back to indexYaron Brook: Ayn Rand and the Philosophy of Objectivism | Lex Fridman Podcast #138
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The following is a conversation with Yaron Brook,
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one of the best known objectivist philosophers
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and thinkers in the world.
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Objectivism is the philosophical system developed by Ayn Rand
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that she first expressed in her fiction books,
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The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,
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and later in nonfiction essays and books.
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Yaron is the current chairman of the board
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at the Ayn Rand Institute, host of the Yaron Brook Show,
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and the coauthor of Free Market Revolution,
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Equal is Unfair, and several other books
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where he analyzes systems of government, human behavior,
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and the human condition from the perspective of objectivism.
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Quick mention of each sponsor,
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followed by some thoughts related to the episode.
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Blinkist, an app I use for reading
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through summaries of books.
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to protect my privacy on the internet.
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Please check out these sponsors in the description
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to get a discount and to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that I first read Atlas Shrugged
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and The Fountainhead early in college,
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along with many other literary and philosophical works
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from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, Locke, Foucault,
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Wittgenstein, and of course, all the great existentialists
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from Kierkegaard to Camus.
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I always had an open mind, curious to learn
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and explore the ideas of thinkers throughout history,
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no matter how mundane or radical
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or even dangerous they were considered to be.
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Ayn Rand was, and I think still is, a divisive figure.
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Some people love her, some people dislike
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or even dismiss her.
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I prefer to look past what some may consider
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to be the flaws of the person
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and consider with an open mind the ideas she presents
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and Jaron now describes and applies
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in his philosophical discussions.
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In general, I hope that you will be patient
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and understanding as I venture out across the space of ideas
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and the ever widening Overton window,
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pulling at the thread of curiosity,
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sometimes saying stupid things,
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but always striving to understand
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how we can better build a better world together.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
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review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
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follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon,
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or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
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And now, here's my conversation with Jaron Rook.
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Let me ask the biggest possible question first.
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What are the principles of a life well lived?
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I think it's to live with thought,
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that is to live a rational life, to think it through.
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I think so many people are in a sense zombies out there.
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They're alive, but they're not really alive
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because their mind is not focused,
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their mind is not focused on what do I need to do
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in order to live a great life?
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So too many people just go through the motions
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of living rather than really embrace life.
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So I think the secret to living a great life
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is to take it seriously.
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And what it means to take it seriously
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is to use the one tool that makes us human,
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the one tool that provides us with all the values
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that we have, our mind, our reason,
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and to use it, apply it to living.
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People apply it to their work,
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they apply it to their math problems,
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to science, to programming.
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But imagine if they used that same energy,
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that same focus, that same concentration
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to actually living life and choosing values
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that they should pursue,
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that would change the world,
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and it would change their lives.
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Yeah, actually, I wear this silly suit and tie.
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It symbolizes to me always,
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it makes me feel like I'm taking the moment really seriously.
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I think that's really, that's right.
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And each one of us has different ways
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to kind of condition our consciousness.
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I'm serious now, and for you, it's a suit and tie.
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It's a conditioning of your consciousness
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to now I'm focused, now I'm at work,
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now I'm doing my thing.
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And I think that's terrific,
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and I wish everybody took that.
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Look, I mean, it's a cliche, but we only live once.
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Every minute of your life, you're never gonna live again.
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This is really valuable.
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And when people don't have that deep respect
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for their own life, for their own time, for their own mind,
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and if they did, again, one could only imagine,
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look at how productive people are.
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Look at the amazing things they produce
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and they do in their work.
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And if they applied that to everything, wow.
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So you kind of talk about reason.
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Where does the kind of existentialist idea
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of experience maybe, fully experiencing all the moments
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versus fully thinking through?
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Is there an interesting line to separate the two?
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Why such an emphasis on reason for a life well lived
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versus just enjoy, like experience the moment?
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Well, because I think experience in a sense
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I'm not saying it's how we experience the life that we live.
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And yes, I'm all with the take time to value what you value,
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but I don't think that's the problem of people out there.
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I don't think the problem is they're not taking time
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to appreciate where they are and what they do.
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I think it's that they don't use their mind
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in this one respect, in planning their life,
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in thinking about how to live.
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So the focus is on reason is because
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it's our only source of knowledge.
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There's no other source of knowledge.
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We don't know anything that does not come
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from our senses and our mind,
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the integration of the evidence of our senses.
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Now we know stuff about ourselves
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and I think it's important to know oneself
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through introspection.
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And I consider that part of reasoning is to introspect.
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But I think reason is undervalued, which is funny to say,
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because it's our means of survival.
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It's how human beings survive.
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We cannot, see, this is why I disagree
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with so many scientists and people like Sam Harris.
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You mentioned Sam Harris before the show.
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We're not programmed to know how to hunt.
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We're not programmed to do agriculture.
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We're not programmed to build computers
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and build networks on which we can podcast
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All of that requires effort.
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It requires focus.
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It requires energy and it requires will.
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It requires somebody to will it.
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It requires somebody to choose it.
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And once you make that choice,
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you have to engage that choice means
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that you're choosing to engage your reason
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in discovery, in integration,
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and then in work to change the world in which we live.
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And human beings have to discover,
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figure out, solve the problem of hunting.
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Hunting, everybody thinks, oh, that's easy.
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I've seen the movie.
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But human beings had to figure out how to do it, right?
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You can't run down a bison and bite into it, right?
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You're not gonna catch it.
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You're not gonna, you have no fangs to bite into it.
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You have to build weapons.
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You have to build tools.
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You have to create traps.
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You have to have a strategy.
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All of that requires reason.
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So the most important thing that allows human beings
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to survive and to thrive in every value
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from the most simple to the most sophisticated,
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from the most material to, I believe, the most spiritual,
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requires thinking.
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So stopping and appreciating the moment
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is something that I think is relatively easy
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once you have a plan, once you've thought it through,
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once you know what your values are.
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There is a mistake people make.
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They attain their values and they don't take a moment
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to savor that and to appreciate that
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and to even pat themselves on the back that they did it.
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But that's not what's screwing up the world.
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What's screwing up the world
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is that people have the wrong values
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and they don't think about them
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and they don't really focus on them
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and they don't have a plan for their own life
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and how to live it.
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If we look at human nature,
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you're saying the fundamental big thing
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that we need to consider is our capacity,
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like a capability to reason.
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So to me, reason is this massive evolutionary achievement
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If you think about any other sophisticated animal,
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everything has to be coded.
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Everything has to be written in the hard way.
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It has to be there.
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And they have to have a solution for every outcome.
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And if there's no solution, the animal dies typically,
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or the animal suffers in some way.
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Human beings have this capacity to self program.
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They have this capacity.
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It's not a tabula rasa in the sense
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that there's nothing there.
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Obviously, we have a nature.
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Obviously, our minds, our brains
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are structured in a particular way.
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But given that, we have the ability
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to turn it on or turn it off.
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We have the ability to commit suicide,
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to reject our nature, to work against our interests,
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not to use the tool that evolution has provided us,
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which is this mind, which is reason.
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So that choice, that fundamental choice,
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you know, Hamlet says it, right, to be or not to be.
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But to be or not to be is to think or not to think,
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to engage or not to engage, to focus or not to focus.
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You know, in the morning when you get up,
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you kind of, you know, you're not really completely there.
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You're kind of out of focus and stuff.
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It requires an act of will to say,
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okay, I'm awake, I've got stuff to do.
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Some people never do that.
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Some people live in that haze,
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and they never engage that mind.
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And when you're sitting and try to solve
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a complex computer problem or math problem,
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you have to turn something on.
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You have to, in a sense, exert certain energy
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to focus on the problem to do it.
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And that is not determined in a sense
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that you have to focus.
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You choose to focus, and you could choose not to focus.
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And that choice is more powerful than any other,
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like, parts of our brain that we've borrowed from fish
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and from our evolutionary origins.
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Like this, whatever this crazy little leap in evolution is
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that allowed us to think is more powerful than anything else.
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So I think neuroscientists pretend they know a lot more
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about the brain than they really do.
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And that we know. Shots fired.
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And we don't know that much yet
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about how the brain functions and what's a fish
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and what, you know, all this stuff.
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So I think what exists there
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is a lot of potentialities.
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But the beauty of the human brain is it's potentialities
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that we have to manifest through our choices.
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It's there. It's sitting there.
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And, yes, there's certain things
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that are going to evoke certain senses, certain feelings.
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I'm not even saying emotions
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because I think emotions are too complex
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to have been programmed into our mind.
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But I don't think so.
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You know, there's this big issue of evolutionary psychology
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is huge right now and it's a big issue.
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You know, I find it to a large extent as way too early
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and in storytelling about expo storytelling about stuff.
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We still don't, you know, so for example,
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I would like to see if evolutionary psychology
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differentiate between things like inclinations,
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feelings, emotions, sensations, thoughts, concepts, ideas.
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What of those are programmed and what of those are developed
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and chosen and a product of reason?
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I think anything from emotion to abstract ideas is all chosen,
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is all a product of reason.
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And everything before that, we might have been programmed for.
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But the fact is so clearly a sensation is not a product of,
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you know, is something that we feel
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because that's how our biology works.
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So until we have these categories
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and until we can clearly specify what is what
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and where do they come from,
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the whole discussion in evolutionary psychology
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seems to be rambling.
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It doesn't seem to be scientific.
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So we have to define our terms, you know,
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which is the basis of science.
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You have to have some clear definitions
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about what we're talking about.
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When you ask them these questions,
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there's never really a coherent answer
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about what is it exactly.
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And everybody is afraid of the issue of free will.
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And I think to some extent, I mean, Harris has this,
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and I don't want to misrepresent anything Harris has
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because, you know, I'm a fan and I like a lot of his stuff.
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But on the one hand, he is obviously intellectually active
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and wants to change our minds.
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So he believes that we have some capacity to choose.
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On the other hand, he's undermining that capacity
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to choose by saying it's just determines
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you're gonna choose what you choose.
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You have no say in it, there's actually no you.
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So it's, you know, and that's to me completely unscientific.
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That's completely him, you know, pulling it out of nowhere.
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We all experienced the fact that we have an eye.
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That kind of certainty saying that we do not have
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that fundamental choice that reason provides
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is unfounded currently.
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Look, there's a sense in which it can never be contradicted
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because it's a product of your experience.
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It's not a product of your experience.
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You can experience it directly.
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So no science will ever prove that this table isn't here.
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I can see it, it's here, right?
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I know I have free will because I can introspect it.
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In a sense, I can see it.
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I can see myself engaging it and that is as valid
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as the evidence of my senses.
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Now I can't point at it so that you can see
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the same thing I'm seeing,
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but you can do the same thing in your own consciousness
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and you can identify the same thing.
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And to deny that in the name of science
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is to get things upside down.
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You start with that and that's the beginning of science.
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The beginning of science is the identification
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that I choose and that I can reason
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and now I need to figure out the mechanism,
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the rules of reasoning, the rules of logic.
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How does this work?
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And that's where science comes from.
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Of course, it's possible that science,
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like from my place of AI would be able to,
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if we were able to engineer consciousness or understand,
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I mean, it's very difficult
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because we're so far away from it now,
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but understand how the actual mechanism
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that consciousness emerges.
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And in fact, this table is not real,
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that we can determine that it,
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exactly how our mind constructs the reality
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that we perceive, then you can start to make interesting.
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But our mind doesn't construct the reality that we perceive.
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The reality we perceive is there.
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We perceive a reality that exists.
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Now, we perceive it in particular ways
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given the nature of our senses, right?
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A bat perceives this table differently,
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but it's still the same table
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with the same characteristics and the same identity.
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It's just a matter of, we use eyes,
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they use a radar system to,
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they use sound waves to perceive it,
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but it's still there.
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Existence exists whether we exist or not.
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And so you could create, I mean, I don't know how,
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and I don't know if it's possible,
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but let's say you could create a consciousness, right?
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And I suspect that to do that,
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you would have to use biology, not just electronics,
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but way outside my expertise.
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Because consciousness, as far as we know,
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is a phenomenon of life,
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and you would have to figure out how to create life
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before you created consciousness, I think.
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But if you did that, then that wouldn't change anything.
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All it would say is we have another conscious being.
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Cool, that's great.
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But it wouldn't change the nature of our consciousness.
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Our consciousness is what it is in respect.
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So that's very interesting, I think this is a good way
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to set the table for discussion of objectivism is,
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let me at least challenge a thought experiment,
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which is, I don't know if you're familiar
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with Donald Hoffman's work about reality.
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So his idea is that we're just,
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our perception is just an interface to reality.
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So Donald Hoffman is the guy you see on Vine?
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Yes, I've met Donald and I've seen his video.
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And look, Donald has not invented anything new.
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This goes back to ancient philosophy.
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Let me just state it in case people aren't familiar.
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I mean, it's a fascinating thought experiment to me,
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like of out of the box thinking, perhaps literally,
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is that there's a gap between the world as we perceive it
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and the world as it actually exists.
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And I think that's, for the philosophy,
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objectivism is a really important gap to close.
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So can you maybe at least try to entertain the idea
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that there is more to reality than our minds can perceive?
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Well, I don't understand what more means, right?
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Of course there's more to reality
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than what our senses perceive.
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That is, for example, I don't know,
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certain elements have radiation, right?
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Uranium has radiation.
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I can't perceive radiation.
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The beauty of human reason is I can,
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through experimentation,
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discover the phenomena of radiation,
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then actually measure radiation.
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And I don't worry about it.
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I can't perceive the world
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the way a bat perceives the world.
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And I might not be able to see certain things,
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but I can, we've created radar,
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so A, we understand how a bat perceives the world,
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and I can mimic it through a radar screen
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and create images like the bat,
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its consciousness somehow perceives it, right?
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So the beauty of human reason is our capacity
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to understand the world beyond
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what our senses give us directly.
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At the end, everything comes in through our senses,
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but we can understand things
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that our senses don't provide us.
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But what he's doing is he's doing something very different.
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He is saying what our senses provides us
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might have nothing to do with the reality out there.
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That is just a random, arbitrary, nonsensical statement.
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And he actually has a whole
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evolutionary explanation for it.
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He runs some simulations.
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The simulations seem, I mean,
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I'm not an expert on this field,
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but they seem silly to me.
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They don't seem to reflect.
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And look, all he's doing is taking
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Immanuel Kant's philosophy,
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which articulate exactly the same cause,
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and he's giving it a veneer of evolutionary ideas.
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I'm not an expert on evolution,
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and I'm not an expert on epistemology,
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which is what this is.
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So to me, as a semi layman,
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it doesn't make any sense.
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And, you know, I'm actually,
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you know, I have this Yaron Book Show.
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I don't know if I'm allowed to pitch it,
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but I've got this Yaron Book Show on YouTube.
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I'm a huge fan of the Yaron Book Show.
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I listen to it very often.
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As a small aside, the cool thing about reason,
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which you practice,
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is you have a systematic way of thinking
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through basically anything.
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And that's so fun to listen to.
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I mean, it's rare that I think there's flaws in your logic,
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but even then it's fun,
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because I'm like disagreeing with the screen.
