with a better word than humility.
And I don't have one because I'm not a woodsmith.
I'm not, this is not my strength.
But humility is a word from the Christian ethics.
And it means something very specific in the field of ethics.
And it means the opposite of what I think virtue requires.
Right. It's demeaning. It's to put you down.
It's to resist pride.
And I think pride is a very important thing.
I don't know, Iran.
But again, you have to define your terms properly.
Hating myself has been quite useful for me.
Well, but that's because you're Russian and Jewish.
So by-
What?
This changes everything.
You know, this is what happens, right?
We're brought up to feel exactly that way.
This has been a good Russian boy.
So we got him.
Oh my God.
What is this?
What is this?
Gematogen. What is this?
Gematogen.
What? Is that what it says?
Yeah. It's Gematogen.
I can't. I'm blind.
This is for you.
Yeah, but as long as you're a good Russian machik,
we have to have a candy for you.
But wait, but is it kosher?
Did you check if it's kosher?
This is Ukrainian, my friend.
Oh.
Oh my God.
That is a sin.
How dare you.
That is really sinful.
You know, Meese and I were born in the same town.
I'm kidding.
My dad's Ukrainian.
Don't get mad.
So I don't think, I don't think self, self,
well, what did you, how did you define it?
Your self-hate?
Yeah.
I think self-hate is quite destructive.
Speak for yourself.
I think that humility is quite destructive.
Humility in the sense of, I'm no big deal.
No. I mean, if you've achieved something in life,
you are a big deal.
You are a big deal because, you know,
look, you got the two of us to fly into town,
just to sit down here and have a conversation with you.
You're a big deal.
That says more about you than me.
We're desperate.
We're lonely to pray.
I'm not lonely.
But it might be desperate.
I'm starting to question your ability to reason
with the decisions you're making.
But on the, on the aspect of,
and I should mention that the idiot by Dostoevsky
is one of my favorite novels.
And there is a Christian ethic that runs through that.
I mean, because, because, yeah, I mean, particularly,
but I hate to bring this up,
but particularly Russians and particularly Russian Jews
and particularly Eastern European Jews are incredibly Christian.
There is a, there's a, there's a real Christian theme in,
in Judaism that's, that's about guilt.
Guilt is not, there's no guilt in Judaism.
King David doesn't feel any guilt.
Solomon doesn't, there's no guilt in the, in the Old Testament.
Plenty of guilt once Christianity has an impact on Judaism.
We're raised to feel this way.
We're raised to be humble.
We're raised not to feel special.
We're raised to think we're no big deal
and to, and, and our mothers put us down
and use that against us and, and try to inflict guilt on us.
They raise us up and then they knock us down.
It's a mechanism, but it's, it's a cultural mechanism.
And I think it's very destructive to self-esteem and to happiness.
Let me, and I'll give you a great,
he's absolutely right with what he just said.
I just agree.
Well, yeah, why, why is he right?
Because like my family, for example, could,
still doesn't really understand how I could pay the rent
because I don't go into an office.
And like when I started out trying to be a writer,
the immediate reaction isn't,
which is a lot of times I talk to kids, right?
And, and they won't have these aspirations.
And I'll tell them, go for it while you're young.
If you fail, you'll go to your grave with like,
I tried my best.
I didn't make it happen.
Whereas if you don't try and never achieve,
you are going to feel horrible for the rest of your life.
And this is the example I use all the time.
I bring up many times.
I go, go to any bookstore and look at all those
terrible, terrible books on the shelves
that you wonder, how's this a book?
That could be you.
You could be that crappy writer.
But the thing is in that culture
that Yaron was talking about,
you tell your family, I'm going to be a writer.
Who do you think you are?
Why do you think you're going to be,
you're no Stephen King.
And it's like, why do you have to be Stephen King?
Why can't you just be a mediocre, crappy writer
making the rent?
The best that you can be.
But even that is an amazing accomplishment.
If I don't have to go to an office
and I write books that not that many people read,
this is a story of my life, at the same time,
I do have pride because I made this happen.
You can be the best version.
I mean, this is a cliche,
but you can be the best version of yourself.
It's not a competition.
And yet our Jewish mothers,
that's not what they aspire us to be.
They aspire us to be the best version
of what they imagine, what the culture imagines.
You know, what society imagined.
Not what, it's not about you in their minds.
And I've seen it.
I see it all around me.
People putting their kids down, putting themselves down.
It's not healthy.
I've never told the story.
I'm going to tell it now.
When I graduated college, I was a temp for a while
because I didn't know what I wanted to do.
Right?
And when you're a temp, it's like playing roulette.
You're going to have jobs that pay well,
that suck, and pay well that are great,
or that are great that don't pay well,
and suck and pay poorly.
But it's you and your 21, you have that kind of space.
And my grandmother was talking to her brother.
You know, he's talking about his kids.
She's talking about me.
She's, you know, from Odessa.
And she told me, she lied to him
about how much money I was making.
And that's something I've never brought up,
and it still hurts me because it's like,
your approval of me should be a function of my character,
my happiness, and the fact that you feel ashamed
over how much money I'm making,
especially at this point in my life,
I thought was very really misplaced.
Really misplaced priorities.
Yeah, absolutely.
I don't know.
I don't know what to make of that.
I think there's a huge benefit to the humility terms aside
for believing that others can teach you a lot.
Everybody can teach you a lot.
We all agree on that.
I just mentioned that.
We all agree on that.
No, you do it exactly.
Exactly, exactly the point.
But for that, I do believe you have to not constantly
sort of break your ego apart,
and constantly question whether you know anything
about this world.
And sort of there's a negativity with it
that I think is very useful,
and it's also very fulfilling.
Just constantly, I don't know.
It's the other way around.
I find that the more I know,
the more I know I know,
the easier it is for me to learn from other people.
The broader context I have,
the more curious I become,
the more areas I know.
You know, it's true that the more you know,
the more areas you know you don't know.
And the more I find myself attracted to people
who can teach me something about things I don't know.
Whereas if I was ignorant,
if I truly believed I didn't know anything,
I don't know how I would live.
It would really completely challenge everything,
everything about life for me.
Where would I even start?
You wouldn't know where to start.
So no, I think, and if you don't recognize what you know,
you don't have a full appreciation of yourself.
So really building a recognition of what do I know?
And how much do I know?
It's really crucial to living.
And I'll tell you something else that furthers my life enormously
is when you reach a certain point in your career and your life
and you're talking to people who are a lot younger
and they might be smart, driven, intelligent,
they lack data.
When you're 23, you don't know how to speak corporate.
You don't know what the code words are.
So if I am in a position to sit down with this kid
and be like, do X, Y, and Z,
and here's why I'm coming to this conclusion.
This is the information that released me this conclusion.
And I can save them from some of the suffering I went through.
That is very gratifying.
It's making the world a better place.
And it's also the opposite in a sense of humility
because in this context.
I'm an expert.
Or I'm at least knowledgeable enough
that I'm comfortable giving you advice.
Yeah, and look, everything I do is about me knowing stuff
that other people don't.
And I know a lot of stuff other people don't, and I do.
And it's fun.
I'm a teacher.
I'm a teacher at heart always happy.
It turns out I didn't know that early on.
But I like becoming an expert
and then trying to teach people.
It doesn't mean I know everything, quite the contrary.
Again, the more I know, the more I know
that there's certain things I don't know
and there's certain areas of expertise I don't have.
But look, pride is a broader concept than that.
Pride is about, and humility is the opposite of pride.
And Christianity has that right.
Christianity has that right.
Pride is about taking your life seriously.
Pride is about wanting to be really good at living.
Wanting to have the knowledge.
And I think what you're describing is.
You're describing as I'm constantly learning.
Sometimes I have to re-challenge myself.
I have to question what I believe to gain new knowledge.
That's all good.
But that is a drive that is driven by pride.
You want to know.
There are lots of people out there that don't want to know.
Because they don't have that pride.
They don't have that commitment to live.
The commitment to achieving something.
And I'm going to say something else that I think is crucial.
Humility is extremely important when it comes to politics.
Because if you feel comfortable telling someone you've never met
how to live their life, that is a complete lack of humility.
Well, I lack it obviously because I tell people how to live all the time.
Not through the force.
Not through force.
That's what I'm saying.
And of course, not in the concrete.
I don't tell them, you know, move to, or they like to tell them to do it often.
But I don't tell them, this is what you do as a profession.
But I give them the principles.
Because I think the principles are how to live.
But they're making a choice.
That's my point.
Politically, what I'm saying is it shows a lack of humility to be like,
I've never met this person.
This is how I'm going to take money from him.
I'm going to see.
But I don't see that humility.
There's nothing.
No, it's the lack of humility.
No, but it's not even a lack of humility because it's.
Who am I to tell him how to live?
No, of course you're not.
That's lack of humility.
No, who are you to tell him how to live is an issue of,
it's an issue of force and rights and a bunch of different things.
I don't think it's a lack of humility there.
I think it's a lack of being a human being.
It could be both.
Sure.
I think it's who gives you the right to dictate to somebody else how to live their lives.
Yeah, but that's a lack of humility.
If you think you have that right.
Again, we're using humility in a very different way.
No, we're using the same way.
I don't think I don't think.
Because the person who feels comfortable, they think,
I know, I know better than you how you should live your life to the point where a couple
forcing you because I know it's going to be best for you in the long run.
And the answer is you don't know.
Right.
But that's a lack of humility.
I think in your mind, you're on humility somehow tied to the Christian concept of humility.
And so you're kind of allergic to the word.
Well, absolutely, because it's part of, if you look at the cardinal,
the cardinal virtues, the cardinal sins in Christianity, pride is a cardinal sin.
And humility is a cardinal virtue.
But they don't mean it in the sense because they're happy to tell you how to live.
They're happy to be philosopher kings over your life.
And they believe that's being humble.
And you should be humble, by the way, in listening to the Pope or listening to God.
Because what do you know?
You know nothing.
God knows everything.
So you should shut up and do what you're told.
That's the sense in which I don't think you should be humble.
I mean, it's a sense in which I was using the example of Abraham, right?
God comes to Abraham and says, go kill your eldest son.
Go kill your only son, right?
Your only son.
Go kill him.
It's like, and what does Abraham do?
He says, yes, sir.
I'll follow.
And he's a moral hero for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
He's a moral hero because he follows orders because he's humble.
He, you know, I would tell God to go to hell.
Screw you.
I'm not killing my son.
I'm not killing my son.
You know, just don't wait.
I mean, he killed his sons.
That's only fair.
Well, this is before he killed his sons.
I didn't know that, right?
But no, but part of the evil, part of the evil of Christianity is that he's killed his son
in the most torturous form of death possible.
I mean, the whole story of Jesus is one of the most immoral, unjust stories ever told.
And that Christians elevate this to a position of,
I'd love to have this conversation with Jordan, right?
Jordan Peterson, the idea of elevating.
That'll never happen.
No, it won't.
But elevating Jesus, exactly.
Elevating Jesus to a superhero status for one of the most immoral acts in human history
is horrific.
So, yeah, I mean, I'm opposed to God sacrificing his own son.
Never mind my son.
But yeah, let him go do it to his own son.
But he didn't kill Isaac.
He killed the goat.
The story's about Abam, not about God.
First of all, God is mean, right, to put Abam through that.
But Abam has to assume that he's going to kill his son and he lifts his,
he's going to do it and he stopped.
So the whole point is obedience.
That's what humility leads to.
It leads to the opposite of the story you were telling.
It leads to people saying, yes, I should be told what to do.
Where's the authority who actually knows something?
Because I don't know anything.
No, I know a lot.
And I know a lot about my life.
So you stay away from my life because I have pride in my life.
The science has settled, right?
Look at these experts.
Who am I to argue with these experts?
They tell me to drink dog pee.
I'm going to drink, what am I, not drink dog pee?
Yes.
Let's go back to the island.
Which? We're on island again.
We're back to the island.
Manhattan.
And let's go to the island.
I live on an island.
Everything is an island in some context.
Like Earth is an island.
This universe is an island in a multiverse.
They know multiverses.
There's only one universe.
All right, so let's invite Jordan Peterson to this island.
You wish.
Hold on.
Hold on a sec.
Hey girl, what are you doing?
Lex, Lex Friedman, look him up.
Lex who?
Yeah, exactly.
I don't know.
Lex says this is the biggest following almost is Jordan.
No, I know Jordan.
I know his family actually through Jim Keller,
who is his relative, he's an engineer.
And I just talked to Sam who is perhaps a little bit aligned
in some sense on your perspective on religion and so on.
So let me ask, is there some?
Religion, yes, but other things.
Sam Harris.
Sam Harris, yeah.
Oh, sorry.
Sam Harris.
He's on first name relations with these guys.
Look at this inside baseball.
I just talked to Sam.
I thought, I thought.
Let's talk about humility.
Let's talk about humility like my buddy Sam.
I was talking to Barack.
You might know him.
I simply.
You're gonna let you in out the window.
I'm just a natural language processing model
that I assume that once I mentioned Jordan Peterson,
it becomes an obvious statement what Sam means.
This is how your networks think.
This is how robots think.
Michael, you should know this.
I thought by now you'd be a scholar.
For the sake of the audience.
Humility.
Everything can teach you something even a robot.
Okay.
So do you think there's value in religion or broader?
Do you think there's value in myth?
And as we've been talking about the value of reason,
do you think it's possible to argue in society
as we grow this, the population of our little island
that there's some value of common myths,
of common stories, of common religion?
There was value.
There is no value today.
So human beings need explanations, right?
They need a philosophy to guide their life.
They need ethics.
They need some explanation of what's going on in the world, right?
And there's no accident that the early religions
had a river god and they had a sun god and a moon god
because everything they didn't understand, they made god, right?
So they had multiple gods because they didn't understand very much.
As human understanding evolved, increased, as we knew reality more, right?
We came to the conclusion of, you know,
this is very inefficient to have all these gods.
This is a genius of Judaism, right?
Let's just have one bucket to put all the stuff we don't know in
and we'll call it one god.
And then we don't, as we gain new knowledge,
we can just take it out of the bucket that's god
and put it into the bucket of science.
At some point though, at some point,
and that point suddenly came during the scientific revolution, I think,
we could come to the conclusion that no,
we don't need this bucket that's called god
to explain the things that we don't know.
We can say we don't know and we're learning.
And slowly, our knowledge is increasing
and yet there's a lot more that we don't know,
but we don't need to throw it into some bucket
that's called god in order to have it.
And I think that's true for morality
and it's true for everything else, right?
As we gain the tools to understand what morality requires,
we don't need a set of commandments.
We can figure out morality from human nature and from reality.
So I don't think we need religion anymore.
I think religion needed to die probably about 200 years ago
and was dying, I think, up until Kant.
It seemed to be dying and one of Kant's missions, as he says,
is to revive religion against attack of reason and enlightenment.
Now mythology is a little different
because it depends what you mean by mythology.
Certainly we need stories and certainly we need art.
Art is a, and Rand writes about this a lot
and she's an artist and she writes in,
I'm a huge fan of the Romantic Manifesto
which I think is one of her underappreciated masterpieces.
Oh, I hate it.
Okay, that's okay.
Yeah, so I think we have a real need as a conceptual being.
We have a need for aesthetic experiences.
We have a need to concretize abstractions,
to concretize abstract ideas,
to concretize the complex nature of the world out there.
And that's what painting, sculpture,
to an extent music, but painting, sculpture, literature does for us.
So to the extent that mythology serves that purpose,
it's just art, right?
To the extent that it serves another purpose,
that is that it's a way for the gods to communicate with us
or it fits some kind of pre-existing mental construct
that we have, again, kind of a conscient perspective, right?
That we have these categorical imperatives
and this mythology links up to that.
Then I think it's false.
It's not helpful and destructive.
So I believe religion today is a destructive force on planet Earth.
I think it's always been a destructive force.
It was just a necessary force, right?
You needed an explanation.
People needed something to believe in.
Once you get philosophy and once you get philosophy
that starts explaining real life, real world,
you don't need religion anymore
and indeed it becomes a destructive force.
And you look around the world today,
it's an unbelievably destructive force.
Every way it touches is bad for life.
Again, mythology depends.
Art is essential, very, very crucial to human existence.
I mean, I'd love to hear what you think,
but you don't see religion and philosophy
and mythology as just a continuous spectrum.
Yeah, so religion is a primitive form of philosophy.
But I don't think...
It's pre-philosophical.
Where I thought Rand was going to go and he didn't go
was that I think he...
I agree with what he was going to say.
Rand was a mythologizer.
In a certain specific context, Atlas shrugged as a myth.
It's one thing to sit down and say,
these are the people who move us forward.
These are the values that are important.
When you experience it through a story, through a movie,
through a TV show, a poem, or a painting,
it affects you in a very visceral, very different way.
Talk about American history.
You have the founding fathers,
then you have the myth of the founding fathers.
Now, unfortunately, term myth often means lie,
but it could mean, in a useful sense,
an abstraction to help you systematize and concretize ideas.
So you have the myth of Reagan.
You have the myth of Thatcher.
The reality often falls very short.
But when you look at how these different figures
are mythologized,
not only is it very inspirational on a personal level,
very motivating on a personal level,
it's also a great way to concretize ideas
because just how humans think.
It's one thing to think about ideas,
but when you see someone who embodies these ideas,
Miss America, I was saying earlier,
I had an asterisk on my show, these people may be jerks,
but when you look at them,
one specific aspect of their life and you extrapolate it,
that can be to anyone, very motivating,
and it's very important for people to have the belief
that happiness and achievement is possible,
because it's very hard to keep that in mind,
especially if you're depressed, if you're anxious,
you're unemployed, you don't have a girlfriend,
you think it's going to be like this forever.
And then you look at someone's story and they're like,
you know what, that astronaut interview, Clayton Anderson,
he applied 13 times, didn't get a callback,
applied the 14th time, got a callback,
didn't get the job, 15th time he get the job,
he talks to kids and he goes, listen, apply 13 times.
Even if you don't get the callback,
you'll still feel I'm doing something.
And having heard him and the myth of Clayton Anderson,
this is going to tell people, yeah, you know what,
that could be me.
You don't think so.
Absolutely.
And it's not just happiness.
It's the fact that virtue works, that integrity.
I mean, what's the power of the fountain?
I know you love the fountain.
Part of the power of the fountain head
is how it works, absolute commitment to integrity.
He is committed to integrity and he's happy.
And it's very rare in life to see that,
to actually see a concrete of that.
And it's very hard to hold it in your mind.
Yes, I'm going to be stuck in the quarry
or I'm going to be stuck doing this horrible job.
But if I stick to my principles, I'm going to be how it works.
Now I've got that concrete.
I know I can immediately relate to that success.
So I think art is essential and I think in a sense
what we do to Thatcher and Reagan is art.
You have to be careful in true stories,
not to diverge too far from reality
because then when you discover the reality,
you don't want to whitewash it.
And particularly when it has political implications
and then it's really bad.
So particularly with Reagan,
at Thatcher you have to be careful
because they want anyone near as good
as people try to make them out to be.
But these are powerful, powerful, powerful stories
and people are moved by it.
And the integration of emotion with reason is crucial.
One of the goals to be happy
is to bring your emotions in line with your thinking.
And I think that stories and art more broadly.
And when I go and see Michelangelo's David,
it does the same thing to me.
I can stand up to anybody because he did
and look, he succeeded and it makes sense that he could.
So there's a really interesting idea
of bringing your emotion in line
with your thinking, with your reasoning.
So Ben Shapiro famously has this saying,
how do you like that transition, Michael?
You gave me props.
I know you did.
He's not Ben, it's Ben Shapiro.
Yeah.
Someone is not taking your calls.
Benny, Benny.
I guess it's the daily don't take the caller.
Back to the island with the murder, I think we know.
Murder Island.
We would know who would be committing the murder.
I have the suit for it.
So he has the saying of facts don't care about your feelings.
And that always, I've always felt
badly about that statement somehow.
Like it was incomplete.
So it's interesting to that you mentioned
bringing your emotions in line with your thinking.
Like, what do you think about that statement?
I got this one.
What Ben is doing, Ben, what he's doing in a loose way
is attacking Kantianism.
Because Kant, there's this, it's almost impossible
for Westerners who aren't schooled in this
to understand the idea of philosophical idealism
because it sounds so crazy that you're like,
these great minds of all time can't really be saying this.
I must be missing something.
So the idea of, when we hear idealism,
we think John F. Kennedy, right, is an example.
You aspire things, you think life could be better than it is.
That's not what it means in a philosophical sense.
And philosophical idealism, it means ideas
are more real than reality.
That I have this idea, then this comes along.
It's the reality that isn't correct.
My idea is still correct.
A good example of this that you see all the time on the internet
is when they refer to Mitt Romney and John McCain as rhinos.
Republicans in name only.
And it's like, who is more a real Republican?
The nominee of the party, the senator,
the governor of the party, or some person in your mind
who has never existed and there's no evidence for them existing.
So what Kant did is he bifurcated reality
into what we see around us, the phenomenal world.
But then it's inferior.
The real world, the noumenal world, we can't access it.
Because we have eyes, we only see the thing as it appears,
not as it is in itself.
And because of this, everything we know
is a shadow and is secondary.
And that's Plato, right?
Straight out of Plato.
Right.
And the real reality is this realm of ideas.
So when Ben is saying facts don't care about your feelings,
what he is really saying is reality comes first.
Your feelings have to be a response or a reaction to it.
You can't say, this is how I feel.
This table doesn't care.
You can yell at it all day long.
It will still be indifferent to your emotional state
because it comes first.
So it's a great statement.
I think he's cribbing it from Ayn Rand, in a sense.
I love it.
I mean, there's a sense in which he is.
I mean, who popularized that kind of idea?
And Ben has read Ayn Rand quite extensively.
Not enough.
Well, not enough to reference her.
That's where the yarmulke is.
So yeah, obviously.
He may be read enough but didn't understand enough.
But so it's absolutely reality.
Reality is unaffected by your emotional state
and your feelings about it.
And this is a great claim against the idealism,
the philosophical idealism of much of the world out there,
both left and right.
I think politically, culturally, the left and right
are detached from reality.
They live in a different dimension, in a different space.
They are creating in their own minds
that has nothing to do with the real world.
And when they fail, they make stuff up to justify their failure.
Right?
So this is, you know, all of really the ideas
that are promulgated today on both sides
are this kind of detached from reality.
We're putting emotions or ideas before reality itself.
But I believe that, you know, our emotions are responses.
The responses to reality conditioned by our existing concepts.
You're going to have to talk slowly to talk emotions to Lex
because he doesn't really understand what that is.
I don't understand.
So really, you got to really pick some words.
But he's big on love.
What is love?
But he's big on love.
He's trying to learn.
Pretty big on love.
I'm all in, I'm a love maximalist.
I mean, I could create, we could create an environment
on this island where you would really feel emotions.
Like fear is an emotion.
That's the benefit of terror.
We could easily terrorize you to the point where you felt fear.
So we could teach him about emotions.
But emotions are responses to reality.
So some people, for example, you could take five different people
and show them exactly the same thing.
And some of them would feel fear.
And some of them would actually, you know,
feel indifferent and other people might feel love.
Right?
I think Leonard Peacock uses the example of looking through a microscope
and seeing a, I don't know, a virus or bacteria.
And for one, it's a scientist.
He's made a new discovery.
He feels pride and love and, you know,
the one has no clue, right?
And he's looking at this and it means nothing to them.
And somebody else might look at it and, you know,
it's a bacteria, you know, and they feel fear
because of what it could do to them.
So it's conditioned.
But what you know, what your values are
and your level of knowledge and what the thing is out there in reality.
So that's, you know,
that's what you're trying to do.
You're trying to add into, so your emotions respond to that.
So aligning your emotions with your reason is making sure that your emotions
are really conditioned by what you know explicitly
versus what you've internalized implicitly
that you might not agree with anymore.
You know, things might happen in your childhood
and they probably do, right?
Where you get a trauma.
I don't know.
I'm afraid of dogs and maybe when I was a five-year-old,
some dogs jumped me and I don't even remember it, right?
But I came to a conclusion when I was five, dogs bad.
Dogs dangerous, right?
