The following is a conversation with Yaron Brook, one of the best known objectivist philosophers
and thinkers in the world. Objectivism is the philosophical system developed by Ayn Rand that
she first expressed in her fiction books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and later
in nonfiction essays and books. Yaron is the current chairman of the board at the Ayn Rand
Institute, host of the Yaron Brook show, and the co-author of Free Market Revolution, Equal is
Unfair, and several other books where he analyzes systems of government, human behavior, and the
human condition from the perspective of objectivism. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some
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the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I
first read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead early in college, along with many other literary
and philosophical works from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, Locke, Foucault, Wittgenstein, and of course,
all the great existentialists, from Kierkegaard to Camus. I always had an open mind, curious to
learn and explore the ideas of thinkers throughout history, no matter how mundane or radical or
even dangerous they were considered to be. Ayn Rand was, and I think still is, a divisive figure.
Some people love her, some people dislike or even dismiss her. I prefer to look past what some may
consider to be the flaws of the person and consider with an open mind the ideas she presents,
and Yaron now describes and applies in his philosophical discussions. In general, I hope
that you will be patient and understanding as I venture out across the space of ideas and the
ever-widening Orverton window, pulling at the thread of curiosity, sometimes saying stupid
things, but always striving to understand how we can better build a better world together.
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and up a podcast,
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And now, here's my conversation with Yaron Rook. Let me ask the biggest possible question first.
What are the principles of a life well-lived? I think it's to live with thought, that is,
to live a rational life, to think it through. I think so many people, in a sense, zombies out
there, they're alive, but they're not really alive because their mind is not focused, their mind is
not focused on what do I need to do in order to live a great life. So too many people just go through
the motions of living rather than really embrace life. So I think the secret to living a great life
is to take it seriously. And what it means to take it seriously is to use the one tool that
makes us human, the one tool that provides us with all the values that we have, our mind, our
reason, and to use it, apply it to living. People apply it to their work, they apply it to their
math problems, to science, to programming. But imagine if they use that same energy, that same
focus, that same concentration to actually living life and choosing values that they should pursue,
that would change the world. And it would change their lives.
Yeah, actually, you know, I wear the silly suit and tie. It symbolizes, to me always,
it makes me feel like I'm taking the moment really seriously.
I think that's really, that's right. And each one of us has different ways to kind of
condition our consciousness. I'm serious now. And for you, it's a suit and tie. It's a conditioning
of your consciousness too. Now I'm focused, now I'm at work, now I'm doing my thing. And I think
that's terrific. And I wish everybody took that. Look, I mean, it's a cliche, but we only live once.
Every minute of your life, you never can ever live again. This is really valuable. And when people,
people don't have that deep respect for their own life, for their own time, for their own mind.
And if they did, again, you know, one could only imagine, look at how productive people are,
look at the amazing things they produce and they do in their work. And if they apply that to everything, wow.
So you kind of talk about reason. Where does the kind of existentialist idea of experience maybe,
you know, fully experiencing all the moments versus fully thinking through?
Is there an interesting line to separate the two? Like why such an emphasis on reason for life
well lived versus just enjoy like experience? Well, because I think experience in a sense is the
easy part. You know, I'm not saying it's, it's, it's how we experience the life that we live. And
yes, I'm all with the take time to, to, to value what you value. But I think I don't think that's
the problem of people out there. I don't think the problem is they're not taking time to appreciate
where they are and what they do. I think it's that they don't use their mind in this one respect
in planning their life and thinking about how to live. So the focus is on reason is because
it's our only source of knowledge. There's no other source of knowledge. We don't know anything with,
you know, that does not come from our senses in our, in our mind, the integration of the,
of the evidence of our senses. Now we know stuff about ourselves. And I think it's important to
know oneself through introspection. And I can't consider that part of reasoning is to, is to,
is to introspect. But I think reason is undervalued, which is funny to say, because it's our means of
survival. It's how human beings survive. We cannot see this is where I disagree with so many
scientists and people like Sam Harris, you mentioned Sam Harris before the show.
We're not programmed to know how to hunt. We're not programmed to do agriculture. We're not
programmed to build computers and build networks on which we can podcast and do our shows. All of
that requires effort. It requires focus. It requires energy and it requires will. It requires
somebody to will it. It requires somebody to choose it. And once you make that choice,
you have to engage that choice means that you're choosing to engage your reason in discovery,
in integration, and then in work to change the world in which we live. And, you know,
human beings had to discover, figure out, solve the problem of hunting, hunting, you know, everybody
thinks, oh, that's easy. I've seen the movie. But human beings had to figure out how to do it,
right? You, you, you can't run down a bison and bite into it, right? You're not going to catch it.
You're not going to, you have no fangs to bite into it. You have to build weapons. You have to
build tools. You have to create traps. You have to have a strategy. All of that requires reason.
So the most important thing that allows human beings to survive and to thrive in every value,
from the most simple to the most sophisticated, from the most material to, I believe, the most
spiritual requires thinking. So stopping and appreciating the moment is, is something that
I think is relatively easy. Once you have a plan, once you've thought it through, once you know what
your values are, there is a mistake people make. They attain their values and they just, and they
just, they don't take a moment to savor that and to appreciate that and to even pat themselves on
the back that they did it, right? But that's not what's screwing up the world. What's screwing
up the world is that people have the wrong values and they don't think about them and they don't
really focus on them and they don't have a plan for their own life and how to live it.
If we look at human nature, you're saying the fundamental big thing that we need to consider
is our capacity, like capability to reason. So to me, reason is this massive evolutionary
achievement, right? In quotes, right? If you think about any other sophisticated animal,
everything has to be coded. Everything has to be written in, in the hard way. It has to be there.
Yeah. And they have to have a solution for the outcome. And if there's no solution,
the animal dies typically with animal suffers in some way. Human beings have this capacity,
self-program, they have this capacity. There's not, it's not a tabula rasa in the sense that
there's nothing there. Obviously we have a nature. Obviously our minds, our brains are
structured in a particular way. But given that we have the ability to turn it on or turn it off.
We have the ability to commit suicide, to reject our nature, to work against our interests,
not to use the tool that evolution has provided us with, which is this mind, which is reason.
So that choice, that fundamental choice, you know, Hamlet says it, right? To be or not to be.
But to be or not to be is to think or not to think, to engage or not to engage, to focus
or not to focus. You know, in the morning, when you get up, you kind of, you know, you're not,
you're not really completely there. You're kind of out of focus and stuff. It requires an act of
will to say, okay, I'm awake. I've got stuff to do. Some people never do that. Some people live in
that haze. And they never engage that mind. And when you're sitting and try to solve a complex
computer problem or math problem, you have to turn something on. You have to, in a sense, exert
certain energy to focus on the problem to do it. And that is not determined in a sense that you
have to focus. You choose to focus and you could choose not to focus. And that choice is more powerful
than any other like parts of our brain that we've borrowed from fish and from our evolutionary
origins. Like this, whatever this crazy little leap in evolution is that allowed us to think
is more powerful than anything else. So I think neuroscientists pretend they know a lot more
about the brain than they really do. Yeah. And that we know. Shots fired. I agree with you. And
we don't know that much yet about how the brain functions and what's efficient, you know, all
this stuff. So I think what what exists there is a lot of potentialities. But the beauty of the
human brain is its potentialities that we have to manifest through our choices. It's there,
it's sitting there. And yes, there's certain things that are going to evoke certain senses,
certain feelings. I'm not even saying emotions, because I think emotions are too complex to
have been programmed into our mind. But I don't think so. You know, there's this big issue of
evolutionary psychology is huge right now. And it's a big issue. You know, I find it to a large
extent as way too early and in storytelling about exposed storytelling about about stuff.
We still don't, you know, so for example, I would like to say for evolutionary psychology
differentiate between things like inclinations, feelings, emotions, sensations, thoughts,
concepts, ideas. What of those, the programmed and what of those are developed and chosen
and a product of reason? I think anything from emotion to abstract ideas is all chosen is all
a product of reason. And everything before that, we might have been programmed for. But the fact is,
so clearly a sensation is not a product of, you know, is something that we feel because that's
how our biology works. So until we have these categories, and until we can clearly specify
what is what and where do they come from, the whole discussion in evolutionary psychology
seems to be rambling. It doesn't seem to be scientific. So we have to define our terms,
you know, which is the basis of science, you have to have some, some clear definitions about
what we're talking about. It's when you ask them these questions, there's never really a coherent
answer about what is it exactly. And everybody is afraid of the issue of free will. And I think,
I think to some extent, I mean, Harris has this, and I don't want to misrepresent anything Harris
says, because I, you know, I'm a fan and I like a lot of his stuff. But on the one hand, he is
obviously intellectually active and wants to change our minds. So he believes that we have
some capacity to choose. On the other hand, he's undermining that capacity to choose by saying,
it's just determined, so you're going to choose what you choose. You have no say in it. There's
actually no you. So it's, you know, so the, and that's to me, completely unscientific. That's
completely him, you know, pulling it out of nowhere. We all experienced the fact that we have an eye.
That kind of certainty saying that we do not have that fundamental choice that reason provides
is unfounded currently. Look, there's a sense in which it can never be
contradicted because it's a product of your experience. It's not a product of your experience.
You can experience it directly. So no science will ever prove that this table isn't here.
I can see it. It's here. Right. I can, I can feel it. I, I know I have free will because I can
introspect it. In a sense, I can see it. I can see myself engaging it. And that is as valid
as the evidence of my senses. Now, I can't point at it so that you can see the same thing I'm seeing,
but you can do the same thing in your own consciousness and you can identify the same
thing. And to deny that in the name of science is to get things upside down. You start with that
and that's the beginning of science. The beginning of science is the identification
that I choose and that I can reason. And now I need to figure out the mechanism, the rules of
reasoning, the rules of logic, the, the, you know, how does this work? And that's where science come
from. Of course, it's possible that science, like for my place of AI would be able to,
if we were able to engineer consciousness or understand, I mean, it's very difficult to,
because we're so far away from it now, but understand how the actual mechanism of that
consciousness emerges. And in fact, this table is not real, that we can determine that it,
exactly how our mind constructs the reality that we perceive, then, then you can start to make
interesting. But our mind, our mind doesn't construct the reality that we perceive. The reality
we perceive is there. We perceive a reality that exists. Now, we perceive it in particular ways,
given the nature of our senses, right? A bat perceives this table differently, but it's still
the same table with the same characteristics and the same identity. It's just a matter of, we use
eyes, they use a radar system to, you know, they use sound waves to perceive it, but it's still
they existence exists, whether we exist or not. And so you could create, I mean, I don't know how,
and I don't know if it's possible, but let's say you could create a consciousness, right? And I,
I suspect that to do that, you would have to use biology, not just electronics, but, you know,
the way outside my expertise. Because consciousness, as far as we know, is a phenomenon of life, and
you would have to figure out how to create life before you created consciousness, I think. But
if you did that, then that wouldn't change anything. All it would say is we have another
conscious being cool. That's great. But it wouldn't change the nature of our consciousness. Our
consciousness is what it is. But so that's very interesting. I think this is a good
way to set the table for discussion of objectivism is let me at least challenge
a thought experiment, which is, I don't know if you're familiar with Donald Hoffman's work
about reality. So his idea is that we're just our perception is just an interface to reality.
So Donald Hoffman is the, is the guy you see over here? Yes, I've met Donald and I've seen
his video. And look, Donald has not invented anything new. This goes back to ancient philosophy.
Let me just state it in case people aren't familiar. I mean, it's a fascinating thought
experiment to me, like out of the box thinking, perhaps literally, is that, you know, there's
a different, there's a gap between the world as we perceive it and the world as it actually exists.
And I think that's for the philosophy of objectivism is a really important gap to close.
So can you maybe at least try to entertain the idea that,
that there is more to reality than our minds can perceive?
Well, I don't understand what more means, right? Of course, there's more to reality than what our
senses perceive. That is, for example, I don't know, certain, certain elements have radiation,
right? Uranium has radiation. I can't perceive radiation. The beauty of human reason is,
I can, I can through experimentation discover the phenomena of radiation, then actually measure
radiation. And I don't worry about it. I can't perceive the world the way a bat perceives the
world. And I might not be able to see certain things that, but I can, we've created radar.
So a way to understand how a bat perceives the world, and I can mimic it through a radar screen
and create an images like the bat, its consciousness somehow perceives it, right? So
the beauty of human reason is our capacity to understand the world beyond what our senses
give us directly. At the end, everything comes in through our senses, but we can understand
things that our senses don't provide us. But what he's doing is doing something very different. He
is saying what our senses provides us might have nothing to do with the reality out there.
That is just a random arbitrary nonsensical statement. And he actually has a whole evolutionary
explanation for it. He runs some simulations, the simulations seem, I mean, I'm not an expert
in this field, but they seem silly to me. They don't seem to reflect. And look, all he's doing
is taking Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which articulate exactly the same cause, and he's
giving it a venue of evolutionary ideas. I'm not an expert in evolution, and I'm not an expert
on epistemology, which is what this is. So to me, as a semi layman, it doesn't make any sense.
And, you know, I'm actually, you know, I have the Chiron book show, I don't know if I'm allowed
to pitch it, but I've got the Chiron book show on YouTube. I listen to it very often as a small
aside. The cool thing about reason, which you practice is you have a systematic way of thinking
through basically anything. Yes. And that's so fun to listen to. I mean, it's rare that I think
there's flaws in your logic. But even then, it's fun, because I'm like disagreeing with the screen.
And it's great when somebody disagrees with me, and they give good arguments, because that makes it
challenging. So one of the shows I want to do in the next few weeks is one of my
philosophers, bring one of my philosopher friends to discuss the video that Hoffman,
where he presents his theory, because it surprises me how seductive it is. And it seems to be
so, first of all, completely counterintuitive. But because, you know, somehow we managed to cross
the road and not get hit by the car. And if our sensors did not provide us any information about
what's actually going on in reality, how do we do that? And not to mention build computers,
not to mention flight to the moon and actually land on the moon. And if reality is not giving us
information about the moon, if our sensors are not giving us information about the moon,
how did we get there? And where did we go? Maybe we didn't go anyway. It's just nonsensical to me,
and it's a very bad place philosophically, because it basically says there is no objective
standard for anything. There is no objective reality. You can come up with anything, you could
argue anything, and there's no methodology. I believe that at the end of the day, what reason
allows us to do is provides us with a methodology for truth. And at the end of the day, for every
claim that I make, I should be able to boil it down to see. Look, the evidence of the
sensors is right then. Once you take that away, knowledge is gone and truth is gone. And that
opens it up to, you know, complete disaster. So, you know, to me, why it's compelling to at least
entertain this idea. First of all, it shakes up the mind a little bit to force you to go back to
first principles and, you know, ask the question, what do I really know? And the second part of that
that I really enjoy is it's a reminder that we know very little to be a little bit more humble.