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And it's great when somebody disagrees with me
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and they give good arguments,
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because that makes it challenging.
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You know, so one of the shows I want to do
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in the next few weeks is one of my philosophy,
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bring one of my philosophy friends to discuss the video
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that Hoffman, where he presents his theory,
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because it surprises me how seductive it is.
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And it seems to be so,
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first of all, completely counterintuitive,
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but because, you know, somehow we managed to cross the road
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and not get hit by the car.
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And if our senses did not provide us any information
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about what's actually going on in reality,
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how do we do that?
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And not to mention build computers,
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not to mention fly to the moon
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and actually land on the moon.
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And if reality is not giving us information about the moon,
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if our senses are not giving us information about the moon,
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how did we get there?
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You know, and where did we go?
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Maybe we didn't go anywhere.
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It's just, it's nonsensical to me.
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And it's a very bad place philosophically,
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because it basically says
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there is no objective standard for anything.
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There is no objective reality.
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You can come up with anything.
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You could argue anything.
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And there's no methodology, right?
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My, I believe that at the end of the day,
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what reason allows us to do
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is provides us with a methodology for truth.
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And at the end of the day, for every claim that I make,
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I should be able to boil it down to see,
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yeah, look, the evidence of the census is right then.
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Once you take that away, knowledge is gone
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and truth is gone.
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And that opens it up to, you know, complete disaster.
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So, you know, to me why it's compelling
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to at least entertain this idea,
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first of all, it shakes up the mind a little bit
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to force you to go back to first principles
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and, you know, ask the question, what do I really know?
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And the second part of that that I really enjoy
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is it's a reminder that we know very little
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to be a little bit more humble.
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So if reality doesn't exist at all,
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before you start thinking about it,
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I think it's a really nice wake up call to think,
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wait a minute, I don't really know much about this universe,
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I think something I'd like to ask you about
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in terms of reason, when you,
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you can become very confident
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in your ability to understand the world
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if you practice reason often.
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And I feel like it can lead you astray
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because you can start to think,
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it's, so I love psychology
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and psychologists have the certainty
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about understanding the human condition,
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which is undeserved.
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You know, you run a study with 50 people
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and you think you can understand
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the source of all these psychiatric disorders,
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all these kinds of things.
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That's similar kind of trouble
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I feel like you can get into
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when you overreach with reason.
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So I don't think there is such a thing
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as overreaching with reason,
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but there are bad applications of reason.
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There are bad uses of reason
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or the pretense of using reason.
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I think a lot of these psychological studies
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are pretense of using reason.
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And the psychologists have never really taken
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a serious stat class or a serious econometrics class.
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So they use statistics in weird ways
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that just don't make any sense.
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And that's a miss, that's not reason, right?
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That's just bad thinking, right?
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So I don't think you can do too much good thinking.
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And that's what reason is.
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It's good thinking.
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Now, the fact that you try to use reason
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does not guarantee you won't make mistakes.
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It doesn't guarantee you won't be wrong.
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It doesn't guarantee you won't go down a rabbit hole
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and completely get it wrong.
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But it does give you the only existing mechanism to fix it.
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Which is going back to reality,
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going back to facts, going back to reason.
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And getting out of the rabbit hole
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and getting back to reality.
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So I agree with you that it's interesting
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to think about these, what I consider crazy ideas
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because it, oh wait, what is my argument about them?
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If I don't really have a good argument about them,
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then do I know what I know?
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So in that sense, it's always nice to be challenged
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and pushed and oriented.
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You know, the nice thing about objectivism is
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everybody's doing that to me all the time, right?
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Because nobody agrees with me on anything.
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So I'm constantly being challenged,
link |
whether it's in, by Hoffman on metaphysics
link |
and epistemology, right?
link |
On the very foundations of analogy and ethics,
link |
everybody constantly, and in politics all the time.
link |
So I find that it's part of, you know,
link |
I prefer that everybody, there's a sense
link |
in which I prefer that everybody agreed with me, right?
link |
Because I think we'd live in a better world.
link |
But there's a sense in which that disagreement makes it,
link |
at least up to a point, makes it interesting
link |
and challenging and forces you to be able to rethink
link |
or to confirm your own thinking
link |
and to challenge that thinking.
link |
Can you try to do the impossible task
link |
and give a whirlwind introduction to Ayn Rand,
link |
the many sides of Ayn Rand?
link |
So Ayn Rand the human being, Ayn Rand the novelist,
link |
and Ayn Rand the philosopher.
link |
So who was Ayn Rand?
link |
Sure, so her life story is one that I think is fascinating
link |
but it also lends itself to this integration
link |
of all of these things.
link |
She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905
link |
to kind of a middle class family, Jewish family.
link |
They owned a pharmacy, her father owned a pharmacy.
link |
And, you know, she grew up, she grew up,
link |
she was a very, she knew what she wanted to do
link |
and what she wanted to be from a very young age.
link |
I think from the age of nine,
link |
she knew she wanted to be a writer.
link |
She wanted to write stories.
link |
That was the thing she wanted to do.
link |
And, you know, she focused her life after that
link |
on this goal of I wanna be a novelist, I wanna write.
link |
And the philosophy was incidental to that in a sense,
link |
at least until some point in her life.
link |
She witnessed the Russian Revolution,
link |
literally it happened outside.
link |
They lived in St. Petersburg
link |
where the first kind of demonstrations
link |
and of the revolution happened.
link |
So she witnessed it.
link |
She lived through it as a teenager,
link |
went to school under the Soviets.
link |
For a while, they were under kind of on the Black Sea
link |
where the opposition government was ruling
link |
and then they would go back and forth
link |
between the commies and the whites.
link |
But she experienced what communism was like.
link |
She saw the pharmacy being taken away from a family.
link |
She saw their apartment being taken away
link |
or other families being brought
link |
into the apartment they already lived in.
link |
And it was very clear given her nature,
link |
given her views, even at a very young age
link |
that she would not survive the system.
link |
So a lot of effort was put into how did she get out?
link |
And her family was really helpful in this.
link |
And she had a cousin in Chicago
link |
and she had been studying kind of film at the university and...
link |
This is in her 20s?
link |
This is in her 20s, early 20s.
link |
And Lenin, there was a small window
link |
where Lenin was allowing some people
link |
to leave under certain circumstances.
link |
And she managed to get out to go do research on film
link |
in the United States.
link |
Everybody knew, everybody who knew her
link |
knew she would never come back,
link |
that this was a one way ticket.
link |
And she got out, she made it to Chicago,
link |
spent a few weeks in Chicago, and then headed to Hollywood.
link |
She wanted to write scripts, that was the goal.
link |
Here's this short woman from Russia with a strong accent,
link |
learning English, showing up in Hollywood
link |
and I wanna be a script writer.
link |
In English, writing in English.
link |
And this is kind of one of these fairytale stories,
link |
but it's true, she shows up at the Cecil B. DeMille Studios.
link |
And she has a letter of introduction from her cousin
link |
in Chicago who owns a movie theater.
link |
And this is in the late 1920s.
link |
And she shows up there with this letter and they say,
link |
don't call us, we'll call you kind of thing.
link |
And she steps out and there's this massive convertible.
link |
And in the convertible is Cecil B. DeMille.
link |
And he's driving slowly past her
link |
right at the entrance of the studio.
link |
And she stares at him and he stops the car and he says,
link |
why are you staring at me?
link |
And she says, she tells him a story from Russia
link |
and I wanna make it in the movies,
link |
I wanna be a script writer one day.
link |
And he says, well, if you want that, get in the car.
link |
She gets in the car and he takes her to the back lot
link |
of his studio where they're filming The King of Kings,
link |
the story of Jesus.
link |
And he says, here's a pass for a week.
link |
If you wanna write for the movies,
link |
you better know how movies are made.
link |
And she basically spends a week in there.
link |
She spends more time there.
link |
She managed to get an extension.
link |
She lands up being an extra in the movie.
link |
So you can see Ayn Rand there is one of the masses
link |
when Jesus is walking by.
link |
She meets her future husband on the sets
link |
of The King of Kings.
link |
She lands up getting married,
link |
getting her American citizenship that way.
link |
And she lands up doing odds and ends jobs in Hollywood,
link |
living in a tiny little apartment,
link |
somehow making a living.
link |
Her husband was an actor.
link |
He was struggling actors were difficult times.
link |
And in the evenings, studying English,
link |
writing, writing, writing, writing,
link |
and studying and studying and studying.
link |
And she finally makes it by writing a play
link |
that is successful in LA and ultimately goes to Broadway.
link |
And her first novel is a novel called We The Living,
link |
which is the most autobiographical of all her novels.
link |
It's about a young woman in the Soviet Union.
link |
It's a powerful story, a very moving story,
link |
and probably, if not the best,
link |
one of the best portrayals of life under communism.
link |
So you would recommend the book?
link |
Definitely recommend We The Living.
link |
It's her first novel.
link |
She wrote it in the spring of 2000.
link |
First novel she wrote in the 30s.
link |
And it didn't go anywhere.
link |
Because if you think about the intelligentsia,
link |
the people who matter, the people who wrote book reviews,
link |
this is a time of Durante,
link |
who's the New York Times guy in Moscow,
link |
who's praising Stalin to the hills and the success.
link |
So the novel fails, but she's got a novel out.
link |
She writes a small novelette called Anthem.
link |
A lot of people have read that, and it's read
link |
It's kind of a dystopian novel,
link |
and it doesn't get published in the U.S.
link |
It gets published in the U.K.
link |
U.K. is very interested in dystopian novels.
link |
Animal Farm in 1984,
link |
84 is published a couple of years after, I think,
link |
There's reason to believe he read Anthem.
link |
And George Orwell read Animal Farm.
link |
Just a small aside, Animal Farm is probably top.
link |
I mean, it's weird to say,
link |
but I would say it's my favorite book.
link |
Have you seen this movie out now called Mr. Jones?
link |
Oh, you've got to see Mr. Jones.
link |
Sorry for my ignorance.
link |
No, no, it's a movie, and it hasn't got any publicity,
link |
which is tragic, because it's a really good movie.
link |
It's both brilliantly made.
link |
It's made by a Polish director.
link |
But it's in English.
link |
It's a true story,
link |
and George Orwell's Animal Farm is featured in it
link |
in the sense that during the story,
link |
George Orwell is writing Animal Farm,
link |
and the narrator is reading off sections of Animal Farm
link |
as the movie is progressing.
link |
And the movie is a true story
link |
about the first Western journalist to discover
link |
and to write about the famine in Ukraine.
link |
And so he goes to Moscow, and then he gets on a train,
link |
and he finds himself in Ukraine,
link |
and it's beautifully and horrifically made.
link |
So the horror of the famine is brilliantly conveyed.
link |
And it's a true story, so it's a very moving story,
link |
very powerful story, and just very well made movie.
link |
So it's tragic, in my view,
link |
that not more people are seeing it.
link |
I was actually recently just complaining
link |
that there's not enough content
link |
on the famine in the 30s of stuff.
link |
There's so much on Hitler.
link |
I love the reading.
link |
I'm reading, it's so long, it's been taking me forever,
link |
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
link |
Yeah, I love it, but.
link |
Well, I've got the book to compliment that,
link |
that you have to read.
link |
It's called The Ominous Parallels.
link |
It's Lennon Peacock, and it's The Ominous Parallels,
link |
and it's about the causes of the rise of Hitler,
link |
but a philosophical causes.
link |
So whereas The Rise and Fall is more of a kind of,
link |
the existential kind of what happened,
link |
but really delving into the intellectual currents
link |
that led to the rise of Hitler, highly recommend that.
link |
Basically suggesting how it might rise another.
link |
That's The Ominous Parallels,
link |
so the parallel he draws is to the United States,
link |
and he says those same intellectual forces
link |
are rising in the United States,
link |
and this was published, I think, in, published in 82.
link |
It was published in 82.
link |
So it was published a long time ago,
link |
and yet you look around us,
link |
and it's unbelievably predictive, sadly,
link |
about the state of the world.
link |
So I haven't finished Iron Man's story.
link |
I don't know if you want me to finish it.
link |
No, no, no, but on that point, I'll have to,
link |
let's please return to it, but let's now,
link |
for now, let's talk.
link |
Let me also say, just because,
link |
I don't want to forget about Mr. Jones,
link |
it is true, the point you made,
link |
there are tons of movies that are anti fascist,
link |
anti Nazi, and that's good,
link |
but there are way too few movies that are anti communist,
link |
just almost not, and it's very interesting,
link |
and if you remind me later, I'll tell you a story about that.
link |
But so she publishes Anthem, and then she starts,
link |
and she's doing okay in Hollywood,
link |
and she's doing okay with the play,
link |
and then she starts on the book The Fountainhead,
link |
and she writes The Fountainhead, and it comes out,
link |
she finishes it in 1945,
link |
and she sends it to publishers,
link |
and publisher after publisher after publisher turn it down,
link |
and it takes 12 publishers before this editor reads it,
link |
and says, I want to publish this book,
link |
and he basically tells his bosses,
link |
if you don't publish this book, I'm leaving, right?
link |
And they don't really believe in the book,
link |
so they publish just a few copies,
link |
they don't do a mat lot,
link |
and the book becomes a bestseller from word of mouth,
link |
and they land up having to publish more and more and more,
link |
and she's basically gone from this immigrant
link |
who comes here with very little command of English,
link |
and to all kinds of odds and ends jobs in Hollywood,
link |
to writing one of the seminal, I think, American books.
link |
She is an American author.
link |
I mean, if you read The Fountainhead, it's not Russian.
link |
This is not Dostoevsky.
link |
It feels like a symbol of what America is
link |
in the 20th century, and I mean, probably, maybe you can,
link |
so there's a famous kind of sexual rape scene in there.
link |
Is that like a lesson you wanna throw in
link |
some controversial stuff
link |
to make your philosophical books work out?
link |
I mean, why was it so popular?
link |
Do you have a sense?
link |
Well, because I think it illustrated,
link |
first of all, because I think the characters are fantastic.
link |
It's got a real hero, and I think the whole book
link |
is basically illustrating this massive conflict
link |
that I think went on in America then, is going on today,
link |
and it goes on on a big scale, politics,
link |
all the way down to the scale
link |
of the choices you make in your life.
link |
And the issue is individualism versus collectivism.
link |
Should you live for yourself?
link |
Should you live for your values?
link |
Should you pursue your passions?
link |
Or should you do what your mother tells you?
link |
Should you follow your mother's passions?
link |
And it's very, very much a book about individuals,
link |
and people relate to that.
link |
But it obviously has this massive implications
link |
to the world outside,
link |
and at the time of collectivism just having been defeated,
link |
communism, well, fascism,
link |
and the United States representing individualism
link |
as defeated collectivism.
link |
But where collectivist ideas are still popular
link |
in the form of socialism and communism.
link |
And for the individual, there's constant struggle
link |
between what people tell me to do,
link |
what society tells me to do,
link |
what my mother tells me to do,
link |
and what I think I should do.
link |
I think it's unbelievably appealing,
link |
particularly to young people
link |
who's trying to figure out what they wanna do in life,
link |
trying to figure out what's important in life.