And now anytime I see a dog, oh my God,
that bringing my emotions aligned with reality, right?
With my ideas is, no, now I understand dogs don't have to be scary.
I can work through this in various techniques
and hopefully if there is such a science of psychology,
good in psychology to get you to the point
where you can get rid of that fear
and align your emotion now with your explicit ideas.
And that's what I mean by that.
And let me build on that.
Talking about your friend, Putin.
I think I mentioned this before, maybe on the show.
He was meeting with Angela Merkel.
Oh, Vladimir, please.
Yeah, Vlad.
My boy, Vlad.
He was meeting with Angela Merkel.
Angela Merkel has a fear of dogs.
So he brought out his big Labrador retriever.
Now for people who don't know,
Labradors are very big dogs,
but they're also like the least aggressive.
It's like you could punch them in the face.
They don't care.
That dog is not going to be more likely to attack
just because she's scared.
I know they say animals can sense fear.
Domesticated dogs, if they see you're scared,
they're not going to be aggressive.
They're going to try to play.
I remember when I was a kid,
there was this dog, Rex, this German Shepherd.
I'm five.
This dog is gigantic.
And I'm sitting on the couch.
The German Shepherds have been bred for intelligence.
They're very bright dogs.
They're very good with kids.
He's sitting next to me.
This thing is three times my size.
He very gently puts his paw on my leg to be like, kid,
like he can sense my fear.
He's like, I'm not going to do it.
Like I want to be your friend.
I'm still freaking out.
He licks my hand is just very scary.
You know, animals are so bright,
but that's the thing is in terms of facts,
don't care about your feelings.
That dog is not more likely to attack someone
because their emotion is so intense.
It's not that I feel something very strongly.
Therefore, this thing is more likely to happen.
So my intensity of my emotion does not in any way correlate
when you're being irrational to the likelihood
of that thing actually happening.
No, you could have a dog that does respond to your emotion.
Oh, of course.
But then it's not part of reality.
That's a fact of reality that certain dogs respond
to certain emotions.
But isn't this emotion a part of reality?
Like, okay, let me say a word.
So part of that, I would even say,
don't let your emotion about your emotion, right?
Because sometimes you have an emotion about your emotion.
Don't be repressed.
Don't be repressed and identify the emotion as reality.
And evaluate it.
Don't judge it.
Evaluate it.
Is it a rational emotion?
Is it consistent with my, like if I'm afraid of these dogs,
if I feel that fear, is it rational to be afraid of these dogs?
But you're speaking to your own individual trajectory
as a human being is to grow through the world
and try to understand reality and connect yourself
through reason to reality.
What I'm talking about is a term like lived experience.
When you observe and analyze the, you know,
conversations with other people to try to understand
how other people see the world,
doesn't emotion fundamentally integrate into that?
Like, is an emotion lived experience?
So everybody experiences the same reality,
but the way they experience it might be very different
and that has to do with what?
Doesn't have to do with...
What their values, what their conclusions,
what their ideas, what their experiences
with a million different things, right?
But at the end of the day,
it's about the conclusions that they come to,
which are then shaping their emotions.
But look, emotions are not something to be avoided or ignored.
That is, I can sense your emotions to some extent.
That's a lie.
Okay, it is a lie.
I can sense his emotions.
I can sense Michael's emotions.
And that's part of the facts of reality, right?
So if Michael responds to something that I view
as really, really important, right?
If we were standing in front of Michelangelo's David,
a Michael response to Michelangelo's David was,
eh, and turned his back to it and walked away.
That would be really meaningful to me, right?
That I would respond emotionally to that
and cognitively, I would say,
what is it about Michael that makes him, you know,
respond this way?
That gives me a lot of information about him.
So emotions are information laden, right?
But they are not primary.
They are responses, responses to something.
So once one must be very aware of one's own emotions,
recognize them and analyze them.
And one should be aware of other people's emotions
if they're important to you, if they're not important to you.
It doesn't matter, right?
You don't care about a stranger's emotion.
You know, like a stranger walks up to Michelangelo's David
and said, eh, and walks away.
Then I go, okay, I'm glad you're a stranger.
But it's...
Now, I've known you when Michael was a sponsor
to Michelangelo's David was or is.
So I'm a little worried about what he's going to say.
You got candy too, but that was great.
Do I get Ukrainian?
I thought I was special.
I don't know. I can't read either.
What does this say to him?
Is this Ukrainian candy as well?
Do you know that Atlas Shrugged was the best-selling book
in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016?
Do you know Atlas Shrugged was translated to Russian
by someone who's now a crypto billionaire
and he made like six copies and I have one of them.
And I sent it to my great-grandma.
No, they're more than six, but yeah.
Oh, but they were like...
Because I have a copy too.
Okay.
Not I personally. The institute has a copy.
I sent it to my great-grandma and she said,
why is he sending me this?
I want to read books about love.
And I'm like, you know what?
It's just about love.
That's what you should have said.
What's that? Is that say?
So this says it's...
It has vitamins and minerals.
If it's in Russian, I don't believe it.
It just sounds really strange to read
like health information in Russian.
But look, there's a Yorker like you have.
Exactly.
I mean, I'm much...
He doesn't mean it.
He doesn't mean it more than I like Moscow.
Wow. Strong words.
But this is not...
It's like hard candy.
I don't know.
I think this...
Some of my friends sent me that's made with blood
to give the kids iron.
Who's blood?
Like cow blood.
Like with chocolate.
All right.
I should keep it.
That's all you.
All right.
I'm keeping both of these.
Can I take all of it again?
Something you're talking about with emotion.
Something that is very pernicious in terms of emotion
is people denying the validity of their own emotions.
And here's one example.
Someone could be in an abusive relationship
or had an abusive childhood.
And they think, well, I didn't have a black eye.
We had dinner on the table.
It wasn't abusive because you hear some other story.
So they feel their emotion isn't valid.
Or like, oh, he never lays hands on me.
He gets drunk and is mean to me.
He's still basically a good person.
You're denying that emotion.
And that emotion is a response to something real.
There's an expression.
I have friends who are in 12 step programs.
There's an expression there, which I think is very profound,
which is if it's hysterical, it's historical.
Meaning if some minor incident is having an extreme
disproportionate impact on you, think ask yourself,
why am I responding in such an extreme way to some minor thing?
I will tell you 10 times out of 10,
you'll go back and you'll be like, oh,
I'm feeling now like I felt when I was eight and my dad came home
and he was a total jerk and I didn't do anything wrong.
And he thought I had and I was complete powerless.
And now I'm in the same situation.
My boss, I'm not that eight year old and one since I am another
since I'm not, but I feel the same way I did as a kid.
And this is a very useful mechanism in terms of furthering
one's happiness because you kind of deep program all those things
that you picked up as a child.
But it's also, you know, if you're feeling something wrong,
even though you're trying to rationalize in a way,
you know, it's not abusive because he's not hitting me.
No, the emotion is telling you something real about what's going on.
So acknowledge it and fix the situation, right?
So one of the powers emotions give you is they send you signals
about something that might not be in cognition yet.
And when you examine their motion, it brings it to cognition
and now you can act on it.
So maybe the boss is abusive, but I didn't really think of it
in those terms and my emotions is sending me signals.
And now that I signal it, I'm going to resign.
I'm going to find a better job.
I'm going to complain to his boss or whatever.
I'm going to take action.
Why do you think Ein Rand is such a controversial figure?
Last time I spoke with you on this particular podcast,
the amount of emails I've gotten, positive and negative.
And certainly negative.
I don't usually get negative emails.
Yeah, but I can't relate.
I'm sure mine were wrongly positive.
It was mostly women sending pictures for me to forward to you.
You didn't send me anything.
Oh, it's the wrong email address.
I kept bouncing while sending it to you.
Oh, so this is love.
Love hurts.
Okay.
Why do you think she's such a divisive figure?
Why do you think she provokes such emotion in both the positive
and the negative side?
I'd love to hear both of your viewpoints on this.
Well, I think on the negative side and both on the positive and the negative side,
I think it's because she's radical.
She's consistently radical.
She upends the premises, the ideas that are prevalent in the culture
that were brought up on that are like, you know, they're like milk and,
you know, the basic stuff that we're growing up.
You have to be altruistic.
You have to live for other people.
That's just basic stuff.
Nobody challenges that.
Nobody questions it.
And if they do question it, they usually question it from the perspective of a cynic
or a bad guy, right?
You mentioned the Joker, right?
Before we started, right?
You know, I'm going to upend the world because I don't care about other people, right?
So they're presented with these two alternatives and it's real in people's lives, right?
You either live for other people or you're an evil SOB.
And, you know, yeah, most people in either one of those, but the ethic is right here.
It's living for other people.
And when you challenge that, they have no way cognitively to go with that.
And the only place they can go with that cognitively is to the Joker.
It's the evil guy.
It's the somebody who wants to smash everything and destroy.
Because they don't have this alternative conception of, oh, no, you can be rationally self-interested.
And that does not involve destruction and that does not involve, you know, exploiting other people.
They can't conceptualize that.
It's not in their framework.
So it's the fact that she's so consistently on the side of self-interest, for example,
on the side of capitalism, on the side of freedom.
It's the fact that she dismisses faith to the extent that she does or to the extent that I do, right?
And that alienates people because that is completely different from what they brought up.
Now, the flip side of that is, it's also really interesting to some people.
So, you know, a lot of, you got some positives, right?
And I got a lot of positives in that appearance.
I know a lot of people came to my podcast because I appeared on your show.
Why?
Because they hear something that's completely fresh, new, different.
They've never heard before.
It appeals to something in them that maybe, you know, a lot of people say I read, I ran and it confirmed everything I believed.
Now, for me, it didn't.
It was the opposite.
It turned upside down everything I believed.
But there are a lot of people out there that have a sense that something's wrong in the world,
that altruism is wrong, that socialism, that just the stuff and religion is wrong,
but they don't have an alternative.
It hasn't coalesced.
And they listened to a lot of podcasts because they're trying to get ideas of what is it,
what is it that I'm sensing that's wrong out there?
And suddenly somebody comes out and gives them some clear explanation of things and they go,
wow, that's what I've been looking for my whole life.
So that's the positive for people.
You know, and I read, I ran, it just all made sense.
It all clicked and it made clear that everything I believed to that point was just wrong.
It just didn't integrate.
And I always knew to some extent it didn't integrate, but there was an alternative.
So I believed it. What else was there?
I remember saying to myself as a kid, probably 15, why should I, why is this,
why is Moraleo about other people?
Why is that?
Well, that's just the way it is.
And I couldn't come up with an explanation.
She gave me the explanation and she gave me the explanation why it's wrong to do that.
And I think, so I think that's why people respond.
It's just too radical.
It can't fit into their cognitive framework that they're being brought up on,
that they've been educated on, that just the whole life revolves around.
Michael, you don't bring up Ayn Rand that much in conversation,
except as kind of references every once in a while as part of the humor
of just the general flow and the music of the way you like to talk.
Well, why do you think you don't integrate her into your philosophy
when you're like explaining ideas and all those kinds of things?
Like, why is she not, you know, a popular reference point for discussion of ideas?
Because I don't know if everyone's going to agree with or can't agree with me.
I think for a certain percentage of population,
actually I talked to someone from the Ayn Rand Institute,
I forgot his name, older guy with glasses,
and he didn't disagree with me.
He said, this is changing.
I said, I think for a certain percentage of population who are uninformed about her work,
higher than 10%, less than 50%, you mentioned Ayn Rand.
They have been trained to think this is identical to Scientology.
So as soon as her name comes up, it's like, okay, I'm out the door.
I'm not going to have anything to do with this.
And everyone who follows her is a crazy person.
That's one thing that has happened.
Another thing is Rand, in her personality, was very aggressive and antagonistic.
She was, for a long time, the lone voice in the wilderness,
being like, this isn't like one of her big adversaries in a certain sense,
was Milton Friedman.
And she really hated how Milton Friedman was like, oh, you know,
having rent control is inefficient.
And she's like, inefficient.
We're talking about mass homelessness and people dying.
And you're talking about this, like, what color tie goes with this color shirt?
And in fact, it's hilarious.
There was an organization called the Foundation for Economic Education Fee.
Leonard Reed was the head of this.
And there were a series of letters, and she was helping him.
She was much more philosophically grounded in certain contexts than he was.
And there was an essay, a pamphlet that he published called Roofs or Ceilings.
It was co-written by Milton Friedman, later Nobel Prize winner,
and George Stigler, also later Nobel Prize winner.
And basically, the argument was, well, if the government controls all housing,
how's that going to work out?
And she's sitting there, and she's typing in all caps.
So you know she's holding on the shift key and doing this.
On a typewriter.
On a typewriter, and being like, how, and you can imagine her with her cigarette holder, apoplectic,
being like, how is an organization ostensibly devoted to free enterprise,
discussing this Stalinist idea in the most casual of terms?
She's like, have I taught you not?
And what's amazing is, so at fee, they only have her letters because she sent them to read.
The Iran Institute must have Leonard Reed's letters.
I was able to, knowing random enough, predict exactly what the conversation would go like
because he also did something she didn't approve of, which is,
he asked other people for feedback on her work, and she goes, I gave this to you to read.
Who are you shopping around to some jerk that I don't, I need their approval?
What are you doing?
So it was a very interesting situation.
But so that's one issue.
I remember this design when she's young.
She was not young.
Well, I mean, she's relatively young, right?
Yeah.
It's before Astroshock.
It was before I left.
So it's before she's super famous and before this is the fan has been published.
But, but, you know, she's, she's trying to work with others and they're disappointing her left and right.
Yeah.
So, and also when you are a, what she takes away from bad people is you have these kids, right?
And you're going to sit down with them and they're going to be like, yeah, I'm going to take your guns.
I'm going to lock you in your house.
I'm going to take 60% of your income and all this other stuff.
And they might up to reading ran, they might sit down and have a discussion and ran goes, Hey, you know what?
You didn't have to give them an answer.
You could say, go to hell.
We're not having this conversation and you have no right to one second of my life.
And this is not a legitimate opener.
This is a declaration of war.
This isn't like, it's not like, if I sit down with you, I run like, Hey, Ron, here are my plans for your wife.
Go to hell.
This isn't a conversation we're having.
Oh, I'm going to make you unsafe in your house.
What?
This is not a discussion.
So what happens is these people who five minutes ago were able to have a debate with this kid because people read ran when they're young often.
And now that kid is like, yeah, I'm not even talking to you.
It's her fault.
Whereas in reality, it's that person's fault because that person had no right.
Although they've been trained to the contrary of our culture to believe, yeah, I'm going to sit down and we're just going to equally have a discussion of your own life.
And you have one vote and I have one vote.
And we're going to.
Oh, Lex has a vote.
And that's how it's going to be.
And Rand's not having it.
So I think those are two issues.
And there's some other things which, which I don't need to get into.
But I because one of the things that Rand said, consisting of her life is that her philosophy is an integrated whole.
Right.
So to be an objective isn't just like, I like Atlas shrugged.
It means I accept objectivism as a totality.
Since I do not, I don't, I think it is proper to be respectful to her wishes and not constantly be, especially given that I've somewhat of a platform to be like, I ran, I ran, I ran.
Because I don't think I ran would have liked it if I was talking about Iran this much.
So how do you, how do you deep program?
Because I don't like to bring up Iran just because I do see what, like how people roll their eyes essentially.
So how do.
What's the upside?
What, what's the upside exactly, but what is that pro can we, can you speak to that programming?
I think people have programming people.
I mean, look, at the end of the day, if you talk about the ideas and ideas make sense and people attract it to the ideas, then you say, oh, by the way, and this came from my man.
That's how you deep program them.
Right.
If you make the ideas prevalent in the culture of people start viewing self interest as something that's kind of interesting and worthwhile and something with investigating.
And they said, oh, that came from my man, then I think, I think then we'll, we'll deep program them and get them and get them changing their minds about these things.
And also, you know, going on shows where people are going to watch your show no matter who you bring on.
Right.
So even though now you do, if you put on, you, you put Iran in the title that immediately reduces the number of people who watch.
So, so in the future, you shouldn't.
You put like a mouse in the title and then at least the female population to the female to, you know, absolutely.
But so, so you go and you try to make them as credible as possible to as many people as possible over time.
It takes time.
And ultimately, I don't think the culture will have this response to her.
They might still disagree with her.
But I think over time and already you're seeing it younger people.
I think today are far less.
There was a generation who never read.
And was like this, bring out the garlic in the crosses, we don't want to have anything to do with it.
Then, and I think today, there are many more people who've read her and might disagree or not disagree.
Right.
And then there are a lot of people who haven't read her, but who not opposed to it or willing to have an engage to engage.
So I think it's changing already.
And I think in 20 years, it'll be completely different.
And just two more things that she does that I think it says that I think people find very, very off putting given our culture.
Basically, you could sit down with Rand and be like, your fear is not in any way a hold on my freedom.
Just that one sentence.
And for a lot of people that's very off putting and very harsh, it's correct.
But for them, it's just like, wait a minute, I'm still scared.
I don't care.
Like for example, like with lockdowns and things like this.
It's like, well, I'm scared and maybe I have a right to be scared.
Oh, God.
Or like, I'm scared that you have a gun in your house.
And it's like, I respect that you're scared.
I don't care at the end.
As you say, at the end of the day, this is my house.
I'm going to live my life as I please as long as I don't hurt other people.
Well, you are hurting me because I'm scared.
No, that's not.
This is the feeling versus fact.
Yeah.
So that is one situation.
It's like a feeling versus freedom.
Yes.
Where Rand puts a lot of people off.
I also think that historically a lot of people who were drawn to her are drawn to her for the wrong reasons.
That a lot of times like Howard Rourke, the hero, we're going to still say hero.
You're supposed to say protagonist, the hero, the hero of the fountain head.
He's extremely intelligent, but he's also extremely uncompromising.
What often ends up happening is you'll have a young kid who is somewhat intelligent,
but then they pick up the personality and now you're someone I can't work with.
And then it's like, you're not Howard Rourke.
Relax.
You're not that skilled.
You're not that talented.
But because the character has to be personification and have certain aspects together,
when kids read that they're going to might get the wrong idea and that's not Rand's fault.
And it's more than that.
It's so, I completely agree with that, but it's even broader than that.
So here is, in my view, one of the geniuses of the millennium presenting a philosophy.
And she's got not just the questions, in my view, she's got the answers.
And you're reading them at 16 and you're reading the answers.
You don't know at 16 that this is true.
You might have a sense that it's true, but you don't have the life experience, the learned experience.
You don't have the facts.
You don't have the knowledge.
You're picking up truth.
It's just being absorbed.
You're accepting it as true, but you don't know it's true.
And then you go out into the world advocating for it, right?
Which we all did, or at least I did, when I was 16.
And you're obnoxious.
You can't prove what you're arguing.
Because you don't have the experience.
It took me, I don't know, 10, 20 years, probably 20, to figure out that I really do think what she said was true, right?
But I didn't know when I was 16.
When I was 16, I just absorbed these ideas and accepted them in a sense, you know, with some connection to reality,
but a sense on faith, right?
At least presented it that way.
And as a consequence, you come off as a detached from reality, obnoxious human being.
And I think of a lot of young objectivists, oh, and it's hard not to be.
Because you are.
You're confronted with genius.
And you're not a genius.
I certainly am not a genius.
And I'm confronted with just genius and have all this information in my head now.
I cannot articulate it.
And it's hard to deal with yourself.
There's an inside joke.
No, you said I'm confronted with genius, I point to us.
I'm confronted with you guys.
I'm at an age where I know how to deal with geniuses.
But I'm going to say there's something else that this is not why people don't like her, but there's something that the fountainhead does,
which I think is very, and I don't blame her, but it's a bad consequence.
If you read the fountainhead and you're young and you're intelligent and talented, the message, at least I got,
and I know I'm not alone, is you are going to think that you're going to be a pariah,
that a lot of people are going to be against you and you're basically doomed for a short period of being isolated and alone.
And that may have been the case when the fountainhead was written.
But I think now with the internet, and in my experience, both as a youth and someone who's a little bit older,
I didn't appreciate and you're not going to get it from that book.
And you can't get it through that book because it has to have a certain narrative.
How many people who are a little older are giddy when they find young talent.
How inspiring it is, how exciting it is.
Like when you talk to these kids who are doing things on the internet or writing or whatever achievement,
you want them to flourish.
You're not threatened by them as the antagonists of the fountainhead are.
And that doesn't come through in the fountainhead because it depends on your profession, right?
I mean, parts of the world are better than others.
If you're an artist, at least the way I conceive of art, and you want to go study art today,
you're going to be poo pooed and look down on and so on.
So yeah, I agree.
I mean, in my generate, when I read, I meant, you know, there was no internet.
There was, and I was in Israel, so we were isolated and there was nobody else who had shared their ideas.
And he did feel that kind of isolation.
But Rock gave you, to me, he didn't teach me about, you know, you're going to be isolated,
partially because I wasn't, maybe I was humble, right?
You were Israeli.
When I read Atlas Rock, I identified with Eddie Willis.
Okay.
When I read the fountainhead, I didn't identify with Howard Rock.
How old were you when you read the fountainhead?
So I read Atlas when I was 16.
I probably read a fountainhead when I was 16 and a half, 17, something like that.
That is unfaul crime.
You read the fountainhead after Atlas Shrug?
Yeah.
If anyone listening to this.
They should read fountainhead first.
If you read fountainhead after Atlas Shrug, no.
That is a war crime.
No, for me, reading Atlas Shrug was much more important.
It is more important.
But my point is, I think the fountainhead in many ways is redundant in certain aspects
if you read Atlas Shrugged first.
And because the fountainhead is such a masterful book and such a personal book.
I agree with that.
So ideally you would read the fountainhead first.
That's what I'm saying.
Yes.
And here's the other thing people don't appreciate.
I'm sorry to interrupt you.
People think Randall is about politics, politics, politics, politics.
The fountainhead is not a political book.
At all.
It's about, well, she talks about politics in Man's Soul.
Sure.
But it's about ethics, how important everyone has to have a moral code.
That's the other thing why people find Randall's putting.
If you have young people who now find it very important to live a moral life, who are like,
what does that mean to have morality, to have ethics, to live with integrity for people who
have gotten a little older, who have made these little sacrifices, who are like, I'm
not going to fight at work.
Do I really need to look for another job?
Yeah, my wife's kind of, you know, getting annoying, but am I going to make a fight about
it?
These little sacrifices that they make every day.
And big ones.
And big ones.
Absolutely.
So when you have someone who's saying, forcing you to look in the mirror and say, those little
sacrifices and big sacrifices made, you did the wrong thing and you're evading that you
betrayed your own conscience.
That to many people, I think is very threatening.
But this is why so many people say that I'm Rand is for 14 year old boys.
Right.
Right.
And there's a reason why, there's a reason why it appeals to 14 is a little young, but
16, 18.
Yeah.
It's because those are the ages where we were still open to idealism, idealism in a positive
sense.
Right.
To beautiful things, to ideals, to seeking perfection, to seeking a great life.
I think as you grow older, most people become cynical.
They give up on their ideals.
Why?
Because their ideals were wrong and their ideas fail.
Right.
My parents were socialists when they were young.
Those ideas fail.
So where do you go from socialism to your ideas?
Sinicism.
Sinicism.
Which is horrible.
Almost all adults, almost all adults out there are cynical.
And that is, that is, that has failed idealism.
And when they look at the young people, they see their idealism.
Oh, well, that's, I was idealistic too.
And they don't question the idea, well, they're good ideas and they're bad ideas.
They're right ideas and they're wrong ideas.
And that's why they attribute it to, they attribute it to youth.
So it's a threat to a lot of people, a lot of people who it's too late for.
For some people, it's too late to change their minds and they know it and they're too
invested in the, in the job, in the wife, in the, in the compromises.
In the comfort.
In the comfort.
And they're too invested in the comfort, too, too invested in the compromise, too invested
in the comfort.
And they know that they shouldn't be, they know they should change.
And these young people are challenging that.
And that is really, really scary for them.
And that's, that's why they reject it without even, without too much consideration.
One of the things Rand, the working title for Fountainhead was Second Hand Lives.
And Rand had two definitions of selfishness in that book.