So, if reality doesn't exist at all, before you start thinking about it, I think it's a really
nice wake up call to think, wait a minute. I don't really know much about this universe,
that humbleness. I think something I'd like to ask you about in terms of reason, when you
you can become very confident in your ability to understand the world if you practice reason
often. And I feel like it can lead you astray, because you can start to think it's so I love
psychology. And psychologists have the certainty about understanding the human condition, which
is undeserved. You know, you run a study with 50 people and you think you could understand
the source of all these psychiatric disorders, all these kinds of things.
That's similar kind of trouble. I feel like you can get into when you overreach with reason.
So, I don't think there is such a thing as overreaching with reason, but there are bad
applications of reason. They're bad uses of reason or the pretense of using reason. I think
a lot of these psychological studies are pretense of using reason. And these psychologists have
never really taken a serious stat class or a serious econometrics class. So, they use statistics
in weird ways. They just don't make any sense. And that's not reason, right? That's just bad
thinking. So, I don't think you can do too much good thinking. And that's what reason is. It's
good thinking. And now, the fact that you try to use reason does not guarantee you won't make
mistakes. It doesn't guarantee you won't be wrong. It doesn't guarantee you won't go down a rabbit hole
and completely get it wrong. But it does give you the only existing mechanism to fix it.
Which is going back to reality, going back to facts, going back to reason.
And getting out of the rabbit hole and getting up back to reality. So, I agree with you that it's
interesting to think about these, what I consider crazy ideas because it, oh wait, what is my
argument about them? If I don't really have a good argument about them, then do I know what I know?
So, in that sense, it's always nice to be challenged and pushed. And the nice thing about
objectivism is everybody's doing that to me all the time, right? Because nobody agrees with me on
anything. So, I'm constantly being challenged, whether it's by Hoffman on metaphysics and
epistemology, right? On the very foundations of analogy and ethics, everybody constantly.
And in politics all the time. So, I find that it's part of, you know, I prefer that everybody,
there's a sense in which I prefer that everybody agreed with me, right? Because I think we live
in a better world. But there's a sense in which that disagreement makes it, at least up to a point,
makes it interesting and challenging and forces you to be able to rethink or to confirm your own
thinking and to challenge their thinking. Can you try to do the impossible task and give a
whirlwind introduction to Ayn Rand the, the many sides of Ayn Rand? So, Ayn Rand the human being,
Ayn Rand the novelist, and Ayn Rand the philosopher. So, who was Ayn Rand? Sure. So, her life story
is one that I think is fascinating. But it also lends itself to this integration of all of these
things. She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905, to kind of a middle class family, Jewish
family, they owned a pharmacy, her father owned a pharmacy. And, you know, she grew up, she grew
up, she was a very, she knew what she wanted to do and what she wanted to be from a very young age.
I think from the age of nine, she knew she wanted to be a writer. She wanted to write stories.
That was the thing she wanted to do. And, you know, she focused her life after that on this goal
of, I want to be a novelist, I want to write. And the philosophy was incidental to that,
in a sense, at least until some point in her life. She witnessed the Russian revolution,
literally, it happened outside. They lived in St. Petersburg, where the first kind of
demonstrations and of the revolution happened. So, she witnessed it. She lived through it as a
teenager, went to school under the Soviets. For a while, they were under kind of the in the Black
Sea, where the opposition government was ruling, and then they would go back and forth between
the communes and the whites. But she experienced what communism was like. She saw the pharmacy
being taken away from her family. She saw their apartment being taken away or other families
being brought into the apartment they already lived in. And it was very clear, given her nature,
given her views, even at a very young age, that she would not survive the system. So,
a lot of effort was put into how do we get, how does she get out? And her family was really
helpful in this. And she had a cousin in Chicago, and she had been studying kind of film at the
university. And this is in her 20s? This is in her 20s, early 20s. And Lenin, there was a small
window where Lenin was allowing some people to leave under certain circumstances. And she managed
to get out to go do research on film in the United States. Everybody knew, everybody who knew her
knew she would never come back, that this was a one-way ticket. And she got out, she made it to
Chicago, spent a few weeks in Chicago, and then headed to Hollywood. She wanted to write scripts.
That was the goal. Here's this short woman from Russia with a strong accent, learning English,
showing up in Hollywood. And I want to be a script writer. In English. In English, writing in English.
And this is kind of one of these fairy tale stories, but it's true. She shows up at the
Cecil B. DeMille Studios. And she has a letter of introduction from her cousin in Chicago who
owns a movie theater. And this is in the late 1920s. And she shows up there with this letter,
and they say, you know, don't call us, we'll call you kind of thing. And she steps out,
and there's this massive convertible. And in the convertible is Cecil B. DeMille. And he's
driving slowly past her right at the entrance of the studio, and she stares at him. And he stops
the car and he says, you know, why are you staring at me? And she says, you know, she tells him a
story, I'm from Russia, and you know, I want to want to make it in the movies. I want to be a
script writer one day. And he says, well, if you want to, if you want that, you don't get in the
car. She gets in the car and he takes her to the back lot of his studio where they're filming
The King of Kings, the story of Jesus. And he says, here's a pass for a week. If you want to be,
if you want to write for the movies, you better know how movies are made.
And she basically spends a week and then she spends more time there. She managed to get an
extension. She lands up being an extra in the movie. So you can see, I ran there in one of the
masses when Jesus is walking by. She meets her future husband on the set of the King of Kings.
She lands up getting married, getting her American citizenship that way. And she lands up doing
odds and ends jobs in Hollywood, living in a tiny little apartment. Somehow making a living,
her husband was an actor. He was, you know, struggling actors were difficult times. And in
the evenings, studying English, writing, writing, writing, writing and studying and studying and
studying. And she finally makes it by writing a play that is successful in LA and ultimately goes
to Broadway. And she writes her first novel is a novel called We The Living, which is the most
autobiographical of all her novels. It's about a young woman in the Soviet Union. It's a powerful
story, a very moving story and probably, if not the best, one of the best portrayals of life
under communism. And so you would recommend the book. Definitely recommend We The Living. It's a
first, first novel. She wrote in the 30s. And it didn't go anywhere. Because if you think about
the intelligentsia, the people who mattered, the people who wrote book reviews, this is a time
of Durante, who's the New York Times guy in Moscow, who's praising Stalin to the hills and the
success. So the novel fails, but she's got a novel out. She writes a small novel let called
Anthem. A lot of people have read that and it's, it's read in high schools. It's kind of dystopian
novel. And it's won't, it doesn't get published in the US. It gets published in the UK. UK is very
interesting dystopian novels, Animal Farm and 1984. 84 is published a couple of years after,
I think, after Anthem. There's reason to believe he read, he read Anthem that.
And George Orwell read for Animal Farm. Yeah. Just a small side, Animal Farm is probably top.
I mean, I would, it's weird to say, but I would say it's my favorite book.
Have you seen this movie out now called Mr. Jones? No.
Oh, you've got to see Mr. Jones. What's Mr. Jones?
It's sorry for my ignorance. No, no, it's a movie. It hasn't got any publicity,
which is tragic because it's a really good movie. It's both brilliantly made. It's made by
a Polish director, but it's in English. It's a, it's a true story and, and George Orwell's Animal
Farm is featured in it in the sense that during the story, George Orwell was writing Animal Farm
and, and he's, the narrator is reading off sections of Animal Farm as the movie is progressing.
And the movie is a true story about the first Western journalist to discover and to write
about the famine in Ukraine. And so he goes to Moscow and then he gets on a train and he finds
himself in Ukraine and it's, it's, it's beautifully and horrifically made. So the horror of the famine
is brilliantly conveyed. And then, and it's a true story. It's a very moving story, very powerful
story. And, and just very well made movie. So it's, it's tragic in my view that not more people
are seeing it. That's true. I was actually recently just complaining that there's not enough
content on the, the famine, the thirties of, you know, of stuff. There's so much on Hitler. Like,
I love the reading. I'm reading, it's so long. It's been taking me forever. The, the rise and
falls of Third Reich. Yeah, I love it. I've got the book to compliment that that you have to read.
It's called the ominous parallels. It's Leonard Peacock. And it's the ominous parallels. And
it's about, it's about the causes of the rise of, of, of Hitler, but a philosophical causes. So
whereas the rise and fall is more of a kind of the existential kind of what happened.
But really delving into the intellectual, intellectual currents that led to the rise of
Hitler and maybe highly recommend that and basically suggesting how it might rise another.
That's the ominous parallels. So the parallel he draws is to the United States. And he says those
same intellectual forces are rising in the United States. And this is, this was published, I think
in published in 81, 82, it was published in 82. So it's published a long time ago. And yet you look
around us. And it's unbelievably predictive, sadly, about the state of the world. So I haven't
finished that story. I don't want to, I don't know if you want me to. No, no, no. But on that point,
I'll have to, let's please return to it. But let's now, for now, let's talk. But let me also say
just, just because I don't want to forget about Mr. Jones, it is true, the point you made,
there are tons of movies that are anti fascist, anti Nazi. And that's good. But there are way too
few movies that are anti communist, just almost not. And it's very interesting. And if you remind
me later, I'll tell you a story about that. But so she publishes Anthem. And then she starts,
and she's doing okay in Hollywood. And she's doing okay with the play. And then she starts
on her on the book, The Fountainhead, and she writes The Fountainhead. And it comes out. She
finishes it in 1945. And she's, she sends it to publishers, and publisher after publisher,
after publisher, turn it down. And it takes 12 publishers before this, this editor reads it
and says, I want to publish this book. And he basically tells his bosses, if you don't publish
this book, I'm leaving. Right. And they don't really believe in the book. So they publish
just a few copies, they don't do a MATLAB. And the book becomes a bestseller from word of mouth.
And they land up having to publish more and more and more. And, and it's, you know,
she's basically gone from this immigrant who comes here with very little command of English,
and, and to all kinds of odds and ends jobs in Hollywood to, you know, writing one of the
seminal, I think, book American books, she is an American author. I mean, if you read The Fountainhead,
it's not Russian. This is not Dostoevsky. It feels, it feels like a symbol of what America is in the
20th century. And I mean, probably maybe you can, so there's a famous kind of sexual rape scene
in there. Is that, is that like a lesson you want to throw in some controversial stuff to make
your philosophical books work out? I mean, is that why, why was it so popular? Do you have a sense?
Well, because I think it illustrated, first of all, because I think the character is a,
a fantastic, it's got a real hero. And I think the whole book is basically illustrating this
massive conflict that I think went on in America then is going on today, and it goes on in a big
scale politics, all the way down to the scale of the choices you make in your life. And, and the,
the issue is individualism versus collectivism. Should you live for yourself? Should you live
for your values? Should you pursue your passions? Should you, or should you do what your mother
tells you? Should you follow your mother's passions? And that's, and it's, it's, it's
very, very much an individual, a book about individuals and people relate to that. But it
obviously has this massive implications to the world outside. And at the time of collectivism,
just having been defeated communist, well, not fascism and, and, and, and, you know, the United
States representing individualism, right, as defeated, defeated collectivism. But where
collectivist ideas are still popular in the form of socialism and communism. And for the individual,
this constant struggle between what people tell me to do, what society tells me to do,
what my mother tells me to do, and what I think I should do. I think it's unbelievably appealing,
particularly to young people who's trying to figure out what they want to do in life,
trying to figure out what's important in life. It had this enormous appeal, it's romantic,
it's bigger than life, the characters are big heroes. It's very American in that sense. It's
about individualism. It's about the triumph of individualism. And so I think that's what related
and it had this big romantic element from the, I mean, when I use romantic, I use it kind of in
the sense of a movement in art. But it also has this romantic element in the sense of a relationship
between a man and a woman who's, that's very intriguing. It's not only that there's a, I would
say almost rape scene, right? I would say, but it's also that this woman is hard to understand.
I mean, I've, I've read it more than once and I still can't quite figure out Dominique, right?
Because she loves him and she wants to destroy him and she marries other people. I mean, think
about that too. Here she's writing a book in the 1940s. It's, there's lots of sex. There's a woman
who marries more than one person has having sex with more than one person, very unconventional.
She's having married, she's having sex with work, even though she's not married to work. This is 1945.
And it's, it's very jarring to people. It's very unexpected, but it's also a book of its time.
It's about individuals pursuing their passion, pursuing their life and not caring about convention
and, and what people think, but doing what they think is right. And, and, and so, so I think it's,
it's, it's, I encourage everybody to read it, obviously. So that was, was that the first time
she articulated, started, articulated something that sounded like a philosophy of individualism?
I mean, the philosophy is there in We The Living, right? Because at the end of the day, the woman
is the hero of We The Living is this individualist stuck in Soviet Union. So she's struggling with
these things. So the theme is there already. It's not as fleshed out. It's not as articulated
philosophically. And it's certainly then anthem, which is a dystopian novel, where the dystopian,
the future has a, has, there's no I. Everything is we. And it's about one guy who breaks out of
that. I don't want to give it away, but, but it breaks out of that. So these themes are running.
And then we have, and they've been published, some of the early Iron Man stories that she was writing
in preparation for writing her novel stories, she was writing when she first came to America.
And you can see these same philosophical elements, even in the male-female relationships and the
passion and the, you know, you, in the conflict, you see them even in those early pieces. And she's
just developing them. It's same philosophically. She's developing her philosophy with her literature.
And of course, after the fountainhead, she starts on what turns out to be her Magnus Opus,
which is Atlas Shrugged, which takes her 12 years to publish. By the time, of course,
she brings that out. Every publisher in New York wants to publish it because the fountainhead
has been such a huge success. They don't quite understand it. They don't know what to do with
Atlas Shrugged, but they're eager to get it out there. And indeed, when it's published,
it becomes an instant bestseller. And the thing about the, particularly the fountainhead and
Atlas Shrugged, but true of even Anthem and Wither Living, she is one of the only dead authors that
sell more after they've died than when they were still alive. Now, you know, that's true, maybe
music, we listen to more Beethoven than when he was alive, but it's not true typically of novelists.