link |
It had this enormous appeal, it's romantic,
link |
it's bigger than life, the characters are big heroes.
link |
It's very American in that sense.
link |
It's about individualism,
link |
it's about the triumph of individualism.
link |
And so I think that's what related,
link |
and it had this big romantic element from the,
link |
I mean, when I use romantic,
link |
I use it kind of in the sense of a movement in art.
link |
But it also has this romantic element
link |
in the sense of a relationship between a man and woman
link |
who's, that's very intriguing.
link |
It's not only that there's a,
link |
I would say almost rape scene, right?
link |
I would say, but it's also that this woman
link |
is hard to understand.
link |
I mean, I've read it more than once,
link |
and I still can't quite figure out Dominique, right?
link |
Because she loves him and she wants to destroy him
link |
and she marries other people.
link |
I mean, think about that too.
link |
Here she's writing a book in the 1940s.
link |
There's lots of sex.
link |
There's a woman who marries more than one person,
link |
has having sex with more than one person,
link |
very unconventional.
link |
She's having married, she's having sex with work
link |
even though she's not married to work.
link |
And it's very jarring to people.
link |
It's very unexpected, but it's also a book of its time.
link |
It's about individuals pursuing their passion,
link |
pursuing their life and not caring about convention
link |
and what people think, but doing what they think is right.
link |
And so I think it's,
link |
I encourage everybody to read this, obviously.
link |
So that was, was that the first time
link |
she articulated something that sounded like a philosophy
link |
I mean, the philosophy's there in We The Living, right?
link |
Because at the end of the day, the woman is,
link |
the hero of We The Living is this individualist
link |
stuck in Soviet Union.
link |
So she's struggling with these things.
link |
So the theme is there already.
link |
It's not as fleshed out.
link |
It's not as articulated philosophically.
link |
And it's certainly then Anthem, which is a dystopian novel
link |
where this dystopia in the future has a,
link |
there's no I, everything is we.
link |
And it's about one guy who breaks out of that.
link |
I don't want to give it away, but breaks out of that.
link |
So these themes are running and then we have,
link |
and they've been published,
link |
some of the early Ayn Rand stories that she was writing
link |
in preparation for writing her novel,
link |
stories she was writing when she first came to America.
link |
And you can see these same philosophical elements,
link |
even in the male, female relationships and the passion
link |
and the, you know, in the conflict,
link |
you see them even in those early pieces.
link |
And she's just developing them.
link |
It's same philosophically,
link |
she's developing her philosophy with her literature.
link |
And of course, after The Fountainhead,
link |
she starts on what turns out to be her Magnus Opus,
link |
which is Atlas Shrugged,
link |
which takes her 12 years to publish.
link |
By the time, of course, she brings that out,
link |
every publisher in New York wants to publish it
link |
because The Fountainhead has been such a huge success.
link |
They don't quite understand it.
link |
They don't know what to do with Atlas Shrugged,
link |
but they're eager to get it out there.
link |
And indeed it, when it's published,
link |
it becomes an instant bestseller.
link |
And the thing about the,
link |
particularly The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,
link |
but true of even Anthem and We the Living,
link |
she is one of the only dead authors
link |
that sell more after they've died
link |
than when they were still alive.
link |
Now, that's true maybe in music,
link |
we listen to more Beethoven than when he was alive,
link |
but it's not true typically of novelists.
link |
And yet here we are,
link |
was it 50, 60 years after,
link |
63 years after the publication of Atlas Shrugged,
link |
and it sells probably more today than it sold
link |
when it was a bestseller when it first came out.
link |
Is it true that it's like one of the most sold books
link |
I've heard this kind of statement.
link |
Any Tom Clancy book comes out,
link |
sells more than Atlas Shrugged.
link |
But I've read, I've heard statements like this.
link |
So there was a very,
link |
and I shouldn't say this, but it's the truth,
link |
a very unscientific study done by the Smithsonian Institute,
link |
probably in the early 90s,
link |
that basically surveyed CEOs and asked them,
link |
what was the most influential book on you?
link |
And Atlas Shrugged came out as number two,
link |
the second most influential book on CEOs in the country.
link |
But there's so many flaws in the study.
link |
One was, you want to guess what the number one book?
link |
But the Bible was like,
link |
so maybe they surveyed 100 people.
link |
I don't know what the exact numbers were,
link |
but let's say it's 100 people,
link |
and 60 said the Bible and 10 said Atlas Shrugged,
link |
and there were a bunch of books over there.
link |
That's, again, the psychology discussion
link |
what we're having right now.
link |
Exactly, well, and it's one thing I've learned,
link |
and maybe COVID has taught me,
link |
and there are very few people
link |
who know how to do statistics,
link |
and almost nobody knows how to think probabilistically,
link |
that is, think in terms of probabilities,
link |
that it is a skill, it's a hard skill,
link |
and everybody thinks they know it.
link |
So I see doctors thinking they're statisticians
link |
and giving whole analyses of the data on COVID,
link |
and they don't have a clue what they're talking about,
link |
not because they're not good doctors,
link |
but because they're not good statisticians.
link |
People think that they have one skill,
link |
and therefore it translates immediately into another skill,
link |
and it's just not true.
link |
So I've been astounded at how bad people are at that.
link |
For people who haven't read any of the books
link |
that we were just discussing,
link |
what would you recommend,
link |
what book would you recommend they read,
link |
and maybe also just elaborate
link |
what mindset should they enter
link |
the reading of that book with?
link |
So I would recommend everybody
link |
read Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
link |
So it would depend on where you are in life, right?
link |
So it depends on who you are and what you are.
link |
So Fountainhead is a more personal story.
link |
For many people, it's their favorite,
link |
and for many people, it was their first book,
link |
and they wouldn't replace that, right?
link |
Atlas Shrugged is a...
link |
It's about the world.
link |
It's about what impacts the world,
link |
how the world functions,
link |
how it's a bigger book in the sense of the scope.
link |
If you're interested in politics
link |
and you're interested in the world,
link |
read Atlas Shrugged first.
link |
If you're mainly focused on your life, your career,
link |
what you wanna do with yourself, start with Fountainhead.
link |
I still think you should read both
link |
because I think they are...
link |
I mean, to me, they were life altering,
link |
and to many, many people, they're life altering,
link |
and you should go into reading them with an open mind,
link |
I'd say, and with a...
link |
Put aside everything you've heard about Ayn Rand.
link |
Even if it's true, just put it aside.
link |
Even what I just said about Ayn Rand, put it aside.
link |
Just read the book as a book,
link |
and let it move you and let your thoughts,
link |
let it shape how you think,
link |
and you'll either have a response to it or you won't,
link |
but I think most people have a very strong response to it,
link |
and then the question is,
link |
are they willing to respond to the philosophy?
link |
Are they willing to integrate the philosophy?
link |
Are they willing to think through the philosophy or not?
link |
Because I know a lot of people
link |
who completely disagree with the philosophy, right?
link |
Here in Hollywood, right?
link |
Lots of people here in Hollywood,
link |
love The Fountainhead.
link |
Oliver Stone, who is, I think, a avowed Marxist, right?
link |
I think he's admitted to being a Marxist, he is.
link |
His movies certainly reflect a Marxist theme,
link |
is a huge fan of The Fountainhead,
link |
and is actually his dream project, he has said in public,
link |
his dream project is to make The Fountainhead.
link |
Now, he would completely change it, as movie directors do,
link |
and he's actually outlined what his script would look like,
link |
and it would be a disaster for the ideas of The Fountainhead,
link |
but he loves the story,
link |
because to him, the story is about artistic integrity.
link |
And that's what he catches on.
link |
And what he hates about the story is the individualism.
link |
And I think that his movie ends
link |
with Howard Rourke joining some kind of commune
link |
of architects that do it for the love
link |
and don't do it for the money.
link |
But so, yeah, so he can connect with you
link |
without the philosophy,
link |
and before we get into the philosophy,
link |
staying on Ayn Rand,
link |
I'll tell you sort of my own personal experience,
link |
and I think it's one that people share.
link |
I've experienced this with two people, Ayn Rand and Nietzsche.
link |
When I brought up Ayn Rand when I was in my early 20s,
link |
the number of eye rolls I got from sort of, you know,
link |
like advisors and so on, that of dismissal,
link |
I've seen that later in life about more specific concepts
link |
in artificial intelligence and technical,
link |
where people decide that this is a set of ideas
link |
that are acceptable and these sets of ideas are not.
link |
And they dismissed Ayn Rand
link |
without giving me any justification
link |
of why they dismissed her,
link |
except, oh, that's something you're into
link |
when you're 19 or 20.
link |
That's the same thing people say about Nietzsche.
link |
Well, that's just something you do when you're in college
link |
and you take an intro to philosophy course.
link |
So, and I've never really heard anybody cleanly articulate
link |
their opposition to Ayn Rand,
link |
in my own private little circles and so on.
link |
Maybe one question I just wanna ask is,
link |
why is there such a opposition to Ayn Rand?
link |
And maybe another way to ask the same thing is,
link |
what's misunderstood about Ayn Rand?
link |
So, we haven't talked about the philosophy,
link |
so it's harder to answer right now.
link |
We can return to it if you think
link |
that's the right way to go.
link |
Well, let me give a broad answer
link |
and then we'll do the philosophy
link |
and then we'll return to it,
link |
because I think it's important to know
link |
something about her ideas.
link |
She, I think her philosophy challenges everything.
link |
It really does, it shakes up the world.
link |
It challenges so many of our preconceptions.
link |
It challenges so many of the things
link |
that people take for granted as truth.
link |
From religion to morality to politics
link |
to almost everything,
link |
there's never quite been a thinker like her
link |
in the sense of really challenging everything
link |
and doing it systematically
link |
and having a complete philosophy
link |
that is a challenge to everything that has come before her.
link |
Now, I'm not saying they're on threads that connect,
link |
In politics, there might be a thread
link |
and in morality, there might be a thread,
link |
but on everything, there's just never been like it.
link |
And people are afraid of that
link |
because it challenges them to the core.
link |
She's basically telling you to rethink almost everything.
link |
And that is that people reject.
link |
The other thing that it does,
link |
and this goes to this point about,
link |
oh yeah, that's what you do when you're 14, 15, right?
link |
She points out to them that they've lost something.
link |
They've lost their idealism.
link |
They've lost the youthful idealism.
link |
What makes youthfulness meaningful
link |
other than we're in better physical shape,
link |
starting to feel, because I'm getting older.
link |
sometime in the teen years, right?
link |
There's something that happens to human consciousness.
link |
We almost awakened and knew, right?
link |
We suddenly discovered that we can think for ourselves.
link |
We suddenly discovered that not everything our parents
link |
and our teachers tell us is true.
link |
We suddenly discovered that this tool, our minds,
link |
is suddenly available to us to discover the world
link |
and to discover truth.
link |
And it is a time of idealism.
link |
It's a time of, whoa, I want to, you know,
link |
the better teenagers, I want to know about the world.
link |
I want to go out there.
link |
I don't believe my parents.
link |
I don't believe my teachers.
link |
And this is healthy.
link |
This is fantastic.
link |
And I want to go out there and experiment.
link |
And that gets us into trouble, right?
link |
We do stupid things when we're teenagers.
link |
Because we're experimenting.
link |
It's the experiential part of it, right?
link |
We want to go and experience life.
link |
But we're learning.
link |
It's part of the learning process.
link |
And we become risk takers because we want to experience.
link |
But the risk is something we need to learn
link |
because we need to learn where the boundaries are.
link |
And one of the damages that helicopter parents do
link |
is they prevent us from taking those risks
link |
so we don't learn about the world
link |
and we don't learn about where the boundaries are.
link |
So the teenage years are these years of wonder.
link |
They're depressing when you're in them
link |
for a variety of reasons,
link |
which I think primarily have to do with the culture,
link |
but also with oneself.
link |
But they are exciting, the periods of discovery.
link |
And people get excited about ideas
link |
and good ideas, bad ideas, all kinds of ideas.
link |
And then what happens?
link |
Whether that happens in college
link |
where we're taught that nothing exists and nothing matters
link |
and stop being an idealist, be a cynic, be whatever.
link |
Or whether it happens when we get married and get a job
link |
and have kids and are too busy
link |
and can't think about our ideals and forget
link |
and just get into the norm of conventional life
link |
or whether it's because a mother pesters us
link |
to get married and have kids
link |
and do all the things that she wanted us to do.
link |
We give up on those ideals.
link |
And there's a sense in which Ayn Rand reminds them
link |
that they gave up.
link |
That's beautifully, that's so beautifully put and so true.
link |
It's, it's worth pausing on,
link |
that this dismissal,
link |
people forget the beauty of that curiosity.
link |
That's true in the scientific field too,
link |
is that youthful joy of like everything is possible
link |
and we can understand it with the tools of our mind.
link |
And that's what it's all about.
link |
That's what Ayn Rand's ideas
link |
at the end of the day all boil down to,
link |
is that confidence and that passion
link |
and that curiosity and that interest.
link |
And if you think about what academia does
link |
to so many of us, right?
link |
We go into academia and we're excited about,
link |
we're gonna learn stuff.
link |
We're gonna discover things.
link |
And then they stick you into sub sub field
link |
and examining some minutia
link |
that's insignificant and unimportant.
link |
And to get published, you have to be conventional.
link |
You have to do what everybody else does.
link |
And then there's the tenure process of seven years
link |
where they put you through this torture to write papers
link |
that fit into a certain mold.
link |
And by the time you're done,
link |
you're in your mid thirties and you've done nothing.
link |
You discovered nothing.
link |
You're all in this minutia in this stuff
link |
and it's destructive.
link |
And where's holding onto that passion,
link |
holding onto that knowledge and that confidence is hard.
link |
And when people do away with it, they become cynical
link |
and they become part of the system
link |
and they inflict the same pain on the next guy
link |
that they suffered because that's part of how it works.
link |
Yeah, this happens in artificial intelligence.
link |
This happens when like a young person shows up
link |
and with like fire in their eyes and they say,
link |
I want to understand the nature of intelligence.
link |
And everybody rolls their eyes.
link |
Well, for these same reasons,
link |
because they've spent so many years
link |
on the very specific set of questions
link |
that kind of they compete over and they write papers over
link |
and they have conferences about.
link |
And it's true that incremental research
link |
is the way you make progress answering the question
link |
of what is intelligence exceptionally difficult.
link |
But when you mock it, you actually destroy the realities.
link |
When we look like centuries from now,
link |
we'll look back at this time
link |
for this particular field of artificial intelligence,
link |
it will be the people who will be remembered,
link |
will be the people who've asked the question
link |
and made it their life journey of what is intelligence
link |
and actually had the chance to succeed.
link |
Most will fail asking that question,
link |
but the ones that like had a chance of succeeding
link |
and had that throughout their whole life.
link |
And I suppose the same is true for philosophy.
link |
It's in every field.
link |
It's asking the big questions and staying curious
link |
and staying passionate and staying excited
link |
and accepting failure, right?
link |
Accepting that you're not going to get it first time.
link |
You're not going to get the whole thing.