One is selfishness in the sense of my life is the most important thing.
It's not the only important thing.
My family would be number two friends.
They certainly are extremely high values, but you can't have these secondary values
without the first value.
But in the context of my life, right?
Cause your family might not be a value, right?
You might hate your parents.
Sure.
The point being selfishness, then there's the other kind of selfishness, which is Peter
Keating, one of the villains of the book, which is he's selfish in that he's greedy.
He's looking out for number one, but he has no values.
He has no sense of character.
He just wants to be wealthy.
He wants to have a beautiful wife.
He wants to have a big house.
Why?
He couldn't tell you because other people have it and he wants to have it more than
them.
His sense of reference is other people.
He's living second hand.
What the problem with that is a lot of young people read Rand.
And when they start arguing online, they just start trying to talk like Rand, whereas Rand
would be like the original, be an innovator.
If you want to argue for objectivism in Rand's views, take her ideas, articulate them in
your own way.
Cause that's a good way of showing that you understand what she thinks.
But what they end up doing is just talking like her.
It sounds dated and comical.
And that's going to be off-putting cause it's like, Rand wouldn't expect someone else
to sound like Rand.
She's a, you know, a person.
And she of course wouldn't view Keating as selfish in any sense because, or even greedy,
greed is a tricky word.
But she was selfish in the old school sense.
Yeah.
He's selfish in the old, but even there, it's not as if, it's not as if he has some passion
and he's going after a passion no matter what.
I'm getting, you know, light sheets, steel, I'm getting, he, he doesn't have, his passion
is painting, right?
And he doesn't pursue his passion.
He pursues what his mother wants him to pursue and he pursues money and he's completely second-handed
in the sense that he follows other people's values, not his own.
Can we actually just backtrack and can we define some of these ideas that Iron Man is
known for of selfishness, selfishness, egoism, egotism, greed, I mean, those, all, basically
all of those words are seen as negative in society.
And Iron Man has been reclaiming in her work those words.
So can you speak to what they mean?
I think she's, I think she's trying to be, you're on my disagree, I think she's trying
to be needlessly provocative and it's off-putting and on one hand, maybe you want to be a provocateur
because that gives you people like, what does this woman mean?
On the other hand, many people are going to be viscerally put off.
When Iron Man was on Donahue in 1979, he asked her explicitly, define to me the virtue of
selfishness, which is the title of her collection of essays as well.
And she, this is Rand, immediately says, use a different word, self-esteem.
And it's like, yeah, it's like, why are you championing this word, which has extremely
negative connotations, whereas if you just say, and this is thanks to her and her work,
my life matters, my values matter, I'm not going to apologize for that.
That is a lot less off-putting than this caricature of Rand, which is I'm, when people hear I'm
for selfishness, they hear, oh, someone's bleeding out in the corner, but I want to
get a coke.
That's nice.
She condemned that.
She says, I'm against this kind of sociopathy.
That's absolutely crazy.
But that word selfishness.
It goes a mistake to, to, to be provocative in this one dimension, to go, like, and to
stick with it.
I mean, she's stuck with this idea of selfishness and so on.
This term.
And it's, I, I, I, I often use terms for provocative effect.
Yes, this is true.
You're a master, you're a scholar of the trolling arts.
Thank you, sir.
But I think this is one example where the costs that weigh the benefits.
And go ahead, you're on.
Yes.
I'm, I'm, I don't, I'm open to that idea, but I don't, I don't think that's right.
I mean, when you actually dig, you know, deeper into what people object to, they're not but
objecting to the word.
They're objecting to the ideas.
And she addresses this explicitly in the virtue of selfishness in the, I think, the
introduction.
Wait, hold on.
I gotta, I gotta, that's for clarification.
You're saying they're objecting to the ideas, but when they talk about her, they're not
talking about her actual ideas.
They're talking about the caricature.
Well, sure.
But, but the caricature is a defense mechanism.
Okay.
Not to, not to have to deal with the ideas.
Sure.
So they create the caricature in order to ignore the ideas in order to, and, and some of them
do it consciously.
Like when, when, when people like Krugman and others do this, they know exactly what
they're doing.
Krugman is, it's Ellsworth Toohey.
Yes.
He's, he's the perfect Ellsworth Toohey.
And, and he, he knows Iron Man.
He's red Iron Man.
And he knows she's the enemy in some sense.
He knows.
Checked out our episode with, with Krugman.
I think it's number 90.
It was a great conversation.
Didn't get as many views as me, but what are you going to do?
Well, you got a Nobel Prize, so what you got?
I've got a ticket to heaven.
Sorry, Paul.
Yes, sir.
Alfred has an Nobel Prize.
And Hitler was a times man of the year.
Yes.
But you could, you, that, that really bothers me when people bring that up.
Are you really?
Yeah.
Time of the year.
It's called a joke, Michael.
Good.
Is it?
Man of the year is not representative.
Good.
It's the represents the most influential person of that year.
And Hitler was.
Absolutely.
Wait.
What were you upset about?
Look at Time magazine, they called Hitler man of the year.
Like you're on set.
They weren't saying this guy's awesome.
They said this is the guy who moved on the world.
No, they never sanctioned him in that sense.
I don't know.
It's not like he was Stalin.
I don't, I don't go out there.
No, that's who they like.
Yeah.
Hitler's terrible.
Stalin guy.
Yeah.
Oh, no, no.
I'm not even joking.
The attitude between, the attitude of people between Nazism and, or fascism and communism
is stunning.
Like in my upcoming book, I have all the receipts how like the things that they were saying
about Stalin at the time are, if you look back, it's unconscionable.
And these people have had no accountability in the positive direction.
But it's not, it's not even at the time.
And we need to get back to the selfishness stuff, but it's not even at the time.
So I'm, I was once, I think I've told this story, I was at, I was in the green room going
on John Stossel show.
And so a bunch of libertarians, right?
In the green room all hanging out and this guy walks in, the young guy walks in and somebody
says to me, you know, he's, he's a communist.
I said, what do you mean?
I said, they said, no, no, he's, he's a card carrying real member of the communist part.
He's a communist.
And I said, and that's okay with you guys.
And they go, yeah, yeah, it's a nice guy.
And I'm like, no, this is not acceptable.
Hold on.
Let me quote Rand.
Rand said she would rather talk to a philosophical Marx, right?
Did she not say this?
Yeah.
But this is not, this is, this is a communist in the context of 21st century, right?
So, so I said, well, well, in a sense that we know exactly what we know exactly.
So I'm like, this guy has the blood of a hundred million people on his hands.
I'm not letting him off the hook.
So I get, I engage with this guy and, and, and, and literally we get into this, you know,
I'm telling him what I, what I think of his ideas and therefore what I think of him.
Then the people from the wardrobe department come out and their chairs are put aside and
you know, this little gladiator ring.
It's like the libertarians are like sitting there amused because to them it's just, you
know, and I don't, you know, I'm not going to name names, but to them it's just like,
yeah, he's a communist and I said, I said at some point, and I said at some point to
them, I won't name names because I said at some point to them, if somebody walks into
a room and says, I'm a Nazi, do you just treat him as, okay, let's, let's go hang out and
get some drinks?
I do.
I don't.
I do.
Because I wrote a book about this, the new right.
And I did talk to Nazis and I went to North Korea.
Because you were writing a book.
But, but you're not, you're not going to hang out with a Nazi or a communist just like
the regular person.
Right.
To me, a Nazi and a communist are the same.
I don't.
Okay.
Please explain this.
Because first of all, any time you have equivocation, I hate that because I don't, I don't like
equality.
I think it's a bad concept.
Sure.
We're all sitting here as Jewish people.
Right.
We're from the.
We're from the Soviet Union.
Yeah.
To say these two things are basically the same.
It's a matter of life and death for all of us.
We'd be dead under Hitler.
We're not doing so hot under Stalin, but we're still alive.
So.
Sure.
There's some very big.
Sure.
It's one more.
There are all context.
Hold on.
One more thing.
There's also one very big difference in that one has a lot worse of a brand name and the
other does not, even though the other should.
It's a brand.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I, so I agree.
So there's a context in which I would fear Stalin more than Hitler.
There's a different context in which I would fear Hitler, but as ideologies, they are equally
evil.
Wait, wait, but.
Not, not the same because the difference has been communism and fascism.
And as ideologies, they equally evil.
They both view the individual as insignificant, unimportant, and they both basically want
to kill any independent minded.
Well, you're equating communism and Stalinism.
So you're equating.
No, I'm equating communism.
I don't know what Stalinism is.
I don't care.
Stalinism is one version of communism.
It's an implementation.
Yeah.
Communism is an evil ideology, no matter who practices it.
I don't, I don't think that's, I think that's too loose because here's one example.
The first person who went to the Soviet Union from the left and denounced it was Emma Goldman.
She was an anarcho-communist, right?
So she went there.
She got deported from the United States.
She went to Lenin to his face.
Hold on.
Let me finish.
You're ready.
You're already dismissing what I'm saying.
Me?
Your body language, your emotion.
Humility, yeah.
Humility.
History doesn't care about your feelings either.
She goes to Lenin.
She goes, we're supposed to be about free speech.
We're supposed to be about the individual freedom.
What are you doing?
Free speeches of bourgeois extravagance.
You can't have it during a revolution.
Too bad.
Right.
She comes back to the West.
Wait, he's right?
Yeah.
Oh, no.
Yeah, correct.
Yeah, I understand.
Yeah, yeah.
She's more consistent with the idea.
Yeah, yeah.
He's more consistent.
Hold on.
She's a compromise.
Yeah, you're right.
Well, she comes back to the West.
The big red Emma, the big hero of the left.
And she goes, you guys, this is a complete, not, she didn't say bad.
She was very ranted.
She goes, this is pure evil.
This is horrifying.
But they're doing to the workers, which you supposedly care about, completely oppressing.
And when one person described, they go, when she got up to talk, it was a standing ovation.
And when she was finished, you could hear a pin drop because she wasn't some capitalist.
She wasn't some bourgeois conservative.
She was as hard left for violent revolution as it gets.
And so I don't think she, as a communist, is an evil person.
I think she is.
Because if she wasn't evading and, you know, with Rand, and I think in reality, the essence
of evil is evasion, is ignoring the facts of reality, is putting your feelings ahead
of your facts.
She would realize that what was going on in the Soviet Union was the inevitable consequence
of her ideas.
That could be just done.
So she could have changed her mind.
She could have, coming back to the Soviet Union, said, these ideas are wrong.
I now repudiate my ideas, not just of implementation, but my ideas.
And then I would have said, yeah, she had been mistaken before, and now she's confronted
reality.
But if she stayed a leftist, if she stayed a leftist to that extent, not just a mild
leftist, but a leftist thought, then I think she's dishonest and therefore immoral, right?
But you're using three words identically.
You're saying dishonest, immoral, and evil.
So evil is more, is an extreme form of immorality, right?
Sure, of course.
So she's immoral, the ideology she holds is still evil, because the ideology, she might
be delusional.
But delusional and evil are the same.
But she can be delusional, she cannot be delusional.
See, I'm willing to accept a delusion before she's gone to the Soviet Union and seen it.
Once she's gone to see it, I don't think that excuse holds anymore.
I think now she's been confronted and she's lying to herself about the implications of
it.
Logically, it's inevitable that what happens in the Soviet Union has to happen in any
communist context.
So to play a little bit of a devil's advocate here, is it logically inevitable?
Is it, can you imagine that there is communist systems where the consequences we've seen
in the 20th century are not the consequences we get in, imagine future societies under
different conditions, under different, you know, with the internet, different communication
schemes, different set of resources.
As long as the human beings are what we are.
Now the Borg, you remember the Borg from Star Trek or whatever the series was.
Leonard.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm a nerd, okay.
The Borg is the highest of compliments.
The Borg in this household.
The Borg is the highest of lex.
The Borg is communist, right?
The Borg is a different species.
It has a different biology.
It has a business, different form consciousness.
Now, whether such a being could survive evolution is a question.
Whether such a...
Ants, they don't have to be intelligent.
But then the question is, can you have free will, cognitive cognition and be a Borg?
I don't think so.
But maybe.
Sure.
Maybe in another planet.
You've got to take DMT to meet the Borg.
Say human beings, no.
Communism is anti...
The reason communism is evil is it's anti-reality, anti-human nature, anti-the individual.
And therefore, it is inherently evil.
It cannot result in anything good coming out of it.
Only bad can come of it.
I think you could have predicted that before the 20th...
Yes.
And plenty of people did.
It's not...
You know who did?
Mikhail Bakunin.
Mikhail Bakunin, who was an early communist, Marx's rival in 18...
This is going to be in my upcoming book.
In 1860, he sat down and wrote an essay, goes, what Marx is advocating is insane.
This is going to be worse than the czar.
You're talking about complete totalitarian nightmare.
When you put this into practice, it's going to be something we've never seen before.
It's a pure horror.
Like, he was a hardcore leftist.
Look, Marx predicted it, right?
Yeah, that's true.
Marx at some point says, certain people cannot be part of the proletariat and they have to
be liquidated.
So this idea of mass murder and mass killing is not new to communism.
It is an inherent part of what it means.
You're either proletarian or you're not.
And look, and in Marx, it's in Marx, right?
The individual doesn't matter.
Now he might matter in his utopia because he knows he's got a marketing problem.
See, Marx has a marketing problem because the fact is you have individuals.
How do you convince individuals to give up their individualism, to give up the individuality?
What you say is, well, we have to go through this difficult process to get to this utopia.
And in this utopia, I mean, he's very Christian.
I mean, this is the other thing about Marx.
But the end time.
Marx is very Christian in everything, in his morality, in his collectivism, and in the
end time.
The end times for Marx is going back to the Garden of Eden.
The end time for Marx is you don't have to do anything.
Food is just available.
Right?
Wealth is just available.
You can do your hobbies.
You can do everything.
You can do whatever you want, whatever feelings, whatever.
So it's going back to a Garden of Eden perception perspective on human.
So he knows what that is going to require.
It's going to require this dictatorship of the proletarian to get there.
And he never tells you how we get there.
Right?
There's no game plan.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a dictatorship, then there's utopia.
It's like the underpants knows.
Step one, dictatorship.
Step two, question mark.
Step three, utopia.
Yeah.
And the question mark is what action is, right?
You annihilate.
Yeah.
You yadda yadda the important part.
Yeah.
And people buy this garbage, right?
So there's nothing of value in Marx.
I mean, let me be very clear.
There's nothing.
He gets capitalism wrong.
He gets the proletarian wrong.
He gets the workers wrong.
He gets the labor theory of value is wrong.
There is nothing of value.
There's nothing of value in communism.
It is a wrong unfitted to human nature ideology from beginning to end.
The clarity with which you speak is just not something I don't think I have that clarity
about anything.
So I mean, it has to do with that thing that where everybody has something to teach you.
I just feel like I've been reading Mein Kampf recently, for example, for the first time.
Something to learn from Hitler?
Well, there's a lot to learn from Hitler.
About the nature of evil, about wrong ideas, not about anything good, not about anything
positive.
Oh, so yeah.
So that's probably a really bad example.
And why is Hitler different than Marx?
That's a very good question.
No, I get that.
Yeah, but in terms of ideas, why is Hitler different than Marx?
Why do we have to assume there's something to learn from Marx, but we acknowledge that
there's nothing positive to learn from him?
Because I mean, I could tell you something in the sense that there's an interesting question
is how did this person get from step A to being able to implement the ideas?
I know.
Everybody should read.
Anybody who's interested should read Marx because it's really important.
It's important in the history and a lot of people were influenced by it.
Why was it influential?
What is it that he says that appeals to people?
I find it interesting to see all the parallels with Christianity.
And I think that's why to a large extent it appeals to people because they got to give
up the unimportant part of religion and got to keep the fun parts of religion, the important
parts to them of religion, the morality, for example.
But no, there's not something positive to learn from everybody.
In Ein Rahn's view, in your view, who was worse, Stalin or Hitler?
I think worse is this is something that I'll do a randy and sin and be evasive.
It really drives me crazy when people sit down and have these competitions about like
if someone who's Jewish brings up the Holocaust and someone who's African-American brings
up slavery.
And this is a conversation that I think is pointless and very hurtful and harmful.
And it is really silly and ridiculous.
So it might make sense in like some kind of stoner context about like you're doing the
math and trying to figure out.
But it's like, you know, and yeah, you could be like, what would you rather have like this
kind of cancer or full blown AIDS and short, I mean, there's got to be life expectancy.
But these are such, I'll evade your question, reframe it.
I think we understand, and a lot of this is a function of the propaganda at the time and
I'm not using the word propaganda in a negative sense, the horrors of Hitler and Nazism.
I think and one of the things I'm trying to solve with my upcoming book, there is a very
poor understanding about the horrors of Stalinism and what that meant in practice.
One of the reasons I wrote Dear Reader, my North Korea book and what I was shocked and
delighted by when I started writing Dear Reader, I thought to myself, look, I have very little
capacity to affect change.
But I can tell stories.
I can write books.
This is my competency.
If I move the needle in America, we got it pretty good here.
If I move the needle in North Korea, this could have really profound positive consequences.
So I set a very limited goal and that goal is to change the conversation about North Korea,
to stop it being regarded as a laughing stock and start regarding it as a existential horror.
And the metaphor I use always, and we brought up earlier was the Joker, because people look
at Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il, his father, they look at a clown, this guy's a buffoon.
And that's valid.
And I go, and I said, this is what I can do.
I can move that camera a little bit.
And now that camera, instead of looking at Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il, you see behind him
literally millions of corpses.
And when you see people putting on these performances and these shows, look at these fools, then
you're like, everyone, those people, their kid has a gun to their head right now.
If someone puts a gun to your kid's head, you're going to put on a clown makeup.
Yeah, you are.
What color?
Put on the shoes, whatever you want.
So in terms of, people do not appreciate the horrors of Stalinism.
I think this is a big fault of the right wing.
You can't expect necessarily the New York Times to do this because of the blood on their
hands.
And for a long time, I was berating conservatives.
I go, this was the big right wing victory, bloodless largely, the victory of the Soviet
Union.
No one's talking about it.
No one's informing.
And let's be clear, there are very many people who are Democrats, who are on the left, who
are violently opposed, literally violently opposed to the Soviet Union and its horrors.
This is not necessarily a partisan issue.
And I'm like, all right, I'm going to do something about it.
So I know that's not really literally your question, but that's kind of information
that feeds us.
Let me ask you that question if it's okay.
So which do we, can we learn more from, from a historical perspective of looking forward?
Which has more lessons in, in how to avoid it, how to, and just general lessons about
human nature.
Well, I mean, I agree with Michael that it's not important who's more evil because they're
both evil and they're both just so evil that the differences don't matter.
What matters is, what is the ideology?
What is the, what is, what are the consequences?
What do we understand from it?
What are we worried about?
What are we going to avoid?
So I'm not worried about Nazism, Kwan Nazism, because everybody hates Nazism.
I mean, it's uniform that that's out.
Even the people I think on the far right in America are staying away from the cliches
of Nazism, some of them are stupid enough not to, but in the end, if the United States
goes authoritarian right, it's not going to be Nazism, it'll be some other form of fascism
because that is so obviously, you know, being understood as evil and bad that there's almost
no understanding that the evil of communism.
I mean, you brought it up earlier, right?
Almost nobody understands that communism is an evil ideology, that there's, that there's
nothing worthwhile there, that any, any attempt to go in that direction in any sustainable
way is destructive.
They are, as you mentioned, they're economists out there claiming they are communists.
I mean, I find that spicable that anybody would claim to be a communist economist or
communist anything because I think that's, it's, it's a, it's an ideology that has no
basis, but we haven't learned that.
So to me, communism is the much bigger threat because we still think it's some kind of beautiful
ideal in, in the world around us.
I think Nazism is out, but I think, I think fascism is a, is a massive threat out there
because I don't think we've learned real lessons of, nobody knows what fascism is.
Everybody thinks fascism is Nazism.
They don't, they don't recognize that in a sense we already fascist and they were certainly
heading in that direction.
So they don't know what it is.
And again, we haven't studied, and the real lesson here is we haven't studied what unifies
them both because there's not a big difference between fascism and communism.
There's no big difference between Nazism and communism.
What does unify them?
What unifies them is the common good, the public interest.
What unifies them is this idea that there is some elite group of people who can run our
lives for us, for the common good, for the public interest.
And that you don't matter.
You as an individual, you individual don't matter and they, they will dictate how you
live.
And you know, so these are philosopher kings.
It goes back to Plato's philosophy, but it really unifies it.
Think about communism.
Nazism is about the sacrifice of the individual to the proletarian.
Who is the proletarian?
It's this collective group here.
Who represents the proletarian?
Well, they have, somebody has to, somebody has to tell the proletarian what they believe
in because they don't know, because there is no collective consciousness.
So you need a Stalin.
And this is the point about Marxism.
Marxism needs a dictator because somebody has to represent the, the, the, the values,
the, the, the public interest, what's good for the public.
Just Nazism needs the same thing.
Just Nazism replaced proletarian with Arians, the Aryan race.
And you have exactly the same thing.
You need a dictator to tell us what's good for the Aryan people so we can do what's good
for the Aryan people.
So it's impossible to have a communist system or a fascist system without a dictator naturally
emerging.
It's not, it's not possible to have a Georgia.
It's ideologically.
It's absolutely impossible to have that on, on scale.
You can certainly have communes where people behave communistically because it's not inside
the ideology.
And let me talk about this because let's talk about fascism, because fascism definitely
is going to have a strong man.
I don't even know how it could be fascism without that.
And let's talk, what you said earlier on is about how people don't know what fascism
is.
Fascists don't know what fascism is.
So there's a superb book by John Diggins from the early seventies called Mussolini
and Fascism, The View from America.
So I find Mussolini to be a far more interesting figure than Hitler because he had a much more
nuanced career.
He was much more of an innovator.
He was an intellectual.
He was intellectual.
He was shocking because he always comes across as a buffoon.
But he was actually a thinker.
So why does he not resist Hitler at all?
So one of the things with fascism is it comes, it's a direct line from Kant to Mussolini.
So basically there is a philosopher who I adore, who I'm sure you don't, called Schopenhauer.
And Schopenhauer, the question became, Rand was not a particularly humorous person.
She had some moments of wit.
There's a great moment when she was on Tom Snyder's show in 1980, I believe, and she's
talking about Kant.
And she goes, Immanuel Kant and all his ill-legitimate children, if you catch my meaning, she mean
all his bastards.
But the host, Tom Snyder, did not pick up on it.
If you watch it on YouTube, you could pick up on it.
And what happened was once Kant bifurcated reality into the phenomenal world, the pure
idea world, and the numinal world, the question became, well, what is the nature of this world
of ideas?
And Hegel had it meant reason.
I don't even know what that means theoretically, that the world of reason is idea.
And this is Schopenhauer, who hated Hegel, who constantly attacked him by name and Hegel's
followers in his work.
He was a very big innovator in a malevolent way, because he said the nature of reality,
this idea is will, meaning the universe doesn't care about you.
And it's constantly in this reality, putting urges in your mind values.
And when you denounce these values and urges, that's the basis of morality.
And from there, it went to Nietzsche, and the will isn't mindless, it is a will to power.
Mussolini took this and basically said, because the will to power is the real reality, the
Kantian idea, therefore, all of this is secondary.
So if we will it, we can make it happen.
When you have this concept of my willpower is stronger than reality, and you're like,
okay, how's this program going to work?
We can make it happen.
That was why fascism is not a very coherent ideology, because explicitly, there's a book
called from 1936 called The Philosophy of Fascism, which tried to codify this, 36.
This is a long time ago where they're like, we're against reason and explicitly rationality.
We are for willpower, for strength.
And if you are strong enough and united enough, you can force these things to work.
So there's a lot that is not taught about this ideology.
I highly recommend people read the books from the time.
And what was fascinating about Mussolini is he was regarded as the moderate.
Because the 1930s, you had the Great Depression, all the intellectuals said this proves capitalism
can't work.
The Great Depression, obviously, are quotes, it's capitalism's fault.
Then you had the alternative, the USSR, well, that's not tenable for us.
Here comes Mussolini, and Mussolini says, I'm going to take the best of both worlds.