And yet here we are, you know, was it 50, you know, 60 years after the 63 years after the
publication of Atlas Shrugged, and it sells probably more today than it sold when it was a
bestseller when it first came out. Is it true that it's like one of the most sold books in history?
No. Okay. I've heard this kind of statement. Tom Clancy book comes out, sells more than Atlas
Shrugged. But I've read, I've heard statements like this. So there was a very, and I shouldn't
say this, but it's the truth. So I'll say it, a very unscientific study done by the Smithsonian
Institute, probably in the early 90s, that basically surveyed CEOs and asked them, what was the most
influential book on you? And Atlas Shrugged came out as number two, the second most influential
book in CEOs in the country. But there's so many flaws in the study. One was, you want to guess
what the number one book, Bible, the Bible, but the Bible was like, you know, so maybe they surveyed
it a hundred people, I don't know what the exact numbers were, but let's say it's a hundred people
and 60 said the Bible and 10 said Atlas Shrugged and there were a bunch of books over here.
So, you know, I don't. That's again, the psychology discussion we were having.
Exactly. Well, and it's one thing I've learned and maybe COVID has taught me and nobody, you know,
there are very few people who know how to do statistics. And almost nobody knows how to think
probabilistically. That is, think in terms of probabilities that it is a skill, it's a hard
skill. And everybody thinks they know it. So I see doctors thinking they're statisticians and giving
whole analyses of the data on COVID and they don't have a clue what they're talking about,
not because they're not good doctors, because they're not good statisticians. It's not,
you know, people think that they have one skill and therefore it translates immediately into another
skill and it's just not true. So I've been astounded at how bad people are at that.
For people who haven't read any of the books that we're just discussing,
what would you recommend? What book would you recommend they read and maybe also just elaborate
what mindset should they enter the reading of that book with?
So I would recommend everybody read Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and in that order,
so it would depend on where you are in life, right? So it depends on who you are and what you
are. So Fountainhead is a more personal story. For many people, it's their favorite. And for
many people, it was their first book and they wouldn't replace that, right? If Atlas Shrugged
is a, it's about the world. It's about what impacts the world, how the world functions, how
it's a bigger book in the sense of the scope. If you're interested in politics and you're interested
in the world, read Atlas Shrugged first. If you're mainly focused on your life, your career,
what you want to do with yourself, start with Fountainhead. I still think you should read both
because I think they are, I mean, to me, they were life altering. And to many, many people,
they're life altering. And you should go into reading them with an open mind, I'd say.
And with a, put aside everything you've heard about Iron Man, put aside any, even if it's
true, just put it aside, even what I just said about Iron Man, put it aside. Just read the book
as a book and let it move you and let, let, let your thoughts, let it shape how you think. And,
and it'll have, you know, it either have, you'll either have a response to it or you won't. But
I think most people have a very strong response to it. And then the question is,
do they, are they willing to respond to the philosophy? Are they willing to integrate
the philosophy? Are they willing to think through the philosophy or not? Because I know a lot of
people who completely disagree with the philosophy, philosophy, right here in Hollywood, right? Lots
of people here in Hollywood love the fountainhead. Interesting. Oliver Stone, who is, I think, a
avowed Marxist, right? I think he's, I think he's admitted to being a Marxist. He is. His movies
certainly reflect a Marxist theme. Is a huge fan of the fountainhead and is actually his dream
project he has set in public. His dream project is to make the fountainhead. Now he would completely
change it as movie directors do. And he's actually outlined what his script would look like. And
it would be a disaster for the ideas of the, but he loves the story because to him, the story is
about autistic integrity. And that's what he catches on. And what he hates about the story is
the individualism. And I think that his movie ends with Howard Walk joining some kind of commune
of architects that do it for the love and don't do it for the money. Interesting. But so yeah,
so you can connect with you without the philosophy. And before we get into the philosophy,
staying on Ayn Rand, I'll tell you sort of my own personal experience. And I think it's one that
people share. I've experienced this with two people. Ayn Rand and Nietzsche.
Yeah. When I brought up Ayn Rand when I was in my early twenties,
the number of eye rolls I got from sort of, you know, like advisors and so on that
of dismissal, I've seen that later in life about more, more specific concepts in artificial
intelligence and technical where people decided this is, this is a set of ideas that are acceptable
and these sets of ideas are not. And they dismissed Ayn Rand without giving me any justification of
why they dismissed her, except, oh, that's something you're into when you're 19 or 20. That's
same thing people say about Nietzsche. Well, that's just something you do when you're
in college and you take an intro to philosophy course. So, and I've never really heard anybody
cleanly articulate their opposition to Ayn Rand in my own private little circles and so on.
Maybe one question I just want to ask is why is there such an opposition to Ayn Rand?
And maybe another way to ask the same thing is what's misunderstood about Ayn Rand?
So, we haven't talked about the philosophy, so it's hard to answer right now.
We can return to it if you think that's the right way to go.
Well, let me give a broad answer and then we'll do the philosophy and then we'll return to it
because I think it's important to know something about her ideas. She, I think her philosophy
challenges everything. It really does. It shakes up the world. It challenges so many of our
preconceptions. It challenges so many of the things that people take for granted as truth.
From religion to morality to politics to almost everything, there's never quite been a thinker
like her in the sense of really challenging everything and doing it systematically and
having a complete philosophy that is a challenge to everything that has come before her. Now,
I'm not saying they're on threads that connect. They are in politics. There might be a thread
in morality that might be thread, but on everything, there's just never been like it and people are
afraid of that because it challenges them to the core. She's basically telling you to rethink
almost everything and that is that people reject. The other thing that it does, and this goes to
this point about, oh yeah, that's what you do when you're 14, 15, right? She points out to them
that they've lost something. They've lost their idealism. They've lost their youthful idealism.
What makes youthfulness meaningful, other than we're in better physical shape,
starting to feel because I'm getting older? When we're young,
sometime in the teen years, there's something that happens to human consciousness.
We almost awaken anew, right? We suddenly discover that we can think for ourselves.
We suddenly discover that not everything our parents and our teachers tell us is true.
We suddenly discover that this tool, our minds, is suddenly available to us to discover the world
and to discover truth. It is a time of idealism. It's a time of, whoa, I want the better teenagers.
I want to know about the world. I want to go out there. I don't believe my parents. I don't
believe my teachers, and this is healthy. This is fantastic. I want to go out there and experiment,
and that gets us into trouble. We do stupid things when we're teenagers. Why? Because we're
experimenting. It's the experiential part of it. We want to go and experience life,
but we're learning. It's part of the learning process, and we become risk takers because we
want to experience. But the risk is something we need to learn because we need to learn where
the boundaries are. One of the damages that helicopter parents do is they prevent us from
taking those risks, so we don't learn about the world and we don't learn about where the boundaries
are. The teenage years of these years of wonder, they're depressing when you're in them for a
variety of reasons, which I think primarily have to do with the culture, but also with oneself.
But they are exciting, the periods of discovery, and people get excited about ideas and good ideas,
bad ideas, all kinds of ideas. And then what happens? We settle. We compromise. Whether that
happens in college, where we're taught that nothing exists and nothing matters and stop being
nihilist, be a cynic, be whatever, or whether it happens when we get married and get a job and have
kids and are too busy and can't think about ideals and forget and just get into the norm of
conventional life or whether it's because a mother pesters us to get married and have kids and do
all the things that she wanted us to do, we give up on those ideals. And there's a sense in which
Ayn Rand reminds them that they gave up. That's so beautifully put and so true. It's
worth pausing on that this dismissal, people forget the beauty of that curiosity. That's true in
the scientific field too, is the youthful joy of everything is possible and we can understand it
with the tools of our mind. Yes. And that's what it's all about. That's what Ayn Rand's idea is
at the end of the day, all brought down to, is that confidence and that passion and that curiosity
and that interest. And if you think about what academia does to so many of us, we go into academia
and we're excited about, we're going to learn stuff, we're going to discover things. And then
they stick you into sub-subfield and examining some minutiae that's insignificant and unimportant.
And to get published, you have to be conventional. You have to do what everybody else does. And then
there's the tenure process of seven years where they put you through this torture to write papers
that fit into a certain mold. And by the time you're done, you're in your mid 30s and you've done
nothing. You discovered nothing. You're all in this minutiae in this stuff and it's destructive.
And where's holding on to that passion, holding on to that knowledge and that confidence is hard.
And when people do away with it, they become cynical and they become part of the system
and they inflict the same pain on the next guy that they suffered because that's part of how
it works. Yeah, this happens in artificial intelligence. This happens when like a young
person shows up and with like fire in their eyes and they say, I want to understand the nature
of intelligence and everybody rolls their eyes. Well, for these same reasons, because they've
spent so many years on the very specific set of questions that kind of they compete over and
they write papers over and they have conferences about. And it's true, that incremental research
is the way you make progress. Answering the question of what is intelligence,
it's exceptionally difficult. But when you mock it, you actually destroy the realities.
When we look like centuries from now, look back at this time for this particular field of artificial
intelligence, it will be the people who will be remembered will be the people who've asked the
question and made it their life journey of what is intelligence and actually had the chance to
succeed. Most will fail asking that question, but the ones that like had a chance of succeeding
and had that throughout their whole life. And I suppose the same is true for philosophy.
It's in every field. It's asking the big questions and staying curious and staying passionate and
staying excited and accepting failure. Accepting that you're not going to get it first time,
you're not going to get the whole thing. But and sometimes you have to do the minutiae work and
I'm not here to say nobody should specialize and you shouldn't do the minutiae. You have to do that.
But there has to be a way to do that work and keep the passion and keep it all integrated.
That's another thing. I mean, we don't live in a culture that integrates. We live in a culture
that is all about this minutiae and not and medicine is another field where you specialize in
the kidney. I mean, the kidneys connected to other things. And we don't have a holistic view
of these things. And I'm sure not official intelligence, you're not going to make the big
leaps forward without a holistic view of what it is you're trying to achieve. And maybe that's
the question of what is intelligence. But that's the kind of questions you have to ask to make
big leaps forward to really move the field in a positive direction. And it's the people who can
think that way, who move fields and move technology, move anything, anything is everything.
But just like you said, it's painful because underlying that kind of questioning is,
well, maybe the work I've done for the past 20 years was a dead end. And you have to kind of
face that even just, it might not be true, but even just facing that reality is just,
it's a painful feeling. Absolutely. But that's part of the reason why it's important to enjoy
the work that you do. So even if it doesn't completely worked out, at least you enjoy the
process. It was not a waste because you enjoyed the process. And if you learn as any entrepreneur
knows this, and if you learn from the waste of time, from the errors, from the mistakes,
then you can build on them and make things even better. And so the next 20 years,
I'm a massive success. Can we, another impossible task, so you did wonderfully on talking about
Ayn Rand, the other impossible task of giving a whirlwind overview of the philosophy of
objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Yeah. So luckily she did it in an essay,
or she talks about doing her philosophy on one foot. But let me integrate it with the literature
and with her life a little bit. She wanted to be a writer, but her goal, she had a particular
goal in her writing. She was an idealist. She wanted to portray the ideal man.
So one of the things you do when you want to do something is what is an ideal man? You have to
ask that question. What does that mean? You might have a sense of it. You might have,
so in glimpses of it in other people's literature, but what is it? So she starts reading philosophy
to try to figure out what a philosopher say about the ideal man. And what she finds horrifies her
in terms of the view of most philosophers of man. And she's attracted, certainly,
when she's young to Nietzsche, because Nietzsche at least has a vision of grandeur for man, even
though his philosophy is very flawed and has other problems and contradicting man in many ways.
But at least he has that vision of what is possible to man. And she's attracted to that
romantic vision, that idealistic vision. So she discovers in writing, and particularly in writing
at Leshrug, but even in the Fontaine, that she's going to have to develop her own philosophy.
She's going to have to discover these ideas for herself, because they're not fully articulated
anywhere else. They glimpses again of it in Aristotle, in Nietzsche, but they're not fully
fleshed out. So to a large extent, she develops a philosophy for a very practical purpose,
to write, to write a novel about the ideal man. And at Leshrug is the manifestation of that.
By the way, sorry, to interrupt. As a little aside, she does, when you say man, you mean human.
And because we'll bring this up often, she does, maybe you can elaborate of how
she specifically uses man and he in the work. We live in a time now with gender and so on.
Well, she did that in the sense that everybody did it during her period of time. It's only in
modern times where we do he slash she. Historically, when you said he, human being,
unless the particular context implied that it was a... But in Iron Man's case, in this case,
in this one sentence, she probably meant man. Not that because she viewed that there are
differences between men and women were not the same, which I know comes out of shock to many
people. But she... She's working on a character. She was working on a particular vision. She
considered herself a man worshiper and a man, not human being, a male. Male. She worshipped
manhood, if you will, the hero in man. And she wanted to fully understand what that was.
Now, it has massive implications for an ideal woman. And I think she does portray the ideal
woman in Atlas Shrugged and the character of Dagny. But her goal is... I think her selfish
goal for what she wanted to get out of the novel is that excitement, partially sexual,
about seeing your ideal manifest in reality of what you perceive as that which you would be
attracted to, fully, intellectually, physically, sexually in every aspect of your life. That's
what she's trying to bring. So there was no ambiguity of gender. So there was a masculinity
and a femininity in her work. Very much so. And if you read the novels, you see that. You see
that. Now, remember, this is in the context of... In Atlas Shrugged, she is portraying a woman
who runs a railroad, the most masculine of all jobs you could imagine, right? Running a railroad,
better than any man could run it. And achieving huge success better than any other man out there.
But for her, even Dagny needs somebody to... needs a man in some sense to look up to.
And that's the character whose name I will mention because it gives away too much of the plot. But
they have to... I like how you do that. You're good. You're not... A lot of practice. A lot of
practice. Because you convey all the important things without giving away plot lines. That's
beautiful. You're a master. So she's very much... She described herself once as a male chauvinist.
Okay. She very... She likes the idea of a man opening a door for him. But more metaphysically,
she identifies something in the difference between a way a man relates to a woman and
a woman relates to a man. It's not the same. And let's not take too far of a tangent, but
I just... As a side comment, to me, she represented... She was a feminist to me. But perhaps there's a...