link |
But, and sometimes you have to do the minutia work
link |
and I'm not here to say nobody should specialize
link |
and you shouldn't do the minutia, you have to do that.
link |
But there has to be a way to do that work
link |
and keep the passion and keep it all integrated.
link |
That's another thing.
link |
I mean, we don't live in a culture that integrates, right?
link |
We live in a culture that is all about this minutia
link |
and not, and medicine is another field
link |
where you specialize in the kidney.
link |
I mean, the kidney's connected to other things.
link |
You've got to, and we don't have a holistic view
link |
of these things and I'm sure in artificial intelligence,
link |
you're not going to make the big leaps forward
link |
without a holistic view of what it is
link |
you're trying to achieve.
link |
And maybe that's the question of what is intelligence?
link |
But that's the kind of questions you have to ask
link |
to make big leaps forward, to really move the field
link |
in a positive direction.
link |
And it's the people who can think that way,
link |
who move fields and move technology,
link |
who move anything, anything is, everything is like.
link |
But just like you said, it's painful
link |
because underlying that kind of questioning is,
link |
well, maybe the work I've done for the past 20 years
link |
was a dead end and you have to kind of face that.
link |
Even just, it might not be true,
link |
but even just facing that reality is just,
link |
it's a painful feeling.
link |
Absolutely, but it's, that's part of the reason
link |
why it's important to enjoy the work that you do.
link |
So that even if it doesn't completely work out,
link |
at least you enjoy the process, right?
link |
It was not a waste because you enjoyed the process.
link |
And if you learn, as any entrepreneur knows this, right,
link |
and if you learn from the waste of time,
link |
from the errors, from the mistakes,
link |
then you can build on them and make things even better.
link |
Right, and so the next 20 years are a massive success.
link |
Can we, another impossible task,
link |
so you did wonderfully on talking about Ayn Rand,
link |
the other impossible task of giving a whirlwind overview
link |
of the philosophy of objectivism,
link |
the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
link |
Yeah, so luckily she did it in an essay.
link |
She talks about doing a philosophy on one foot.
link |
But let me integrate it with the literature
link |
and with her life a little bit.
link |
She wanted to be a writer, but her goal,
link |
she had a particular goal in her writing.
link |
She was an idealist, right?
link |
She wanted to portray the ideal man.
link |
So one of the things you do when you want to do something
link |
is what is an ideal man?
link |
You have to ask that question.
link |
What does that mean?
link |
You might have a sense of it.
link |
You might have some glimpses of it
link |
in other people's literature, but what is it?
link |
So she starts reading philosophy to try to figure out
link |
what do philosophers say about the ideal man?
link |
And what she finds horrifies her
link |
in terms of the view of most philosophers of man.
link |
And she's attracted, certainly when she's young,
link |
to Nietzsche, because Nietzsche at least has a vision
link |
of grandeur for man, even though his philosophy
link |
is very flawed and has other problems
link |
and contradicts man in many ways.
link |
But at least he has that vision of what is possible to man.
link |
And she's attracted to that romantic vision,
link |
that idealistic vision.
link |
So she discovers in writing,
link |
and particularly in writing Atlas Shrugged,
link |
but even in the Fountainhead,
link |
that she's gonna have to develop her own philosophy.
link |
She's gonna have to discover what she can do
link |
and she's gonna have to discover these ideas for herself,
link |
because they're not fully articulated anywhere else.
link |
The glimpses again of it in Aristotle, in Nietzsche,
link |
but they're not fully fleshed out.
link |
So to a large extent, she develops a philosophy
link |
for a very practical purpose, to write,
link |
to write a novel about the ideal man.
link |
And Atlas Shrugged is the manifestation of that.
link |
By the way, sorry to interrupt, as a little aside,
link |
she does, when you say man, you mean human.
link |
And because we'll bring this up often,
link |
she does, maybe you can elaborate
link |
of how she specifically uses man and he in the work.
link |
We live in a time now of gender and so on.
link |
Well, she did that in the sense that everybody did it
link |
during her period of time, right?
link |
It's only in modern times where we do he slash she, right?
link |
Historically, when you said he, you meant a human being,
link |
unless the particular context implied that it was a...
link |
But in Ayn Rand's case, in this case, in this one sentence,
link |
she probably meant man.
link |
Not that, because she viewed that there are differences
link |
between men and women, we're not the same,
link |
which I know comes at a shock to many people.
link |
She's working on a character.
link |
She was working on a particular vision, right?
link |
She considered herself a man worshiper.
link |
And a man, not human being, a male.
link |
She worshiped manhood, if you will, the hero in man.
link |
And she wanted to fully understand what that was.
link |
Now, it has massive implications for ideal woman.
link |
And I think she does portray the ideal woman
link |
in Atlas Shrugged, in the character of Dagny.
link |
But her goal is, I think her selfish goal
link |
for what she wanted to get out of the novel
link |
is that excitement, partially sexual,
link |
about seeing your ideal manifest in reality
link |
of what you perceive as that which you would be attracted to
link |
fully, intellectually, physically, sexually,
link |
in every aspect of your life.
link |
That's what she's trying to bring into it.
link |
So there was no ambiguity of gender, so there was a masculinity
link |
and a femininity in her work.
link |
And if you read the novels, you see that.
link |
Now, remember, this is in the context of, in Atlas Shrugged,
link |
she is portraying a woman who runs a railroad,
link |
the most masculine of all jobs you can imagine, right?
link |
Running a railroad, better than any man can run it.
link |
And achieving huge success,
link |
better than any other man out there.
link |
But, but for her, even Dagny needs somebody to,
link |
needs a man, in some sense, to look up to.
link |
And that's the character whose name I won't mention
link |
because it gives away too much of the plot.
link |
But there has to be that.
link |
I like how you do that.
link |
You're not, a lot of practice, a lot of practice.
link |
Nothing, brilliant.
link |
Because you convey all the important things
link |
without giving away plot lines.
link |
So she's, so she's very much,
link |
she, she described herself once as a male chauvinist.
link |
She very, she likes the idea of a man opening a door for her.
link |
But more metaphysically, she identifies something
link |
in the difference between the way a man relates to a woman
link |
and a woman relates to a man.
link |
It's not the same.
link |
And let's not take too far of a tangent,
link |
but I just, as a side comment, I, to me, she represented,
link |
she was a feminist to me.
link |
Perhaps there's a, perhaps technically,
link |
philosophy, you disagree with that, whatever.
link |
But the, you know, that to me represented strong,
link |
like she had some of the strongest female characters
link |
in the history of literature.
link |
Again, this is, this is a woman running a railroad in 1957.
link |
And not just a woman running a railroad,
link |
and this is true of the Fountainhead as well.
link |
A woman who is sexually, in a sense, assertive,
link |
This is, this is not a woman who, you know,
link |
this is a woman who, who, who embraces her sexuality.
link |
And, you know, sex is important in life.
link |
This is why it keeps coming up, right?
link |
It's, it was important to Ayn Rand.
link |
It was, it's important in the novels.
link |
It's important in life.
link |
And for her, one's attitude towards sex
link |
is a reflection of one's attitude towards life.
link |
And it, you know, and what attitude towards pleasure,
link |
which is an important part of life.
link |
And she thought that was an incredibly important thing.
link |
And so she has these assertive, powerful, sexual women
link |
who live their lives on their terms 100%,
link |
who seek a man to look up to.
link |
It's not, it is psychologically complex.
link |
It's more psychology than philosophy, right?
link |
It's psychologically complex and, you know,
link |
not my area of expertise, but this is,
link |
there's something in, she would argue,
link |
there's something fundamentally different
link |
about a male and a woman, about a male and female,
link |
psychologically in their attitude towards one another.
link |
Yeah, but as a side note, I say that,
link |
I would say that, I don't know philosophically
link |
if her ideas about gender are interesting.
link |
I think her other philosophical ideas
link |
are much more interesting.
link |
But reading wise, like the stories it created,
link |
the tension it created, that was pretty powerful.
link |
I mean, that was, that's pretty powerful stuff.
link |
I'll speculate that the reason it's so powerful
link |
is because it reflects something in reality.
link |
Yeah, that's true.
link |
There's a thread that at least.
link |
And look, it's really important to say,
link |
I think she was the first feminist in a sense.
link |
I think in a sense, the feminists have
link |
promoted feminism into something that it shouldn't be.
link |
But in the sense of men and women are capable,
link |
she was the first one who really put that
link |
into a novel and showed it.
link |
To me, as a boy, when I was reading Alice Shrugged,
link |
I think I read that before Fountainhead,
link |
that was one of the early introductions,
link |
at least of an American woman,
link |
I had examples of my own life of Russian women,
link |
but of like a badass lady.
link |
Like I admire, like I love engineering.
link |
I had loved that she could, you know,
link |
here's a lady that's running the show.
link |
So that at least to me was an example
link |
of a really strong woman, but objectivism.
link |
So, and so she developed it for a novel.
link |
She spent the latter part of her life
link |
after the publication of Alice Shrugged
link |
really articulating her philosophy.
link |
So that's what she did.
link |
She applied it to politics, to life, to gender,
link |
to all these issues from 1957 until she died in 1982.
link |
So the objectivism was born
link |
out of the later parts of Alice Shrugged.
link |
It was there all the time,
link |
but it was fleshed out during the latter parts
link |
of Alice Shrugged and then articulated
link |
for the next 20 years.
link |
So what is objectivism?
link |
So objectivism, so there are five branches in philosophy.
link |
And so I'm gonna just go through the branches.
link |
She starts with, you start with metaphysics,
link |
the nature of reality.
link |
And objectivism argues that reality is what it is.
link |
It's kind of goes Hawkins back to Aristotle,
link |
law of identity, A is A.
link |
You can wish it to be B,
link |
but wishes do not make something real.
link |
Reality is what it is and it is the primary.
link |
And it's not manipulated, directed by consciousness.
link |
Consciousness is there to observe,
link |
to give us information about reality.
link |
That is the purpose of consciousness.
link |
That is the nature of it.
link |
So in metaphysics, existence exists.
link |
The law of identity, the law of causality,
link |
things act based on their nature,
link |
not randomly, not arbitrarily, but based on their nature.
link |
And then we have the tool to know reality.
link |
This is epistemology, the theory of knowledge.
link |
A tool to know reality is reason.
link |
It's our senses and our capacity
link |
to integrate the information we get from our senses
link |
and to integrate it into new knowledge
link |
and to conceptualize it.
link |
And that is uniquely human.
link |
We don't know the truth from revelation.
link |
We don't know truth from our emotions.
link |
Our emotions are interesting.
link |
Our emotions tell us something about ourselves,
link |
but our emotions are not tools of cognition.
link |
They don't tell us the truth about what's out there,
link |
about what's in reality.
link |
So reason is our means of knowledge
link |
and therefore reason is our means of survival.
link |
Only individuals reason,
link |
just in the same way that only individuals can eat.
link |
We don't have a collective stomach.
link |
Nobody can eat for me and therefore nobody can think for me.
link |
We don't have a collective mind.
link |
There's no collective consciousness.
link |
It's bizarre that people talk about
link |
these collectivized aspects of the mind.
link |
They don't talk about collective feet
link |
and collective stomachs and collective things.
link |
But so we all think for ourselves
link |
and it is our fundamental basic responsibility
link |
to live our lives, to live, to choose.
link |
Once we choose to live, to live our lives
link |
to the best of our ability.
link |
So in morality, she is an egoist.
link |
She believes that the purpose of morality
link |
is to provide you with a code of values and virtues
link |
to guide your life for the purpose of your own success,
link |
your own survival, your own thriving, your own happiness.
link |
Happiness is the moral purpose of your life.
link |
The purpose of morality is to guide you towards a happy life.
link |
Your own happiness.
link |
Your own happiness, absolutely.
link |
Your own happiness.
link |
So she rejects the idea
link |
that you should live other people.
link |
That you should live for the purpose
link |
of other people's happiness.
link |
Your purpose is not to make them happier,
link |
to make them anything.
link |
Your purpose is your own happiness.
link |
But she also rejects the idea
link |
that you could argue maybe the Nietzschean idea
link |
of you should use other people for your own purposes, right?
link |
So every person is an end in himself.
link |
Every person's moral responsibility is their own happiness.
link |
And you shouldn't use other people for your own,
link |
shouldn't exploit other people for your own happiness,
link |
and you shouldn't allow yourself
link |
to be exploited for other people.
link |
Every individual is responsible for themselves.
link |
And what is it that allows us to be happy?
link |
What is it that facilitates human flourishing,
link |
human success, human survival?
link |
Well, it's the use of our minds, right?
link |
It goes back to reason.
link |
And what does reason require in order to be successful,
link |
in order to work effectively?
link |
It requires freedom.
link |
So the enemy of reason, the enemy of reason is force.
link |
The enemy of reason is coercion.
link |
The enemy of reason is authority, right?
link |
The Catholic church doing what they did to Galileo, right?
link |
That restricts Galileo's thinking, right?
link |
When he's in house arrest,
link |
is he gonna come up with a new theory?
link |
Is he gonna discover new truths?
link |
No, the punishment is too, you know, it's too dangerous.
link |
So force, coercion are enemies of reason.
link |
And what reason needs is to be free,
link |
to think, to discover, to innovate,
link |
to break out of convention.
link |
So we need to create an environment
link |
in which individuals are free to reason, free to think.
link |
And to do that, we come up with a concept,
link |
historically we've come up with a concept
link |
of individual rights.
link |
Individual rights define the scope of,
link |
define the fact that we should be left alone,
link |
free to pursue our values, using our reason,
link |
Free of coercion, force, authority.
link |
And that the job of government
link |
is to make sure that we are free.
link |
The whole point of government,
link |
the whole point of when we come in a social context,
link |
the whole point of establish a government in that context
link |
is to secure that freedom.
link |
It's to make sure that I don't use coercion on you.
link |
The government is supposed to stop me,
link |
supposed to intervene before I can do that,
link |
or if I've already done it,
link |
to prevent me from doing it again.
link |
So the purpose of government is to protect our freedom
link |
to think and to act based on our thoughts.
link |
It's to leave individuals free to pursue their values,
link |
to pursue their happiness, to pursue their rational thought,
link |
and to be left alone to do it.
link |
And so she rejects socialism, which basically assumes
link |
some kind of collective goal,
link |
assumes the sacrifice of the individual to the group,
link |
assumes that your moral purpose in life
link |
is the well being of other people rather than your own.
link |
And she rejects all form of statism,
link |
all form of government that is overly,
link |
that is involved in any aspect
link |
other than to protect us from forced coercion authority.
link |
And she rejects anarchy, and we can talk about that.
link |
I think you had a question in the list of questions
link |
you sent me about anarchy.
link |
And I'm happy to discuss that.
link |
I just talked to Michael Malice about anarchy,
link |
so I don't know if you're familiar with him.
link |
Yes, I'm familiar with him.
link |
So yeah, so she would completely reject anarchy.
link |
Anarchy is completely inconsistent with her point of view,
link |
and we can talk about why if you want.
link |
So there is some perfect place where freedom is maximized,
link |
so systems of government and that.