I have aspects of markets, capitalism, but I don't have this chaos, but I also don't
have complete government control of the bureaucrats.
I'm going to have this combination.
And there was a Broadway song, You're the Top, You're Mussolini.
That was later edited out, because that's when he took a bad turn.
But this is kind of the fascist idea.
And it's about power and it's about control.
That's the essence.
It's about will.
They don't care.
Fascists don't care who owns stuff, owns in quotes, because what's important is who controls
it.
So you can own your home, but if I get to tell you when you can sell it, for how much you
can sell it and what you can do on that home, then I'm in control of it.
That's the essence of fascism.
And if you think about it, we live today in a much more fascist economic context than
anything else.
We pretend that corporations are private.
But when everything they do is regulated, how much they pay them, when and how they
can fire them, what they can do in their property, it's all control.
That's the way fascists start controlling everything.
But it's not possible to have checks on power and balance on power at the top of fascism
or communist systems.
The question was whether in fascist systems or communist systems, we're saying the dictator
naturally or must emerge.
If I don't say emerge, the dictator is the one who makes the fascist system.
Yeah, fascism, well, it could emerge, because for example, I think today in America, we're
moving much, much towards fascism, socialism, and at some point that manifests itself in
some kind of dictator.
And the dictator might be different than a Mussolini on Nazis.
It might be couched in some kind of pseudo-constitutional American presence.
It would be a lot easier for a female to be a fascist dictator in America than a male,
because do you have that softness?
She's not going to come off as a strong woman.
People won't see it coming, in my opinion.
Maybe.
I think it's going to be, I have my own view.
I think it's going to be a nationalist, religionist, environmentalist.
I think somebody who can combine those three.
Hitler did those, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And somebody who can combine those three and articulate the case for it, I think America
is ready.
So you think it's possible for fascism to arise in the world again?
Oh, of course.
It has never went away.
They just adopt the name.
And because the fundamental ideas, the Kantian ideas, the ideas that are behind fascism never
went away.
They're still as popular, if anything, more popular.
Then they were back then.
Marx is as popular.
I think these ideas are prevalent, they're out there, and absolutely we, I think America
is ready for them.
Again, it won't be quite in the form that we've experienced in the past.
It'll be in a uniquely American form, couched at a flag, and of course it was couched at
a flag before.
But no, yes, an authoritarian, some form of authoritarianism and the necessary, because
the fundamental principle behind both communism and fascism is the unimportance of the individual.
The individual is nothing.
The individual is a nobody, and the importance of the collective.
The collective will, the collective soul, the collective consciousness, but the collective
has no will, has no soul, has no consciousness.
So somebody has to emerge to speak for the collective, otherwise everything falls apart.
So it's necessary, whether it's a committee or whether it's one person, how exactly,
somebody has to speak for the collective.
Even a committee doesn't function as a committee.
Most committees, particularly when the committee is about dictating how people should live,
somebody is going to, because now it becomes really, really important, somebody is going
to dominate that committee and rule over it, because you don't want independent voices,
because the individual doesn't matter, the individual doesn't come.
People in natural hierarchicals, if you have seven people and they're ostensibly have the
same role, someone is going to emerge as a leader naturally, and some people are going
to follow as you.
Yeah, it's the same reason you cannot have the Richard Wolfe type socialism of, and
this is the more, if you will, innocent part of his ideas, oh, why can't we have corporations
or be worker owned, and everybody votes on everything, and we vote on who should be CEO.
And no, communism, fascism, most ideas necessitate ultimately authoritarians, and that's most
of human history we forget again.
This idea of liberty, this idea of freedom, even the limited freedom we have today.
It's a recent invention.
It's a recent invention.
It happens in little pockets throughout history.
Now we had a little bit of this democracy stuff, partial, only a few, you know, some
people got to vote and it wasn't rights respecting, because it didn't have the concept of rights
in Athens, right?
Yet in a few Greek cities, we maybe had a version of it in Venice, we had a version
of it in city states around the world.
But then it was invented by the founding fathers in this country.
That's what makes the founding of America so important and so different, and such a
radical thing to have happened historically.
Freedom is rare, authoritarianism is common.
So I was looking at some statistics that 53% of people in the world live under authoritarian
governments.
Only 53.
Oh, because India is democratic, so I guess they don't count India, but yes, it used to
be 100.
How do we change that?
Exactly, yeah.
How do we change that?
How do we change that?
And even the authoritarianism in a country like China is a lot less than it used to be
under Mao, right?
So I would, you know, they were better off than they were under Mao.
That's a reality.
How do we change it?
We have to declare, we have to change the ethical views of people.
This brings us back to selfishness.
Because it, as long as the standard of morality is the group, others, as long as the standard
of value is what other people want, what other people think.
As long as you are alive, only to be sacrificed to the group, that's why you have to challenge
Christianity.
As long as Jesus on a cross dying for other people's sin is viewed as this noble, wonderful
act instead of one of the most unjust things that ever happened to anybody, as long as
the common good and the public interest are the standards by which we evaluate things,
we will always drift towards fascism, some form of authoritarianism.
Can I answer your question?
I think there's something that has to go along with what Yaron was saying, and I know he's
going to agree with me, which is technology, because if it becomes harder technologically
for the authoritarian and more expensive for him to enforce his edicts, that is going
to create a pocket of freedom regardless of what the masses think.
The masses, hold on, let me finish, the masses as a rule are not going to be able to think
in general anyway.
I have a much more elitist view of mankind than Randolph's.
Let me give you one specific example, which I mentioned in my book, The New Right.
Let's suppose it's 1990.
Not that long ago, we all remember 1990, and we're having an argument about censorship,
and Yaron says, I want full freedom of the press, freedom of books, publish whatever
you want, whatever, free speech.
And I say, well, what about books like Mein Kampf?
What about people read this with the wrong idea?
What about child pornography, things like this, like where are you going to draw the
line?
And we could argue along.
Lex appears from the future, and he goes, hey guys, this conversation is moot.
And we're like, Lex, you look exactly the same.
I'm like, yeah, of course, robust on age.
And you go, I'm from the future.
And I go, wait a minute, black president.
And you go, look, this conversation is moot, because in a few years from now, you will
be able to send any book anywhere on earth at the speed of light.
You can make infinite copies in one second, and you could send it to anyone such that
they can only open this book if they know a magic word.
And I go, well, how much is this going to cost?
Oh, it's free.
And I go, wait, you're telling me I can make infinite copies of any book and teleport them
at the speed of light anywhere for free.
And you would say, yes, we would think he's insane.
But that's the status quo, right?
So technology has done far more to fight government censorship of literature and ideas than has
spreading the right ideas.
So when you have things like crypto, which makes money less accessible than a gold block
in your house, when you have things like people being able to travel quickly, those are also
necessary compliments to having the right ideas.
And Rand herself said that she couldn't have come up with her philosophy before the industrial
revolution.
So as time goes forward, and we have more technology, and we have more discourse.
But for very difficult reasons, she said that.
But it's also a lot easier to persuade people of the right ideas.
So I kind of agree.
Maybe I'm more pessimistic, or maybe I don't get the technology completely.
That's because you're a boomer.
There you go.
Okay, boomer.
I get that.
I get that.
It's also a lot.
I think I'm the last year of the boomer generation.
It's a mindset.
I think I hit that last year.
It's a mindset.
There you go.
I love you so much.
So the reason she said she couldn't develop her, the reason she said she couldn't develop
the philosophy without the industrial revolution, is the link between reason and wealth was not
obvious before the industrial revolution.
And that, you know, for example, it's not obvious to Aristotle.
Aristotle doesn't see the link between rationality and wealth creation.
Business is low, you know, and money is, money is barren, money is barren, your interest
has no productive function, bankers don't have.
So yet to see it existentially, to be able to see reason is the source of wealth creation.
So I think that's a little different.
Now there is a sense in which, yes, technology makes it more difficult for authoritarians
to achieve their authoritarianism.
I wouldn't, I'm not convinced that they can't.
I didn't say can't.
Yeah.
Okay.
I didn't say can't.
Yeah.
So at a certain point, I'm saying it's more expensive.
I'm just saying it becomes more expensive.
Yes.
It becomes more expensive, no question.
It becomes more expensive.
And we're still beings that live in a physical reality, therefore they can still harm us in
this physical reality.
But let me say this, like, it's going to sound as absurd if there was technology that we
could teleport anywhere on Earth at the speed of light, that would certainly go a long way
towards hurting authoritarianism.
Sure.
If there was some way to go.
Yeah, yeah.
And of course they could teleport too.
Sure.
And this is, of course, the danger of they can use the technology too.
Sure.
Absolutely.
They can use social scores and with monitoring people and cameras everywhere.
So there's a sense in which you probably had more privacy before some of the technology.
Oh, absolutely.
So it's not obvious to me that, so to me, it's all about ideas.
And if we don't get the ideas right, technology will be used for evil, yes, and it will allow
some of us maybe to escape for a little while in some realms, but others not.
You know, Iran and North Korea do a pretty good job shutting themselves away from technology,
although a lot gets through in the Iranian, at least with Iran.
And North Korea gets through.
I don't know about North Korea.
How much gets through?
It's real undermining them, which is wonderful.
Yeah, which is great.
So yes, but it's more than that, and this is what leads me to be optimistic.
It's that we live in a world today where 7 billion people basically have access to all
of human knowledge, all of human knowledge.
It's not like in Rome, when Rome fell, all of human knowledge disappeared.
Now some of it escaped to Byzantines, some of the Byzantines had and ultimately landed
up with the Arabs and found its way back into Western civilization through them, but a lot
of knowledge disappeared, just wiped out, right?
How to build a dome, how to build a big dome, how to have, you know, in Pompeii, they had
faucets, they're running water in faucets.
They didn't have faucets for another 1,000 years, right?
A lot of, they couldn't build tall buildings once Rome came down.
The Great Pyramid of Egypt was the tallest building on earth until like 1840.
It was crazy.
Rome was a city of a million people.
Other than China, there wasn't another city of a million people in the West until London
in the 19th century, 1500 years later.
So it all disappeared because all of it was concentrated basically in one place.
Today none of that exists because of the internet, because of universities everywhere, institutions.
I mean, think about how many engineers they are in the world today, right?
Who have basically all, basically the same level of knowledge on how to build stuff.
So even if the United States went to some kind of dark ages, it's unlikely the whole
world goes into that kind of dark ages.
So I am optimistic in that sense that the diffusion of knowledge is so broad today that
other than wiping out all the electricity on the planet, everything electronic on the
planet, it's just, it's not going to be possible to control us all.
And in that sense, technology is going to make it possible for us to survive and to
stay semi-free because I don't think full freedom, but semi-free because full freedom,
you need the ideas because full freedom means you need some political implementation.
No, full freedom means anarchy, but we know that.
We need to get into that because we can't leave without pointing out that we fundamentally
disagree about that.
Wow, that's beautiful to be continued on that one.
Let me ask about one particular technology that I've been learning a lot about, thinking
a lot about, talking about, which is Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general, but Bitcoin
specifically, which a lot of people argue that the Bitcoin, that setting ideas aside
when you look at practical tools that governments use to manipulate its people is inflation
of the monetary system, within the monetary system.
And so they see Bitcoin as a way for individuals to fight that, to go outside those specific
government control systems and thereby sort of decentralizing power.
There's a case to be made historic of the 20th century that you couldn't have Stalin,
you couldn't have Hitler, you couldn't have much of the evil that you see in the world
if they couldn't control the monetary system.
You couldn't have had the New Deal.
And FDR realized this very quickly.
That's right, confiscated all the gold.
Everybody knows FDR is going to come into, to become president and confiscate the gold.
So one of the mythologies, the myths about the Great Depression is that there were
all these bank runs that, bank runs happened because everybody was afraid that FDR would
get elected, confiscate the gold.
So everybody ran to the bank and took the gold.
Little did they realize that he would confiscate their private holdings in their own backyard.
He would dig, he would force them to dig up the gold from their own backyard.
But yes, one of the first things FDR did in spite of denying it throughout the campaign,
right?
He was asked about this over and over again and denied it.
One of the first things was take over the gold and take the United States, the Federal
Reserve off the gold standard so that they can in a sense print money in that he could
start spending.
Yeah.
What people don't realize just to clarify what you're on said is FDR, this is something
that's so crazy to us that we think, okay, I'm misunderstanding it, FDR made it illegal
for people to own gold unless it's like a wedding ring.
And before that, contracts, because inflation was a concern, I made a contract with your
own, right?
I said, okay, you're either going to pay me in $1,500 for my work or the gold equivalent
because if that $1,500, you know, you know, Weimar Germany and you have hyperinflation,
I don't want that $1,500.
Just give me the gold bullion.
And FDR said all of those clauses, he broke every contract.
No, let me.
They don't, they don't matter.
So now if I say your own says, okay, you owe me three feet of drywall and I go, here's
three feet of drywall.
It's a 12 inches.
And you go, wait, wait, wait, three feet is 36 inches.
You go, no, no, not anymore.
It's like, what am I supposed to do?
And because you have, when you print more money, the value of every individual dollar
matters less, it becomes that much harder to plan anything, either in the government
level or in the private level, because if I'm managing outlays, if I'm trying to pay
my work as I'm trying to build factories, I'm thinking long term, and I don't know what
this dollar is going to buy in 10 years, that puts an enormous incentive for me to spend
it now and not save it.
Because if I save it, it's going to be worth a lot less.
And the worst thing about inflation, and this is something I think people who are pro-capitalism
don't talk about enough.
They do talk about, I would just like to see it more.
This by far hurts the poorest of the poor the most.
When we came to this country, my mom told me they would go to 86th Street in Bensonhurst
with the fruit stands to buy me some grapes.
And you go to this fruit stand, and she'd walk all the way to the other corner.
And if it was three cents more a pound or less a pound, she'd walk all the way back
because that three cents mattered.
Now, if I have this dollar, and it's 5% inflation, whatever, and next year it's 95 cents, me
and you, the three of us might not care.
But if I destitute hand to mouth, and I've got 5% less, that is really a material consequence
of my life.
So inflation really is evil because it hurts the people for who those pennies matter.
Well, one of the ways the government gets around that, and it's because they get smart
to that, is they index everything.
So they index your Social Security, they index welfare, they try to make sure.
But that only makes you more dependent on them.
And the people in the modern context that saving the inflation hurts the most are savers.
People trying to save money, and Fed policy right now is just horrific if you're a saver,
right?
Because the Fed interest rates are zero, you get nothing on your saving.
And cost of living is going up, maybe not at a huge level, but it is going up.
And yet you can't even save to keep the value of your dollars.
And the government controls, and this has massive perverse effects because it's not
just the prices go up, it's the prices don't reflect reality anymore.
So some prices go up, some prices might not.
Investments get distorted, things get produced that shouldn't get produced.
And then people like Richard Wolff turn around and blame all the distortions and the perversions
and the crashes and the financial crisis on capitalism.
Not on the fact that the Fed, look at the financial crisis.
Financial crisis was caused, you could argue by inflation.
And we could get into that if you wanted, but that's probably a three hour show, just
that, right?
It was caused by the Fed reserve.
And yet who got blamed for the financial crisis?
Who would Richard Wolff is going to jump up and down?
This is a crisis of capitalism.
This was caused by capitalism.
But capitalism is the negation of the Fed.
Capitalism says there should be no Fed.
That's item number one on the list of the things capitalists want is to get rid of the
Fed and then grant you guys your wish, have competition for currency and let's see if
Bitcoin wins.
I'm skeptical, but I don't care.
My point is under freedom.
I don't care who wins.
I just want free choices and let the best currency win.
I doubt that becomes Bitcoin, but it doesn't really matter if I'm wrong.
Let me add to this.
And I think people appreciate, and this is a leftist, leftist, but it's best that the
government and the banks are in bed with each other.
This I don't think is particularly controversial statement.
Well, I don't like that statement.
Let me just say why I don't like it.
I don't like it because it assumes that they're equal partners or that this causality goes
in both directions.
From day one, and this is really from day one of the establishment of the United States,
banks have been regulated by the state.
And the reason for that is primarily Jefferson and others found as distrust of finance.
So from the beginning, banks have been controlled by the state.
Now, over time, if I'm controlling you, you won't have influence over me because I get
to...
So yes, they get into bed over time, but so I don't like it that they're in bed together.
One is dominating over the other and the other is participating because what choice
do they have?
I should explain to you how things work when you get to bed in bed and it's not always
equal.
Well, okay.
So let's talk about safeguards, which is very Randy and top, she doesn't like those.
I had to read that scene three times in the fountain head as I couldn't read what I was
getting.
I was like, yeah.
No, because I'm like, I looked at the back cover.
I'm like a woman wrote this book in 1943.
I must be misunderstanding this scene.
And it's 43.
Yeah.
She sure had a lot of shades of gray.
Yeah.
So no, she hated that.
Only black and white.
No, but what I meant is 2008, right?
You have the bailout of Wall Street, whereas in 2020, we saw every medium and small business
under the sun go under.
There's not even a pretense that these are going to be a bailed out.
So the priorities of the politicians, in my view, are always going to be towards powerful
entities, powerful corporations, and they're not going to be about the medium guy, the
middle guy.
Let me just finish my point because I see you champing at the bit.
At the very least, if you have regulation, people influencing each other with Bitcoin
and with crypto, that is not a possibility.
You do not have any agency who is king of Bitcoin, who is the Federal Reserve of Bitcoin.
There is no organizing management team.
Now you could say this is a bad thing, but you can't say that this is a different thing
to money as opposed to Federal Reserve system.
Yeah.
So I agree with that description of Bitcoin, my problems with Bitcoin elsewhere.
Let me just say about the financial crisis.
I don't like it phrased that way again.
They let Lehman go under and destroyed Lehman Brothers.
In the past, they destroyed Drexel Burnham because they didn't like Michael Melkin.
They are vindictive.
It's not an accident that the Treasury Secretary at the time was an ex-Chairman of Goldman
Sachs, not Lehman Brothers, and Goldman hates Lehman, and the next day they bail out AIG.
What I got out of financial crisis more than anything, and by the way, there wasn't a bailout,
so it wasn't even a bailout because they gave money to every bank whether they had problems
or not.
And indeed, I know several bankers, including big banks like JPMorgan and West Fargo and
a friend of mine, John Allison of BB&T, who told them explicitly, we don't want your money.
We don't need your money.
And they were basically, a gun was put to their head and they said, you don't take the
money, we'll shut you down basically, the equivalent of that.
So they a wanted a virtue signal, so there's a big virtue signal.
We're taking care of things.
Don't worry.
We've got everything under control, even though they were completely panicking and they had
no clue what they were doing.
One of the things that the financial crisis really illustrated was how pathetic, ignorant,
and incompetent the people at the top are, and they knew it.
And so Paulson goes to Congress, give me $700 billion, don't tell me how to use it because
I have no clue, just give it to me and give me your authoritarian power to do it any way
I want.
And that was not out of a sense of grandeur.
That was a sense of panic.
He had no idea.
He had no clue.
None of them did.
They bailed out everybody they could, everybody within their periphery.
When they thought it was appropriate, they were vindictive about some people like Lehman.
It was complete arbitrary use of power.
The bankers didn't benefit from this.
Indeed, many bankers who took their money lost from it.
Bank stocks got crushed after the bailout.
Before the bailout, bank stocks were doing okay.
And right after top was announced, bank stocks crushed because this was bad for banks.
It wasn't good for banks.
This is just central planning gone amuck.
It's not them bailing out elites.
It's them throwing money at a problem without knowing what they would actually do and what
the consequences would be.
Right.
But the point is, sorry, we agree, the focus will always be on bailing out elites.
But the little banks got money too?
No.
I was saying that last year, there's no talk of saving ICE and Vice, saving Century 21,
saving all these other industries.
But sure there was.
If you look at what the Fed did, the Fed was bailing out.
Third, fourth-class businesses in all kinds of areas that you wouldn't consider elitist
areas.
Oh, PPP.
You're talking 2008.
Yeah.
No, I'm talking about now.
Okay.
I'm talking about COVID last year.
What the Fed did was unbelievable, the kind of bonds that they were buying even 2008.
Even after 2000, I couldn't believe what they did last year.
PPP, the Paypal Protection Program, was targeted at everybody.
Everybody got PPP.
It's not about, I don't think it's about bailing out elites.
It's about securing their power base.
And if they believe that securing their power base is Wall Street, then they'll bail out
Wall Street.
They believe securing their power base is writing checks to restaurant owners all over the country.
They'll write checks to restaurant owners all over the country, which is what they did
with PPP.
It's all about power for them.
And it's whatever will achieve power, whatever will result in power.
I don't think it's about elites.
I don't see a lead-ism in the bailouts of last year.
I agree.
I agree.
It wasn't last year.
That's one distinction between 2008 and 2020.
And I do think, just one more thing, I do think getting in good bed with the elites
is a great mechanism in general for maintaining one's power.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that's on dispute.
Depending on how we define the elites.
Of course.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
You mentioned there's some criticism towards Bitcoin.
There's a lot of excitement about the technology of Bitcoin for the resistance against this
kind of central state pursuit of power.
That's part of my criticism, because I don't think it works.
So yeah, I can imagine a world, I can imagine, I'd love to see a technology evolve where
money is competitive and it's a financial instrument that the government cannot touch.
You think the state is too powerful in Bitcoin?
I think two things.
I think right now, and maybe this won't be true in the future, right now I think crypto
is, it cannot function as money right now.
It just can't.
But it does.
No, it doesn't.
It functions as a mechanism, it functions as a mechanism to transfer, it's a technology
that allows me to transfer fiat money from place to place.
But it doesn't function, and it can't because it's too volatile.
Wait, wait, I've sold things with Bitcoin.
No, I know you have, but I can sell things, I can buy things and sell things with my airline
miles.
There are lots of ways in which you can use things as money, but it doesn't make the
money.
If you're using something as money, it's money.
No, so let me take something you said before, and the contradicts I think Bitcoin.
You said one of the things about money is that it's stable.
I know what it's going to buy tomorrow, right?
This is why we're against inflation because I know what the dollar today I can plan because
I can't plan, I don't know what Bitcoin is going to be with tomorrow.
So I can't plan with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is way too volatile to serve right now as money.
Now, the argument from Bitcoin is, yes, it's still being adopted.
At some point, it'll reach a certain crucial mass and then it will become money because
at that point, it can be used as money because they don't have a stable value.
Maybe right now, it's not useful as money because I can't predict what, I can't invest
in it knowing what the value will be in five years.
Right now, it's an asset.
It's not a monetary unit.
It's much more functions as an asset.
Assets value can go up.
Oh, I agree.
It's a function much more as an asset than as money.
That's not in dispute.
I agree.
So I don't think it's money, but I think it can compete as a money with something tangible.
So I think in a free market, some kind of crypto backed by gold would be more successful.
So Bitcoin folks argue that Bitcoin has all the same fundamental properties that does gold.
So it's backed by, there's a scarcity to it and it's backed by Pooferworks.
Backed by physical resources.
So they say that's a very natural replacement of gold, so it doesn't need to be connected
to gold.
So the two things that gold has that it doesn't have.
One is gold is not finite.
Gold supply actually grows over time.
Bitcoin at some point is truly finite, at least unless you count the fact that you can
split bitcoins and create coins, but that's a whole other question.
So that's one.
The other question is that gold has value beyond its use as a currency, beyond its use
as money.
For jewelry and stuff.
Yeah.
But you minimize that.
But jewelry and stuff has been important for the human race for 100,000 years.
You can find jewelry in caves, for the cavemen design jewelry and war them.
So we obviously assume being valued jewelry a lot.
And almost all jewelry evolved to be made out of gold because whatever it is within
us is attracted to shiny gold in particular, shiny object generally.
So there's something about gold that appeals to human being.
There's some value that gold has beyond its being a currency.
It doesn't, it's not, that Bitcoin doesn't.
Now it's not enough to use it as money.
Lots of things appeal to human beings.
But those are two characteristics.
One that it's not finite and second that it is a value beyond that Bitcoin doesn't have.
Don't you think the finiteness could be framed as a feature, the scarcity of Bitcoin?
No, because I think it creates a real problem with scarcity economically.
It's the issue of planning.