Perhaps technically, you disagree with that, whatever. But the...
That to me represented strong... She had some of the strongest female characters in the history
of literature. Again, this is a woman running a railroad in 1957. And not just a woman running
a railroad. And this is true of The Fountainhead as well. A woman who is sexually, in a sense,
assertive, sexually open. This is not a woman who... This is a woman who embraces her sexuality.
And sex is important in life. This is why it's coming up. It was important during the
end. It was important in the novels. It's important in life. And for her, one's attitude towards sex
is her reflection. One's attitude towards life and what attitude towards pleasure,
which is an important part of life. And she thought that was an incredibly important thing.
And so she has these assertive, powerful, sexual women who live their lives on their
terms a hundred percent, who seek a man to look up to. Now, this is psychologically complex.
It's more psychology than philosophy. It's psychologically complex and not my area of
expertise. But this is something, and she would argue, there's something fundamentally different
about a male and a woman, about a male and female, psychologically in their attitude towards one
another. But as a side note, I would say that I don't know philosophically if her ideas about
gender are interesting. I think her other philosophical ideas are much more interesting.
But reading-wise, the stories it created, the tension it created, that was pretty powerful.
I mean, that's pretty powerful stuff. I'll speculate that the reason it's so powerful
is because it reflects something in reality. Yeah, that's true. There's a thread that at
least... And look, it's really important to say. I think she was the first feminist in a sense.
I think, in a sense, the feminists have provoked feminism into something that it shouldn't be.
But in the sense of men and women are capable, she was the first one who really put that into
a novel and showed it. To me, as a boy, when I was reading Atlas Shrugged, I think I've read
that before and had... That was one of the early introductions, at least if an American woman
had examples of my own life for Russian women, but of a badass lady. I love engineering.
I had loved that she could... Here's a lady that's running the show. At least to me,
was an example of a really strong woman, but objectivism. Objectivism. So she developed
it for a novel, she spent the latter part of her life after the publication of Atlas Shrugged,
really articulating her philosophy. So that's what she did. She applied it to politics,
to life, to gender, to all these issues from 1957 until she died in 1982.
So the objectivism was born out of the later parts of Atlas Shrugged.
Yes, definitely. It was there all the time, but it was fleshed out during the latter parts of
Atlas Shrugged and then articulated for the next 20 years. So what is objectivism?
So objectivism... So there are five branches in philosophy, and so I'm gonna just go through
the branches. You start with metaphysics, the nature of reality. And objectivism argues that
reality is what it is. It kind of goes... Hawkins back to Aristotle, law of identity.
A is A. You can wish it to be B, but wishes do not make something real. Reality is what it is,
and it is the primary. And it's not manipulated, directed by consciousness. Consciousness is there
to observe, to give us information about reality. That is the purpose of consciousness,
and it's the nature of it. So in metaphysics, existence exists. The law of identity, the law
of causality. Things act based on their nature, not randomly, not arbitrarily, but based on
their nature. And then we have the tool to know reality. This is epistemology, the theory of
knowledge. Our tool to know reality is reason. It's our senses and our capacity to integrate
the information we get from our senses and to integrate it into new knowledge and to conceptualize
it. And that is uniquely human. We don't know the truth from revelation. We don't know truth
from our emotions. Our emotions are interesting. Our emotions tell us something about ourselves,
but our emotions are not tools of cognition. They don't tell us the truth about what's out there,
about what's in reality. So reason is our means of knowledge, and therefore, reason is our means
of survival. Only individuals reason, just in the same way that only individuals can eat. We
don't have a collective stomach. Nobody can eat for me. And therefore, nobody can think for me.
We don't have a collective mind. There's no collective consciousness. It's bizarre that
people talk about these collectivized aspects of the mind. They don't talk about collective
feats and collective stomachs and collective things. But so we all think for ourselves,
and it is our fundamental basic responsibility to live our lives.
Once we choose to live, to live our lives to the best of our ability. So in morality,
she is an egoist. She believes that the purpose of morality is to provide you with the code of
values and virtues, to guide your life for the purpose of your own success. Your own survival,
your own thriving, your own happiness. Happiness is the moral purpose of your life. The purpose
of morality is to guide you towards a happy life. Your own happiness. Your own happiness.
Absolutely. Your own happiness. So she rejects the idea that she should live for other people,
that you should live for the purpose of other people's happiness. Your purpose is not to
make them happier, to make them anything. Your purpose is your own happiness. But she also rejects
the idea that you could argue maybe the Nechayana idea of you should use other people for your own
purposes. So every person is an end in himself. Every person's moral responsibility is their own
happiness. And you shouldn't use other people for your own, shouldn't exploit other people
for your own happiness, and you shouldn't allow yourself to be exploited for other people.
Every individual is responsible for themselves. And what is it that allows us to be happy? What
is it that facilitates human flourishing, human success, human survival? Well, it's the use of
our minds. It goes back to reason. And what does reason require in order to be successful,
in order to work effectively? It requires freedom. So the enemy of reason, the enemy of reason is
force. The enemy of reason is coercion. The enemy of reason is authority, right? The Catholic Church
doing what they did to Galileo, right? That restricts Galileo's thinking, right? When he's in
house arrest, is he going to come up with a new theory? Is he going to discover new truths? No,
it's the punishment is too dangerous. So force, coercion are enemies of reason. And what reason
needs is to be free, to think, to discover, to innovate, to break out of convention.
So we need to create an environment in which individuals are free to reason, to free to think.
And to do that, we come up with a concept, historically, we've come up with a concept,
of individual rights. Individual rights define the scope of, define the fact that we should be left
alone, free to pursue our values, using our reason, free of what? Free of coercion, force, authority.
And that the job of government is to make sure that we are free. The whole point of government,
the whole point of when we come in a social context, the whole point of establishing a
government in that context is to secure that freedom. It's to make sure that I don't use
coercion on you. The government is supposed to stop me, supposed to intervene before I can do
that, or if I've already done it, to prevent me from doing it again. So the purpose of government
is to protect our freedom, to think and to act based on our thoughts. It's to leave individuals
free to pursue their values, to pursue their happiness, to pursue their rational thought,
and to be left alone to do it. And so she rejects socialism, which basically assumes some kind of
collective goal, assumes the sacrifice of the individual to the group, assumes that your moral
purpose in life is the well-being of other people rather than your own. And she rejects all form of
statism, all form of government that is overly, that is involved in any aspect other than to protect
us from forced coercion, authority. And she rejects anarchy. And we can talk about that. I think
you had a question in the list of questions you sent me about anarchy. So I don't know if you're
familiar with him. Yes, I'm familiar with him. So she completely rejects anarchy. Anarchy is
completely inconsistent with her point of view, and we can talk about why if you want.
So there's some perfect place where freedom is maximized, so systems of government.
Absolutely. And she thought that the American system of government came close in its idea,
obviously founded with original sin, with the sin of slavery. But in its conception,
the Declaration of Independence is about as perfect a political document as one could write.
I think the greatest political document in human history, but really articulated almost
perfectly and beautifully. And that the American system of government with the Texas balances,
which is with its emphasis on individual rights, with its emphasis on freedom,
with its emphasis on leaving individual freedom, pursue their happiness and explicit
recognition of happiness as a goal, individual happiness, was the model. It wasn't perfect.
There are a lot of problems to a large extent because the founders had mixed philosophical
premises. So there were alien premises introduced into the founding of the country,
slavery obviously being the biggest problem. But it was close. And we need to build on that
to create an ideal political system that will, yes, maximize the freedom of individuals to do
exactly this. And then, of course, she had, so that's kind of, that's the manifestation of this
individualism in a political realm. And she had a theory of art. She had a theory of aesthetics,
which is the fifth branch of, she had metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics. And the fifth
branch is aesthetics. And she viewed art as an essential human need, a fuel for the human spirit.
And that just like any human need, it had certain principles that it had to abide by.
That is just like there's nutrition, right? So some food is good for you and some food is bad
for you. Some food, some stuff is poison. She believed the same is true of arts, that art had
an identity, which is very controversial today. Today, if you put a frame around it, it is art.
If you put a urinal in a museum, it becomes art, which she thought was evil and ludicrous.
And she rejected completely that art had an identity and that it served a certain function
that human beings needed it. And if it didn't have, not only did it have that identity, but that
function was served well by some art and poorly by other art. And then there's a whole realm of
stuff that's not art, basically, all of all of what today is considered modern art, she would
consider as not being art, you know, splashing paint on a canvas, not art. So she had very clear
ideas. She articulated them not, so I would say not in conventional philosophical form. So she
didn't write philosophical essays using the philosopher's language. It's partially why
I think philosophers have never taken it seriously. They're actually accessible to us.
We can actually read them. And she integrates the philosophy in what I think are amazing ways
with psychology, with history, with economics, with politics, with what's going on in the world.
And she has dozens and dozens and dozens of essays that she wrote. Many of them were
aggregated into books. I particularly recommend books like The Virtue of Selfishness,
Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, and Philosophy Who Needs It. I think it's a beautiful philosophy.
I know you're big on love. I think it's a philosophy of love. We can talk about that.
Essentially, it's about love. That's what the philosophy is all about when it applies in terms
of it applying to self. And I think it's sad that so few people read it and so few intellectuals
take it seriously and are willing to engage with it.
Let me ask, that was incredible. But after that beautiful whirlwind overview, let me ask the
most shallow of questions, which is the name Objectivism. How should people think about
the name being rooted? Why not individualism? What are the options? If we're like, had a
branding meeting right now. Sure. So she actually had a branding meeting. So she did this. She went
through the exercise. Objectivism, I do not think, I don't know all the details, but I don't think
Objectivism was the first name she came with. The problem was that the other names were taken
and they were not positive implications. So for example, rationalism could have been a good word
because she's an advocate of rational thought or reasonism. But reasonism sounds weird,
right? The ism because of too many Ss, I guess. Rationalism, but it was already a philosophy
and it was a philosophy inconsistent with hers because it was what she considered a false view
of reason, of rationality. Realityism just doesn't work. So she came on Objectivism and I think,
actually, it's a great word. It's a great name because it has two aspects to it. And this is
a unique view of what Objectivity actually means. Inobjectivism, inobjectivity is the idea of an
independent reality. There is truth. There's actually something out there. And then there's
the role of consciousness. There is the role of figuring out the truth. The truth doesn't just
hit you. The truth is not in the thing. You have to discover it. It's that a consciousness
applied to, that's what Objectivity is. It's you discovering the truth in reality. It's your
consciousness interacting. And thereby posing the individual in that sense.
And only the individual could do it. Now, the problem with individualism
is it would have made the philosophy too political. And she always said, so she said,
she said, I'm an advocate of capitalism because I'm really an advocate for rational egoism.
But I'm an advocate for rational egoism really because I'm an advocate for reason.
So she viewed the essential of her philosophy as being this reason and her
particular view of reason. She has a whole book. She has a book called Introduction to
Objectivist Epistemology, which I encourage any scientist, mathematician, anybody interested
in science to read because it is a third of force on, in a sense, what it means to hold
concepts and what it means to discover new discoveries and to use, to use concepts and
how we use concepts. And she has a theory of concepts that is completely new,
that is completely revolutionary, and I think is essential for the philosophy of science.
And therefore, ultimately, for the more abstract we get with scientific discoveries,
the easier it is to detach them from reality and to detach them from truth, the easier it is to be
inside our heads instead of about what's real. And they're probably examples from
metaphysics that fit that. And I think what she teaches in the book is how to ground your concepts
and how to bring them into grounding in reality. So Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,
note that it's only an introduction because one of the things she realized, one of the things
she realized, one of the things that I think a lot of her critics don't give enough credit for,
is that philosophy is, there's no end, right? It's always growing, there's always new discoveries,
there's always, it's like science, there's always new things and there's a ton of work to do
in philosophy. And particularly in epistemology and the theory of knowledge that she was actually
given your interest in mathematics, she was, she actually saw a lot of parallels between
math and concept formation. And she was actually, you know, in the years before she died,
she was taking private lessons in mathematics, in algebra and calculus, because she believed
that there was real insight in understanding algebra in calculus to philosophy into epistemology.
And she also was very interested in neuroscience because she believed that that had a lot to tell
us about epistemology, but also about music, therefore about aesthetics. So, I mean, she
recognized the importance of all these different fields and how, and the beauty of philosophy is
it should be integrating all of them. And one of the sad things about the world in which we live
is, again, we view these things as silos. We don't view them as integrating. We don't have teams of
people from different arena, you know, different fields, you know, discovering things, we become
like ants, specialized. So, she was definitely like that. And she was constantly curious, constantly
interested in new discoveries and new ideas and how this could expand the scope of her
philosophy and application of her philosophy. There's like a million topics I can talk to you,
but since you mentioned math, I'm almost only got three hours. I'm almost curious.
I don't know if you're familiar with Gaol's incompleteness theorem.
I'm not, unfortunately. Okay. It was a powerful proof that any axiomatic systems, when you start
from a bunch of axioms, that there will, in that system, provably must be an inconsistency.
So, that was this painful like stab in the idea of mathematics that, no, if we start with a set
of assumptions, kind of like Adnan started with objectivism, there will have to be at least one
contradiction. See, I intuitively, I'm going to say that's false.
Philosophically, but in math, it's just true. It's a question about how you define, again,
your definitions matter. And you have to be careful on how you define axioms.
And you have to be careful about what you define as an inconsistency and what that means to say
there's an inconsistency. And I don't know, I'm not going to say more than that because I don't know.
But I'm suspicious that there is some, and this is the power of philosophy, and this is why I said
before, concept formation is so important. And understanding concept formation is so important
for particularly getting mathematics because it's such an abstract field. And it's so easy to lose
grounding in reality that if you properly define axioms and you properly define what you're doing
in math, whether that is true. And I don't think it is.
This is, yeah, we'll leave it as an open mystery because actually this audience,
you know, there's literally over 100,000 people that have PhDs. And so they know
Gato's the complete theorem. I have this intuition that there's something different
to mathematics and philosophy that I'd love to hear from people. What exactly is that difference?
Because there's a precision to mathematics that philosophy doesn't have, but that precision
gets you in trouble. It somehow actually takes you away from truth. The very constraints of the
language used in mathematics actually puts a constraint on the capture of truth that it's
able to do. I'm going to argue that that is a total product of the way you're conceptualizing
the terms within mathematics. It's not in reality.