link |
And she thought that the American system of government
link |
came close in its idea,
link |
obviously founded with original sin, with the sin of slavery,
link |
but in its conception, the Declaration of Independence
link |
is about as perfect a political document as one could write.
link |
I think the greatest political document in human history,
link |
but really articulated almost perfectly and beautifully.
link |
And that the American system of government
link |
with the checks as balances,
link |
which is with its emphasis on individual rights,
link |
with its emphasis on freedom,
link |
with its emphasis on leaving individual freedom
link |
to pursue their happiness,
link |
an explicit recognition of happiness as a goal,
link |
individual happiness, was the model.
link |
It wasn't perfect.
link |
There are a lot of problems to a large extent
link |
because the founders had mixed philosophical premises.
link |
So there were alien premises introduced
link |
into the founding of the country,
link |
slavery obviously being the biggest problem.
link |
And we need to build on that
link |
to create an ideal political system
link |
that will, yes, maximize the freedom of individuals
link |
to do exactly this.
link |
And then of course she had,
link |
so that's kind of,
link |
that's the manifestation of this individualism
link |
in a political realm.
link |
And she had a theory of art.
link |
She had a theory of aesthetics,
link |
which is the fifth branch of,
link |
she have metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics.
link |
And the fifth branch is aesthetics.
link |
And she viewed art as an essential human need,
link |
a fuel for the human spirit.
link |
And that just like any human need,
link |
it had certain principles that it had to abide by.
link |
That is just like there's nutrition, right?
link |
So some food is good for you
link |
and some food is bad for you.
link |
Some food, some stuff is poison.
link |
She believed the same is true of art,
link |
that art had an identity,
link |
which is very controversial today, right?
link |
If you put a frame around it, it is art, right?
link |
If you put a urinal in a museum, it becomes art,
link |
which she thought was evil and ludicrous,
link |
and she rejected completely.
link |
That art had an identity
link |
and that it served a certain function
link |
that human beings needed it.
link |
And if it didn't have,
link |
not only did it have the identity,
link |
but that function was served well by some art
link |
and poorly by other art.
link |
And then there's a whole realm of stuff that's not art.
link |
Basically, all of what today is considered modern art,
link |
she would consider as not being art.
link |
Splashing paint on a canvas, not art.
link |
So she had very clear ideas.
link |
She articulated them not,
link |
so I would say not in conventional philosophical form.
link |
So she didn't write philosophical essays
link |
using the philosopher's language.
link |
It's why, partially why I think philosophers
link |
have never taken it seriously.
link |
They're actually accessible to us.
link |
We can actually read them.
link |
And she integrates the philosophy
link |
in what I think are amazing ways with psychology,
link |
with history, with economics, with politics,
link |
with what's going on in the world.
link |
And she has dozens and dozens and dozens of essays
link |
Many of them were aggregated into books.
link |
I particularly recommend books like
link |
The Virtue of Selfishness,
link |
Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal,
link |
and Philosophy Who Needs It.
link |
And I think it's a beautiful philosophy.
link |
I know you're big on love.
link |
I think it's the philosophy of love.
link |
We can talk about that.
link |
Essentially, it's about love.
link |
That's what the philosophy is all about
link |
in terms of it applying to self.
link |
And I think it's sad that so few people read it
link |
and so few intellectuals take it seriously
link |
and are willing to engage with it.
link |
Let me ask, that was incredible.
link |
But after that beautiful whirlwind overview,
link |
let me ask the most shallow of questions,
link |
which is the name Objectivism.
link |
How should people think about the name being rooted?
link |
Why not individualism?
link |
What are the options?
link |
If we had a branding meeting right now.
link |
So she actually had a branding meeting.
link |
She went through the exercise.
link |
Objectivism, I do not think,
link |
I don't know all the details,
link |
but I don't think Objectivism was the first name
link |
The problem was that the other names were taken
link |
and they were not positive implications.
link |
So for example, rationalism could have been a good word
link |
because she's an advocate of rational thought or reasonism,
link |
but reasonism sounds weird, right?
link |
The ism because of too many Ss, I guess.
link |
Rationalism, but it was already a philosophy
link |
and it was a philosophy inconsistent with hers
link |
because it was what she considered a false view
link |
of reason, of rationality.
link |
Reality ism, you know, just doesn't work.
link |
So she came on Objectivism.
link |
And I think actually, it's a great word.
link |
It's a great name because it has two aspects to it.
link |
And this is a unique view
link |
of what objectivity actually means.
link |
In Objectivism, in objectivity is the idea
link |
of an independent reality.
link |
There's actually something out there that we,
link |
and then there's the role of consciousness, right?
link |
There is the role of figuring out the truth.
link |
The truth doesn't just hit you.
link |
The truth is not in the thing.
link |
You have to discover it.
link |
It's that a consciousness applied to,
link |
that's what objectivity is, right?
link |
It's you discovering the truth in reality.
link |
It's your consciousness.
link |
It's your consciousness interacting.
link |
And thereby posing the individual in that sense.
link |
And only the individual could do it.
link |
Now, the problem with individualism
link |
is it would have made the philosophy too political.
link |
And she always said, so she said,
link |
she said, I'm an advocate of capitalism
link |
because I'm really an advocate for rational egoism.
link |
But I'm a advocate for rational egoism
link |
really because I'm an advocate for reason.
link |
So she viewed the essential of her philosophy
link |
as being this reason and her particular view of reason.
link |
And she has a whole book.
link |
She has a book called
link |
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,
link |
which I encourage any scientist, mathematician,
link |
anybody interested in science to read
link |
because it is a tour de force on,
link |
in a sense, what it means to hold concepts
link |
and what it means to discover new discoveries
link |
and to use concepts and how we use concepts.
link |
And she has a theory of concepts that is completely new,
link |
that is completely revolutionary.
link |
And I think is essential for the philosophy of science.
link |
And therefore, ultimately,
link |
the more abstract we get with scientific discoveries,
link |
the easier it is to detach them from reality
link |
and to detach them from truth,
link |
the easier it is to be inside our heads
link |
instead of about what's real.
link |
And there are probably examples
link |
from modern physics that fit that.
link |
And I think what she teaches in the book
link |
is how to ground your concepts
link |
and how to bring them into grounding in reality.
link |
So Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,
link |
note that it's only an introduction
link |
because one of the things she realized,
link |
one of the things that I think a lot of her critics
link |
don't give enough credit for,
link |
is that philosophy is, there's no end, right?
link |
It's always growing, there are always new discoveries.
link |
There's always, it's like science,
link |
there's always new things.
link |
And there's a ton of work to do in philosophy,
link |
and particularly in epistemology and the theory of knowledge.
link |
And she was actually,
link |
given your interest in mathematics,
link |
she actually saw a lot of parallels
link |
between math and concept formation.
link |
And she was actually, in the years before she died,
link |
she was taking private lessons in mathematics,
link |
in algebra and calculus,
link |
because she believed that there was real insight
link |
in understanding algebra in calculus
link |
to philosophy and to epistemology.
link |
And she also was very interested in neuroscience
link |
because she believed that that had a lot to tell us
link |
about epistemology, but also about music,
link |
therefore about aesthetics.
link |
So, I mean, she recognized the importance
link |
of all these different fields
link |
and the beauty of philosophy
link |
is it should be integrating all of them.
link |
And one of the sad things about the world in which we live
link |
is again, we view these things as silos.
link |
We don't view them as integrating.
link |
We don't have teams of people from different arena,
link |
you know, different fields, you know, discovering things.
link |
We become like ants, specialized.
link |
So she was definitely like that.
link |
And she was constantly curious,
link |
constantly interested in new discoveries and new ideas
link |
and how this could expand the scope of her philosophy
link |
and the application of her philosophy.
link |
There's like a million topics I could talk to you,
link |
but since you mentioned math, I'm almost curious.
link |
We only got three hours.
link |
I'm almost curious.
link |
I don't know if you're familiar
link |
with Gayle's incompleteness theorem.
link |
I'm not, unfortunately.
link |
It was a powerful proof that any axiomatic systems,
link |
when you start from a bunch of axioms,
link |
that there will, in that system,
link |
provably must be an inconsistency.
link |
So that was this painful like stab
link |
in the idea of mathematics that, no,
link |
if we start with a set of assumptions,
link |
kind of like Ayn Rand started with objectivism,
link |
there will have to be at least one contradiction.
link |
See, I intuitively am gonna say that's false.
link |
Philosophically, but in math, it's just true.
link |
It's a question about how you define,
link |
again, definitions matter,
link |
and you have to be careful on how you define axioms.
link |
And you have to be careful about what you define
link |
as an inconsistency and what that means
link |
to say there's an inconsistency.
link |
I'm not gonna say more than that,
link |
because I don't know.
link |
But I'm suspicious that there is some...
link |
And this is the power of philosophy.
link |
And this is why I said before,
link |
concept formation is so important.
link |
And understanding concept formation is so important,
link |
for particularly, again, mathematics,
link |
because it's such an abstract field.
link |
And it's so easy to lose grounding in reality
link |
that if you properly define axioms,
link |
and you properly define what you're doing in math,
link |
whether that is true.
link |
And I don't think it is.
link |
Yeah, we'll leave it as an open mystery,
link |
because actually, this audience,
link |
there's literally over 100,000 people that have PhDs.
link |
So they know Gaydo's The Compliance Theorem.
link |
I have this intuition that there's something different
link |
to mathematics and philosophy
link |
that I'd love to hear from people.
link |
Like, what exactly is that difference?
link |
Because there's a precision to mathematics
link |
that philosophy doesn't have,
link |
but that precision gets you in trouble.
link |
It somehow, it actually takes you away from truth.
link |
Like, the very constraints of the language used
link |
in mathematics actually puts a constraint
link |
on the capture of truth that it's able to do.
link |
I'm gonna argue that that is a total product
link |
of the way you're conceptualizing
link |
the terms within mathematics.
link |
It's not in reality.
link |
Yeah, so you would argue it's in the fact
link |
that mathematics, in as much as it's detached from reality,
link |
that you can do these kinds of things.
link |
Yes, and that mathematicians have come up with concepts
link |
that they haven't grounded in reality properly
link |
that allows them to go off in places
link |
that don't lead to truth.
link |
That's right, that don't lead to truth.
link |
But I encourage you then, I encourage you
link |
to do one of these podcasts with one of our philosophers
link |
who know more about this stuff.
link |
And if you move to Austin,
link |
I've got somebody I'd recommend to you.
link |
And I'd love to hear from you.
link |
I've got somebody I'd recommend to you.
link |
Can you throw a name out, or no?
link |
Yeah, I mean, I would talk to Greg Saumieri.
link |
When you say our, can you say what you mean by our?
link |
I'd say people who are affiliated
link |
with the Ironman Institute are philosophers
link |
who are affiliated with objectivism.
link |
And Greg is one of our brightest, and he's in Austin.
link |
He's just got a position at UT,
link |
so at the University of Texas.
link |
And he would want, Ankar Gatte would be another one
link |
who works at the Institute and a chief philosophy officer
link |
And there are others who specialize in philosophy
link |
of science who I think Greg could probably give you a lead.
link |
But these are unbelievably smart people
link |
who know this part of the philosophy much better than I do.
link |
What, can you just briefly perhaps say
link |
what is the Ironman Institute?
link |
Yeah, so the Ironman Institute was an organization founded
link |
three years after Ironman died.
link |
And it was founded in 1985 to promote her ideas,
link |
to make sure that her ideas and her novels
link |
continued in the culture and were relevant.
link |
Well, they're relevant, but the people saw the relevance.
link |
So our mission is to get people to read her books,
link |
to engage in the ideas.
link |
We teach, we have the Objectivist Academic Center
link |
where we teach the philosophy,
link |
primarily to graduate students and others
link |
who take their ideas seriously
link |
and who really want a deep understanding of the philosophy.
link |
And we apply the ideas.
link |
So we take the ideas and apply them to ethics,
link |
to philosophy, to issues of the day,
link |
which is more my strength and more what I tend to do.
link |
I've never formally studied philosophy.
link |
So all my education philosophy is informal.
link |
And I'm an engineer and a finance guy.
link |
That's my background.
link |
So I'm a numbers guy.
link |
Well, let me, I feel pretty undereducated.
link |
I have a pretty open mind,
link |
which sometimes can be painful on the internet
link |
because people mock me or,
link |
if I say something nuanced about communism,
link |
people immediately kind of put you in a bin
link |
or something like that.
link |
It hurts to be open minded to say,
link |
I don't know, to ask the question,
link |
why is communism or Marxism so problematic?
link |
Why is capitalism problematic and so on?
link |
But let me nevertheless go into that direction with you.
link |
Maybe let's talk about capitalism a little bit.
link |
How does Objectivism compare,
link |
relate to the idea of capitalism?
link |
Well, first we have to define what capitalism is.
link |
Cause again, people use capitalism in all kinds of ways.
link |
And I know you had Ray Dalio on your show once.
link |
I need to listen to that episode.
link |
But Ray has no clue what capitalism is.
link |
And that's his big problem.
link |
So when he says there are real problems today in capitalism,
link |
he's not talking about capitalism.
link |
He's talking about problems in the world today.
link |
And I agree with many of the problems,
link |
but they have nothing to do with capitalism.
link |
Capitalism is a social, political, economic system
link |
in which all property is privately owned
link |
and in which the only role of government
link |
is the protection of individual rights.
link |
I think it's the ideal system.
link |
I think it's the right system
link |
for the reasons we talked about earlier.
link |
It's a system that leaves you as an individual
link |
to pursue your values, your life, your happiness,
link |
free of coercion and force.
link |
And you get to decide what happens to you.
link |
And I get to decide if to help you or not, right?
link |
Let's say you fall flat on your face.
link |
People always say, well, what about the poor?
link |
Well, if you care about the poor, help them.
link |
Just don't, you know, what do you need a government for?
link |
You know, I always ask audiences, okay,
link |
if there's a poor kid who can't afford to go to school
link |
and all the schools are private
link |
because capitalism is being instituted
link |
and he can't go to school,
link |
would you be willing to participate in a fund
link |
that pays for his education?
link |
Every hand in the room goes up.
link |
So what do you need government for?
link |
Just let's get all the money together and pay for schooling.
link |
So the point is that what capitalism does
link |
is leave individuals free to make their own decisions.
link |
And as long as they're not violating other people's rights,
link |
in other words, as long as they're not using coercion force
link |
on other people, then leave them alone.
link |
And people are going to make mistakes
link |
and people are gonna screw up their lives
link |
and people are gonna commit suicide.
link |
People are gonna do terrible things to themselves.
link |
That is fundamentally their problem.
link |
And if you want to help,
link |
you under capitalism are free to help.
link |
It's just the only thing that doesn't happen
link |
under capitalism is you don't get to impose your will
link |
Now, how's that a bad thing?
link |
So the question then is how does the implementation
link |
of capitalism deviate from its ideal in practice?
link |
I mean, this is what is the question with a lot of systems
link |
is how does it start to then fail?
link |
So one thing maybe you can correct me or inform me,
link |
it seems like information is very important.
link |
Like being able to make decisions, to be free,
link |
you have to have access, full access
link |
of all the information you need to make rational decisions.