There is a mechanism, there's a beautiful mechanism in markets that as the supply of
gold is in a sense the quantity of gold is, prices are going down because there's too
little gold, right?
So the value of gold in a sense in dollar terms, the prices are going down.
What happens then is there's an incentive to then go mine for more gold, right?
Because it becomes cheaper and cheaper to mine as the price goes down.
So you mine for more gold, so it keeps increasing and it keeps increasing, basically very correlated
to the rate of increasing productivity.
That's the beauty of gold mining because prices are related to gold.
Gold is the dominant money and it increases at about the same rate as productivity.
So it keeps these, it keeps prices relatively stable.
You still have bouts of inflation and deflation, but it keeps it relatively stable.
With Bitcoin it's fine at its ends, now prices will only decline.
What rate will they decline at?
They're declining at the rate of productivity increases.
It's hard to predict the rate at which productivity increases.
For example, technological shocks can change that dramatically.
You could get bouts of dramatic deflation, dramatic price drops that could be problematic
in terms of planning the same problem of inflation just for first that you had before.
So again, it's a technical issue.
I'm sure there are ways to get around it.
And again, I'm not sure.
I don't know if you guys consider Bitcoin the end or the beginning.
That is, is Bitcoin it or is Bitcoin just the first example of a technology that's evolving?
I was just going to say, there's same technological issue with regard to gold, which is we now
have the technology though is very expensive to turn elements into different elements.
And at a certain, yeah, you could fire electrons at it or whatever, you could make gold.
They figured out how to do it.
It's not cheap and it's called aggressive.
If gold is the standard, a lot of resources are going to be going toward turning other
things into gold, making the production of gold cheaper.
And that's going to have a similar consequence that Lawrence talked about.
That's kind of the category of security that Bitcoin is talking about that it's very difficult
to do that with Bitcoin.
But I would argue that it's exceptionally difficult to do that with gold.
It is now, but the thing is, there's not huge incentive.
If gold is the basis and if gold is worth that much, gold isn't worth that much gold
is worth.
I'm saying in this world that we're talking about in the future, in the future, gold is
not going to be worth.
Let's say right now, gold is about 2000 bucks.
It's less than 2000.
But let's say 2000 bucks, that's that's price in terms of in dollars.
So you'd have to, it would have to be worth your while to create something of $2,000.
How much would you be willing to put into it?
At some point, you're right.
And at that point, I think gold stops being money because it's useless.
Once I can create it like silicon, then once I can make out official gold.
So I'm just not, I don't think Bitcoin is the solution.
I think, you know, I don't know what the solution is.
I wish I was that innovative.
But I think you need a solution that has more of the characteristics of gold than Bitcoin
currently has.
And I'm surprised, I guess I'm surprised at a lot of the technologists who view Bitcoin
as the end game where it strikes me as it's the birth of a new tech, it represents the
birth of a new technology and who the winner in that technology is going to be.
We have no clue.
Bitcoin is one of the players.
The other players, there might be a new technology that is even better than anything we can imagine
right now that so Bitcoin doesn't strike me as optimal and that we should be moving
towards something better.
Can you please stop shilling RANDCOIN for five minutes?
You know where there was RANDCOIN?
South Africa.
No, I was...
There are recurrences in RANDCOIN.
No, that's true.
No, I mean...
RANDCOIN is the South African one dollar, yeah.
The INE RANDCOIN was, I was in China in 20, I think it was 2015 or 14, what's that?
China.
China.
I was in China 20, something like that.
And this entrepreneur came up to me, she said she's bought this massive quantity of land
in this area in China, it's a little secluded.
She's starting what she's calling Gold Scalch.
She's serious.
And she's issuing and she issued cryptocurrency based on the land, right back by the land
called RAND, but INE RAND with a little portrait of INE RANDCOIN, you know, a little portrait
in the marketing INE RANDCOIN.
I don't think it went anyway.
You're not going to be a janitor?
A janitor in China at Gold Scalch, yeah.
By the way, I do want to point out something I do enjoy about Objectivist, I constantly
talk about INE RAND and her vampire novels, and that's the joke you're on, thank you.
And inevitably, someone feels the need to point out that she did not write vampire novels
and her name is actually INE, so thank you.
Thank you.
We've been talking for two hours, I own her copy of The Fountainhead, somehow I thought
her name was INE.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So, this is a really interesting way of phrasing it, which is...
I was kidding with the INE.
I know you knew how to pronounce it.
Yeah, I know you know you know.
Yeah, I know.
You just got confusing.
I think we all know, and we all know that we're jokers here.
We're all one.
Yeah.
There's no Batman in this conversation.
Zero is the only one.
So, it's an interesting way to frame it is Bitcoin the end or the beginning or something,
and I've, as sort of with an open mind and seeing kind of all the possibilities of technologies
out there, I also kind of thought that Bitcoin is the beginning of something.
But what the Bitcoin community argues is that Bitcoin is the end of the base layer, meaning
all the different innovations will come on top of it, like for example, there's something
called Lightning Network, where it's basically just like gold is the end, and everything
is built like the monetary systems like cash and all that is built on top of gold.
Bitcoin is the end in that other technologies that build on top of Bitcoin.
That's their argument.
I get that, and I hear that all the time, and I don't quite understand that, and I think
Bitcoin has limitations that potentially other cryptocurrencies might not have.
My attitude towards something like this is, logically, I don't understand technology.
My view is, let it play out, I think I have more fear of physical ability of the government
to crush these things than I think many in the community.
So, for example, I gave a talk between, and they were hyping the acceptance now, a lot
of vendors will accept Bitcoin, and this is great.
And I said, yeah, it's absolutely great, more options is better than fewer options.
But I said, you know that that could be taken away like that.
Now, it's true that we could exchange Bitcoin, and the government that wouldn't know, I think,
wouldn't know that we do.
But once he's advertising on his website that he accepts Bitcoin, or once he tries to turn
his Bitcoin into particular goods, once you manifest it in the physical world, now the
government can step in.
So the government could say, you can't sell anything to anybody using Bitcoin.
They can do that, and you won't be able to sell it.
It will have to go into the black market.
But that isn't able to sell it, it's just selling in the black market.
Yeah, but that's where the government thrives, right?
The government thrives on letting you do stuff in the black market so they can decide when
to put you in jail or not, right?
So if I'm buying a sweatshirt from the government, sorry, if I'm buying a sweatshirt from somebody
using Bitcoin, the government can't monitor my exchange of Bitcoin to him, but they can
monitor the sweatshirt being sent to me, right?
That's where they can interfere.
And I think that at some point, to the extent Bitcoin is successful, it will be stopped.
And that's what will stop it from becoming money.
See money can only become money.
It can only become money if people are using it as money, right?
And if the government can stop it being used, if I can't go to the grocery store and use
my ATM that charges on Bitcoin or whatever, then it's not money.
And I think that the government is going to step in and stop people from doing that.
And that's what I, so I have more respect and fear for the power of government today.
I don't see that at all.
However, I could be wrong.
And I'm sure Yaron hopes he's wrong.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And in some sense.
I hope the government just give in and the Fed tomorrow says, yeah, let Bitcoin thrive.
But I think that one, a regulated control, and the only way to regulate and control it
is to stop it.
Yeah.
There's a bunch of people who argue that Bitcoin is too compelling to argue to government
that they'll actually embrace it like it's first and foremost.
But that issues, government has positive goals and wants to do good things.
You can ask, you can...
No, no.
It's greedy.
They say government is greedy because they, well, Bitcoiners have this whole lingo.
They say number go up.
Government is not greedy.
Government is not greedy for money.
Government is greedy for power.
Government is greedy for control.
Government is much more...
Now, money's good too.
They'll take the money if they can get it.
But it's not fundamentally about money.
It's fundamentally...
And this is something that many libertarians don't understand.
This is something many of the Bitcoin community don't understand.
They have far too benevolent a view of politicians and the people in government today.
And I know why he's laughing.
I think I know why he's laughing.
You know exactly why I'm laughing.
And we should get to that issue at some point here.
But, you know, so I think there's a lot of naivete.
Yeah, there's a lot of naivete.
Speaking of naivete.
A lot of it your own.
No, okay.
I'm not naïve.
I'm actually providing the warning and all these Bitcoiners are saying, no, no, no, government
doesn't function that way.
No, no one says I'm naïve.
Naïve people think they're not naïve.
Well, so let's put this on the table.
Speaking of naïve, I still, more than the two of you by far, I think, have faith that
government can work.
Okay, let's put that on the table.
I got it.
I'm not trying to be pedantic.
What do you mean work?
Government can achieve goals.
That is not in dispute.
Can achieve goals effectively to build a better world, a functioning society.
So I'm going to take it one step further than you.
Oh, boy.
The only way to achieve a better world is through government.
Michael, what do you think about that?
You almost dropped, and I said it on purpose that way.
I'm glad that the mask is dropping.
You cannot achieve, you cannot have liberty or freedom without a government.
Now not anything like the governments we have today.
So I think the idea that you can have liberty or freedom without government is the rejection
of the idea of liberty and freedom and the undermining of any effort, any attempt to
do it.
So in that sense, I knew it was you.
He's sitting right here, right?
Oh, exactly.
On this side, I'm going to agree with Lex, which is unusual.
That government is good for freedom.
Yeah, you agree with the guy who's reading my conference.
That's not a surprise.
Who's dressed in black.
Yeah.
That's the bad guys.
No, the fascism, I mean, the road to fascism is anarchy.
It's not.
What the hell are you talking about?
Anarchy?
Can you give me one example of anarchy like the fascism?
Well, every example of a stateless society leads to authoritarianism, every single one
in all of human history.
It has to.
Wait, wait, you're saying why Germany was anarchy?
Well, it wasn't pure anarchy, but it got close.
But no.
It got close to anarchy.
I said the reverse, by the way.
I said the reverse.
I didn't say that every form of authoritarianism started with anarchy.
I said that every situation in which human beings lived under anarchy led to authoritarianism.
So I said the flip was not.
Anarchism isn't a location.
Anarchism is a relationship.
The three of us are in an anarchist relationship.
Every country is in a relationship of anarchy toward each other.
The US and Canada have an anarchist relationship toward one another.
And to claim, going back to Emma Goldman, who I love, in 1901, William McKinley, President
McKinley, was shot by this guy, Leon Salgas.
And it was very funny because he was a crazy person.
And they arrested him.
He shot the president and they go, why did you shoot President McKinley?
And he just goes, I was radicalized by Emma Goldman.
And she's like, oh, god damn it.
So now she's on the lambs.
She had nothing to do with this guy.
She's trying to flee.
She gets arrested.
They caught her.
And she said, and this is the hubris of this woman, which I admire as the subject of the
good hubris.
She goes, I'd like to thank the cops for doing what they're doing.
They're turning far more people into anarchism than I could do on my own.
So given everything you've said in these two hours, and then to pivot to being anti-government
is being anti-liberty, I don't feel I have to say anything.
Well, okay.
For people who are not familiar, if you're, I don't know why you would not be familiar,
but Michael Malis talks quite a bit about the evils of the state and government.
And espouse his ideas that anarchism is actually, what is it, the most moral system, the most
effective system for human relationships.
There's this great book called Atlas Shrugged, and the author posits an anarchist private
society.
She calls it Galt's Gulch, where everything is privately owned, and no one is in a position
of authority over anyone else other than the landowner.
That's an anarchist society.
It is one judge and one authority.
Yeah.
And that's what everyone has voluntarily moved there and agreed to be under.
It's a very small community, right?
That is right.
So I have no problem with competing governments.
That's the definition of anarchism.
What's that?
That's the definition of anarchism.
Case Clays.
Okay.
And the show.
No, no, no, no.
And the show.
I got him over.
Not definition.
Not definition of anarchy at all.
I'm all for competing governments.
Good job.
He did it.
He did it.
Yeah, you're on.
Let's get over.
Red, Roman, Red, Roman.
It's more Lithuanian.
What is this clown's hat?
It's Lithuanian.
That's my people.
Tulski.
Yasnaya Palyana.
Miodem.
That's honey.
That's honey.
No claims of health.
The other one claimed health.
This one no claims.
No, I'm for competing governments on different geographic areas.
That's fine.
Why does it have to be over two?
Okay.
Let me ask you.
It's really crucial that it's undifferent.
So you don't have two judges in Gold's Gulch.
You have one.
And there's a reason one.
There's one authority, there's one system of laws
in Gold's Gulch that all the people under the Gulch
abide by, there's one.
There's two, because they're in America.
No, they're not.
The whole point is they're not, right?
They're not in America, they're in Colorado.
I know, but the whole point of the novel is
they've left America.
They haven't left America.
They've hid themselves.
So they're not under the authority of the American.
But they are, don't get it.
But they're not.
The whole point is that they're hidden
so they're not under the discussion.
No, no, no, no.
If you, if the three of us hide,
we're still under the authority of Washington.
No, well, not if they don't know that we are.
But this is why they haven't established a state.
And it's not a government.
And it's not in that sense, you know,
an example of really the way we form societies.
It is a private club that is hidden away from everybody else.
Fine, I'm fine with that.
What happens if an American kills a Canadian in Mexico?
What happens an American, it depends.
Depends on the nature of the governments
of the three places, right?
But usually what happens in most of human history
is that America will launch a war
either against Mexico or Canada.
Okay, just first of all.
So usually violence results in much more violence.
Anarchy is just a system that legalizes violence.
That's all it does.
And in international affairs, that's the reality.
The reality is that the way you resolve disputes
that are major disputes is through violence.
Ayn Rand said, the definition of a government
is an agency that has a monopoly of force
in a geographical area.
So you can't complain that anarchism is legalizing violence
when the definition of government,
according to Rand, is legalized violence.
No, but because you're taking the definition of violence
the way she defines it, right, in this context.
A, she talks about retaliatory force only.
Has that ever happened?
That's not the point.
That is the point.
Before there was Aristotle, was there an Aristotle?
Before there was an America, was there an America?
The fact that something has never existed
means that it will never exist before.
The fact that the ideas haven't been developed
to make something exist means
that it will never exist before.
You know, where human race is a young race,
the ideas of freedom are very young.
The ideas of the Enlightenment are just 250 years old.
The idea that you can't create
the kind of government Ayn Rand talked about,
I talk about that it's never been before
means it'll never happen again.
That's a silly argument.
It's not a silly argument, it's you're being a Platonist.
No, not at all.
I'll explain to you how you're being exactly a Platonist.
So if I was sitting in 1750,
arguing with Thomas Jefferson,
he was telling me what kind of state he was gonna create.
And I said, is a state like this ever been created?
And he said, no, was I being a Platonist?
Of course not.
No, you're being a Platonist.
Things change.
You're being a Platonist now.
Here's why you're being a Platonist now.
Because one of the things that Aristotle believed in,
one of the things that Ayn Rand
and other contexts believed in,
the cover of her book, The Philosophy Who Needs It,
is, I think it's the Sistine Chapel, the cover,
or wherever it is.
It's Aristotle and Plato walking.
No, not, yeah, but yeah.
What's that painting?
I forget what it is.
It's the School of Athens.
School of Athens, thank you.
It's the Raphael.
So Plato's pointing toward the heavens while they're talking
and Aristotle's pointing to the earth.
Reality.
Reality.
So if you want, there's two approaches.
There's the Descartes Cartesian approach,
which is I sit in my armchair and I deduce all of reality.
Or if I want to study the nature of man,
if I want to study the nature of dogs,
if I want to study the nature of the sun,
I have to look around.
I have to open my eyes.
I have to look at data.
It's very difficult.
When Rand was on Donahue,
he asked her about aren't you impressed
with the order in the universe?
And she goes, oh, now you have to give me a moment.
And the point she made,
which was very hard for many people to grasp,
which was hard for me to grasp, is one's concept of order
comes from the universe.
You can't have a disorderly universe
because order means describing that which exists
and which has existed.
Now, if you are looking at governments throughout history
that have always existed,
and when you were on Lex,
you said what I'm talking about has never existed.
To say that this, therefore,
that that has a possibility of working in reality,
I think is certainly not a point in that favor, number one.
And number two, Jefferson was a fraud.
What Jefferson argued how America would look
did not come true.
Jefferson's concerns about the constitution were accurate.
And the fact is the federal government
did become centralized, did become a civil war.
So if you told Mr. Jefferson,
the government you're positing can't work,
you would have been correct.
That's not what I'm saying.
It's not the issue of can it work or not.
It's the issue of can something exist
that hasn't existed in the past?
It's a silly argument.
Now, we can argue about the facts of reality
whether such a thing can exist.
But to say it hasn't existed in the past
is not an argument about whether it consists in the future.
But that's the argument you made.
No, no, you're talking about history
and now you're dancing around it.
No, I'm not. Yes, you are.
I'm saying that something different happened
in the founding of America.
It might not have been perfect.
It might not have been ideal.
It might have been some people even think it was bad, right?
It's something different happened.
And you could have said 20 years before and said,
well, that's never happened before.
So it can't happen in the future.
That is a bad argument.
It's not a good argument.
It irrelevant.
No, but you're making the argument
that just because something hasn't happened before,
that's certainly not a point to say
it's likely to happen or possible.
No, I'm saying, first of all,
I agree that everything we know about what's possible
or what's not possible has to be from reality.
That we agree completely.
I think Anarchy has completely evaded that point.
I think you guys live in a world
of mythology, of abstraction, of decod.
To imagine the kind of Anarchy
that David Friedman or Rothbard describe.
It's complete fiction and it's complete.
That's just name-calling.
You missed this.
Okay, let me ask just a few dumb questions.
So first of all, what do we do with violence
in terms of just natural emergence of violence
in human societies?
Sure.
So the idea that Anarchy proposes
is that we would, as the community grows,
there may be violence and then we together form collectives
that sort of fund mechanisms that resist that violence.
I'd love to sort of talk about violence
because that seems to be the core thing
that's the difference between the state
that has, was definitionally, I guess,
is the thing that has a monopoly on violence
or controls violence in such a way
that you don't have to worry about it.
And then the anarchism, I don't know.
I'm using bad words.
No, your definition is accurate,
but the point is that being definition of the state
versus how states act in reality is just absurd.
Yeah.
And then the idea that anarchism would be
is that it's more kind of a market
of defenses against violence.
So you have security companies
and then you hire different ones
that you have more companies.
You have things being made affordable.
You have more accessibility to security.
You have accountability when people misuse their power
and you have more layers of security
than having a government monopoly.
But objectivists understand and they don't deny this.
This is something they talk about constantly
is anytime you have a government monopoly,
it's going to have enormous distortions as a consequence.
It's going to be expensive.
It's going to be ineffective.
And when you're talking about ineffectiveness in markets,
that's not just like the cup sucks.
It often means mass death.
It often means persecution.
So this is something that anarchism,
if not entirely prevents, certainly mitigates enormously.
So can I just, as a thought experiment,
say it was very easy to immigrate to another country
like where you could just move about
from government to government,
would that alleviate most of the problems
that you have towards the state?
Which is like people being free to choose
which government they operate under.
Wouldn't that essentially become-
That's him.
I'm trying to understand why governments
aren't already the thing that's the goal of anarchism.
The kind of collectives that emerge under anarchism
seems to be what government-
You're equating two terms.
So there's something called like private governance
and there's government.
So for example, if I go to Yaron's house
and he has a rule, take off your shoes, become your house,
if you want to really be kind of silly about it,
you could say he's the governor.
But it's really nonsensical to say that.
If you go to Macy's, right?
If you want to return your sweater,
Macy's rules are right up there.
You have seven days.
If you don't have receipt, you're going to get store credit.
If you do have receipt, you get a refund.
So every organization, every bar, nightclub, your house,
has rules of governments.
This is often they're unspoken.
This is unavoidable.
No one in America by law has to pay a tip,
but it's just customary.
You go at the waiter, you give them 15, 20%,
so on and so forth.
Now, what anarchism does is it says,
okay, security is something that is of crucial,
essential human need.
We all need to be safe in our property,
safe in our purpose.
The organization that by far is the biggest violator of this,
and always has been, always will be, is the government.
Why?
Because it's a monopoly,
because it has no accountability.
And look at the rioting last year, right?
If you have one agency, pretend it's not the government,
pretend it's Apple.
And Apple has the in charge of security in this town,
people are rioting, people are looting.
And Apple says, yeah, we're not gonna send people into work.
And if you try to defend yourself,
we're gonna put you in jail as well.
That's the problem of having a government monopoly,
and that's something that anarchism solves for.
So, okay.
But don't you, because you said no accountability,
don't you mean to say poor accountability?
No, I mean to say no accountability.
But isn't that the idea of democracies?
I'm not for democracy.
No, not for democracy,
but like the system of governments that we have,
there is a monopoly on violence,
but there is a, I mean, at least in the ideal,
but I think in practice as well, there's an accountability.
I do not think that's-
I know you're a critic of the police force
and all those kinds of things,
but the military is accountable to the people.
I do not agree.
The police force is accountable to the people,
perhaps imperfectly, but you're saying not at all.
Not at all.
And we've seen many examples of police officers
doing horrific things on video,
and they don't even lose their pension.
But there's a lot of amazing police officers or not.
You, I mean, no, they're not.
So you're saying by nature,
police is like a fundamentally flawed system?
No, by nature, government monopoly in police
is a fundamentally irredeemable system.
Let's talk about private security.
If I have a private security firm,
you could have that under a government,
and as a result of my private security,
my person who I'm bodyguarding gets shot,
that's gonna be very bad for my company
as compared to competing companies.
However, when you have a government monopoly
and I get people shot, what are you gonna do?
So the problem is that all the examples
are going to be within the context of an existing government.
This is why I said the cell phone example,
and all these are the examples of us being here.
We're not an anarchy, that is absurd.
We're under a particular system of law,
and the system of laws applies,
and we know that the particular system of laws applies.
So the problem is when you have...
There are many laws that we're not gonna be enforced,
that we're not...
Sure, we know that.
Violence-related?
No, there are lots of laws
that are not gonna be enforced.
Right, and that doesn't make this anarchy
because there are the laws out there,
they could be enforced,
which makes an enormous difference.
But look, there's a number of issues here.
There's an issue of the role of force in human society.
I gotta clarify, I think,
because I think you misunderstood what I said.
I'm not saying that America is anarchist.
What I'm saying is the three of us
have an anarchist relationship between us,
because none of us have authority over the others.
That's what I'm saying.
But that's a bad use of the word anarchy.
No, that's the correct use of the word anarchy.
It makes it meaningless.
It makes it...
Every time any people get together,
they have an anarchistic relationship.
No, we have a voluntary relationship.
That's what anarchism means, militarism.
No, it doesn't.
It's a political system.
You wanna get a dictionary out?
You're taking a word, and it's accepted usage,
and then you're saying, oh no, it means...
You mean like selfishness?
Maybe, and we never finished that discussion.
You're taking a word...
We're taking a word that you're defining
as in replacing it with voluntary.
Now...
Okay, fine, I'm not for anarchism or voluntarism.
Fine, go ahead.
But let me...
Let's understand what voluntary means, right?
So we, for example, going to stores,
and there's a certain relationship that we have with the store
that we engage in certain voluntary transactions
with their store.
Now, I believe that that works
because there is a certain system of law
that both the store and we have accepted.
That makes that possible.
Now, if that didn't,
there are certain people who would like to walk into their store
and just take the stuff, right?
So there is a...
Not, we might not, but there are certain people
who might want it to go into their store.
There's a certain system of laws that regulates
the relationship and that defines the property rights
and then provides protection for the property rights.
Now, you would like all that privatized.
That is, the store would have its police force
and that would be privatized.
Now, I don't believe that force can be privatized.
And there are many reasons...
And it shouldn't.
I don't think it can.
And I don't think...
I think it's a...
That's an interesting distinction.
I don't think it can
because I think that it's an unstable equilibrium, right?
I don't think competing police forces can work.
At the end, the police force with the biggest gun always wins
and always takes over.
That's not true.
And becomes authoritarian.
Look at Iran and Iraq, excuse me.
We had the bigger guns.
We didn't win.
Look at Afghanistan.
We didn't win partially
because none of that is an example of anarchy.
No, but you said the guy with the biggest gun is going to win.
Yeah, the guy with the biggest gun is going to win.