Yes. So you would argue it's in the fact that mathematics in as much as it's detached from
reality that you can do these kinds of things. Yes. And that mathematicians have come up with
concepts that they haven't grounded in reality properly, that allows them to go off in places
that don't lead to truth. That's right. That don't lead to truth. But I encourage you then,
I encourage you to do one of these podcasts with one of our philosophers who know more about
this stuff. And if you move to Austin, I've got somebody I'd recommend to you.
Can you throw a name out? Yeah. I mean, I would talk to Greg Salomieri.
When we say hour, can you say what you mean by hour?
I'd say people who are affiliated with the Ironman Institute are philosophers who are
affiliated with Objectivism. And Greg is one of our brightest, and he's in Austin. He's just
got a position at UT, at the University of Texas. And he would want, on Cargate,
would be another one who actually works at the Institute and a chief philosophy officer at
the Institute. That's awesome. And there are others who specialize in philosophy of science who
I think Greg could probably give you a lead. But these are unbelievably smart people who
know this part of the philosophy much better than I do.
What, can you just briefly perhaps say what is the Ironman Institute?
Yeah. So the Ironman Institute was an organization founded three years after Ironman died. She died
in 1982. And it was founded in 1985 to promote her ideas, to make sure that ideas and her novels
continued in the culture and were relevant. Well, they're relevant, but what the people
saw the relevance. So our mission is to get people to read her books, to engage in the ideas.
We teach, we have the Objectivist Academic Center where we teach the philosophy primarily to graduate
students and others who take the ideas seriously and who really want a deep understanding of the
philosophy. And we apply the ideas. So we take the ideas and apply them to ethics, to philosophy,
to issues of the day, which is more my strength and more what I tend to do. I've never formally
studied philosophy. So all my education philosophy is informal. And I'm an engineer
and a finance guy. That's my background. So I'm a numbers guy.
Well, let me, I feel pretty undereducated, have a pretty open mind, which sometimes can be painful
on the internet because people mock me or, you know, if I say something nuanced about communism,
people immediately kind of put you in a bin or something like that. It hurts to be open-minded
to say, I don't know, to ask the question, why is communism or Marxism so problematic?
Why is capitalism problematic? And so on. But let me nevertheless go into that direction with you.
Maybe let's talk about capitalism a little bit. How does Objectivism compare or relate
to the idea of capitalism? Well, first, we have to define what capitalism is.
Because again, people use capitalism in all kinds of ways. And I know you had Ray Dalio
on your show once. I need to listen to that episode. But Ray has no clue what capitalism is.
And that's his big problem. So when he says there are real problems today in capitalism,
he's not talking about capitalism. He's talking about problems in the world today.
And I agree with many of the problems, but they have nothing to do with capitalism.
Capitalism is a social, political, economic system in which
all property is privately owned and in which the only role of government is the protection
of individual rights. I think it's the ideal system. I think it's the right system for the
reasons we talked about earlier. It's a system that leaves you as an individual to pursue your
values, your life, your happiness, free of coercion and force. And you get to decide what
happens to you. And I get to decide if to help you or not. Let's say you fall flat on your face,
people always say, well, what about the poor? Well, if you care about the poor, help them.
Just don't, what do you need a government for? I always ask audiences, okay, if there's a poor
kid who can't afford to go to school and all the schools are private because capitalism has been
instituted and he can't go to school, would you be willing to participate in a fund that pays for
his education? Every hand in the room goes up. So what do you need government for? Just let's get
all the money together and pay for his schooling. So the point is that what capitalism does is
leave individuals free to make their own decisions. And as long as they're not violating other people's
rights, in other words, as long as they're not using coercion force on other people,
then leave them alone. And people are going to make mistakes and people are going to screw up
their lives and people are going to commit suicide. People are going to do terrible things to themselves.
That is fundamentally their problem. And if you want to help, you under capitalism are free to
help. It's just the only thing that doesn't happen under capitalism is you don't get to impose your
will on other people. Now, how's that a bad thing? So the question then is how does the
implementation of capitalism deviate from its ideal in practice? I mean, this is what is the
question with a lot of systems is how does it start to then fail? So one thing, maybe you can
correct me or inform me, it seems like information is very important. Like being able to make decisions
to be free, you have to have access, full access of all the information you need to make
rational decisions. Because it can't be right because none of us has full access to all the
information we need. I mean, what does that even mean? And how much of the scope do you want to do?
Let's just start there. So you need to have access to information. So one of the big
criticisms of capitalism is this asymmetrical information. The drug maker has more information
about the drug than the drug buyer, pharmaceutical drugs. True, it's a problem. Well, I wonder if
one can think about an entrepreneur can think about how to solve that problem. See, I view any
one of these challenges to capitalism as an opportunity for an entrepreneur to make money.
And they have the freedom to do it. Yeah. So imagine an entrepreneur steps in and says,
I will test all the drugs that drug companies make and I will provide you for a fee with the
with the answer. And how do I know he's not he's not going to be corrupted? Well, there'll be other
ones and they'll compete. And who am I to tell which one of these is the right one? Well, it
won't be you really getting the information from them. It'll be a doctor. The doctors need that
information. So the doctor who has some expertise in medicine will be evaluating which rating agency
to use to evaluate the drugs and which ones then to recommend to you. So do we need an FDA?
Do we need a government that siphons all the information to one source that does all the
research, all the thing and has a clear incentive, by the way, not to approve drugs. There's no
reason because they don't make any money from it. They nobody pays them for the information.
Nobody pays them to be accurate. They're bureaucrats at the end of the day. And what is a
bureaucrat? What's the main focus of a bureaucrat? Even if they go in with the best of intentions,
which I'm sure all the scientists at the FDA have the best of intentions,
what's their incentive? The system builds in this incentive, not to screw up. Because one drug gets
value and does damage, you lose your job. But if 100 drugs that could cure cancer tomorrow,
don't ever get to market, nobody's gonna nobody's gonna come after you.
Yeah. And you're saying that's not, that's not a mechanism that's conducive to it.
It multiplies this competition. So if you won't approve the drug, if I still think it's possible,
I will. And it's not zero one. You see the other thing that happens with the FDA is zero one.
You see the proof that's not approved. Oh, it's approved for this, but it's not approved for that.
But what if a drug came out and you said, right, you told the doctors,
this drug in 10% of the cases can cause patients an increased risk of heart disease.
You and your patients should, we're not, we're not forcing you, which you should,
right? It's your medical responsibility to evaluate that and decide if the drug is appropriate or
not. Why don't I get to make that choice if I want to take on the 10% risk of heart disease?
So there was a drug, and right now I forget the name, but it was a drug against pain,
particularly for arthritic pain. And it worked. It reduced pain dramatically,
right? And some people tried everything, and this was the only drug that reduced their pain.
And it turned out that in 10% of the cases, it caused the elevated risk. Didn't kill people
necessarily, but it caused elevated risk of heart disease. Okay. What did the FDA do? It banned the
drug. Some people, I know a lot of people who said living with pain is much worse than taking on a
10% risk. Again, probabilities, right? People don't think in those numbers. 10% risk of maybe
getting heart disease. Why don't I get to make that choice? Why does some bureaucrat make that
choice for me? That's capitalism. Capitalism gives you the choice, not you as an ignorant person,
you with your doctor and a whole marketplace, which is not created to provide you with information.
And think about a world where we didn't have all these regulations and controls.
The amount of opportunities that would exist to create, to provide information, to educate you
about that information would mushroom dramatically. Bloomberg, the billionaire,
Bloomberg, how did he make his money? He made his money by providing financial information,
by creating this service called Bloomberg that you buy a terminal and you get all this amazing
information. And he was before computers, desktop computers. I mean, he was very early on in that
whole computing revolution. But his focus was providing financial information to professionals.
And you hire a professional to manage your money. That's the way it's supposed to be.
So you as an individual cannot have all the knowledge you need in medicine,
all the knowledge you need in finance, all the knowledge you need in every aspect of your life.
You can't do that. You have to delegate. And you hire a doctor. Now, you should be able to figure
out if the doctor's good or not. You should be able to ask doctors for reasons for why you have to
make the decision at the end. But that's why you have a doctor. That's why you have a financial
advisor. That's why you have different people who you're delegating certain aspects of your life,
too. But you want choices. And what the marketplace provides is those choices.
So let me then, this is what I do. I'll make a dumb case for things. And then you shut me down.
And then the internet says how dumb Lex is. This is good. This is how it works.
Good. It's shutting down. And they're foolish in blaming you for the question because you're here
to ask me questions. Let me make a case for socialism. It's going to be bad because that's
the only case there is for socialism. That's reality. So perhaps it's not a case for socialism,
but just a certain notion that inequality, the wealth inequality, that the bigger the gap between
the poorest or the average and the richest, the more painful it is to be average. Psychologically
speaking, if you know that there is the CEOs of companies make 300, 1,000, 1 million times more
than you do, that makes life for a large part of the population less fulfilling. That there's a
relative notion to the experience of our life that even though everybody's life has gotten better
over the past decades and centuries, it may feel actually worse because you know that life could
be so, so much better in life to the CEOs that that gap is fundamentally a thing that is undesirable
in a society. Everything about that is wrong. I like to start off like that. So my wife likes
to remind me that as well as we've done in life, we are actually from a wealth perspective closer
to a homeless person than we are to Bill Gates. Just a math, right? Just a math, right?
It's a good ego check. When I look at Bill Gates, I get a smile on my face. I love Bill Gates. I've
never met Bill Gates. I love Bill Gates. I love what he stands for. I love that he has a hundred
billion dollars. I love that he has built a trampoline room in his house where his kids can
jump up and down in a trampoline in a safe environment. Can we take another billionaire?
Because I'm not sure if you're paying attention, but there's all kinds of conspiracy theories about
Bill Gates. Well, but that's part of the story, right? They have to pull him down because people
resent him for other reasons. That's strange. But yes, we can take Jeff Bezos. We can take,
you know, my favorite, just because I like a lot about him was Steve Jobs.
I mean, I love these people. And I can't, they're very few billionaires I don't love.
In the sense that I appreciate everything they've done for me, for people I cherish and love,
they've made the world a better place. Why would it ever cross my mind that they make me look bad
because they're richer than me or that I don't have what they have? They've made me so much richer
that they've made inventions that used to cost millions and millions and millions of dollars
accessible to me. I mean, this is a supercomputer in my pocket. Now, but think about it, right?
What is the difference between, and I'll get to the essence of your point in a minute,
but think about what the difference is between me and Bill Gates in terms of, because it's
true that in terms of wealth, I'm closer to the homeless person. But in terms of my day-to-day
life, I'm closer to Bill Gates. You know, we both live in a nice house. His is nicer.
His is nicer, but we live in a nice house. His is bigger, but mine is plenty big. We both drive
cars. His is nicer, but we both drive cars, cars. A hundred years ago, what cars? We both
can fly. Get on a plane in Los Angeles and fly to New York and get there in about the same time.
We're both flying private. The only difference is my private plane I share with 300 other people
and his, but it's accessible. It's relatively comfortable. Again, in the perspective of 50
years ago, a hundred years ago, it's unimaginable that I could fly like that for such a low fee.
We live very similar lives in that sense. So I don't resent him. So first of all,
I'm an exception to the supposed rule that people resent. I don't think anybody,
I don't think people do resent unless they're taught to resent. And this is the key. People
are taught. And I've seen this in America. And this is, to me, the most horrible, shocking thing
that has happened in America over the last 40 years. I came to America. So I'm an immigrant. I came
to America from Israel in 1987. And I came here because I thought this was the place where I could,
where I'd had the most opportunities. And it is the most opportunities. And I came here because
I believe there was a certain American spirit of individualism. And exactly the opposite of what
you just described, a sense of, I live my life. It's my happiness. I'm not looking at my neighbor.
I'm not competing with the Joneses. The American dream is my dream. My two kids, my dog, my station
wagon, not because other people have it because I want it. And that sense. And when I came here in
the 80s, you had that. You had, you still had it. It was less than I think it had been in the past.
But you had that spirit. There was no envy. There was no resentment. There were rich people.
And they were celebrated. There was still this admiration for entrepreneurs and admiration for
success. Not by everybody, certainly not by the intellectuals, but by the average person.
I have witnessed, particularly over the last 10 years, a complete transformation,
and America's become like Europe. I know, are you Russian? Yeah. Yeah. It's become Russian.
In a sense where, you know, they've always done these studies. You know, I'll give you
a hundred dollars in your neighbor, a hundred dollars, or give you,
well, I'll give you a thousand dollars, but your neighbor gets $10,000. And a Russian will always
choose the hundred dollars, right? He wants equality above being better himself. Americans
would always choose that gap. My sense is not anymore. And it's changing because
we've been told it should change. And morally, you're saying that doesn't make any sense. So
there's no sense in which, let me put another spin, I forget the book, but the sense of if you're
working for Steve Jobs, and you, your hands, you're the engineer behind the iPhone, and there's a
sense in which his salary is stealing from your efforts. Because I forget the book, right? That's
literally the terminology is used. Well, this is straight out of Karl Marx, right? Sure. It's
also straight out of Karl Marx. But like, there's no sense morally speaking that you see that as
the other way around. That engineer stealing off of, and it's not stealing, right? It's not.
But the engineer's getting more from Steve Jobs by a lot, not by a little bit, than Steve Jobs
is getting from the engineer. The engineer, even if they're a great engineer,
they're probably other great engineers that could replace him.
Would he even have a job without Steve Jobs? Would the industry exist without Steve Jobs?
Without the giants that carry these things forward? And let me ask you this. I mean,
you're a scientist. Do you resent Einstein for being smarter than you?
I mean, you and VM, do you, are you angry with him? Would you, would you, would you feel
negative towards him if he was in the room right now? Or would you, if you came into the room,
you'd say, oh my God, I mean, you interview people who I think some of them are probably
smarter than you and me. Yeah, for sure. And your attitude towards them is one of reverence.
Well, one interesting little side question there is what is the natural state of being
for us humans? You kind of implied education has polluted our minds. But like, if I,
because you're referring to jealousy, the Einstein question, the Steve Jobs question,
I wonder which way, if we're left without education, would we naturally go?
So there is no such thing as the natural state in that sense, right? This is,
this is the myth of, of who sows noble savage and of John Wall's is behind the veil of ignorance.