link |
No, that can't be.
link |
Because it can be right, because none of us has full access
link |
to all the information we need.
link |
I mean, what does that even mean?
link |
And how big, how much of the scope do you wanna do?
link |
Let's just start there.
link |
So you need to have access to information.
link |
So one of the big criticisms of capitalism
link |
is this asymmetrical information.
link |
The drug maker has more information about the drug
link |
than the drug buyer, pharmaceutical drugs.
link |
True, it's a problem.
link |
Well, I wonder if one can think about,
link |
an entrepreneur can think about how to solve that problem.
link |
See, I view any one of these challenges to capitalism
link |
as an opportunity for entrepreneur to make money.
link |
And they have the freedom to do it.
link |
Yeah, so imagine an entrepreneur steps in and says,
link |
I will test all the drugs that drug companies make,
link |
and I will provide you for a fee with the answer.
link |
And how do I know he's not gonna be corrupted?
link |
Well, there'll be other ones and they'll compete.
link |
And who am I to tell which one of these is the right one?
link |
Well, it won't be you really getting
link |
the information from them.
link |
It'll be your doctor.
link |
The doctors need that information.
link |
So the doctor who has some expertise in medicine
link |
will be evaluating which rating agency to use
link |
to evaluate the drugs and which ones then
link |
to recommend to you.
link |
So do we need an FDA?
link |
Do we need a government that siphons all the information
link |
to one source that does all the research, all the thing,
link |
and has a clear incentive, by the way,
link |
not to approve drugs.
link |
Because they don't make any money from it.
link |
Nobody pays them for the information.
link |
Nobody pays them to be accurate.
link |
They're bureaucrats at the end of the day.
link |
And what is a bureaucrat?
link |
What's the main focus of a bureaucrat?
link |
Even if they go in with the best of intentions,
link |
which I'm sure all the scientists at the FDA
link |
have the best of intentions, what's their incentive?
link |
The system builds in this incentive not to screw up.
link |
Because one drug gets value and does damage,
link |
you lose your job.
link |
But if a hundred drugs that could cure cancer tomorrow
link |
don't ever get to market,
link |
nobody's gonna come after you.
link |
And you're saying that's not a mechanism,
link |
and that's conducive to like...
link |
You see, the marketplace is competition.
link |
So if you won't approve the drug,
link |
if I still think it's possible, I will.
link |
And it's not zero one.
link |
You see the other thing that happens with the FDA
link |
It's either approved or it's not approved.
link |
Oh, it's approved for this, but it's not approved for that.
link |
But what if a drug came out and you said, right?
link |
You told the doctors,
link |
this drug in 10% of the cases can cause patients
link |
an increased risk of heart disease.
link |
You and your patients should,
link |
we're not forcing you, but you should, right?
link |
It's your medical responsibility to evaluate that
link |
and decide if the drug is appropriate or not.
link |
Why don't I get to make that choice
link |
if I wanna take on the 10% risk of heart disease?
link |
So there was a drug, and right now I forget the name,
link |
but it was a drug against pain,
link |
particularly for arthritic pain, and it worked.
link |
It reduced pain dramatically, right?
link |
And some people tried everything,
link |
and this was the only drug that reduced their pain.
link |
And it turned out that in 10% of the cases,
link |
it caused the elevated risk.
link |
It didn't kill people necessarily,
link |
but it caused elevated risk of heart disease.
link |
Okay, what did the FDA do?
link |
It banned the drug.
link |
Some people, I know a lot of people who said
link |
living with pain is much worse than taking on a 10% risk.
link |
Again, probabilities, right?
link |
People don't think in those numbers.
link |
10% risk of maybe getting heart disease.
link |
Why don't I get to make that choice?
link |
Why does some bureaucrat make that choice for me?
link |
That's capitalism.
link |
Capitalism gives you the choice,
link |
not you as an ignorant person.
link |
You with your doctor and a whole marketplace,
link |
which is not created to provide you with information.
link |
And think about a world where we didn't have
link |
all these regulations and controls.
link |
The amount of opportunities that would exist
link |
to create, to provide information,
link |
to educate you about that information,
link |
would mushroom dramatically.
link |
Bloomberg, you know, the billionaire,
link |
Bloomberg, you know, how did he make his money?
link |
He made his money by providing financial information,
link |
by creating this service called Bloomberg
link |
that you buy a terminal and you get
link |
all this amazing information.
link |
And he was before computers, desktop computers.
link |
I mean, he was very early on
link |
in that whole computing revolution,
link |
but his focus was providing financial information
link |
And you hire a professional to manage your money.
link |
That's the way it's supposed to be.
link |
You know, you have to have,
link |
so you as an individual cannot have
link |
all the knowledge you need in medicine,
link |
all the knowledge you need in finance,
link |
all the knowledge you need in every aspect of your life.
link |
You can't do that.
link |
You have to delegate and you hire a doctor.
link |
Now you should be able to figure out
link |
if the doctor's good or not.
link |
You should be able to ask doctors for reasons
link |
for why you have to make the decision at the end.
link |
But that's why you have a doctor.
link |
That's why you have a financial advisor.
link |
That's why you have different people
link |
who you're delegating certain aspects of your life to,
link |
but you want choices.
link |
And what the marketplace provides is those choices.
link |
this is what I do.
link |
I'll make a dumb case for things
link |
and then you shut me down
link |
and then the internet says how dumb Lex is.
link |
This is how it works.
link |
I'm good at shutting down and they're foolish
link |
in blaming you for the question
link |
because you're here to ask me questions.
link |
Let me make a case for socialism.
link |
It's gonna be bad because that's the only case
link |
there is for socialism.
link |
So perhaps it's not a case for socialism,
link |
but just a certain notion that inequality,
link |
the wealth inequality,
link |
that the bigger the gap between the poorest
link |
or the average and the richest,
link |
the more painful it is to be average.
link |
Psychologically speaking,
link |
if you know that there is the CEOs of companies
link |
make 300, 1000, 1 million times more than you do,
link |
that makes life for a large part of the population
link |
That there's a relative notion to the experience of our life
link |
that even though everybody's life has gotten better
link |
over the past decades and centuries,
link |
it may feel actually worse
link |
because you know that life could be so,
link |
so much better in the life of the CEOs
link |
that yeah, that gap is fundamentally a thing
link |
that is undesirable in a society.
link |
Everything about that is wrong.
link |
I like to start off like that.
link |
so my wife likes to remind me
link |
that as well as we've done in life,
link |
we are actually from a wealth perspective
link |
closer to a homeless person than we are to Bill Gates.
link |
Just a math, right?
link |
Just a math, right?
link |
It's a good ego check.
link |
When I look at Bill Gates,
link |
I get a smile on my face.
link |
I love Bill Gates.
link |
I've never met Bill Gates.
link |
I love Bill Gates.
link |
I love what he stands for.
link |
I love that he has $100 billion.
link |
I love that he has built a trampoline room in his house
link |
where his kids can jump up and down in a trampoline
link |
in a safe environment.
link |
Can we take another billionaire?
link |
Because I'm not sure if you're paying attention,
link |
but there's all kinds of conspiracy theories
link |
Well, but that's part of the story, right?
link |
They have to pull him down
link |
because people resent him for other reasons.
link |
But yes, we can take Jeff Bezos.
link |
We can say my favorite, historically,
link |
just because I like a lot about him, was Steve Jobs.
link |
I mean, I love these people.
link |
And I can't, there are very few billionaires I don't love.
link |
In the sense that I appreciate everything they've done
link |
for me, for people I cherish and love,
link |
they've made the world a better place.
link |
Would it ever cross my mind that they make me look bad
link |
because they're richer than me
link |
or that I don't have what they have?
link |
They've made me so much richer
link |
that they've made inventions that used to cost millions
link |
and millions and millions of dollars accessible to me.
link |
I mean, this is a supercomputer in my pocket.
link |
Now, but think about it, right?
link |
What is the difference between,
link |
and I'll get to the essence of your point in a minute,
link |
but think about what the difference is
link |
between me and Bill Gates in terms of,
link |
because it's true that in terms of wealth,
link |
I'm closer to the homeless person,
link |
but in terms of my day to day life,
link |
I'm closer to Bill Gates.
link |
You know, we both live in a nice house.
link |
His is nicer, but we live in a nice house.
link |
His is bigger, but mine is plenty big.
link |
We both drive cars.
link |
His is nicer, but we both drive cars.
link |
We both drive cars, cars, 100 years ago, what cars?
link |
We both can fly, get on a plane in Los Angeles
link |
and fly to New York and get there in about the same time.
link |
We're both flying private.
link |
The only difference is my private plane
link |
I share with 300 other people and his,
link |
but it's accessible.
link |
It's relatively comfortable.
link |
Again, in the perspective of 50 years ago, 100 years ago,
link |
it's unimaginable that I could fly like that
link |
for such a low fee.
link |
We live very similar lives in that sense.
link |
So I don't resent him.
link |
So first of all, I'm an exception to the supposed rule
link |
that people resent.
link |
I don't think anybody, I don't think people do resent
link |
unless they're taught to resent.
link |
And this is the key.
link |
People are taught and I've seen this in America.
link |
And this is to me the most horrible shocking thing
link |
that has happened in America over the last 40 years.
link |
I came to America, so I'm an immigrant.
link |
I came to America from Israel in 1987.
link |
And I came here because I thought this was the place
link |
where I could, where I'd had the most opportunities
link |
and it is, most opportunities.
link |
And I came here because I believed
link |
there was a certain American spirit of individualism
link |
and exactly the opposite of what you just described.
link |
A sense of I live my life, it's my happiness.
link |
I'm not looking at my neighbor.
link |
I'm not competing with the Joneses.
link |
The American dream is my dream.
link |
My two kids, my dog, my station wagon.
link |
Not because other people have it, it's because I want it.
link |
In that sense, and when I came here in the 80s,
link |
You had, you still had it.
link |
It was less than I think it had been in the past.
link |
But you had that spirit.
link |
There was no envy.
link |
There was no resentment.
link |
There were rich people and they were celebrated.
link |
There was still this admiration for entrepreneurs
link |
and admiration for success.
link |
Not by everybody, certainly not by the intellectuals,
link |
but by the average person.
link |
I have witnessed particularly over the last 10 years
link |
a complete transformation
link |
and America's become like Europe.
link |
I know, are you Russian?
link |
It's become Russian in a sense where,
link |
you know, they've always done these studies.
link |
You know, I'll give you a hundred dollars
link |
and your neighbor a hundred dollars
link |
or I'll give you, what was it, I'll give you a thousand
link |
dollars but your neighbor gets $10,000
link |
and a Russian will always choose the hundred dollars, right?
link |
He wants equality above being better himself.
link |
Americans would always choose that gap.
link |
And that's changing.
link |
My sense is not anymore.
link |
And it's changing because we've been told it should change.
link |
And morally you're saying that doesn't make any sense.
link |
So there's no sense in which, let me put another spin.
link |
I forget the book, but the sense of,
link |
if you're working for Steve Jobs and your hands,
link |
you're the engineer behind the iPhone
link |
and there's a sense in which his salary
link |
is stealing from your efforts.
link |
Because I forget the book, right?
link |
That's literally the terminology is used, right?
link |
This is straight out of Karl Marx.
link |
Sure, it's also straight out of Karl Marx.
link |
But there's no sense morally speaking
link |
that you see that as the theft.
link |
The other way around.
link |
That engineer is stealing off of,
link |
and it's not stealing, right?
link |
But the engineer is getting more from Steve Jobs
link |
by a lot, not by a little bit,
link |
than Steve Jobs is getting from the engineer.
link |
The engineer, even if they're a great engineer,
link |
there are probably other great engineers
link |
that could replace him.
link |
Would he even have a job without Steve Jobs?
link |
Would the industry exist without Steve Jobs?
link |
Without the giants that carry these things forward?
link |
Let me ask you this.
link |
I mean, you're a scientist.
link |
Do you resent Einstein for being smarter than you?
link |
I mean, and VM, are you angry with him?
link |
Would you feel negative towards him
link |
if he was in the room right now?
link |
Or would you, if he came into the room,
link |
you'd say, oh my God.
link |
I mean, you interview people who I think some of them
link |
are probably smarter than you and me.
link |
And your attitude towards them is one of reverence.
link |
Well, one interesting little side question there
link |
is what is the natural state of being for us humans?
link |
You kind of implied education has polluted our minds,
link |
but like if I, because you're referring to jealousy,
link |
the Einstein question, the Steve Jobs question,
link |
I wonder which way, if we're left without education,
link |
we would naturally go.
link |
So there is no such thing as the natural state
link |
in that sense, right?
link |
This is the myth of who so is a noble savage
link |
and of John Walls is behind the veil of ignorance.
link |
Well, if you're ignorant, you're ignorant.
link |
You can't make any decisions.
link |
You're just ignorant.
link |
There is no human nature that determines
link |
how you will relate to other people.
link |
You will relate to other people based on the conclusions
link |
you come to about how to relate to other people.
link |
You can relate to other people as values
link |
to use your terminology from the perspective of love.
link |
This other human being is a value to me
link |
and I want to trade with them and trade,
link |
the beauty of trade is it's win, win.
link |
I want to benefit and they are going to benefit.
link |
I don't want to screw them.
link |
I don't want them to screw me.
link |
I want us to be win, win.
link |
Or you can deal with other people as threats, as enemies.
link |
Much of human history, we have done that.
link |
And therefore, as a zero sum world,
link |
what they have, I want, I will take it.
link |
I will use force to take it.
link |
I will use political force to take it.
link |
I will use the force of my arm to take it.
link |
I will just take it.
link |
So those are two options, right?
link |
And they will determine whether we live
link |
in civilization or not.
link |
And they are determined by conclusions people come to
link |
about the world and the nature of reality
link |
and the nature of morality and the nature of politics
link |
and all these things.
link |
They're determined by philosophy.
link |
And this is why philosophy is so important
link |
because the philosophy shapes,
link |
evolution doesn't do this.
link |
It doesn't just happen.
link |
Ideas shape how we relate to other people.
link |
And you say, well, little children do it.
link |
Well, little children don't have a frontal cortex.
link |
It's not relevant, right?
link |
What happens as you develop a frontal cortex,
link |
as you develop the brain, you learn ideas.
link |
And those ideas will shape how you relate to other people.
link |
And if you learn good ideas,
link |
you relate to other people in a healthy, productive win, win.
link |
And if you develop bad ideas,
link |
you will resent other people and you will want their stuff.
link |
And the thing is that human progress depends
link |
on the win, win relationship.
link |
It depends on civilization, depends on peace.
link |
It depends on allowing people,
link |
going back to what we talked about earlier,
link |
allowing people the freedom to think for themselves.
link |
And anytime you try to interrupt that,
link |
you're causing damage.
link |
So this change in America is not some reversion
link |
to a natural state.
link |
It's a shift in ideas.
link |
We still live, the better part of American society
link |
and the world, still lives on the remnants
link |
of the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment ideas,
link |
the ideas that brought about this scientific revolution,
link |
the ideas that brought about the creation of this country.
link |
And it's the same basic ideas that led to both of those.