We didn't win in Vietnam.
We had the bigger guns.
But again, you're taking it outside of a context.
That was a context in which...
That was a context in which countries are fighting,
not a context in which there is no country.
Okay, let's plus you, Yaron, have a rocket launcher.
And there's 100 people with handguns.
How are you going to win?
You have the biggest gun.
Oh, believe me, I could win.
With one rocket launcher against 100 people?
Yeah, it's just...
Well, it depends how many rockets I have in the rocket launcher
and whether I'm willing to use them.
But that's...
But so now it's democracy
because they're more of them that they win.
Look, any one of these scenarios, all it does...
So let's go back to the store.
This is fascinating, by the way.
I'm really enjoying this.
I just want to say that.
This is great.
I'm glad you are.
I am enjoying the pain.
And I'm also enjoying the comments that are going to happen.
Oh, the comments.
The comments are going to be overwhelmingly on your side.
I don't think so.
Because people like honesty.
No.
Because I think the Anarchy position is completely dishonest.
I'm a modern day.
What's his name?
What's the guy who was defending communism?
Oh, Richard Wolff.
I'm a modern day Richard Wolff.
There's a sense in which I think Anarchists are
evading reality in the same sense.
So we've got this...
Do you think I'm dishonest or delusional?
I think you...
Calling someone dishonest is a really specific thing.
I think you're delusional.
I think you're delusional.
And I'm going to give you the benefit of a doubt of being delusional.
OK, good.
That's fair.
We all love each other.
And as I said on the show, on the previous interview,
I said only smart people can be anarchists.
Because it requires a certain level of abstraction
of being divorced from reality
that is hard for people who are actually connected to reality.
He makes a good point because I always talk about this with people on social media
and they talk about a lot of people who buy into the corporate media narrative
and how they're dumb.
I go, it's easier to train smart people than dumb people.
It's easier to convince smart people of the systemic that's divorced from reality
than somebody's dumb.
They can deal in an abstraction.
They don't have to deal with the concrete that actually happened.
This is an example I gave debating another anarchist.
So...
Who was it?
James the sucked.
Well, you are the best.
They were Hoppe fans.
Oh, OK.
Hoppe fans.
Not one of my least, people I liked the least in the world out there.
You like them better than the communists, don't you?
Barely.
Oh, come on.
Seriously?
Yes.
Because I think it leads to the same place.
I really do.
I think it leads to gulags.
Fine.
I think Anarchy leads to gulags.
And I think Hoppe's view of Anarchy definitely leads to gulags.
I'll grant you just for the sake of argument that it leads to gulags.
However, surely you concede that they are against gulags,
whereas the communists have no problem with it.
And that's a big...
I think some do.
I'm not sure people like Hoppe do.
Because if you read some of his stuff, one wonders.
But once Monarchy's, and he wants...
No, he said Monarchy is a preferable to democracy, which is true.
No, it's not.
Oh, God.
I mean, one of the problems with anarchists is...
What judge?
That's the monarch.
One of the problems...
Yeah.
One judge, one authority.
This is why I think...
That's why I think...
So you're a Hoppean.
I know you're so authoritarian.
Yaron Brooks a Hoppean.
No, I'm not a Hoppean.
I don't want one judge.
I don't want an arbitrary judge.
I want an objective judge.
There's an essay by John Hasnass.
I think his name, I'm going to bungle it.
It's going to be in my upcoming book on anarchism.
And he just discusses...
And it's a very long, complicated technical issue
that the idea of objective law is incoherent.
Well, yeah.
I mean, that's why we disagree so much.
Because I think objective law is the only coherence system.
Do you disagree that we, in effect, have competing systems of law under America?
Meaning there's different ideologies.
You have the sort of major ideology versus the Scalia ideology.
And that effectively...
And the point being, when you and I file a lawsuit,
it completely depends on who the judge is.
Yes.
Okay.
And in theory, in theory, I don't think the system works this way,
but in theory, the way the system would work is that on new issues,
there are... There was some competition.
It's nice to meet you.
Syria wasn't talking to you.
Technology.
Capitalism.
So, in theory, the system works.
And this works, I think, with competing states,
but also with competing legal views, particularly on a new issue.
There's some... This is how common law worked, right?
There's some evolution of it.
And at some point, that gets codified into the law.
And it gets objectified in that sense.
That is, there's some conclusion that people come to.
This is the role in theory of a legislation.
The legislature would be nice if it was composed of people
who had some idea of legal philosophy.
Sure.
And it gets codified.
And when... Because these things are complex.
And at some point, it goes through all the arguments.
And then a certain truth emerges, or certain proof is identified.
And that's what gets encoded in law.
That's what the purpose of a legislature is.
Now, if you have competing mechanisms
that don't converge on one authority,
because there's no one authority,
there are multiple authorities.
That is, in a sense, a multiple governments
or multiple systems of enforcement.
Sure.
Right?
Then you get not just something emerging out of it.
What you get is competing legal systems.
Competing legal systems that now have competing mechanisms
of enforcement.
Competing police forces, completing militaries,
however we want to define it.
And now there's no mechanism to resolve that.
Now, yes, we could negotiate and there's goodwill and so on.
Right?
Yeah.
There you go.
No.
But now we're talking about the law.
What each view, each position views as true and right.
Right?
And it might involve, for example,
it might involve the fact that the legal system
has come to the conclusion that it's okay
for children to have sex with adults
and this legal system thinks that is evil and wrong.
Sure.
Right?
And you know, something has happened
between the two.
Right?
How do you resolve that conflict?
There is no resolution of it.
You know, if this adult wants to have sex with this child,
this legal system thinks it's okay,
that's the legal system thinks it.
The only way to resolve that system
is through one system imposing itself on the other.
An example of countries is exactly that.
When you had monarchies,
when you had the little states all over the place,
the way any kind of dispute was resolved
when there were issues of territorial disputes
or issues of marriage or issues of different legal interpretations
about what is war.
No, it wasn't.
It was marriage.
A lot of times people would marry a princess from another country.
Sure.
Force marriages, which was not very pleasant.
I'd rather sacrifice one princess than an army.
No, I don't want to sacrifice anybody.
And in addition, I don't want to sacrifice anybody.
I want to sacrifice the royals.
And in addition, I don't want royals.
Well, that's what sacrificing means.
I think war is pretty disgusting.
I agree.
And then I'm...
Get the baskets.
And then on top of that,
look, those periods in history are filled with violence,
much more violence than we have today,
much more bloody than they are today,
far less freedom than we have today in terms of individual freedom.
You're comparing this to 20th century.
Yes, I'm comparing a monarchy, right?
You said that's preferable to democracy, right?
Yes, I did.
I'm comparing...
I think Hoppe said that.
I'm not saying I'm saying that.
Oh, I thought you.
To some extent.
To some extent.
But I'm not going to die in that hell.
Hoppe said that.
And I think it's ridiculous.
These kings and queens were fighting constantly.
I mean, the wars back then were violent in a way that...
Unlike now?
No, much more violent than now.
If you look at the actual percentage of people killed in war...
Yeah, the Stephen Pinker book.
Yeah, if you look at percentage of people,
and not just that, you can look at the other stats,
that the percentage of people killed in war back then
were far greater than the percentage of people,
even during World War II and World War I.
So anarchy...
And, you know, David Feynman loves to quote the sagas of Iceland
about how wonderful the anarchy...
And I mean, it's funny because a lot of people read...
David Feynman never read the sagas.
It's worth reading.
The sagas of the Iceland are filled with violence.
Constant violence.
Constantly people killing each other over...
I, you know, I stole your chickens and you slept with my wife.
And the only way to resolve disputes...
The only way to resolve disputes was violence.
There was no authority.
There was no mechanism to resolve these disputes.
There was a council.
But the council couldn't enforce anything.
So in the end of the day, we just resolved to violence.
And this is legalized because there is no...
There is no mechanism by which to make the violence illegal.
So all anarchy is, is legalized violence constrained...
Constrained up, you know, for a while.
And up until people stop that constraint by, you know,
arrangements between the security organizations.
But the security organizations have us by the balls
to put it, to put it figuratively, right?
They really do.
Sure. Unlike the state.
Oh, the state today has it.
But I would rather live in this state.
Much rather live in this state.
Much rather live in many more authoritarian states than this.
Than a place where there's constant violence.
I have a bunch of questions, but I'm enjoying this.
That's why everything he said is wrong.
Okay, yes.
First of all, the idea of competing legal systems is inevitable.
Because what Rand talked about is what she wanted was
and this is really kind of Eric out of character
with her broader ideology is, I think this was her term,
and I'm not saying this to make fun of you.
When she has a judge and he's looking at the information,
she wants him to be basically, I think she's the word robot,
someone without any ideology,
that they're just looking at the facts.
They're not bringing their kind of worldview to it.
I take it as a compliment.
You are welcome.
I think that given otherwise, her correct view that ideology
is just a slur for someone's philosophy,
that someone especially someone is erudite educated
and informed as a judge has to and in fact,
should bring their ideology to their work
is in one sense a little contradiction in her view.
Number one.
Number two is we have right now the DA in San Francisco.
I forget his name.
He's the son of literal terrorists, communist terrorists.
And he has made it the decree unilaterally
that if you shoplift for less than, I forget, $200,
we're not prosecuting.
Yeah, I know that.
You know this game.
Right, right, right.
So now you and I certain and Lex, I'm sure,
probably agree that his ideology is abhorrent,
that this doesn't help poor people.
It doesn't help shop owners.
It creates a culture, an area,
where it's just deleterious to human life.
However, he has in one sense,
given that he is a state operative, a legitimate worldview.
Can I ask you just a quick question?
Sure.
Why couldn't a security force in a particular context say,
yeah, if you take stuff on that store,
we're not going to have any problem with that.
I agree with you.
That's very fair.
That's a very legitimate question.
The point is, in the context that I'm talking about,
that firm is like, wait a minute, I'm hiring you for security.
You're saying we're not going to provide security.
Why am I writing you a check?
And we have examples of this in real life.
If I get into a car accident with you, right,
you have your car insurance, I have my car insurance.
If your car insurance had their druthers,
they wouldn't pay me one penny.
If my car insurance didn't have their druthers,
they wouldn't pay you one penny.
We already have.
You were saying earlier that we need to have one kind of umbrella
because of the fuse.
There are already more cases than you can count
where there's private arbitration.
Now, the argument is that private arbitration only works
because they have recourse to the government.
But my point is, there's many examples
where even though that recourse is theoretically possible,
it's not a realistic concern, specifically because they know
that if you have recourse to the state,
you have no concept of what that outcome is going to look like,
except knowing it's going to be exorbitant.
It's going to be time-consuming.
We can't use the state.
Right.
I mean, I'm as critical as the state as it is right now.
Maybe not as critical as you are.
Not as critical as you are.
But I'm quite critical of the state as it is right now.
But let's say we got into a traffic accident
and you have a Rolls Royce and I destroyed your Rolls Royce.
And my insurance company now owes your insurance company a lot of money.
And let's imagine it's a lot of money just for the sake of it.
You're clearly guilty.
Yeah, clearly guilty.
And my insurance company looks at the books and it goes,
really, I don't want to pay this.
Sure.
And you know what?
I've got bigger guns than his insurance company.
Sure.
And I'm just going to take over their insurance company.
And hostile takeover takes on a whole new meaning.
When I can muster guns on my behalf,
then in a hostile takeover in a capitalist context,
that to me is what happens.
That to me is inevitably what happens.
And I think this is where the delusion comes in.
The idea that everything, that when big money is involved
and big and power is involved, remember, again,
the same kind of politicians who today get into politics
are likely to want to run some of these security agencies
because they have a lot of power over people.
So the same kind of maybe sociopaths would be there.
I don't think it's the same skill set,
but that's separate issue.
I think it very much is.
You think people, the people in Washington,
the same as CEOs, psychologically and skill set wise?
Well, today's CEOs, yes.
OK.
Yes.
You might be right.
Because I think that's what's rewarded for CEOs,
somebody who could get along with government.
And I think the kind of CEO who is going to run a security
company, which is not just about business.
It's about the use of force.
It's about control.
It's about negotiation with other entities
that are using force.
Negotiate diplomacy.
Then negate.
And we should get back to objective law
because I think it's essential to this whole argument.
I would love to get back to something.
I think all you get into is security agencies,
fighting security agencies.
And again, the biggest gun.
And I don't mean here the guy who has the biggest literal gun,
the rocket launcher versus the guns.
I got excited by the biggest gun.
The party that has the more physical force,
however, that is mustered either by numbers or by weapons
is going to dominate.
And we'll take over everybody else.
Now, one of the things that's common in a market
is takeovers.
It's consolidation.
And here, the consolidation can happen through force.
And you can roll other security companies.
And that's exactly what will happen until you dominate
the particular geographic area.
OK.
So let me explain why I disagree with that.
You were just saying, and I agree correctly.
I agree with you, that listen, if I have access
to the bigger gun, why am I paying you?
Or whoever's paying whatever, I'm just
going to use force and not pay them.
We have that right now.
It's called lobbying.
So instead of me, and I'm sure in your example,
you weren't being literal, instead of the insurance
company literally having the army,
they could be like, hey, let me call CorruptCo with a mafia.
I agree.
Yeah.
Go out and take them out.
By having this federal government,
as you know and certainly are not a fan of,
has, takes more through asset forfeiture than burglary is
combined.
What asset forfeiture is, people don't even understand this.
This is something crazy, which you, which are on,
is as opposed to me as opposed as I am, which is I'm a cop.
I go to your house.
I think you haven't been charged or convicted of anything.
I have evidence.
Usually in a car.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, but no, it's like drug deals.
OK.
I go to your house, you're a drug dealer.
I say, and you can understand the reasoning.
Well, if someone is getting profit through illegal mechanisms,
their profit isn't real, their property,
and they shouldn't be rewarded that profit.
So basically, I go to your house, you're a drug dealer.
I seize all your property.
You don't really have recourse, even though you haven't been
through deep, I'm just explaining to the audience,
be through the new process.
And SOL, that combined for people who don't know,
is more than the total amount of burglaries in America.
It's a huge incentive.
And what happens is the police department,
which ceases your car auctions, it sees your house auctions,
it's a great way to line their pockets.
This is a huge incentive.
It's horrible.
It's a huge incentive for police departments
to do this because it's like, look, this guy's a crook.
Maybe he's not a drug dealer, but he's clearly a pimp.
Let me just take all his stuff and it's going to go to the community.
Well, the rationale originally was, if I try him,
in the meantime, he'll take that money
and funnel it somewhere else and hide it.
And I'll never be able to get access to it.
And it was passed in the 1970s under the original
Caesar laws, what kind of RICO act, going after the mafia.
And one of the reasons I despise Giuliani as much as I do,
and there's very few politicians out there that I despise more,
is because he was the first guy to use RICO on financiers.
And so it wasn't even a drug dealer.
It was you accused of a financial fraud.
Not you weren't shown to be guilty.
Accused, yeah.
All your assets basically were forfeiture.
Innocence of proven guilty went out the window.
If you were managing money, you were done.
You were finished.
So you're saying this kind of stuff naturally
versus with the state?
Hold on.
So my point is, what are presented as the strongest
criticism of anarchism are inevitably descriptions of status quo.
What you're describing is already the event.
I am a big insurance company.
I don't want to pay you.
I call Washington.
Either I pay you and Washington gives me a subsidy.
So what you're describing is an inevitable aspect
of having a government.
So what I'm describing is the inevitable evolution
of anarchy into a government.
I just think that the markets don't consolidate into monopoly.
That's the leftist propaganda myth.
Not markets where you have substitute products.
But this is the problem.
The problem is force has no substitute.
That is, force is not a product you can have.
So this is my fundamental issue about competing police forces.
Force is not a product.
Force is not a service.
It's not a service.
And it's not a product.
Security is not a service?
No.
Well, security in the context of a legal system is.
But this is the point.
The legal system, the laws are not a service or a product.
They are a different type of human institution.
Science is not a product or service.
It's a different type of human institution.
They're different types of human institutions.
Some are marketable.
You can create markets in.
Some you cannot.
Law is not a marketable system.
Can I ask a question quickly?
Is there any other field other than law
that you think you can't create markets?
No, science.
Science is not marketable.
The science itself is not marketable.
But science is true.
And the same I think is in law.
Law is not marketable.
Law is the system that allows markets to happen.
You need a system of law, whether it's private law
in a particular narrow context or whether it's broader law.
Law is the context in which markets arise.
So one of the reasons we transact
is we know that there's a certain contract between us,
explicit or implicit, that is protected by a certain law,
whether it's protected by private agency or private.
The government doesn't matter.
But there's a certain contract that is protectable, right?
Theoretically.
Theoretically, yes.
So law is the context in which markets arise.
You don't create a market in the,
because there's nothing above it, in a sense.
There's no, it is the context that allows markets to be created.
Once you market it, markets fall apart.
So hold on a minute, yeah, hold on.
So you think that law could be a market?
And it already is a market.
And we see it, for example, eBay.
If I am buying something from your own,
I won't even know his name.
I don't know, maybe he's in another country.
And he screws me out of the money.
I don't have access, I can't sue you.
Or if I sue you in England, it's good luck with that.
You're not going to argue that I'm going to sue you.
What happens in this case,
which has already been solved by the market,
eBay and PayPal, which has access to your bank account,
they act as the private arbiter.
They're going to get it wrong a lot.
Not even a question.
Just like Jaron's not going to argue
that the government right now gets it wrong a lot.
That's not even a question.
The point is, at the very least,
I'm going to get my resolution faster, cheaper,
and more effectively.
So the issue with having any kind of government, anything,
and Jaron's not going to disagree with this,
is at the very least,
it's going to be expensive, inefficient,
and cause conflict.
Yeah, but I think what it allows is exactly...
We don't even know what the Supreme Court's going to judge.
Again, you're moving us to today's environment,
which I'm trying against, right?
I'm moving us to reality.
No, but reality doesn't have to be what it is.
I have to be what it is.
That's the most anti-Rant quote.
No, in a sense of the politics, the political reality.
I know, but the quote by itself is great.
I know. I know. You'd love to...
He agrees with Donald Hoffman.
Yeah, it turns out I agree with Hoffman.
He's an elf.
So it's... Where were we?
So I believe that because we have a certain system
of government, right,
it allows for these private innovations to come about
that facilitate certain issues in a much more efficient way
than the government would deal with it.
But it's only because we have a particular system
that has defined property rights,
that has a clear view of what property rights are,
it has a clear view of what a transaction means
and what contract law is.
And eBay has a bunch of stuff that you sign with.
You read it or not. Of course.
All of that is defined first.
And then there are massive innovations at the level
of particular transactions at the level of an eBay
that facilitate increased efficiency.
And that's great.
But the fact is none of that gets developed.
None of that gets created in a world in which
I might be living under different definition of property rights.
eBay might be living under separate definition of property rights.
You might have a third definition of property rights.
And there's no mechanism by which we can actually
operationalize that because we all have a different system.
There is a mechanism. We already have that.
Let's change the example I just used.
What happens if a Chinese person
who has different definition of property rights
kills an American in Brazil?
Again, in a smaller community,
what happens is lots of violence.
No, but I'm talking right now.
If a Chinese person has...
Right now, the only reason that it doesn't lead to violence
is because people are afraid of even more violence
and it affects many people, large numbers of people
who don't want to go to war.
But if you have small...
In a state where the states were small,
in those little states,
there was war all the time for exactly those reasons
because the cost was lower,
because it was more personal,
because I knew maybe the person who was killed over there.
And I went to my king and encouraged him to go to war.
You know why there was war?
Violence is constant.
You know why there was war?
Because there had been no iron rand.
And good ideas lead to good societies,
which leads to good people,
which leads to good behavior, good interrelationships.
So now that we have iron rand,
all this stuff in the past is irrelevant,
because if they studied her works,
we would be...
Rand was on Donahue again.
You could watch the clip.
And he asked her, she goes,
he goes, you're saying that if we were more selfish
and acted more self-interest,
there'd be less war, less Hitler.
And she said there wouldn't be any.
Right.
Well, if we were all selfish, there wouldn't be any Hitler's.
But who do you regard as the overwinning authority
if I am buying a product from you as a summoner in England
via eBay?
Who is the governing authority?
The governing authority is...
Are there other legal systems in England and the United States
which have to be synchronized pretty well?
Right.
But what I'm saying is...
It's why eBay...
Why do they have to be...
Why eBay doesn't function in certain countries?
Because there is no legal system...
I agree with you.
The legal system in those countries...
Why do those legal systems have to be a function
specifically of geography as opposed to,
why can't I sitting here...
I could sit here...
You're not going to let me finish my point.
I can sit here and be a British diplomat, right?
And as a British diplomat,
I'm going to be treated differently under American law
than you are as an American citizen as you are.
Why can't you have that same process?
Sure, we're geographically proximate,
but I'm a citizen of this company
and you're a citizen of that company.
Why would that be different in your opinion?
If it's England in the United States,
it's probably not going to matter that much, right?
But if it's Iran and the United States,
then the fact that we're sitting next to each other
makes a huge difference, a massive difference.
And the fact is that...
And I in the end, I think would be the first acknowledges
and this is why she was so opposed to Anarchy.
It's not...
That's not why it is...
It's because of Rothbard.
No.
It has nothing to do with...
Nothing?
It has nothing to do with Rothbard.
Nothing.
Nothing.
How do you know?
Nothing.
How would you know?
Because the argument against Anarchy is an intellectual one,
not a personality based one.
Can it be both?
Anyway, but back to it, back to Iran.
No, it has nothing to do with Rothbard.
You don't know that.
You're not a psychic or a necromancer.
The only way we're going to resolve this is on wrestling,
right? It's through violence.
On wrestling is not violence.
Words are violence.
Words are violence, you're wrong.
Words are violence.
Emotions are violence.
Wait, let's...
He froze me off with this stuff.
That's the problem.
He's very, very good.
Not facts and truths.
I mean, there's distortions and arbitrary statements.
Because your statement about Rothbard is an arbitrary statement
that has no cognitive standing.
And therefore, I can dismiss it.
So I'm not doing like this because I want to...
Wait, wait, hold on.
It has no cognitive status.
The fact that she disliked Rothbard doesn't mean
that everything he said, she was going to dismiss
because she disliked it.
I agree with you.
But what I'm saying is it would not be impossible.
But there's no evidence.
I'll give you...
I'll talk.
I'll give you some evidence.
Human psychology.
It is not impossible that if you hate some...
What's his name?
What's that guy's name?
Richard Wolff.
Right.
It's not impossible that if Richard Wolff said something
that you would otherwise agree with, you...
Hold on.
Let me finish.
You'd be dismissive or less likely to give him credit for it.
Being a human being.
That's all I'm saying.
It's as silly as to say Rothbard came up with this theory of anarchy
because he was pissed off at Iron Man and wanted to write something.
I don't know.
Bring it down because...
Bring it down so that he can speak too.
And let's keep it...
I don't think we're getting agitated.
No, you guys aren't.
No, no, no.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, bring it down.
Not in terms of a give more pauses.
So Michael can insert himself.
That's what I mean.
See, private governance.
What's the point of that?
Private governance.
Look, he's...
Look, it's private governance.
I'm also private governance.
I'm trying to establish his geographic law of the land.
That's not the point.
I do think that Michael's...
I mean, that's interesting that you disagree with this.
I do believe that psychology has an impact on ideas.
And Iron Rand, you don't think Iron Rand had grudges
that impacted the way she saw the world?
I would like to think that...
I don't think any of her grudges entered into philosophical statements,
at least not that I can tell.
And I don't see...
And given the centrality Iron Rand gave,
and to the role of government,
to the existence of government,
to the need for government,
to establish real freedom,
and the way she defines freedom,
which is very different than Rothbard,
and the way she defines government,
to say then that her opposition to Anarchy
is because of, I think, is just an obituary statement.
I didn't say because.
I didn't say because.
I didn't say color by.
And I don't see why psychology would enter it.
Now, maybe the tone in which you responded to an answer
might have been motivated by that or something like that.
But given the amount of thought she gave
to the role of government in human society
and why government was needed,
and why you needed laws in order to be free,
that freedom didn't proceed,
that you needed the right hierarchy.