Well, if you're ignorant, you're ignorant. You just, you can't make any decisions. You're just
ignorant. There is no human nature that determines how you will relate to other people. You will
relate to other people based on the conclusions you come to about how to relate to other people.
You can relate to other people as values to use your terminology from the perspective of love.
This other human being is a value to me. And I want to trade with them and trade the beauty
of trade is it's win-win. I want to benefit and they are going to benefit. I don't want to screw
them. I don't want them to screw me. I want us to be win-win. Or you can deal with other people
as threats, as enemies, much of human history. We have done that. And therefore, as a zero sum
world, what they have, I want, I will take it. I will use force to take it. I will use political
force to take it. I will use the force of my arm to take it. I will just take it. So,
those are two options, right? And they will determine whether we live in civilization or not.
And they are determined by conclusions people come to about the world and the nature of reality
and the nature of morality and the nature of politics and all these things. They're determined
by philosophy. And this is why philosophy is so important. Because so philosophy shapes its
evolution doesn't do this. It doesn't just happen. Ideas shape how we relate to other people.
And you say, well, little children do it. Well, little children don't have a funnel cortex.
Why? It's not relevant, right? What happens as you develop a frontal cortex, as you develop
the brain, you learn ideas. And those ideas will shape how you relate to other people. And if you
learn good ideas, you will relate to other people in a healthy, productive, win-win. And if you
develop bad ideas, you will resent other people and you will want their stuff. And the thing is
that human progress depends on the win-win relationship. It depends on civilization,
depends on peace. It depends on allowing people going back to what we talked about earlier,
allowing people the freedom to think for themselves. And anytime you try to interrupt that,
you're causing damage. So this change in America is not some reversion to a natural state.
It's a shift in ideas. We still live the better part of American society in the world, still
lives on the remnants of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment ideas, the ideas that brought about
this scientific revolution, ideas that brought about the creation of this country. And it's
the same basic ideas that led to both of those. And as those ideas get more distant, as those
ideas are not defended, as those ideas disappear, as enlightenment goes away, we will become more
violent, more resentful, more tribal, more obnoxious, more unpleasant, more primitive.
A very specific example of this that bothers me, I'd be curious to get your comment on.
So Elon Musk is a billionaire. And one of the things that really, maybe it's almost a pet peeve,
it really bothers me when the press and the general public will say, well, all those rockets
they're sending up there, those are just the toys, the games that billionaires play.
That, to me, billionaire has become a dirty word to use as if money can buy or has anything to do
with genius. I'm trying to articulate a specific line of question here, because it just bothers
me. I guess the question is, how do we get here and how do we get out of that? Because Elon Musk
is doing some of the most incredible things that a human being has ever participated in.
He doesn't build the rockets himself. He's getting a bunch of other geniuses together
that have. That takes genius.
That takes genius. But where did we go and how do we get back to where Elon Musk is an inspiring
figure as opposed to a billionaire playing with some toys?
So this is the role of philosophy. It goes back to the same place. It goes back to our
understanding of the world and our role in it. And if you understand that the only way to become
a billionaire, for example, is to create value. Value for whom? Value for people who are going
to consume it. The only way to become a billionaire, the only way Elon Musk became a billionaire is
through PayPal. Now, PayPal is something we all use. PayPal is an enormous value to all of us.
It's why it's worth several billions of dollars, which Elon Musk could then
earn. But you cannot become a billionaire in a free society by exploiting people.
You cannot because you'll be laughed. Nobody will deal with you. Nobody will have any interactions
with you. The only way to become a billionaire is to do billions of win-win transactions.
So the only way to become a billionaire in a free society is to change the world
to make it a better place. Billionaires are the great humanitarians of our time. Not because
they give charity, but because they make them billions. And it's true that money and genius
are not necessarily correlated. But you cannot become a billionaire without being super smart.
You cannot become a billionaire by figuring something out that nobody else has figured out
in whatever realm it happens to be. And that thing that you figure out has to be something that
provides immense value to other people. Where do we go wrong? We go wrong. Our culture goes wrong
because it views billionaires as selfish. And there's a sense in which, and not a sense,
it's absolutely true. The billionaire doesn't ask from my opinion on what product to launch.
Elon Musk doesn't ask others what they think you should spend his money on, what the greatest
social well-being will be. I mean, there's a sense in which the Rockets are his toys.
There's a sense in which he chose that he would be inspired the most. He would have the most fun
by going to Mars and building rockets. And he probably dreamt of rockets from when he was a
kid and probably always played with rockets. And now he has the funds, the capital, to be able to
deploy it. So he's being selfish. Obviously, he's being self-interested. This is what Elon Musk is
about. I mean, the same with Jeff Bezos. It's all committee to decide whether to invest in
cloud computing or not. Bezos decided that. And at the end of the day, the bosses, they pursue
the values they believe are good. They create the wealth. It's their decisions. It's their mind.
And the fact is we live in a world where for 2000-plus years, self-interest, even though we all do it,
to a more extent or the less, we deem it as morally abhorrent. It's bad. It's wrong. I mean,
your mother probably taught you the same thing my mother taught me. Think of others first.
Think of yourself last. The good stuff is kept for the guests. You never get to use the good stuff.
You know, it's others. That's what the focus of morality is. Now, no mother, even no Jewish mother,
actually believes that, right? Because they don't really want you to be last. They want you to be
first and they push you to be first. But morally, they taught their entire lives and they believe
that the right thing to say and to some extent do is to argue for sacrifice for other people.
So most people, 99% of people are torn. They know they should be selfless, sacrifice, live for
other people. They don't really want to. So they act selfishly in their day-to-day life and they
feel guilty. And they can't be happy. They can't be happy. And Jewish mothers and Catholic mothers
are excellent at using that guilt to manipulate you. But the guilt is inevitable because you've
got these two conflicting things. The way you want to live and the way you've been taught to live.
And what objectivism does is at the end of the day, provides you with a way to unite morality,
a proper morality, with what you want. And to think about what you really want, to conceptualize
what you really want properly. So what you want is really good for you. And what you want will
really lead to your happiness. So we reject the idea of sacrifice. We reject the idea of living
for other people. But you see, if you believe that the purpose of morality is to sacrifice for
other people, and you look at Jeff Bezos, when was the last time he sacrificed anything? He's
living pretty well. He's got billions that he could give it all away. And yet he doesn't. How
day? In my talks, I often position, and I'm going to use Bill Gates, sorry guys, drop the
conspiracy theory. They're all BS, complete and utter nonsense. There's not a shred of truth.
You know, I disagree with Bill Gates on everything political. I think he politically
is a complete ignoramus. But the guy's a genius when it comes to technology and when he's just
thoughtful, even in this philanthropy, he just uses his mind. And I respect that even though
politically he's terrible. Anyway, think about this. Who had a bigger impact on the lives of
poor people in the world? Bill Gates or Mother Teresa? Bill Gates. It's not even close.
And Mother Teresa lived this altruistic life to the core. She lived it consistently.
And yet she was miserable, pathetic, horrible. She hated her life. She was miserable. And most
of people she helped didn't do very well because she just helped them not die. Right? And then Bill
Gates changed all. And he helped a lot by providing technology. We even philanthropy gets to them.
The food gets them much faster, more efficient. Yet who is the moral saint?
Saintshood is not determined based on what you do for other people. Saintshood is based on how
much pain you suffer. I like to ask people to go to a museum and look at all the paintings of saints.
How many of them are smiling and are happy? They've usually got arrows through them and holes in
their body and they're just suffering a horrible death. The whole point of the morality we are taught
is that happiness is immorality, that happy people cannot be good people,
and that good people suffer, and that suffering is necessary for morality.
Morality is about sacrifice, self-sacrifice and suffering. And at the end of the day,
almost all the problems in the world boil down to that false view.
So can we try to talk about, part of this is the problem of the word selfishness,
but let's talk about the virtue of selfishness. So let's start at the fact that for me,
I really enjoy doing stuff for other people. I enjoy being cheering on the success of others.
Why? I don't know. Well, think about it. Why? Because I think you do know.
If I were to really think... I don't want to resort to like evolutionary arguments or like
this. So I think... So I can tell you why I enjoy helping others. Maybe you can go there,
like one thing, because we should talk about love a little bit. I'll tell you,
there's a part of me that's a little bit not rational, like there's a gut that I follow,
that not everything I do is perfectly rational. Like, for example, my dad
criticizes me. He says, like, you should always have a plan. Like, it should make sense. You have
a strategy. And I say that, you know, I left, I stepped down from my full-cell A position at MIT.
There's so many things I did without a plan. It's a gut. It's like, I want to start a company.
Well, you know how many companies fail? I don't know.
Thank you for saying that.
It's a gut. And the same thing with being kind to others is a gut. I watched the way
that karma works in this world, that the people, like us, one guy I look up to is Joe Rogan,
that he does stuff for others. And that the joy he experiences, the way he sees the world, like,
just the glimmer in his eyes because he does stuff for others that creates a joyful experience.
And that somehow seems to be an instructive way to, that to me is inspiring of a life while
lived.
But you probably know a lot of people who have done stuff others were not happy.
True.
True. So I don't think it's the doing stuff for others that brings the happiness. It's why you
do stuff for others and what else you're doing in your life and what is the proportion.
But it's why at the end of the day, which is, and it's the same. Look, you can maybe through a gut
feeling say, I want to start a company, but you better start doing thinking about how and what
and all of that. And to some extent, the why, because if you really want to be happy doing
this, you may better make sure you're doing it for the right reason. So I'm not, you know,
there's something called fast thinking. They're common. Daniel Kahneman.
Yes. Daniel Kahneman talks about and it's, it's, it's, you know, all the integrations you've made
so far in your life cause you to have specialized knowledge in certain things. And you can think
very fast. And, and, and your gut tells you what that what the right answer is. It's, but it's
not, it's, it's your mind is constantly evaluating and constantly working. You want to make it as
rational as you can, not in the sense that I have to think through every time I make a decision,
but that they've so programmed my mind in a sense that the answers are the right answers,
you know, in, in, in, when I get them. So, you know, I like, I view other people as a value.
Other people contribute enormously to my life, whether it's a romantic love relationship or
whether it's a friendship relationship or whether it's just, you know, Jeff Bezos creating Amazon
and, and delivering goodies to my home when I get them. And, and, and people do all that,
right? It's not just Jeff Bezos. He gets the most credit, but everybody in that chain of command,
everybody at Amazon is working for me. I love that. I love the idea of a human being. I love the
idea that they are people capable of, of being an Einstein of being, you know, and, and creating and
building and making stuff that makes my life so good. I, you know, most of us like, this is not
a good room for an example, most of us like plants, right? We like pets. I don't particularly, but
people like pets. Why? We like to see life. Yeah. Human beings are life on steroids, right?
They're life with a brain. It's amazing, right? What they can do. I love people. Now, that doesn't
mean I love everybody because there's some, they're really bad people out there who I hate, right?
And I do hate, and there are people out there that are just, I have no opinion about, but generally,
the idea of a human being to me is a phenomenal idea. When I see a baby, I light up because to me,
there's a potential, you know, there's a, there's this magnificent potential that is embodied in
that. And when I see people struggling and need help, I think they're human beings, you know,
they embody that potential. They embody that goodness. They might turn out to be bad,
but why would I ever give the presumption of that? I give them the presumptions that are positive,
and I cheer them on. And I enjoy watching people succeed. I enjoy watching people get to the
top of the mountain and produce something, even if I don't get anything directly from it. I enjoy
that because it's part of my enjoyment of life. So the word, to you, the morality of selfishness,
this kind of love of other human beings, the love of life fits into a morality of selfishness.
Can't not, because it's, it's, you, there's no context in which you can truly love yourself
without loving life and loving what it means to be human. So, you know, the love of yourself is
going to manifest itself differently in different people, but it's core. What do you love about
yourself? First of all, I love, I love that I'm alive. I love that, you know, I love this world
and the opportunities it provides me and the fun and the excitement of discovering something new
and meeting a new person and having a conversation. You know, all of this is, is, is, is immensely
enjoyable. But behind all of that is a particular human capability that not only I have, other
people have and the fact that they have it makes my life so much more fun because so it's, it's, you
cannot view, you know, it's all integrated and you cannot view yourself in isolation. Now that
doesn't, that doesn't place a moral commandment on me. Help everybody who's poor that you happen
to meet in the street. It doesn't place a burden on me in a sense that now I have this moral duty
to help everybody. It leaves me free to make decisions about who I help and who I don't.
There's some people who I will not help. There's some people who I do not wish positive things upon.
Bad people should have bad outcomes. Bad people should suffer. So and you have the freedom to
choose who's good, who's bad within your decision based on your values. Now, I think there's an
objectivity to it. There's a, there's a standard by which you should evaluate good versus bad. And
that standard should be to what extent do they contribute a hurt human life? The standard is
human life. And so when I say, look at a Jeff Bezos, I say he's contributed to human life.
Good guy. I might disagree with him on stuff. We might disagree about politics. We might disagree
about women. I don't know what we agree. But overall, big picture. He is pro-life.
Right? I look at somebody like, you know, to take like 99.9% of our politicians
and they are pro-death. They are pro-destruction. They are pro-cutting corners in ways that destroy
human life and human potential and human ability. So I literally hate almost every politician out
there. And I wish ill on them. Right? I don't want them to be successful or happy. I want them all
to go away. Right? Leave me alone. So I believe in justice. I believe good things should happen
to good people and bad things should happen to bad people. So I can, I make those generalizations
based on this one, you know, on the other hand, if, you know, I shouldn't say all politicians,
right? So if I, you know, I love Thomas Jefferson and, and, and George Washington, right? I love
Abraham Lincoln. I love people who fought for freedom and who believed in freedom and had
his ideas and lived up to at least in parts of their lives to those principles. Now,
do I think Thomas Jefferson was flawed because he held slaves? Absolutely.
But the virtues way outweigh that in my view. And I understand people who don't accept that.
You don't have to also love and hate the entirety of the person. There's parts of
that person that you, that you're directing. The major part is pro-life. And therefore,
I'm pro that person. And, and I think, and I said earlier that objectivism is philosophy of love.
And I, I believe that because objectivism is about your life, about loving your life, about
embracing your life, about engaging with the world, about loving the world in which you live,
about win-win relationships with other people, which means, to a large extent, loving
the good in other people and the, and the best in other people and encouraging that and supporting
that and promoting that. So I know selfishness is a harsh word because the culture's given
it that harshness. Selfishness is a harsh word because the people who don't like selfishness
want you to believe it's a harsh word, but it's not. What does it mean? It means focus on self.