link |
And as those ideas get more distant,
link |
as those ideas are not defended,
link |
as those ideas disappear, as Enlightenment goes away,
link |
we will become more violent, more resentful,
link |
more tribal, more obnoxious, more unpleasant,
link |
A very specific example of this that bothers me,
link |
I'd be curious to get your comment on.
link |
So Elon Musk is a billionaire.
link |
And one of the things that really,
link |
maybe it's almost a pet peeve,
link |
it really bothers me when the press
link |
and the general public will say,
link |
well, all those rockets they're sending up there,
link |
those are just like the toys,
link |
the games that billionaires play.
link |
That to me, billionaire has become a dirty word to use,
link |
like as if money can buy or has anything to do with genius.
link |
I'm trying to articulate a specific line of question here
link |
because it just bothers me.
link |
I guess the question is how do we get here
link |
and how do we get out of that?
link |
Because Elon Musk is doing some of the most incredible things
link |
that a human being has ever participated in.
link |
Mostly, he doesn't build the rockets himself,
link |
he's getting a bunch of other geniuses together that have.
link |
That takes genius.
link |
That takes genius.
link |
But where do we go and how do we get back
link |
to where Elon Musk is an inspiring figure
link |
as opposed to a billionaire playing with some toys?
link |
So this is the role of philosophy.
link |
It goes back to the same place.
link |
It goes back to our understanding of the world
link |
and our role in it.
link |
And if you understand that the only way
link |
to become a billionaire, for example,
link |
is to create value.
link |
Value for people who are gonna consume it.
link |
The only way to become a billionaire,
link |
the only way Elon Musk became a billionaire is through PayPal.
link |
Now, PayPal is something we all use.
link |
PayPal is an enormous value to all of us.
link |
It's why it's worth several billions of dollars
link |
which Elon Musk could then earn.
link |
But you cannot become a billionaire in a free society
link |
by exploiting people.
link |
You cannot because you'll be laughed.
link |
Nobody will deal with you.
link |
Nobody will have any interactions with you.
link |
The only way to become a billionaire
link |
is to do billions of win, win transactions.
link |
So the only way to become a billionaire in a free society
link |
is to change the world to make it a better place.
link |
Billionaires are the great humanitarians of our time,
link |
not because they give charity,
link |
but because they make them billions.
link |
And it's true that money and genius
link |
are not necessarily correlated,
link |
but you cannot become a billionaire
link |
without being super smart.
link |
You cannot become a billionaire by figuring something out
link |
that nobody else has figured out
link |
in whatever realm it happens to be.
link |
And that thing that you figure out
link |
has to be something that provides immense value
link |
Where do we go wrong?
link |
We go wrong, our culture goes wrong
link |
because it views billionaires as selfish.
link |
And there's a sense in which,
link |
not a sense, it's absolutely true.
link |
The billionaire doesn't ask for my opinion
link |
on what product to launch.
link |
Elon Musk doesn't ask others
link |
what they think he should spend his money on,
link |
what the greatest social wellbeing will be.
link |
I mean, there's a sense in which the rockets are his toys.
link |
There's a sense in which he chose
link |
that he would be inspired the most.
link |
He would have the most fun
link |
by going to Mars and building rockets.
link |
And he's probably dreamt of rockets
link |
from when he was a kid
link |
and probably always played with rockets.
link |
And now he has the funds, the capital
link |
to be able to deploy it.
link |
So he's being selfish.
link |
Obviously, he's being self interested.
link |
This is what Elon Musk is about.
link |
I mean, the same with Jeff Bezos.
link |
There's no committee to decide whether to invest
link |
in cloud computing or not.
link |
Bezos decided that.
link |
And at the end of the day,
link |
they are the bosses,
link |
they pursue the values they believe are good.
link |
They create the wealth.
link |
It's their decisions, it's their mind.
link |
And the fact is we live in a world
link |
where for 2000 plus years,
link |
self interest, even though we all do it,
link |
just more extent to the less,
link |
we deem it as morally apparent.
link |
I mean, your mother probably taught you the same thing
link |
my mother taught me.
link |
Think of others first.
link |
Think of yourself last.
link |
The good stuff is kept for the guests.
link |
You never get to use the good stuff.
link |
That's what the focus of morality is.
link |
Now, no mother, even no Jewish mother
link |
actually believes that, right?
link |
Because they don't really want you to be last.
link |
They want you to be first and they push you to be first.
link |
But morally, they've been taught their entire lives
link |
and they believe that the right thing to say
link |
and to some extent do
link |
is to argue for sacrifice for other people, right?
link |
So most people, 99% of people are torn.
link |
They know they should be selfless,
link |
sacrifice, live for other people.
link |
They don't really want to.
link |
So they act selfishly in their day to day life
link |
and they feel guilty and they can't be happy.
link |
They can't be happy.
link |
And Jewish mothers and Catholic mothers are excellent
link |
at using that guilt to manipulate you.
link |
But the guilt is inevitable
link |
because you've got these two conflicting things,
link |
the way you want to live
link |
and the way you've been taught to live.
link |
And what objectivism does is that at the end of the day
link |
provides you with a way to unite morality,
link |
a proper morality with what you want
link |
and to think about what you really want,
link |
to conceptualize what you really want properly.
link |
So what you want is really good for you
link |
and what you want will really lead to your happiness.
link |
So, you know, we reject the idea of sacrifice.
link |
We reject the idea of living for other people,
link |
but you see, if you believe that the purpose of morality
link |
is to sacrifice for other people
link |
and you look at Jeff Bezos,
link |
when was the last time he sacrificed anything, right?
link |
He was living pretty well.
link |
He's got billions that he could give it all away
link |
and yet he doesn't.
link |
You know, in my talks, I often position,
link |
and I'm gonna use Bill Gates,
link |
sorry guys, drop the conspiracy theory.
link |
They're all BS, complete and utter nonsense.
link |
There's not a shred of truth.
link |
You know, I disagree with Bill Gates
link |
on everything political.
link |
I think he politically is a complete ignoramus,
link |
but the guy's a genius when it comes to technology
link |
and he's just thoughtful even in this philanthropy.
link |
He just uses his mind and I respect that
link |
even though politically he's terrible.
link |
Anyway, think about this.
link |
Who had a bigger impact on the lives
link |
of poor people in the world?
link |
Bill Gates or Mother Teresa?
link |
It's not even close.
link |
And Mother Teresa lived this altruistic life to the core.
link |
She lived it consistently.
link |
And yet she was miserable, pathetic, horrible.
link |
She hated her life.
link |
She was miserable.
link |
And most of the people she helped didn't do very well
link |
because she just helped them not die, right?
link |
And then Bill Gates changed the world
link |
and he helped a lot by providing technology.
link |
We even, philanthropy gets to them.
link |
The food gets them, much fancier, more efficient.
link |
Yet who is the moral saint?
link |
Sainthood is not determined based on
link |
what you do for other people.
link |
Sainthood is based on how much pain you suffer.
link |
I like to ask people to go to a museum
link |
and look at all the paintings of saints.
link |
How many of them are smiling and are happy?
link |
They've usually got arrows through them
link |
and holes in their body
link |
and they're just suffering a horrible death.
link |
The whole point of the morality we are taught
link |
is that happiness is immorality,
link |
that happy people cannot be good people,
link |
and that good people suffer
link |
and that suffering is necessary for morality.
link |
Morality is about self sacrifice and suffering.
link |
And at the end of the day,
link |
almost all the problems in the world
link |
boil down to that false view.
link |
So can we try to talk about,
link |
part of it is the problem of the word selfishness,
link |
but let's talk about the virtue of selfishness.
link |
So let's start at the fact that for me,
link |
I really enjoy doing stuff for other people.
link |
I enjoy cheering on the success of others.
link |
It's deep in that.
link |
Well, think about it.
link |
Because I think you do know.
link |
If I were to really think,
link |
I don't want to resort to like evolutionary arguments
link |
or like this is somehow different.
link |
So I can tell you why I enjoy helping others.
link |
Maybe you can go there.
link |
cause we should talk about love a little bit.
link |
I'll tell you there's a part of me
link |
that's a little bit not rational.
link |
Like there's a gut that I follow
link |
that not everything I do is perfectly rational.
link |
For example, my dad criticizes me.
link |
He says like, you should always have a plan.
link |
Like it should make sense.
link |
You have a strategy.
link |
I left, I stepped down from my full salary position
link |
There's so many things I did without like a plan.
link |
It's like, I want to start a company.
link |
Well, you know how many companies fail?
link |
And the same thing with being kind to others is a gut.
link |
I watched the way that karma works in this world
link |
that the people like us,
link |
one guy I look up to is Joe Rogan,
link |
that he does stuff for others.
link |
And that the joy he experiences,
link |
the way he sees the world,
link |
like just the glimmer in his eyes
link |
because he does stuff for others
link |
that creates a joyful experience.
link |
And that somehow seems to be an instructive way to,
link |
that to me is inspiring of a life well lived.
link |
But you probably know a lot of people
link |
who have done stuff for others who are not happy.
link |
So I don't think it's the doing stuff for others
link |
that just brings the happiness.
link |
It's why you do stuff for others
link |
and what else you're doing in your life
link |
and what is the proportion.
link |
But it's why at the end of the day, which is,
link |
and it's the same.
link |
Look, you can maybe through a gut feeling say,
link |
I wanna start a company,
link |
but you better start doing thinking
link |
about how and what and all of that.
link |
And to some extent the why,
link |
because if you really wanna be happy doing this,
link |
you better make sure you're doing it for the right reason.
link |
So I'm not, you know,
link |
there's something called fast thinking,
link |
Carlman, the Daniel Kahneman.
link |
Daniel Kahneman talks about,
link |
and there is, it's, you know,
link |
all the integrations you've made so far in your life
link |
cause you to have specialized knowledge and certain things
link |
and you can think very fast
link |
and your gut tells you what the right answer is.
link |
But it's not, it's your mind is constantly evaluating
link |
and constantly working.
link |
You wanna make it as rational as you can,
link |
not in the sense that I have to think through
link |
every time I make a decision,
link |
but that they've so programmed my mind in a sense
link |
that the answers are the right answers,
link |
you know, when I get them.
link |
So, you know, I like, I view other people as a value.
link |
Other people contribute enormously to my life,
link |
whether it's a romantic love relationship
link |
or whether it's a friendship relationship
link |
or whether it's just, you know,
link |
Jeff Bezos creating Amazon
link |
and delivering goodies to my home when I get them.
link |
And people do all that, right?
link |
It's not just Jeff Bezos.
link |
He gets the most credit,
link |
but everybody in that chain of command,
link |
everybody at Amazon is working for me.
link |
I love the idea of a human being.
link |
I love the idea that there are people capable
link |
of being an Einstein, of being, you know,
link |
and creating and building and making stuff
link |
that makes my life so good.
link |
You know, most of us like,
link |
this is not a good room for an example.
link |
Most of us like plants, right?
link |
I don't particularly, but people like pets.
link |
We like to see life.
link |
Human beings are life on steroids, right?
link |
They're life with a brain.
link |
It's amazing, right, what they can do.
link |
Now that doesn't mean I love everybody
link |
because there's some,
link |
there are really bad people out there who I hate, right?
link |
And there are people out there that are just,
link |
I have no opinion about.
link |
But generally the idea of a human being
link |
to me is a phenomenal idea.
link |
When I see a baby, I light up
link |
because to me there's a potential, you know,
link |
there's this magnificent potential
link |
that is embodied in that.
link |
And when I see people struggling and need help,
link |
I think they're human beings.
link |
You know, they embody that potential.
link |
They embody that goodness.
link |
They might turn out to be bad,
link |
but why would I ever give the presumption of that?
link |
I give them the presumption of the positive
link |
and I cheer them on.
link |
And I enjoy watching people succeed.
link |
I enjoy watching people get to the top of the mountain
link |
and produce something.
link |
Even if I don't get anything directly from it,
link |
I enjoy that because it's part of my enjoyment of life.
link |
So the word, to you, the morality of selfishness,
link |
this kind of love of other human beings,
link |
the love of life fits into a morality of selfishness.
link |
Cannot, because there's no context
link |
in which you can truly love yourself
link |
without loving life and loving what it means to be human.
link |
So, you know, the love of yourself is gonna manifest itself
link |
definitely in different people, but it's core.
link |
What do you love about yourself?
link |
First of all, I love that I'm alive.
link |
I love this world and the opportunities it provides me
link |
and the fun and the excitement of discovering something new
link |
and meeting a new person and having a conversation.
link |
You know, all of this is immensely enjoyable,
link |
but behind all of that is a particular human character.
link |
There's a particular human capability
link |
that not only I have, other people have.
link |
And the fact that they have it makes my life
link |
so much more fun because, so it's,
link |
you cannot view, you know, it's all integrated
link |
and you cannot view yourself in isolation.
link |
Now that doesn't place a moral commandment on me,
link |
help everybody who's poor
link |
that you happen to meet in the street.
link |
It doesn't place a burden on me in a sense
link |
that now I have this moral duty to help everybody.
link |
It leaves me free to make decisions
link |
about who I help and who I don't.
link |
There's some people who I will not help.
link |
There's some people who I do not wish positive things upon.
link |
Bad people should have bad outcomes.
link |
Bad people should suffer.
link |
And then you have the freedom to choose who's good,
link |
who's bad within your.
link |
It's your decision based on your values.
link |
Now, I think there's an objectivity to it.
link |
There's a standard by which you should evaluate
link |
And that standard should be to what extent
link |
do they contribute or hurt human life?
link |
The standard is human life.
link |
And so when I say, look at Jeff Bezos,
link |
I say, he's contributed to human life, good guy.
link |
I might disagree with him on stuff.
link |
We might disagree about politics.
link |
We might disagree about women.
link |
I don't know what we agree.
link |
But overall, big picture, he is pro life, right?
link |
I look at somebody like, you know, to take like 99.9%
link |
of our politicians and they are pro death.
link |
They're pro destruction.
link |
They're pro cutting corners in ways that destroy human life
link |
and human potential and human ability.
link |
So I literally hate almost every politician out there.
link |
And I wish ill on them, right?
link |
I don't want them to be successful or happy.
link |
I want them all to go away, right?
link |
So I believe in justice.
link |
I believe good things should happen to good people
link |
and bad things should happen to bad people.
link |
So I make those generalizations based on this one,
link |
you know, on the other hand, if, you know,
link |
I shouldn't say all politicians, right?
link |
So if I, you know, I love Thomas Jefferson
link |
and George Washington, right?
link |
I love Abraham Lincoln.
link |
I love people who fought for freedom
link |
and who believed in freedom, who had these ideas
link |
and lived up to, at least in parts of their lives,
link |
to those principles.
link |
Now, do I think Thomas Jefferson was flawed
link |
because he held slaves?
link |
But the virtues way outweigh that in my view.
link |
And I understand people who don't accept that.
link |
You don't have to also love
link |
and hate the entirety of the person.
link |
There's parts of that person that you're attracted to.
link |
The major part is pro life and therefore I'm pro that person.
link |
And I think, and I said earlier
link |
that objectivism is a philosophy of love.