You know, I think that we could say that it...
Give her at least the respect that she...
This was...
She might have been wrong, right?
But she had a particular theory that rejected Anarchy,
and it thought Anarchy was wrong.
Okay, hold on. I really resent,
and I'm not saying you're doing this, the implication
that if Rand was guided by her passions,
that somehow is a criticism of her or lessens her.
I think Rand was a very passionate person.
I think she loved her husband enormously.
She despised certain people enormously.
And I don't think that there's anything wrong with that.
I don't think she would change her philosophical position
about something because she disliked somebody.
I agree, but what I'm saying...
Even the amount of thought she gave to that philosophical position...
All I'm saying is, it is possible
that if someone comes across ideas
that she had not considered before,
if she regarded this person as a bad actor,
like all of us,
she would be less likely to take them under consideration.
Sure.
That's all I'm saying.
Sure, and I think other people confronted her with ideas.
Van O'Kiaa, I don't think Rothbard was the only one.
Correct, right, Charles as well, yeah.
Right, Charles certainly did.
And she rejected them, and she rejected them
because she had, and whether you agree with her or not,
she had a thought-out position
about why you needed to have this particular structure in place
so that markets and human freedom could exist.
But it's just really interesting
because this is the one time, in my view,
and please correct me if I'm wrong,
where she invokes need as kind of a basis for political activity.
So, let's suppose you want this federal government,
whatever you want.
Like it is now, like your version of the government.
I don't see why it's an issue for you,
for me and Lex, to say we're not privy to Washington,
we're going to do our own thing,
and given if we go about our lives not initiating force
and being productive actors,
why she would have an issue with this?
Why would I care?
Well, you would care because if you're saying
the government has a monopoly on force between these two oceans,
you can do that as long as you don't violate somebody else's rights.
Sure, but what I'm saying is
we just declare ourselves sovereign.
We're not going to pay any income taxes.
We're going to be peaceful people.
And when Lex and I have disputes,
we're going to call Joe.
That's Joe Rogan.
You're never going to get to meet him,
but he's a good guy.
I know.
We're going to call Joe,
and Joe's going to resolve it between us.
He's so good at, like, needling and getting you off topic that way.
He's really effective at it.
He's Muhammad Ali.
I always say when I debate communist,
I always say to them,
You mean Lex?
Yeah, maybe Lex.
Maybe I should review this.
Tom Radd, I love you.
That if they really believe...
Blurred indeed, not read.
If they really believe in what they think,
then they should be advocates of capitalism,
because under capitalism,
under my system of government, capitalist government, right?
They could go and start a commune.
They can live in copiness.
They can live to each according to his needs,
from each according to his ability,
all they want and live their pathetic, miserable lives that way.
And the government would never intervene,
because the whole view of capitalism is freedom.
We live in the way alone, right?
As long as you're not violating my rights,
as long as you're not taking my property,
as long as you're not engaging with...
So in that sense, yeah,
you and Lex can form your own thing.
I don't believe in compulsory taxes anyway.
So you and Lex can do your own thing, never pay taxes.
As long as you're not violating the laws,
and the laws are very limited, right?
Because they're only there to protect individuals.
As long as you're not violating somebody else's property rights,
or inflicting force on anybody else, you're peaceful.
You can do what you want.
You know, don't have sex with kids, right?
I will stop immediately.
Good.
The rest of us are just playing checkers,
and he's playing chess.
Yeah, I mean, a government that protects individual rights properly
is a government that leaves you alone,
to live your life as you see fit,
even if you live your life in a way that I don't approve of,
that I don't think is right.
I mean, that's the whole point, right?
Okay, then we're going to integrate that.
The only thing you can do is, you know,
try to enforce arbitrary laws that you come up with on me.
Of course, absolutely.
Okay, great.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we lived in a world
where rights-protecting laws are superfluous,
but the reality is usually that somebody violates them,
whether by accident or intentionally,
and that you need some mechanism.
Now, if you guys can resolve that dispute without getting involved, fine.
But if you guys land up not resolving,
there is another authority that will help you resolve it.
Can I ask a question?
Under anarchism, what kind of systems of laws do you think will emerge?
Do you think we'll have basically a similar kind of layer of universal law to where...
Let me answer this. This is a great question.
I know you're going through this.
This is often presented as a criticism of anarchism,
and this is actually something I think Yaron would agree with as well
in other contexts, which is this.
One of the reasons communism can't work, central planning can't work,
and this is one of Mises' great innovations is,
if I could sit down, it's like asking,
what would the fashion industry look like if the government didn't run it?
There's no way for me to know.
What the fashion industry is, which all of us are in favor of it being free,
is literally millions of designers, of seamstresses,
of people who make the fabric,
also references throughout history,
and these creative artistic minds putting things together in every year.
And there's no shortage of clothes.
In fact, we make so many clothes that we send them in land-filled sizes
to overseas poor countries,
and you have people in these desperate countries wearing like Adidas shirts.
They can't even read English,
but because we don't know what to do with all these clothes.
That's how the glory of free enterprise is.
The problem is, the problem is this loosely,
everything comes cheap and overabundant.
It's like food, you know? Well, it doesn't actually come overabundant.
It's done properly. That's fair. Supply meets demand.
Sure, that's fair.
But I'm saying is like, if 150 years ago, you said,
you know, one day we're going to have an issue where there's going to be so much food
and that the kids are too fat.
It's just going to be like, I have four who are dead in the crib.
I wish. I mean, what kind of a paradise is this?
So what you would have, we have this right now in certain centers.
You have the Hasidium.
You have Sharia. You have different.
You have, I'm sure in the medical system,
they have their own kind of private courts and court marshals is another example.
So obviously that's through the state.
So you would have innovation in law, under markets, just the same ways you'd have it.
And we have this already.
Maybe it's not, Yaron doesn't like in terms of like murder and rape,
and I can understand why.
But in terms of like business and interactions,
he would have no problem with different arbitration firms
having different rules for like what kind of evidence is allowed.
Maybe you only have 60 days to make your case and so on and so forth.
And the market is a process of creative innovation.
And it would be dynamic.
It would be changing.
So what's interesting, what's interesting,
relating to this is that one of the ways I ran proposed raising revenue
for the government because she was against,
was let's say we have a contract.
We could just have it arbitrated without government interviewing.
But if we wanted to access the courts of the government as a final authority,
we would pay.
And that's how governments would raise some of the funds would be raised that way.
So this definitely a value to having this innovation and the public space.
But I don't believe that is the case with murder.
I don't believe that is the case with violent crime.
And it's funny you bring up Sharia because David Friedman, when he gives...
Wait, I got to ask you to clarify.
I'm not trying to interrupt you.
You were talking about with murder.
I mean, you would agree, I think just to clarify for the audience,
that there is room for innovation and murder
because there's things like manslaughter, there's murder one, murder two.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't think it happens at a market level.
I don't think there's a market innovation for murder.
Somebody has to figure out what those standards are.
And they will evolve as we gain more knowledge.
But we're all agreement that the word murder means very different things.
Oh, absolutely.
And circumstances matter and standards of proof and standards of evidence.
All of that, there has to be... And consequences too, yes.
All of that, there has to be a standard.
And that's what I think the proper government provides.
But so David Friedman uses in some of his talks about private law.
He uses Sharia law in Somalia as an example.
Look, legal systems evolve privately independent.
Yeah, authoritarian ones.
Ones that don't respect the rights of women at all.
Are you married?
No, no.
But we all want to have sex with our mother, as Freud would say.
Oh my God, can we make that a clip?
Yep.
Where the hell did that come from?
That's much better than what I was just saying about the kids.
I appreciate that.
Okay, so we went in a voluntary way, although sometimes for Iran
and sometimes for Michael, it felt involuntary.
But we all got the big guns.
So how do we land this?
Clearly, there's a disagreement about anarchism here.
I think there's a big agreement.
Because if Yaron was saying that if I want to have my voluntary stupid thing with you
and his government is not going to tax me
and is not going to insinuate itself unless we're murdering each other,
something like that, I'm okay with that.
So if you take the example of Sharia law, which was mentioned earlier.
So if you have a little community within my world
that imposes Sharia law, if it starts mutilating little girls,
then you impose your law on it, right?
You impose the law on it because it's an issue of protecting individuals.
If they want to treat women, if women have to cover up
and the women are okay with that, that's fine.
If the woman wants to leave but is not allowed to leave,
that's where my government would step in and prevent them from using force against her.
And that's it, right?
Now, I think it's more complicated than that, right?
Because I think there are complex issue property rights often
where it's not going to be easy for you guys to resolve
and particularly if you interact with people outside of your community.
But yeah, my view is government is there to protect individual rights.
That's it to otherwise leave you alone.
I think this conversation is going to continue for quite a while.
Michael has a new book on the topic coming out eventually one day.
So you're working also on the still called the White Pill?
The White Pill, yeah.
And the first line of the White Pill is,
Ayn Rand did not laugh.
I'm not joking, that's literally the first line.
I believe it.
Because it opens up with her.
Who knows what the book's going to look like when it's done.
But as of now, that's the beginning because it opens up with her testimony at the House
on American Activities Committee where she's trying to explain
to these Congress people what it was like when she left the Soviet Union
and they are just befuddled by it.
Can you explain she did not laugh?
Well, because the first line, the Fountainhead spoiler alert is how it worked left.
So this is a little inversion of that.
It says Ayn Rand did not laugh because she had this.
Ayn Rand was a huge fan of America as am I.
She took our political system very seriously.
She had enormous reverence for institutions.
One example of this is one of the villains of the Atlas Shrugged is based on Harry Truman.
I think Thompson is the character's name.
And because she had such respect for the title of president,
she refers to him as the chairman.
She couldn't even bring herself.
She had a huge respect for the presidency.
I wonder if she'd still have it.
Right, maybe not.
Even the last string of presidents we've heard.
So having her, which sets up the broader point of the book,
which I'm sure I'll be back on this show to discuss,
assuming this bridge hasn't been burned, but I'll try my best.
All three of us are canceled.
Some are more canceled than the others.
Uh-oh.
Who?
I don't know.
And the point being, which sets up the broader point of the book,
is how ignorant many people are in the West about the horrors of Stalinism and communism,
but also how many people in the West were complicit in saying to Americans,
go home, everything's fine.
This is great.
Sure.
You know, this is why Pence and Savarese are sure they're mistakes.
And they really made a point to downplay really gratuitously some of the
unimaginable atrocities of the communism.
And just one more sentence.
And going through the work and learning about what they actually did is so jaw-dropping
that it's, and if I didn't know about it and many people I'm friends with who are historians,
who are interested in the space, you know, this isn't common knowledge to them,
then we can assume that almost no one knows about it.
And I think it's very important for people to appreciate whether Republican, Democrat,
liberal, whatever, how much of a danger this is.
And I think Americans have this, there's a book called It Can't Happen Here,
I think by Sinclair Lewis about a fashion that comes to America.
American exceptionalism has a positive context, but also have a negative context
where you think we're invincible.
All these horrible things that happens in other countries that can't possibly happen here.
We're America, we're special.
And it's completely an absurdity.
Yeah.
Have you seen the movie, Mr. Jones?
My friend wrote it.
No, I haven't.
But Walter Duranty and his quotes, I have a thread on Twitter.
Walter Duranty for those who don't know.
He won a Pulitzer because he was the New York Times man in Moscow.
And endlessly, he was talking about how great it was, how if you hear about this famine in Ukraine,
this is just propaganda, I went to the villages, you know, everyone's happy and fed.
A lot of it was explicit lies, you know.
And when you realize you're talking about, let's give them the absolute benefit of the doubt,
an accidental genocide, it's still mind-boggling.
And also, you know, Ann Applebaum, who's just a phenomenal, phenomenal writer,
she wrote a book called Red Fam and Stalin's War on Ukraine.
And she talks about how what people in America don't appreciate is how clever in their sadism the Soviets were.
And what they knew to do to Ukraine is everyone is starving.
So they knew if you got some meat on your bones, you're hiding food.
So they come back at night, take your hand, put in the door jam, keep slamming the door, ransack your house.
They didn't have to find the food, burn down your house, take all your clothes, goodbye and good luck.
I don't recall saying good luck.
Yeah.
So I highly recommend the movie because it's very well done.
It's very well directed, it's beautifully made, it's stunningly effective.
Okay, good.
And illustrating exactly that.
The scenes in Ukraine during the famine, oh, your heart, I mean, it's just, it's crushing.
And it shifts to black and white.
It's very, very well made aesthetically.
So highly recommend it.
And it's written by Andrew Shalupa.
She's a Ukrainian friend of mine.
She interests me, Yanmi Park, who's a big North Korean defector.
And it's, this is the kind of thing where I think more people need to...
When I wrote The New Right, which talks a lot about the Nazis or the kind of neo-Nazis,
one of their big complaints about, you know, against people who are Jewish is like,
oh, we hear all about the Holocaust.
How come you don't talk about the Hall of the Moor?
I'm like, I'm trying to do my part.
I agree with you that we need to be talking more about the Hall of the Moor.
Absolutely.
And it's sad that not more movies that are anti-Soviet, which tells you a lot about the
view of the intelligentsia.
It's a great idea.
It just was badly implemented.
And no, it's a rotten idea.
It's an evil idea.
And it was implemented.
Exactly.
It was implemented exactly how it has to be implemented.
There's no alternative.
Can we talk about The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and which character do you find most
fascinating, ones that kind of you meet in your own mind that you almost have conversations
with or as an influence on you and your life in general?
You know what character I like?
Because I know no...
Good or bad, sorry.
No one ever gives this answer.
But this is my...
Just aesthetically...
You know how sometimes you're drawn to a character and it's...
If this person were real, you'd think they're just...
But there's something about the resonance with you.
I can't even explain this.
But I love the character in Atlas Shrugged of Lillian Reardon, who's Hank Reardon's wife.
And what is amazing about her, she's his wife.
He's this big industrialist, innovator.
And she's this like former beauty in that, but she's so cold and soulless that there's...
I mean, I joke about, you know, Anne Rand's vampire novels.
That character is as close to a literal vampire as you're going to see in Rand.
And there's just this great scene where, you know, Hank Reardon invents Reardon Medal.
It's this great medal, which is extremely strong, but extremely...
It's like light.
So this creates all these innovations.
And he brings her a bracelet made of the first Reardon medal.
This is his life goal.
This is like Prometheus bringing fire.
And she's like, what the fuck is this?
It'd walk me diamonds.
Yeah, you couldn't walk me diamonds.
What is this shit?
And Dagny, who is another industrialist, she's a heroine, a very strong female character in Atlas Shrugged,
is at a party and she goes, I got diamonds.
Let's trade.
And Lillian's like, you want this?
And she's like, yes, because that's the concretization of the human mind.
These are rocks.
And Lillian's like, okay, whatever.
And that character is someone who has a lot of resonance in our culture.
This kind of soulless.
It's easy to write a soulless male figure like Peter Keating in some ways is soulless.
But that, for some reason, when it's like a soulless female, it seems that much more chilling and effective.
Do you not agree though that Lillian Reardon is amazingly, very powerful figure?
Powerful figure.
And I think Reardon is too.
And what I love about Reardon is his evolution, right?
He's so flawed.
He's a hero who's completely flawed.
And it drives me nuts when people say who characters are cartoonish.
They never changed.
There's no emotion.
Really?
Did you read the same book I did?
Because if you take Reardon and he's struggling and he's trying to deal with Lillian and his family and all this stuff,
and we know family members like this, right?
We know who are leeches and parasites.
But he's excusing them because that's what he's supposed to do.
And then as he evolves to fully realize what's going on, that evolution is difficult.
It's hard.
Like the scene after he has sex with Dagny, of course, he gives a speech.
But the speeches is such a good speech in terms of conveying his mind, body split, right?
He thinks he really had fun.
He really enjoyed the sex, right?
But he thinks it's animalistic and he thinks it's a sign of his depravity.
And here he is, this woman he loves, and he adores her.
And he can't connect the two.
He can't connect the sex with the love.
He can't connect the sex with adoration and with the values.
So her characters are anything, I think, but cardboard characters.
Because I think Dagny and the scenes where she's listening to music and gets captured by the music
and the way Rand describes that, I think it's just beautiful.
Or the scene, my favorite scene in Atlas is the scene where they're taking the first train ride
across the John Golden Bridge and they're in the engine room and it's traveling through.
And the way she's describing Dagny, it's almost like Dagny's having sex with the machine, right?
It's so powerful emotionally their success, the fact that they did it.
Everybody told them it was impossible and the train is going really fast.
And that whole, it's got a sexual vibe to it.
It's all about passion.
It's all about success.
And it's all about the success of their minds and nobody else matters.
What's really great about that scene just in terms of constructing the novel, I'm not going to spoil anything.
So the Atlas Shrugged has three acts, like three act structure is not uncommon.
And the first act is about Hank Reardon overcoming all this adversity at home in his personal life
and in his business to create this great achievement.
So Rand really makes the reader invested in this character and his accomplishments.
He's unambiguously doing something good.
There's no downside here.
He's making it easy to transport people, transport food.
This is really just great.
And it's just once you read it and you look back, you're like, she does such a masterful job.
You have to be a fan of this person and root for them because she's like, oh, you think things are going great.
He's overcome.
Hold on a minute.
And then the rest of it, she's just real.
And your sense of injustice is triggered as a reader to such an end degree because you saw what he went through to get to this point.
And now you're seeing it taking away people in fear and fear to him.
And one of the quotes on Twitter I use all the time is, I'll see someone politician or a bureaucrat or a thinker just advocate for something completely unconscionable.
And I'll just quote and say, my favorite criticism of Ein Rand is that they say her villains are too evil and unrealistic because the things that people posit with a straight face are so much worse than she has in her book.
And not just politicians.
You find intellectuals today.
Oh, of course.
You know, the way over the time, you know, even when I was struck that was good.
Nobody really talks like this.
No, they do.
Let me give you one example.
There was a story she wrote, which she never published.
They published her journals, the Ein Rand Institute.
And there was one character and this is a prototype of Ellsworth to he was the villain of one of the villains of the fountainhead.
And basically the kid had like deformed legs or broke his leg or something like that.
And he wants to get leg braces.
And the dad is like, oh, we're not going to do that.
Why should you be better than anyone else?
Like you should just have this deformity.
Except your feet.
Except your feet.
And you're reading this.
I'm like, what dad is not going to give his kid leg braces?
It's ridiculous.
But now it's not uncommon for deaf children to not get cochlear implants and not be able to hear because their parents say, well, we're going to lose deaf culture.
Hearing is just information.
And you're sitting there.
And whether you agree with this or not, this is very close to what she was saying.
And when I read what she was saying, I'm like, okay, crazy Ein Rand.
This is not a thing.
And it's like, oh, yeah.
The craziness is that it's not braces.
It's hearing.
It's, it's, yeah.
And what evil to deny your kid hearing.
I mean, God.
So.
Here's the other thing.
If you want deaf culture, which I would believe is a thing sign language or whatever, they could turn it off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you want it, you give them the choice.
Yeah.
Tonight, I'm sorry.
One more thing to, you know, Rand used the word evil frequently.
And I think maybe I can make the argument she's too loosely.
If you are denying a child the gift of music, I will say that's evil.
I agree.
Completely unambiguously go online and listen, watch videos of people getting hearing aids
and being able to hear for the first time.
I promise you, you will cry because there's not no pure.
I'm getting teared up right now.
There's no pure expression of humanity and technology at its best.
Then seeing a two year old or one and a half year old who can't even talk.
And then you see the reaction when they hear mom's voice.
It's so beautiful and moving.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
There's a few things that's moving.
It is.
It's like, it's one of the, one of the ways to rethink technology perhaps.
And there's this, there's a realty funny because sometimes it'll be this tough dude.
Right.
And he's dead, been deaf all his life.
And then he, they put hearing and the girlfriend's like, can you hear me?
And he's trying to be tough for three seconds.
And you just sit there.
It's just this.
No, absolutely.
And that's true of any sense.
I mean.
Like colorblind people seeing color for the first time, that kind of thing.
I think there's.
It's not quite the same, but, but, but it's somewhat.
But if you're blind and suddenly can see.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just, it's just stunning.
Right.
I mean, and, and how do we form our concepts?
How do we think we have to, we get information from reality, right?
We, we, we interact with reality through our senses.
And that's how we become conceptual beings.
You deny an element of that from a human being.
That is horrible.
There's a potential with that, with the neural link too.
So further developments there.
So, yes.
I mean, on that, there's a powerful question of who is John Galt.
I don't know if we can do this without spoiler alert.
Yeah.
That's for the book.
Okay.
Well, but you can say, you can say.
What, what's the importance of this character?
What's the importance of this question?
I mean, without the importance of, so I want to give a talk on who is John Galt.
And who is John Galt in a sense as anybody who takes their own life seriously, anybody
who is willing to really live fully their own life, use their mind in pursuit of their
rational values and pursue their happiness fully, uncompromisingly with no comp, with
no, you know, compromise and, and, you know, sticking to the integrity.
Anybody can be John Galt in that sense.
I think one of the mottos I live by is all we are tested.
Maybe this is a little bit religious, but I think you're on is going to agree with it.
All any of us can do is leave the world a little bit of a better place than we found it.
And I think if you do that through hard work, being honest, being a kind, not at the expense
of other people, you can go to your grave and patting yourself on the back.
I mean, I mean, to me, the, the, the leaving the world a better place.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, that's, that's not what drives me.
What drives me is, I mean, what, what I think drives people.
I think just live a good life.
A good life means a life you're happy living.
And part of that is the impact you have on, on the world, but it's, you know, so many
people live wasted lives, live mediocre lives, live conventional lives.
You know, maybe they even leave the world a better place, but they didn't really, they
didn't leave the world a better place.
They left the world a better place, but they didn't, they didn't, they didn't live their
potential.
They didn't, or they, or they died feeling guilty about it.
Or they, they, a million different things.
So there's so many productive people.
I mean, think about all the innovators and the technologists and the businessmen who leave
the world a better place by a big shot, but they're never happy.
Never happy in their own, in their own souls, in their own, in their own life.
And to me, that's what counts.
And if you're going to be happy, you'll leave the better world a better.
And that's what John Volts symbolizes.
To me, it's, it's living your life by your standards, by your values and, and, and pursuing,
pursuing that, that happens.
I take, I'm sorry.
I take it in a different context, because I think a lot of, and I don't think you're
going to disagree with this.
I think a lot of times when you're young, you have unrealistic expectations about what
you're going to accomplish.
And you think to yourself, well, let's suppose someone wants to go into politics.
Well, if I'm not elected president, I'm a failure.
That's nonsensical.
There's lots of people who are successful who haven't achieved literally the top position,
their role.
So if you can go to your grave, having, defending everything you've done, and you've moved the
needle.
Successes should not be relative.
Yes.
So that goes back to second-handedness.
Yes.
Success is not being better than other people's.
And that is not being the best.
Success is maximizing your potential, whatever that is.
And, and look, you know, I know people, you know, I have a son who's, who could be a really
good engineer, really good mathematician, really good scientist, but he, he decided he wants
to write comedy, right?
So he might have been a better mathematicians than he's a comedian, but that's his values.
That's, that's his goals.
That's what he wants to do.
And hopefully he'll be really, really good at that, and he'll be incredibly successful
at it, and materially and in every other sense.
But that's, that's what you pursue.
Yeah.
You know, so it's, it's really being true to yourself in a deep sense.
And, and if you are true to yourself, yeah, you'll leave the world a better place.
But that's not the essence.
The essence is you.
No, focus on, focus on you, focus on making your life the best life that it can be.
And if you do that, you'll make the world a better place by, almost by definition.
You'll impact people.
We're looking at the same thing in different ways.
Yeah.
It's at least in my little corner of the world, it was disappointing how rare that, that is.
So one of the reasons I'm here in Austin, and one of the reasons I, my work gravitated
towards Elon Musk is because he represents that person for me in the world of technology
in the world of CEO and the world of business.
It was very surprising to me, the more I've learned about the world of tech, how few
people live unapologetically, fully to their potential.
I'm sure people, others do that, maybe music and art.
I'm not sure.
I don't know about those worlds.
I do know about the technology world.