It means take care of self. It means make yourself your highest priority, not your only priority,
because in taking care of self, what would mean, what, what would I be without my life?
What would I be without the people who support me, who help me, who, who, who I have these love
relationships with? So other people are crucial. What would my life be without,
you know, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, right? A lot of things you mentioned here are just beautiful.
So one is one win. So one key thing about this selfishness and the idea of objectivism is the
philosophy of love is that you don't want parasitism. So that goes, that is unethical. So you actually
first of all, you say win, win a lot. And I just like that terminology because it's a good way to
see life is try to maximize the number of win, win interactions. That's a good way to see business
actually. Well, life generally, I think every aspect of life, you want to have a win, win
relationship with your wife. Imagine if it was wouldn't lose either way. If you win and she loses,
how long is that going to sustain? So when lose relationships are not in equilibrium, what they
turn into is lose, lose. Like when lose turns into lose, lose. And the, so the alternative,
the only alternative to lose, lose is win, win. And you win and the person you love wins,
what's better than that? Right? That's the way to maximize. So like the selfishness is you're
trying to maximize the win, but the way to maximize the win is to maximize the win, win.
Yes. And it turns out, and Adam Smith understood this a long time ago, that if you focus on your
own winning while respecting other people as human beings, then everybody wins. And the beauty of
capitalism, if we go back to capitalism for a second, the beauty of capitalism is you cannot
be successful in capitalism without producing values that other people appreciate and therefore
willing to buy from you. And they buy them. And this goes back to that question about the engineer
and Steve Jobs. Why is the engineer working there? Because he's getting paid more than his time is
worth to him. I know people don't like to think in those terms, but that's the reality. If his
time is worth more to him than what he's getting paid, he would leave. So he's winning. And his
apple winning, yes, because they're getting more productivity from him. They're getting more from
him than what he's actually producing. It's tough because there's human psychology and
imperfect information. It just makes it a little messier than the clarity of thinking you have
about this. For sure, but not everything in life is an economic transaction. It ultimately
is close. But even if it's not an economic transaction, even if it's a relationship
transaction, when you get to a point with a friend, where you're now gaining from the relationship,
friendship is going to be over, not immediately because it takes time for these things to
manifest itself and to really absorb into it. But we change friendships, we change our loves,
right? We fall in and out of love. We fall out of love because we're not love. So let's go back
to love. Love is the most selfish of all emotions. Love is about what you do to me.
Right? So I love my wife because she makes me feel better about myself. So the idea of
selfless love is bizarre. So I in Rand used to say, before you said, I love you, you have to say the
I. And you have to know who you are and you have to appreciate yourself. If you hate yourself,
what does it mean to love somebody else? So I love my wife because she makes me feel great
about the world. And she lives me for the same reason. And so I used to use this example. Imagine
you go up to your to be spoused the night before the wedding, and you say, you know, I get nothing
out of this relationship. I'm doing this purely as an act of noble self-sacrifice. She would slap
you as she should, right? So, no, we know this intuitively that love is selfish, but we are
afraid to admit it to ourselves. And why? Because the other side has convinced us that
selfishness is associated with exploiting other people. Selfishness means lying,
cheating, stealing, walking and corpses, backstabbing people. But is that ever in your
self-interest? Truly, right? You know, I'll often be in front of an audience to say, okay, how many
people here have lied? You know, kidding, right? How many of you think that that if you did that
consistently, that would make your life better? Nobody thinks that, right? Because everybody's
experienced how shitty lying, not because of how it makes you feel out of a sense of guilt,
existentially, it's just a bad strategy, right? You get caught, you have to create other lies to
cover up the previous lie. It screws up with your own psychology and your own cognition. You know,
the mind, to some extent, like a computer, right, is an integrating machine. And in computer science,
I understand there's a term called garbage in, garbage out. Lying is garbage in. So,
it's not good strategy, cheating, screwing your customers in a business, not paying your suppliers
as a businessman, not good business practices, not good practices for being alive. So, win-win is
both moral and practical, and the beauty of Iron Man's philosophy, and I think this is really
important, is that the moral is the practical and the practical is the moral. And therefore,
if you are moral, you will be happy. Yeah, that's why the application of the philosophy of
objectivism is so easy to practice. So, like, the order to discuss or possible to discuss,
that's why you talk about all... I'm so clear-cut. Yeah. I'm not ambiguous about my view. And it's
fundamentally practical. I mean, that's the best the philosophy is, is practical. Yes. It's in a
sense, teaching you how to live a good life. And it's teaching you how to live a good life,
not just as you, but as a human being. And then for the principles that apply to you,
probably apply to me as well. And if we both share the same principles of how to live a good life,
we're not going to be enemies. You brought up Anarchy earlier. It's an interesting question,
because you've kind of said politicians, I mean, part of it is a little bit joking, but
politicians are not good people. So, but we should have some. So, you have an opposition to
anarchism. So, first of all, they weren't always not bad people. That is, I gave examples of people
who engage in political life who I think were good people, basically. But they think they get worse
over time if the system is corrupt. And I think the system, unfortunately, even the American system,
as good as it was, was founded on quicksand and had corruption built in. They didn't quite get it.
And they needed an invent to get it. So, I'm not blaming them. I don't think they
show any blame. You needed a philosophy in order to completely
fulfill the promise that is America, or the promise that is the founding of it.
So, the place where corruption sneaked in is the lack in some way of the philosophy underlying
the nation. Absolutely. So, it's Christianity. It's, you know, not to hit on another controversial
topic. It's religion which undercut their morality. So, the founders were explicitly Christian and
altruistic in their morality. Implicitly, in terms of their actions, they were completely secular,
and they were very secular anyway. But in their morality, even, they were secular. So,
there's nothing in Christianity that says that you have an inalienable right to pursue happiness.
That's unbelievably self-interested and based on kind of a moral philosophy of egoistic
moral philosophy. But they didn't know that. And they didn't know how to ground it. They implicitly,
they had that fast thinking, that gut, that told them that this was right. And the whole
enlightenment, that period from John Locke on to really to Hume, that period is about pursuit of
happiness using reason in pursuit of the good life, right? But they can't ground it. They don't
really understand what reason is, and they don't really understand what happiness requires, and
they can't detach themselves from Christianity. They're not allowed to politically, and they can't,
I think conceptually, you just can't make that big break. Rand is an Enlightenment thinker in
that sense. She is what should have followed right after, right? She should have come then
grounded them in the secular and in the egoistic, in the Aristotelian view of morality as a code of
values to basically to guide your life, to guide your life towards happiness. That's Aristotle's
view, right? So they didn't have that. So I think that government is necessary. It's not
a necessary evil. It's a necessary good, because it does something good. And the good that it does
is it eliminates coercion from society. It eliminates violence from society. It eliminates
the use of force between individuals from society. And that... But see the argument that Michael
Mallins would make. Give me a chance here. Why can't you apply the same kind of reasoning that
you've effectively used for the rest of mutually agreed upon institutions that are driven by
capitalism, that we can't also hire forces to protect us from the violence, to ensure the
stability of society that protects us from the violence? Why draw the line at this particular
place, right? Well, because there is no other place to draw a line and there is a line. And by
the way, we draw lines other places, right? We don't have... We don't determine truth and science
based on competition. Right. So that's a line. But first off, some people might say... I mean,
there's competition in a sense that you have alternate theories. But at the end of the day,
whether you decide that this he's right or he's right is not based on the market. It's based on
facts, on reality, on objective reality. You have to... And some people will never accept
that this person is right because they don't see the stream. So first of all, what they reject,
what most anarchists reject, even if they don't admit it or recognize it, is they object...
They reject objective reality. In which sense. Right. So there's a whole... So the whole realm of law
is a scientific realm to define, for example, the boundaries of private property.
It's not an issue of competition. It's not an issue of I have one system and you have
another system. It's an issue of objective reality. And now it's more difficult than science in a sense
because it's more difficult to prove that my conception of property is correct and you're
correct. But there has... There is a correct one. In reality, there's a correct vision. It's more
abstract. But look, somebody has to decide what property is. So I have... I've defined... My property
is defined by certain boundaries. And I have a police force and I have a judiciary system that
backs my vision. And you have a claim against my property. You have a claim against my property.
And you have a police force and a judicial system that backs your claim. Who's right?
So our definitions of property are different. Yes. Our definitions of property or a claim on
the property is different. So what can we just agree on the definition of property?
But why should we agree? Your judicial system is one definition of property. My judicial system
is not. You think that there's no such thing as intellectual property rights. And your whole
system believes that. And my whole system believes there is such thing. So you are duplicating my
books and handing them out to all your friends and not paying me a royalty. And I think that's
wrong. My judicial system and my police force think that's wrong. And we're both living in the same
geographic area, right? So we have overlapping jurisdictions. Now, the anarchists would say,
well, we'll negotiate. Why should we negotiate? My system is actually right. There is such a
thing as intellectual property rights. There's no negotiation here. You're wrong. And you should
either pay a fine or go to jail. Yeah, but why can't? Because it's a community. There's multiple
parties and it's like a majority vote. They'll hire different forces that says, yeah, your
arms is onto something here with the definition of property. And we'll go with that. So anarchists
pro-democracy in the majority rule sense? Well, I think so. I think anarchy promotes like emergent
democracy, right? No, it doesn't. I'll tell you what, it promotes. It promotes emergent
strife and civil war and violence, constant uninterrupted violence. Because the only way
to settle the dispute between us, since we both think that we are right and we have guns behind
us to protect that. And we have a legal system. We have a whole theory of ideas is you're stealing
my stuff. How do I get it back? I invade you, right? I take over. And who's going to win that
battle? The smartest guy? No, the guy with the biggest guns. See, but the anarchists would say
that they're using implied, like the state uses implied force. They're already doing violence.
Because they take the state as it is today and they refuse to engage in the conversation about
what a state should and could look like and how we can create mechanisms to protect us from the
state using those, those, but look, this is my view of anarchy is very simple. It's a ridiculous
position. It's infantile. I mean, I really mean this, right? And sorry to Michael, but and all
the other very, very smart, very, very smart anarchists, because anarchists is never,
you won't find a dumb anarchist, right? Because dumb people know it wouldn't work.
You have to have, it's absolutely true. You have to have a certain IQ to be an anarchist.
That's true. They're all really intelligent. All intelligence. And the reason is that you
have to create such a mythology in your head. You have to create so many rationalizations.
Any Joe in the street knows it doesn't work because they can understand what happens
when two people who are armed are in the street and have a dispute and there's no mechanism to
resolve that dispute. Yeah. That's objective. That's separate. And this is where it gets
subjective. That's objective. The whole point of government is that it is the objective authority
for determining the truth in one regard, in regard to force. Because the only alternative to
determining it when it comes to force is through force. The only way to resolve disputes is through
force or through this negotiation, which is unjust, because if one party is right and one
party is wrong, why negotiate? And this is the point. I'm not against competition of governance.
I'm all for competition of governance. We do that all the time. It's called countries.
The United States has a certain governance structure. The Soviet Union had a governance
structure. Mexico has a governance structure. And they're competing. And we can observe the
competition. In my world, you could move freely from one governance to another. If you didn't
like your governance, you would move to a better governance system. But they have to have autonomy
within a geographic area. Otherwise, what you get is complete and out of civil war. The law needs
to be objective. And there needs to be one law over a piece of ground. And if you disagree with
that law, you can move somewhere else where they meet. This is why federalism is such a beautiful
system. Even within the United States, we have states. And on certain issues, we're allowed to
disagree between states, like the death penalty. Some states do, some states don't. Fine. And now
I can move from one state if I don't like it. But there are certain issues you cannot have
disagreement. Slavery, for example, this is why we had a civil war. But let me one other argument
against Anarchy. Markets exist where force has been eliminated. So I can say that again. Markets
exist where the rule of force has been eliminated. The rule of force. Yes. So a market will exist
if we know that you can't pull a gun on me and just take my stuff. I am willing to engage in
transaction with you if we have an implicit understanding that we're not going to use force
against each other. So the force has something special to it. Yes. It's a special. It overrides
because we're still agreeing we can manipulate each other. Yes. But force we can force kind of.
So there's something fundamental about violence. Force is a is a fundamental force. It's the
anti reason. It's the anti life. It's the anti force against another person. And it's what it
does is shuts down the mind. Right. So in order to have a market, you have to extract force.
How can you have a market in force? When I there's an Instagram channel called nature's
metal where it has all these videos of animals basically having a market of force. Yes. But
that shuts down the ability to reason. And animals don't need to because they can. Exactly. So the
innovation that is human beings is a capacity to reason and therefore the relegation of force to
the animals. We don't do force. Civilization is where we don't have force. And so what you have
of is you cannot have a market in that, which a market requires the elimination of it. And I,
you know, I, I don't debate formally these guys, but I interact with them all the time. Right.
And you get these absurd arguments where, you know, David Friedman will say that's
Milton Friedman son, he will say something like, well, in Somalia, in the northern part of Somalia
where they have no government, you have all these wonderful, you have these tribal tribunals
of these tribes and they resolve disputes. Yeah. Barbarically, they show real law. They have no
respect for individual rights, no respect for property. And the only reason they have any
authority is because they have guns and they have power and they have force. And they do it
barbarically. There's nothing civilizing about the courts of Somalia. And they write about
pirates and because they view force, they don't view force as something unique that must be
extracted from human life. And that's why Anarchy has to devolve into violence because it treats
forces just, what's the big deal with negotiating, you know, over guns. So we, we covered a lot of
high level philosophy, but I'd like to touch on the troubles, the chaos of the day. Yeah.
A couple of things. And I really would, trying to find a hopeful path way out. So one is the
current coronavirus pandemic, or in particular, not the virus, but our handling of it. Is there
something philosophically, politically, that you would like to see that you would like to recommend
that you would like to maybe give a hopeful message? If we take that kind of trajectory,
we might be able to get out. Because I'm kind of worried about the economic pain that people are
feeling that there's this quiet suffering. I mean, I agree with you completely. There is a
quiet suffering. It's horrible. I mean, I know people, you know, I go to a lot of restaurants.
So one of the things we love to do is eat out. My wife doesn't like cooking anymore. We don't
have kids, we don't have kids in the house anymore. So she doesn't have to. So we go out a lot. We go
to restaurants. And because we have our favorites, we go to them a lot. We get to know the owners of
the restaurant, the chef there. And it's just heartbreaking. You know, these people put their
life, you know, their blood sweat and tears, I mean, real blood sweat and tears into these projects.
Restaurants are super difficult to manage. Most of them go bankrupt anyway. And, and the restaurants,
we go to a good restaurant. So they've done a good job. And they've, they've, they, they
got a unique value. And they shut them down. And you know, many of them will never open.
You know, something like they estimate 50, 60% of restaurants in some places won't open.
These are people's lives. These are people's capital. These are people's effort. These are
people's love. Talk about love. They love what they do, particularly if they're the chef as well.
And it's gone. And it's disappeared. And what are they going to do with their lives now? They're
going to live off the government, the way our politicians would like them, bigger and bigger
stimulus plans. So we can hand checks to people to get them used to living off of us rather than
it's disgusting and it's offensive and it's unbelievably sad. And this is where it comes
to this. I care about other people. I mean, this idea that objectivists don't care. I mean, I love
these people who, who provide me with pleasure of eating wonderful food in a, in a great environment.
This is something inspiring about them too. Like when I say great restaurant, I want to do
better with my own stuff. Yeah, exactly. It's, it's, it's, it's inspiring that anybody who does it
is excellent. I love sports because it's the one realm in which you'd still value and celebrate
excellence. I, but I try to celebrate excellence, everything in my life. So I, I, you know, I try
to be nice to these people and, you know, with COVID, which we went more to restaurants, if
believe it or not. And we did more takeout stuff. We made an effort, particularly the restaurants
we really love to keep them going, to encourage them to support them. The problem is the problem
is philosophy drives the world. The response to COVID has been worse than pathetic.
And it's driven by philosophy. It's driven by disrespect to science, ignorance and disrespect
of statistics, a disrespect of individual human decision making. Government has to decide everything
for us and, and just throughout the process and a disrespect of markets, because we didn't let
markets work to, to, to facilitate what we needed in order to deal with this virus.
If you look at the play, it's interesting that the only place on the planet that's done well
with us are parts of Asia, right? Taiwan did phenomenally with this. And the vice president
of Taiwan is a epidemiologist. So he knew what he was doing. And they got it right from the
beginning. South Korea did, did amazing. Even Hong Kong and Singapore. It's, you know, Hong
Kong is just very few deaths and the economy wasn't shut down in any of those places. There were no
lockdowns in any of those places. The CDC had plans before this happened and how to deal with
good plans. Indeed, if you ask people around the world before the pandemic, which country is best
prepared for a pandemic, they would have said the United States because of the CDC's plans and
how all of our emergency reserves and all that and the wealth. And yet all of that went out the
window because people panicked. People didn't think, go back to reason. People were arrogant,
refused to use the tools that they had at their disposal to deal with this. So you deal with
pandemics. It's very simple how you deal with pandemics. And this is how South Korea and Taiwan
and you deal with them by testing, tracing and isolating. That's it. And you do it well. And
you do it vigorously. And you do it on scale if you have to. And you scale up to do it. We have
the wealth to do that. So one question I have, it's a difficult one. So I talk about love a lot.
And you've just talked about Donald Trump. I guarantee you, though, this particular segment
would be full of division from the internet. But I believe that should be and can be fixed.
What I'm referring to in particular is the division because we've talked about the value of reason.
And what I've noticed on the internet is the division shuts down reason. So when people
when people hear you say Trump, actually the first sentence you said about Trump,
they'll hear Trump and their ears will perk up. And they'll immediately start in that first
sentence, they'll say, is he a Trump supporter or a Trump? They're not interested in anything else
after that. And then after that, that's it. And what how do so my question is,
you as one of the beacons of intellectualism, well, quite honest, I mean, sounds silly to say,
but you are a beacon of reason. How do we bring people together long enough to where we can reason?
I mean, there's no easy way out of this because the fact that people have become tribal and they
have very tribal. And the tribe in the tribe reason doesn't matter. And it's all about emotion.
It's all about belonging and not belonging. And you don't want to stand out. You don't want to
have a different opinion. You want to belong. And it's all about belonging. It took us decades
to get back to tribalism, where we were hundreds of years ago. It took millennium to get out of
tribalism. It took the enlightenment to get us to the point of individualism, where we think
for and reason respect for reason. Before that, we were all tribal. So it took the enlightenment
to get us out of it. We've been in the enlightenment for about 250 years influenced by the enlightenment
and it's fading. The impact is fading. So what would we need to get out of it?
We need self-esteem. People join a tribe because they don't trust their own mind.
People join a tribe because they're afraid to stand on their own two feet. They're afraid
to think for themselves. They're afraid to be different. They're afraid to be unique. They're
afraid to be an individual. People need self-esteem. To gain self-esteem, they have to have respect
for rationality. They have to think and they have to achieve and they have to recognize
that achievement. To do that, they have to have respect for thinking. They have to have to
respect for reason. And think about the schools. We have to have schools that teach people to
think. Teach people to value their mind. We have schools that teach people to feel
and value their feelings. We have groups of six-year-olds sitting around a circle
discussing politics. What? They don't know anything. They're ignorant. So you don't know
anything when you're ignorant. Yes, you can feel, but your feelings are useless as decision-making
tools. But we emphasize emotion. It's all about socialization and emotion. This is why
they talk about this generation of snowflakes. They can't hear anything that they're opposed to
because they've not learned how to use their mind, how to think. So it boils down to teaching
people how to think, two things. How to think and how to care about themselves. So it's thinking
of self-esteem and they're connected because when you think, you achieve, which gains your
self-esteem, when you have self-esteem, it's easier to think for yourself. And I don't know how you
do that quickly. I think leadership matters. So part of what I try to do is try to encourage
people to do those things. But I am a small voice. You asked me when early on, you said,
we should talk about why I'm not more famous. I'm not famous. My following is not big. It's
very small in the scope of things. Well, yours and objectivism, I'm not questioning,
could you linger on it for a moment? Why isn't objectivism more famous?
I think because it's so challenging. It's not challenging to me, right? When I first encountered
objectivism, it's like after the first shock and after the first kind of none of this can be true.
This is all BS and fighting it. Once I got it, it was easy. It was easy. It required years of
studying, but it was easy in the sense of, yes, this makes sense. But it's challenging because
it abandons everything. It really says what my mother taught me is wrong. And when my politicians
say left and right is wrong, all of them. There's not a single politician on which I agree with on
almost anything, right? Because on the fundamentals, we disagree. And what my teachers are telling me
is wrong and what Jesus said is wrong. And it's hard. But the thing is, so you talk about politics
and all that kind of stuff, but most people don't care. The more powerful thing about
objectivism is the practical of my life, of how I revolutionize my life. And that feels to be
like a very important and appealing, get your shit together. Yeah, but this is why Jordan Peterson
is so much more successful than we are, right? Make your bed or whatever. Make your bed. Yeah,
because his personal responsibility is shallow. It's make your bed stand up straight. It's what
my mother told me when I was growing up. There's nothing new about Jordan Peterson. He says, embrace
Christianity. Christianity is fine, right? Religion is okay. Just do these few things
and you'll be fine. And by the way, he says, happiness, you either have it or you don't.
It's random. You don't actually, you can't bring about your own happiness. So he's given people an
easy out. People want easy out. People buy self-help books that give them five principles for living
in, you know, shallow. I'm telling them, think, stand on your own two feet. Be independent.
Don't listen to your mother. Do your own thing, but thoughtfully, not based on emotions.
So you're responsible not just for a set of particular habits and so on. You're responsible
for everything. Yes. And you're responsible. Here's the big one, right? You're responsible for
shaping your own soul. Your consciousness, you get to decide what it's going to be like.
And the only tool you have is your mind. Your only reason is your mind. Well, your emotions
play a tool when they're properly cultivated. They play a role in that. And the tools you have is
thinking, experiencing, living, coming to the right conclusions, you know, listening to great music
and watching good movies. And art is very important in shaping your own soul and helping you do this.
It's got a crucial role in that. But it's work. And it's lonely work because it's work you do
with yourself. Now, if you find somebody who you love, who shares these values and you can do
with them, that's great. But it's mostly lonely work. It's hard. It's challenging. It ends your
world. The reward is unbelievable. But even at the, think about, think about the Enlightenment,
right? So up until the Enlightenment, where was truth? Truth came from a book. And there were
few people who understood the book. Most of us couldn't read. And they conveyed it to us. And
they just told us what to do. And in that sense, life's easy. It sucks. And we die young, and we
have nothing, and we don't enjoy it. But it's easy. And the Enlightenment comes around and says,
we've got this tool. It's called reason. And it allows us to discover truth about the world. It's
not in a book. It's actually your reason allows you to discover stuff about the world. And I consider
the first, really the first figure of the Enlightenment is Newton, not Locke, right? It's a
scientist because he teaches us the laws of mechanics, like how does stuff work? And people go,
oh, wow, this is cool. I can use my mind. I can discover truth. Isn't that amazing?
And everything opens up when you do that. Hey, if I can discover, if I understand the laws of
motion, if I can understand truth in the world, how can I can decide who I marry? I mean, everything
was fixed in those lists. How come I can't decide what profession I should be in, right? Everybody
belonged to a guild. How come I can't decide who my political leader should be? That's, so it's all
reason. It's all once you understand the efficacy of your own mind to understand truth, understand
reality, discover truth, not understand truth, discover it. Everything opens up. Now you can
take responsibility for your own life because now you have the tool to do it. But we are living in an
era where post-modernism tells us there is no truth. There is no reality and our mind is useless
anyway. Critical race theory tells us that you're determined by your race and your race shapes
everything and your free will is meaningless and your reason doesn't matter because reason is just
shaped by your genes and shaped by your color of your skin. It's the most racist theory of all.
And you've got, you've got our friend at UC Irvine telling them, oh, your senses don't tell you
anything about reality. Anyway, reality is what it is. And you know, what's the purpose of reason?
It's to invent stuff. It's to make stuff up. And then what uses that? It's complete fantasy.
You've basically got every philosophical intellectual voice in the culture,
telling them their reason is impotent. There's like a Steven Pinker who tries and I love Pinker
and he's really good and I love his books. But you know, he needs to be stronger about this.
And there's a few people on kind of, there's a few people partially in the intellectual
doc web and otherwise who are big on reason, but not consistent enough and not full understanding
of what it means or what it implies. And then there's little old me. And it's me against the world,
in a sense, because I'm not only willing to accept, to articulate the case for reason,
but then what that implies. It implies freedom. It implies capitalism. It implies taking personal
responsibility over your own life. And there are other intellectual doc web people get to reason
and then, oh politics, you can be whatever. No, you can't. You can't be a socialist and for reason.
It doesn't actually, those are incompatible. And you can't be a determinist and for reason.
Reason and determinism don't go together. The whole point of reason is that it's an achievement.
It requires effort and requires engagement. It requires choice. So it is, it does feel like
a little old me because that's it. The allies I have are allies. I have allies among the
some libertarians over economics. I have some allies in the intellectual doc web, maybe over
reason, but none of them are allies in the full sense. So my allies are the other objectivists,
but we're just, they're not a lot of us. For people listening to this, for the few folks
kind of listening to this and thinking about the trajectory of their own life, I guess the takeaway
is, reason is a difficult project, but a project that's worthy of taking on.
Yeah. Difficulties, I don't know if difficult is the right word because difficult sounds like it's,
you know, I have to push this boulder up a hill. It's not difficult in that sense.
It's difficult in a sense that it requires energy and focus. It requires effort,
but it's immediately rewarding. It's fun to do and it rewards immediate, pretty quick, right?
It takes a while to undo all the garbage that you have, but we all have that I had that took me
years and years and years to get rid of certain concepts and certain emotions that I had that
didn't make any sense, but it takes a long time to fully integrate that. So I don't want it to
sound like it's a burden, like it's hard in that sense. It does require focus and energy.
And I don't want it to sound like a Dr. Spock. I don't want to, and I don't think I do because
I'm a pretty passionate guy, but I don't want it to appeal like, oh, just forget about emotions.
Emotions are how you experience the world. You want to have strong emotions. You want to live.
You want to experience life strongly and passionately. You just need to know that emotions are not
cognition. It's another realm. It's like, don't mix the realms. Think about outcomes and then
experience them. And sometimes your emotions won't coincide with what you think should be.
And that means there's no more integration to be done.
Yaron, as I told you offline, I've been a fan of yours for a long time. It's been,
I was a little starstruck early on, getting a little more comfortable now.
I highly recommend that people that haven't heard your work listen to it through the Yaron Brook
show. The times I've disagreed with something I've heard you say is usually a first step
on a journey of learning a lot more about that thing, about that viewpoint. And that's been
so fulfilling. It's been a gift, the passion. You talk about reason a lot, but the passion
radiates in a way that's just contagious and awe-inspiring. So thank you for everything
you've done for this world. It's truly an honor and a pleasure to talk to you.
Well, thank you. And my word is that if I've had an impact on you and people like you, wow.
I mean, that's amazing. When you wrote to me an email saying you've been a fan, I was blown away
because I had no idea and completely unexpected. And every few months I'd discover, hey,
I had an impact on this world and people that I would have never thought. So the only way to
change the world is to change your one mind at the time. And when you have an impact on a good
mind and a mind that cares about the world and a mind that goes out and does something about it,
then you get the exponential growth. So through you, I've impacted other people. And that's how
you get, that's how you ultimately change everything. And so in spite of everything, I'm
optimistic in a sense that I think that the progress we've made today is so universally
accepted, that scientific progress, that technological progress, it can't just vanish like it did when
Rome collapsed. And whether it's in the United States or some way, progress will continue,
the human project for human progress will continue. And I think these ideas, ideas of reason and
individualism will always be at the heart of it. And what we are doing is continuing the project
of the Enlightenment. And it's the project that will save the human race and allow it to throw
Elon Musk and for Jeff Bezos to reach the stars. Thank you for masterfully ending on a hopeful
note. You're on a pleasure and an honor. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this conversation with
Yaron Brooke. And thank you to our sponsors, Blinkist and AppiUse for reading through summaries
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or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman. And now let me leave you with some words from
Einrand. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of
the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish
in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach.
The world you desire can be one. It exists. It is real. It is possible. It is yours.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.