And it was disappointing to me how many people compromise their integrity in subtle ways at
first, but then it becomes a slippery slope.
Can I say this?
There's this great quote, and I always forget if it's Steinbeck or Hemingway, and the quote,
and this applies for money and applies for morality.
The quote was, how did you go bankrupt?
And he says two ways, gradually and then suddenly.
It's very hard to one day be like, I have no integrity.
You know, that doesn't happen.
It's very easy if it's like, look, I stole this candy bar.
What's the big deal if I steal this thing?
People say they're no slippery slopes.
They are, and they're big, and they're very slippery, and people slide.
This is the biggest one.
And people violate their integrity even without stealing.
Just little things about how they treat other people, how they treat themselves, the values
they pursue, they don't go after the profession they really wanted to.
They compromise in ways that they shouldn't with their spouse or with their mothers or whatever.
They look the other way when they see justice.
And this is why people go through middle age, midlife crisis.
Midlife crisis is a crisis where you suddenly realize, I didn't do it.
I didn't live up to my standards.
I didn't live up to my youthful idealism.
I compromised and I sold out.
But I also would warn you about Silicon Valley.
Yeah, I think at the top, very few of them stick to it.
And partially it's the political pressure is unbearable.
I mean, how would you?
How can you?
It would require to be a hero and very few of them all.
But there are a lot of people who do really well at all kinds of levels in technology,
who little startups, people.
And this is the point Michael was making.
You don't have to be the best.
Yeah.
You know, you don't have to be a CEO to live to your max and to live with integrity and to live a great life.
I know people who do because they joined Amazon or whatever have just made a life for themselves,
an amazing life for themselves and have done great work at Amazon, let's say,
and then have lived a great life because of the opportunity that created for them.
So I think there are more good people out there.
But yes, one of the saddest things of growing up is noted,
or even when you're a teenager and looking at adults and noticing how few of them actually live.
I mean, really alive in a sense of living their values and enjoying their life.
And you start with your parents and you look across the people, everybody lives such mediocre lives.
Yeah.
And the other thing is they don't have to.
That's what people don't appreciate.
Particularly not in the world that we live in today.
They're so wealthy and so many, we all have so many opportunities.
So what, by way of advice, what advice would you give to young people to live their life fully?
I mean, Michael and I have talked about this, but it bears repeating.
So if you look at John Galt, if you look at the highest ideals of a life who could live,
what advice would you give to a 20-year-old today, 18-year-old?
Can I say, I don't think, and I think Rand would agree.
When Rand was writing John Galt, she says,
when you have this character's human perfection, you don't want to get too close.
So he's a little bit of a vague character because she was aware that when you're dealing with day to day,
kind of the shine comes off.
I think Rourke is a lot better character for a young person.
But Rourke is all, the entirety of the fountain head is Rourke.
So it really is the one of several.
We barely know John Galt.
Yeah, but Rourke is someone where you could be like, okay.
And what Rourke also gives young people is,
That's in the fountain head.
The fountain head is the strength to persevere.
Because when you're young, you're going to have down times.
There's going to be times when you're lonely.
There's going to be times when you don't have a girlfriend.
There's going to be times when you're out of work and you're thinking,
holy crap, I'm falling between the cracks.
I'm going to accomplish that.
I'm going to be a failure.
And he gives them the courage.
There's even a scene in the fountain head, which is this amazing scene.
I love it.
It's not talked about enough where basically Rourke is looking at one of his buildings
and this little kid on a bicycle comes up to him.
And you're on, please correct me.
And he's like, who built this and Rourke said, I did.
And the line is, you know, Rourke didn't realize it,
but he just gave that kid the courage to face a lifetime.
And I think that is such a beautiful thing where you can find inspiration in this character.
Don't become needlessly difficult.
Don't start parroting his lines.
You're not Howard Rourke and he's not a real person,
but there's aspects of him that you can apply to your life.
And here's something else.
I'll give one example because this happened to me.
When I was working at Goldman Sachs, I was doing tech support.
And my great grandmother had passed away that year.
And I promised my grandmother I'd have thanks.
I've told the story several times.
I would have Thanksgiving dinner with her.
I was working second shift fort to midnight and we were 24 seven help desk.
And I got the schedule for the next week.
And I sold my grandma going to have lunch with her in Thanksgiving.
And they had put me down from four to midnight the day before Wednesday,
which is my normal shift, but then the day shipped the next day.
And I go to my boss, I go, I first of all, second shift.
I'm like this Thanksgiving.
I promised my grandma.
And they're like, well, if you could find someone to fill this, we'll do it.
And I asked everyone, they're like, no.
And I said, I'm not coming in.
And I, I a hundred percent, not even a question.
If I asked my grandmother, can we have dinner instead?
She would have said yes.
But this was one of those moments.
Maybe this is from my huge ego where I felt like I was in a movie and I'm making a choice.
Am I going to ask grandma or am I going to just bend the knee?
And I go, I, I go, I couldn't find anyone.
And I go, I'm not coming in.
And they go, if you're not coming in, you're fired.
And I go, fire me.
And they did fire me and I'm, and I have no regrets.
And cause if they, if I, if I'd compromised, I'd have money in my pocket.
But since I didn't compromise, I could look at that story.
Rand talks about how man is a being of self-made soul.
I could look at that story.
And next time I have a time where it's a tough decision where there's really pressure.
I could be like, you know what?
This is the kind of person you are.
Stick to it.
There's one more example.
Sorry, Iran.
I've given talks on networking and I tell people, I like to use humor because humor is a great
way to shortcut the brain and get the truth to them directly.
I say, if you know someone is in town with, it's their birthday and they're not doing anything,
take them out.
And I say, I do this for Rand reasons.
I do it selfishly.
And the audience laughs and I go, you're laughing.
But I go, the guy who takes people out for their birthday is awesome.
That could be you.
There's nothing stopping you.
You're just not thinking of these terms.
What's it going to cost you?
$30?
But for the rest of their life or a few years, that person will remember you and be like,
you know what?
This person did right by me and I'll give you a concrete example which changed my life
profoundly.
Ted Hope, who was the producer of the film American Splendor, which starred by mentor
Harvey Picar, sent an email to his firm that said, Harvey's in town with nothing to do.
If you want to hang out with him, here's your chance.
They worked at a film company and I was the only one.
I got the email.
I wasn't working there from a friend who took him up on it.
And as a consequence, Harvey wrote a graphic novel about me, Egon Huberst, which is $250
in eBay now and it moves at that, not too shabby.
The point being, you know what?
Someone had a movie made about him.
Someone is an interesting figure.
Take the lunch and stay overtime for an hour.
But so many people don't think in those terms and there's so many opportunities for them.
So that's the advice I give.
And I think it's also good to give advice via anecdote.
So not only is the person getting the advice, they are learning why you got to that point.
And maybe I'm wrong, but at least they've thought about it.
Yeah.
I mean, I agree with all of that.
And I like the line, Iron Man's line about man as a self made soul is a creature of self
made soul is huge.
And it's something most people don't realize.
And it's something that modern intellectuals undermine.
I mean, even somebody like Sam Harris, when you keep telling people they don't have
free will, then you don't have a self made soul.
Cause what is self made?
There is no self according to Sam, right?
He meditates and he sees that he doesn't have a self.
So you're undermining the ability of people to take control of their own lives and make
the kind of choices that are necessary to create the kind of moral character that is
necessary for them to be successful.
So I'd encourage people to go read, found head and out was shrugged because put aside
the politics, put aside even aspects of the philosophy, focus on these models.
These are, you know, how to walk is a great model for all of us.
It's a great story to have in your head, in your mind when you encounter challenging
choices that you might make.
And then spend the time.
And this is, I, you know, I don't think I ever did this when I was young.
I don't think people do this, but spend the time thinking about what your values really
are.
What do you love doing?
What makes, what gets you going?
What gets you excited?
And how can I make a living at this?
How can I do this and live through this?
And then, you know, think about what kind of life you want, what kind of, I don't know,
what kind of people you want to hang out with.
Don't let life just happen to you.
Think it through.
What kind of people, for example, if you want ambitious, excited, maybe you should move
to Silicon Valley, to Austin, Texas, right?
If you want to be around artsy people, maybe you should go to Hollywood, maybe you should
go to New York, you know, I don't know.
But figure out what kind of life you want to live, what kind of people you want to hang
out with, what kind of woman you want to spend your life with, what kind of, what kind of
romantic relationship you want to have.
Figure that out and go and do it.
Don't sit around.
Life is not.
Or try and fail.
It's okay.
You're going to fail.
Failure.
Failure.
Absolutely.
And that's the other thing.
Think about what you're doing, why you're succeeding, why you're failing.
And keep improving.
Keep working on it because it's not just going to happen like this.
Nobody is Francisco to take a character out of Atlas Shark to succeed at everything first
try.
Right?
We all need to fail a few times.
We all need to.
But what have you got to lose?
Every second is never going to be back.
I mean, these are all cliches, but they're all true cliches.
So think, figure out what your values are and try to apply your reason, your rational
thought on getting those values.
And try to, we talked about early on in the show, in the interview, we talked about integrating
your emotions with your cognition.
I think that's crucial because you don't want to be fighting your emotions as you move towards
these things.
You don't want your emotions to be barriers to your own success.
You want them to be cheerleaders, right, to cheer on when good things happen and to be
negative emotions when it's justified that they're negative.
So work on integrating your soul.
So creating your soul, that's the real challenge.
And I'll give one piece of meta advice.
When you're young, you're going to be clueless because you're going to be ignorant.
You know the data.
Don't ask your dopey friends for advice because they want to be helpful or parents, but the
friends want to be helpful, they're as dopey as you, they have uninformed as you.
So they're just going to give you platitudes and you're going to be worse off because now
you're going to be confused, especially with social media.
Reach out to people who are older than you, who are accomplished, you'd be surprised how
often you got to send them 20 bucks, buy them dinner, buy their book, whatever it takes.
You are getting free world-class advice for very cheap and that is really a mechanism
for success.
It's something very unpopular and not sexy, this is why people probably unfollow me.
That's not why.
Read.
Well, you'll tell me, you'll tell me why after this.
Read, read, read.
Because you're not always going to have access to those experts.
And I'm not just talking about self-help books, I'm not even talking about self-help books.
Read the world with literature.
I mean, literature presents you with all the different characters.
You know, read Dostoevsky, right?
Read Hugo, right?
Read all these authors that have taken time to really create characters and put them in
situations that maybe you will never face those exact situations, but you'll face similar
situations.
And they play it out for you.
You'll see what the consequences are.
Great literature is a real tool for building your soul.
Great art generally with literature and particularly because it's more conceptual.
What, maybe you could speak to love and relationship in your own life, but in general, if you look
at Alice Schragt, if you look at Fountainhead, and maybe this is going to become a therapy
session for Lex, but also just looking at your own life in a form of advice, how can
you be a roric, reared-in type character and do it live your life to the fullest in creating
the most amazing things that you're able to create and yet have others in your life that
you give yourself to in terms of loving them fully and having a family, having kids, but
just even just the love of your life kind of thing.
How do you balance those things together?
Is there anything to say?
I'll say one thing because then I'll defer to your own because he's the one who's married
here.
I don't think it's a balance.
I think they complement each other and feed off each other.
So it's like, how do you balance having shoes and pants?
It's like, no, you want both.
You want it all.
You want having a great partner who thinks you're a badass and then sometimes they're
on the stage and you're like, oh my, I'm married to a badass.
That's the goal.
Am I wrong?
No, absolutely.
It feeds off of each other.
It's synergetic.
It's completely synergetic.
The problem that people have, I think, where they get into challenges is when they view
them as opposites, right?
Work or family?
Well, if you don't work the family, you can't finance the family, but more than that.
Why is your wife going to love you?
What are the virtues that you're bringing?
If you don't maximize your own potential, if you don't live the best life that you can
live, what is it to love?
And if she doesn't do the same thing, why do you love her?
So you don't get this conflict between work and how do I have a balanced life?
Of course, you have a balanced life.
You balance it based on your values and it's never going to be the same.
The time you spend at work with family when you're young or when you have little kids
or when they're grown up is all going to be different.
It's going to depend on your priorities at the point, but it's all going to feed off
of each other.
So maybe another word outside of balance is sacrifice.
Do you think relationship involves sacrifice or not?
Does she know what he's doing?
I know.
He's trolling you.
Is he trolling you?
He's a big troll.
Lex is the biggest troll on Twitter.
Ever.
Ever.
Ever.
Ever.
Never sacrifice.
He means sacrifice.
I know.
I know.
So I'm going to define it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Sacrifice in my world.
Can I say one thing for a good, we get sidebar?
Rand had a good example where he's talking about balance.
So she was married to this guy, Frank O'Connor.
He was not a cerebral.
He was not intellectual.
That's fine.
She was in love with him.
And I met someone who had been friends with Rand.
And a lot of times she'd have these conversations with her acolytes to like four in the morning
about the most cerebral topics.
And I said, he would always bring them food, he'd stay up and kind of sit there in a corner.
And I go, when this was happening, was he sitting there like, Oh God, here goes crazy
old iron.
And I just got to be bored.
And they go, absolutely not.
He was so proud of her.
He was so excited.
In fact, when she got a lot of money from, I think, selling a red pawn, which was her
screenplay, which they're produced, he told her, you can buy any kind of fur coat as long
as it's mink.
He wouldn't, he's like, you earn this, celebrate it.
So that was a good example.
And that's a good relationship.
Absolutely.
The sacrifice is the, is the giving of a heart of a value and expecting either nothing or
something less in return.
You don't do that in a love relationship.
Your love relationship is a sense, a trade.
You're constantly trading.
You're not trading materially, but you're trading spiritually.
Imagine if I only gave my wife, if I gave spiritually and materially, only in one direction,
I'd get sick of it.
She'd get sick of it.
It would never last.
It has to be in give and take constantly in different ways, right?
Different values.
It's not, it's not a monetary exchange, but it's constantly you're giving and you're
receiving and you're giving, right?
And it's, it's, it's gotta, that's gotta be in balance.
And I know a lot of relationship where that gets out of bounds, right?
And at one party feels like they're giving all the time, the sacrificing, they're giving
more than they're receiving in a sense and it's over, right?
So now people use the word sacrifice, like, like Jordan Peterson, sometimes he uses it
both ways, right?
That's the problem.
People use it.
I don't know him personally, you know?
Jordan Peterson, I said, I didn't call him Jordan, you see?
Yeah.
He uses it in his talks as, sometimes he uses it as just as I described it, and he's supportive
of that, like the sacrifice Jesus made, right?
And sometimes he uses it as an investment, but it's, it's not.
If you're, if you're giving some, giving money now expecting a bigger return in the future,
that's not a sacrifice.
That's an investment.
That's why we have two concepts for that.
And the same is true, you know, if my wife is ill and I'm in, you know, I've got a whole
relationship build around what I'm giving.
It's not that I'm not getting anything back.
What I'm getting back is that she is recovering, right?
Is that she is, she's still alive or whatever it is that, that I'm keeping, that's the value
that I'm getting in return.
If I'm not getting that, why am I doing it?
Because I signed a contract a long time ago.
So it's, it's, it's not a sacrifice, children are not a sacrifice.
If I don't go to the movies cause I stay with my home with my kids, it's because I love
my kids more than I love going to the movies, right?
And if I love going to the movies more than I love staying with the kids and get a babysitter
or don't have kids, which is the better, better approach because
That's a good question.
Yeah.
Who did, what book did Ayn Rand say is the most evil book in all of serious literature?
Tolstoy?
It was Anacronina.
Tolstoy, yeah, Anacronina.
And the reason it was that book, which I haven't read, please correct me if I get the plot wrong,
what Rand was saying is the plot is a guy who's a big shot, I think.
He marries a stupid girl who has nothing of value to offer him for at all and she ends
up killing herself.
Whereas Rand's version, and we can take this out of the romantic context, it, I am delighted
when I could be of use to my friends.
It is, it makes me feel wonderful and not in a kind of parasitic way.
It's just like that I'm at a certain point where they call me up, they're having a problem
and I've helped them with that problem.
Anacronina, he gives up the love of his life.
Oh, is that what it is?
The amazing girl, the amazing girl.
He has an affair with the outside of marriage, taints her, is married to the, to the stupid,
but she gives him the prestige and everything.
Oh, oh, that's clearly very anti-Rand.
And the, the, the, the smart, the one he loves, she commits suicide in there.
Oh, okay, I got it wrong.
So it's, it's, it's, it's about him choosing mediocrity and nothingness over this amaze,
over love.
So, so pursuing your values is so crucial.
So don't sacrifice.
It doesn't mean that if you want to eat Chinese and she want to eat Italian, you don't once
in a while eat Italian on that day, right?
That's silly, right?
That's not a sacrifice, not in the sense in which we're talking about that's, you know,
it doesn't mean don't compromise.
It doesn't mean don't compromise on, on the day-to-day stuff.
It means don't compromise on moral values, doesn't, you don't compromise on the big stuff.
And you never, and you never sacrifice and that way you, you have a relationship that's
built as equals and, and as you admire each other and love at the end of the day is a
response to value.
If you stop undermining your own value, the person who loves you will stop or will stop
loving you or love you less.
If you love yourself less, they, you know, you have to say, I also said, just in order
to say I love you, you have to be able to say the I, right?
You have to, you have to be somebody.
You have to know yourself.
You have to have value and so love is a, love is a profound emotional response to value.
So speaking of love and the three of us being on this deserted island for time together,
somehow not murdering each other, let me ask you, you're on Michael, what is the most beautiful
thing you find about the, the other?
So let's go.
You're on first.
What do you think about Michael that you appreciate about him that you think, what, what do you
love?
What do you love about me?
That he's going to edit it.
See, that makes sense.
I just programmed him.
Press play.
It's all just a prerecorded message.
So I've never met Michael before.
So this is my, that's not true.
You have and you're, I don't remember ever meeting Michael and you're the, you're the
very beginning of the new right is me meeting you is the, I'm in the book.
Yes.
All right.
Well, now I have to read his book cause I mean, I presented positively or negatively.
Very.
Oh, okay.
Good.
Lex is not so sure.
He's like, no, I left it.
He goes, are you, am I presented positively or negatively?
I just go very.
And he's like, oh, good.
I'm like, is it?
So he's, Michael Sharp, he's quick.
He's, he's, he's funny, although some of the humor is beyond me.
I'm not sure.
That's what I was saying.
He's very intelligent.
Yeah.
He's, he's definitely very intelligent and, but, but also very engaging.
I think that's very engaging.
And the sharp dresser.
Oh, he's definitely, well, yeah, I compliment him on stuff that's obvious and everybody
can see by the video.
The sex appeal.
All right.
Let me also just comment one thing you mentioned about you deriving joy from being a value
to your friends.
Yeah.
You know, people talk to me about you sometimes, like, cause you'll do humor about various
things and things like maybe you're some kind of a crazy person or something like that.
Yeah.
I know you enjoy this aspect of it, but, you know, I say that the reason I'm friends with
Michael is there's like real love there and like the kind of kindness you give to be your
friends, to people like they're close to you, to your family is amazing, man.
So like that, that's one of my favorite things about you.
Your intellect aside, your philosophies aside, your humor aside, I think there's a lot of
love in you.
That's what I really appreciate.
But enough about you.
I'm actually getting sick of saying nice things about you and I take it all back.
Can I say one thing?
You're joking, but this is something that's very key and this is something in a random
context.
It is very disturbing and this is not by accident how in our culture, it is poo pooed to show
kindness, earnestness, appreciation to tell someone, you see this on Twitter where someone's
like, you know what?
I read your book.
It's made my life a lot better, okay, simp.
And there's a real, it is very much comes out of urban like media circles.
There's this real disdain for showing appreciation, for showing happiness, for showing kindness
and you don't know, now that I've called it out, you'll notice it, but when you see how
common it is and how people can't take compliments, it's the effects of that are extreme and extremely
negative.
I gotta say about Texas.
One of the, so Austin, especially, I mean, I don't really fully know Texas, Texas, but
Austin, the friendliness, there's a reason I've been, I've gotten fatter and been drinking
a lot is all the friendliness from random people who are not no longer random.
They're just friends.
I've made more friends in one week than I have in my entire stay in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
One and a half.
You know what the number two means?
I've never counted up that high.
So this is what happens when people are free?
No.
When people are free and individualistic, it's exact opposite of what people believe.
The more collectivist we are, the less free we are, the nastier we are to one another.
The vigilists who are pursuing their own happiness are incredibly kind, friendly, and supportive
people.
Okay.
And now your task with doing, talk about bad juju, to practice, to practice what you preach.
Is there in your soul that you can find one beautiful thing to say about Iran now that
you guys met for the first, second, or third time, or at least in performance?
So that's the easy one.
So what I like about Yaron is that I think he is taking one of the problems with maybe
more old school objectivism is that they would just use Rand's arguments in Rand's way.
And it's like, you're a parrot, you're not adding anything, and you're not going to be
better than her.
So you give this talk about, I think you can compare, was it Bill Gates to who was the
one?
No, who was the one who went to jail?
Oh, Booty Madoff.
Booty Madoff.
And when you make the point, you're like, does anyone here really think Bernie Madoff
was happy?
Like, yeah, he's successful and he's wealthy, but does he go to bed being like, hey, I'm
a great guy?
No.
And his son kills himself with all this tragedy that goes with him.
So I think anyone who takes an ideology or worldview that I think is of value and adds
to it and articulates it in a new way, I think is a great accomplishment.
I like how uncompromising you are in your views of putting her views forward.
And I like how you illustrate how silly it is to argue against anarchism.
So I don't really have to do any of the work.
As for you, and this I've thought this before many times, you're the first person I met
who I come at, literally the first of them, my friend who went to Yeshiva with as a kid,
who I come at us, there was a line on friends where Ross and Rachel were thinking of dating.
And they go, if we start dating, it would be like the third date because they knew each
other well.
And then she's like, yeah, but it'd be like that.
So it's like a plus and a minus.
Like, yeah, you're fast forwarding to seriousness, but it's also the fact that you and I have
the same background, like I can sit with your own or any of my other friends and try to
explain it.
The fact that intuitively you and I grew up the same and I know that we have that background
in common does create a bond because I feel, even if I haven't told you certain things,
you are going to understand me a lot better than many of my friends who've known me for
a long time.
I also really like how I feel, this is a very new age term, but I'm going to use it.
I feel very seen when I talk to you.
I think you see me for who I am, you appreciate me for who I am.
And I also really like how, and this is increasingly common as my platform increases.
So I'm very flattered by this.
You understand what I'm trying to do and you don't try to get in the way even though it's
your show.
You're like, okay, this guy's a performer.
He's doing his thing.
People appreciate it.
I appreciate it.
I'm not going to try to drive their car.
And I think some people who are bad, and I have not encountered this because I would
shoot it down, but I think a lot of times people have a tendency when they're hosts
to try to drive the car.
And it's like, these things work when we come in here, none of us prepare.
You're prepared by me, none of us talk beforehand and make it spontaneous.
And the audience really enjoys that more because they know it's real, earnest and dynamic.
Yeah.
I enjoy having you drive the car even though I believe you don't have a license or you
don't have a...
And you think we're going to crash?
No, I think he's an extraordinary interviewer because of all those things.
He makes you feel visible and he does...
But he also comes across as really earnest.
The questions are really...
Questions that you seem really interested in that you really want answers to.
It doesn't come across as canned or I prepared my three book project questions.
Thank you, Michael.
I was pretty sure that on a desert island, this would end in murder, but now I believe
it may...
Well, given his comments on Anarchy, it might still...
It's going to be human to speak.
It might still...
It might still...
It might still...
The day is young.
The night is young.
It's just the beginning.
This is a huge honor.
I've been a fan of both of you separately for a long time.
I really appreciate you wasting all this time with me today.
I love you, Michael.
I love you, Iran.
We love you too.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Malis and Yaron Brooke.
And thank you to Ground News, Public Goods, Athletic Greens, Brave, and FourSigmatic.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
And now, let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx.
Surround yourself with people who make you happy.
People who make you laugh, who help you when you're in need.
People who genuinely care.
They are the ones worth keeping in your life.
Someone else is just passing through.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.