link |
And I believe that because objectivism is about your life,
link |
about loving your life, about embracing your life,
link |
about engaging with the world,
link |
about loving the world in which you live,
link |
about win win relationships with other people,
link |
which means to a large extent loving the good
link |
in other people and the best in other people
link |
and encouraging that and supporting that
link |
and promoting that.
link |
So I know selfishness is a harsh word
link |
because the culture has given it that harshness.
link |
Selfishness is a harsh word
link |
because the people who don't like selfishness
link |
want you to believe it's a harsh word.
link |
What does it mean?
link |
It means focus on self.
link |
It means take care of self.
link |
It means make yourself your highest priority,
link |
not your only priority,
link |
because in taking care of self,
link |
what would I be without my wife?
link |
What would I be without the people who support me,
link |
who help me, who I have these love relationships with?
link |
So other people are crucial.
link |
What would my life be without Steve Jobs, right?
link |
A lot of things you mentioned here are just beautiful.
link |
So one is win win.
link |
So one key thing about this selfishness
link |
and the idea of objectivism is the philosophy of love
link |
is that you don't want parasitism.
link |
So that is unethical.
link |
So you actually, first of all, you say win win a lot.
link |
And I just like that terminology
link |
because it's a good way to see life.
link |
It's tried to maximize the number of win win interactions.
link |
That's a good way to see business actually.
link |
Well, life generally, I think every aspect of life,
link |
you wanna have a win win relationship with your wife.
link |
Imagine if it was win lose.
link |
Either way, if you win and she loses,
link |
how long is that gonna sustain?
link |
So win lose relationships are not in equilibrium.
link |
What they turn into is lose lose.
link |
Like win lose turns into lose lose.
link |
And so the only alternative to lose lose is win win.
link |
And you win and the person you love wins.
link |
What's better than that, right?
link |
That's the way to maximize, so like the selfishness
link |
is you're trying to maximize the win,
link |
but the way to maximize the win is to maximize the win win.
link |
Yes, and it turns out,
link |
and Adam Smith understood this a long time ago,
link |
that if you focus on your own winning
link |
while respecting other people as human beings,
link |
then everybody wins.
link |
And the beauty of capitalism,
link |
if we go back to capitalism for a second,
link |
the beauty of capitalism is you cannot be successful
link |
in capitalism without producing values
link |
that other people appreciate
link |
and therefore willing to buy from you.
link |
And they buy them, and this goes back to that question
link |
about the engineer and Steve Jobs.
link |
Why is the engineer working there?
link |
Because he's getting paid more than his time is worth to him.
link |
I know people don't like to think in those terms,
link |
but that's the reality.
link |
If his time is worth more to him than what he's getting paid,
link |
And is Apple winning?
link |
Yes, because they're getting more productivity from him.
link |
They're getting more from him
link |
than what he's actually producing.
link |
It's tough because there's the human psychology
link |
and imperfect information.
link |
It just makes it a little messier
link |
than the clarity of thinking you have about this.
link |
It's just, you know, because for sure,
link |
but not everything in life is an economic transaction.
link |
It ultimately is close, but it...
link |
Even if it's not an economic transaction,
link |
even if it's a relationship transaction,
link |
when you get to a point with a friend
link |
where you're not gaining from the relationship,
link |
friendship's gonna be over.
link |
Not immediately, because it takes time for these things
link |
to manifest itself and to really absorb and to...
link |
But we change friendships, we change our loves, right?
link |
We fall in and out of love.
link |
We fall out of love because we're not...
link |
Love, so let's go back to love, right?
link |
Love is the most selfish of all emotions.
link |
Love is about what you do to me, right?
link |
So I love my wife because she makes me feel better
link |
So, you know, the idea of selfless love is bizarre.
link |
So Ayn Rand used to say, before you say, I love you,
link |
you have to say the I.
link |
And you have to know who you are
link |
and you have to appreciate yourself.
link |
If you hate yourself,
link |
what does it mean to love somebody else?
link |
So I love my wife because she makes me feel great
link |
And she loves me for the same reason.
link |
And so Ayn Rand used to use this example.
link |
Imagine you go up to be spoused the night before the wedding
link |
and you say, you know, I get nothing out of this relationship.
link |
I'm doing this purely as an act of noble self sacrifice.
link |
She would slap you, as she should, right?
link |
So, you know, we know this intuitively that love is selfish,
link |
but we are afraid to admit it to ourselves.
link |
Because the other side has convinced us
link |
that selfishness is associated with exploiting other people.
link |
Selfishness means lying, cheating, stealing,
link |
walking on corpses, backstabbing people.
link |
But is that ever in your self interest truly, right?
link |
You know, I'll often be in front of an audience to say,
link |
okay, how many people have you ever been in a relationship
link |
and say, okay, how many people here have lied?
link |
I'm kidding, right?
link |
How many of you think that if you did that consistently,
link |
that would make your life better?
link |
Nobody thinks that, right?
link |
Because everybody's experienced how shitty lying,
link |
not because of how it makes you feel
link |
out of a sense of guilt.
link |
Existentially, it's just a bad strategy, right?
link |
You get caught, you have to create other lies
link |
to cover up the previous lie.
link |
It screws up with your own psychology and your own cognition.
link |
You know, the mind, to some extent, like a computer, right,
link |
is an integrating machine.
link |
And in computer science, I understand
link |
there's a term called garbage in, garbage out.
link |
Lying is garbage in.
link |
So it's not good strategy.
link |
Cheating, screwing your customers in a business,
link |
not paying your suppliers as a businessman,
link |
not good business practices,
link |
not good practices for being alive.
link |
So win, win is both model and practical.
link |
And the beauty of Heinemann's philosophy,
link |
and I think this is really important,
link |
is that the model is the practical
link |
and the practical is the model.
link |
And therefore, if you are a model, you will be happy.
link |
Yeah, that's why the application
link |
of the philosophy of objectivism is so easy to practice.
link |
So like, or to discuss, or possible to discuss.
link |
That's why you talk about all.
link |
I'm so vigorous about my view.
link |
And that's fundamentally practical.
link |
I mean, that's the best of philosophies is practical.
link |
It's in a sense, teaching you how to live a good life.
link |
And it's teaching you how to live a good life,
link |
not just as you, but as a human being.
link |
And therefore, the principles that apply to you
link |
probably apply to me as well.
link |
And if we both share the same principles
link |
of how to live a good life, we're not gonna be enemies.
link |
You brought up anarchy earlier.
link |
It's an interesting question
link |
because you've kind of said politicians.
link |
I mean, part of it is a little bit joking,
link |
but politicians are not good people.
link |
So, but we should have some.
link |
So you have an opposition to anarchism.
link |
So they, first of all, they weren't always not bad people.
link |
That is, I gave examples of people
link |
who engage in political life
link |
who I think were good people basically.
link |
And, but they think they get worse over time
link |
if the system is corrupt.
link |
And I think the system, unfortunately,
link |
even the American system, as good as it was,
link |
was founded on quicksand and have corruption built in.
link |
They didn't quite get it.
link |
And they needed Ayn Rand to get it.
link |
So I'm not blaming them.
link |
I don't think they share any blame.
link |
You needed a philosophy in order to completely fulfill
link |
the promise that is America,
link |
or the promise that is the founding of America.
link |
So the place where corruption sneaked in
link |
is the lack in some way of the philosophy
link |
underlying the nation?
link |
So it's Christianity.
link |
It's, you know, not to hit on another controversial topic.
link |
It's religion, which undercut their morality.
link |
So the founders were explicitly Christian
link |
and altruistic in their morality.
link |
Implicitly, in terms of their actions,
link |
they were completely secular,
link |
and they were very secular anyway.
link |
But in their morality, even, they were secular.
link |
So there's nothing in Christianity that says
link |
that you have an inalienable right to pursue happiness.
link |
That's unbelievably self interested
link |
and based on kind of a moral philosophy of ego,
link |
of an egoistic moral philosophy.
link |
But they didn't know that.
link |
And they didn't know how to ground it.
link |
They implicitly, they had that fast thinking, that gut.
link |
They told them that this was right.
link |
And the whole enlightenment, that period,
link |
from John Locke on to really to Hume,
link |
that period is about pursuit of happiness,
link |
using reason in pursuit of the good life, right?
link |
But they can't ground it.
link |
They don't really understand what reason is,
link |
and they don't really understand what happiness requires.
link |
And they can't detach themselves from Christianity.
link |
They're not allowed to politically.
link |
And I think conceptually,
link |
you just can't make that big break.
link |
Rand is an enlightenment thinker in that sense.
link |
She is what should have followed right after, right?
link |
She should have come there and grounded them
link |
in the secular and in the egoistic
link |
and the Aristotelian view of morality
link |
as a code of values to basically to guide your life,
link |
to guide your life towards happiness.
link |
That's Aristotle's view, right?
link |
So they didn't have that.
link |
So I think that government is necessary.
link |
It's not a necessary evil.
link |
It's a necessary good, because it does something good.
link |
And the good that it does
link |
is it eliminates coercion from society.
link |
It eliminates violence from society.
link |
It eliminates the use of force
link |
between individuals from society.
link |
But see, the argument like Michael Malice would make,
link |
give me a chance here,
link |
is why can't you apply the same kind of reasoning
link |
that you've effectively used for the rest
link |
of mutually agreed upon institutions
link |
that are driven by capitalism,
link |
that we can't also hire forces
link |
to protect us from the violence,
link |
to ensure the stability of society
link |
that protects us from the violence.
link |
Why draw the line at this particular place, right?
link |
Well, because there is no other place to draw a line,
link |
and there is a line.
link |
And by the way, we draw lines at other places, right?
link |
We don't determine truth and science based on competition.
link |
Right, so that's a line.
link |
But first of all, some people might say...
link |
I mean, there's competition in a sense
link |
that you have alternate theories,
link |
but at the end of the day,
link |
whether you decide that he's right or he's right
link |
is not based on the market.
link |
It's based on facts, on reality, on objective reality.
link |
And some people will never accept that this person is right
link |
because they don't see the string.
link |
So first of all, what they reject,
link |
what most anarchists reject,
link |
even if they don't admit it or recognize it,
link |
is they reject objective reality.
link |
So like, okay, I get it, right.
link |
So there's a whole...
link |
So the whole realm of law
link |
is a scientific realm
link |
to define, for example, the boundaries of private property.
link |
It's not an issue of competition.
link |
It's not an issue of,
link |
I have one system and you have another system.
link |
It's an issue of a big competition.
link |
It's an issue of objective reality.
link |
And now it's more difficult than science in a sense
link |
because it's more difficult to prove
link |
that my conception of property is correct
link |
and you're correct.
link |
But there is a correct one.
link |
In reality, there's a correct vision.
link |
It's more abstract.
link |
somebody has to decide what property is.
link |
So my property is defined by certain boundaries.
link |
And I have a police force
link |
and I have a judiciary system that backs my vision.
link |
And you have a claim against my property.
link |
You have a claim against my property.
link |
And you have a police force and a judicial system
link |
that backs your claim.
link |
So our definitions of property are different?
link |
Yes, our definitions of property
link |
or our claim on the property is different.
link |
So what if we just agree on the definition of property and...
link |
But why should we agree, right?
link |
Your judicial system is one definition of property.
link |
My judicial system is not.
link |
You think that there's no such thing
link |
as intellectual property rights.
link |
And your whole system believes that.
link |
And my whole system believes there is such thing.
link |
So you are duplicating my books
link |
and handing them out to all your friends
link |
and not paying me a royalty.
link |
And I think that's wrong.
link |
My judicial system and my police force think that's wrong.
link |
And we're both living in the same geographic area, right?
link |
So we have overlapping jurisdictions.
link |
Now, the anarchist would say, well, we'll negotiate.
link |
Why should we negotiate?
link |
My system is actually right.
link |
There is such a thing as intellectual property rights.
link |
There's no negotiation here.
link |
And you should either pay a fine or go to jail.
link |
Yeah, but why can't...
link |
Because it's a community, there's multiple parties
link |
and it's like a majority vote.
link |
They'll hire different forces that says,
link |
yeah, Yaron is onto something here
link |
with the definition of property and we'll go with that.
link |
So are anarchists pro democracy in the majority rule sense?
link |
I think anarchy promotes like emergent democracy, right?
link |
I'll tell you what it promotes.
link |
It promotes emergent strife and civil war and violence,
link |
constant uninterrupted violence.
link |
Because the only way to settle the dispute between us,
link |
since we both think that we are right
link |
and we have guns behind us to protect that
link |
and we have a legal system,
link |
we have a whole theory of ideas,
link |
is you're stealing my stuff.
link |
How do I get it back?
link |
I invade you, right?
link |
I take over, and who's gonna win that battle?
link |
Oh, the guy with the biggest guns.
link |
See, but the anarchists would say
link |
that they're using implied,
link |
like the state uses implied force.
link |
They're already doing violence.
link |
Because they take the state as it is today
link |
and they refuse to engage in the conversation
link |
about what a state should and could look like
link |
and how we can create mechanisms
link |
to protect us from the state using those.
link |
But look, my view of anarchy is very simple.
link |
It's a ridiculous position.
link |
I mean, I really mean this, right?
link |
And sorry to Michael,
link |
but and all the other very, very smart,
link |
very, very smart anarchists.
link |
Because anarchists is never,
link |
you won't find a dumb anarchist.
link |
Because dumb people know it wouldn't work.
link |
You have to have, it's absolutely true.
link |
You have to have a certain IQ to be an anarchist.
link |
That's true, they're all really intelligent.
link |
And the reason is that you have to create
link |
such a mythology in your head.
link |
You have to create so many rationalizations.
link |
Any Joe in the street knows it doesn't work
link |
because they can understand what happens
link |
when two people who are armed are in the street
link |
and have a dispute and there's no mechanism
link |
to resolve that dispute.
link |
And this is where it gets subjective.
link |
The whole point of government is
link |
that it is the objective authority
link |
for determining the truth in one regard,
link |
in regard to force.
link |
Because the only alternative to determining it
link |
when it comes to force is through force.
link |
The only way to resolve disputes is through force
link |
or through this negotiation, which is unjust
link |
because if one party is right and one party is wrong,
link |
And this is the point.
link |
I'm not against competition of governance.
link |
I'm all for competition of governance.
link |
We do that all the time.
link |
It's called countries.
link |
The United States has a certain governance structure.
link |
The Soviet Union had a governance structure.
link |
Mexico has a governance structure.
link |
And they're competing.
link |
And we can observe the competition.
link |
And in my world, you could move freely
link |
from one governance to another.
link |
If you didn't like your governance,
link |
you would move to a better governance system.
link |
But they have to have autonomy within a geographic area.
link |
Otherwise what you get is complete and utter civil war.
link |
The law needs to be objective.
link |
And there needs to be one law over a piece of ground.
link |
And if you disagree with that law,
link |
you can move somewhere else where they may.
link |
This is why federalism is such a beautiful system.
link |
Even within the United States, we have states.
link |
And on certain issues, we're allowed
link |
to disagree between states, like the death penalty.
link |
Some states do, some states don't.
link |
And now I can move from one state if I don't like it.
link |
But there's certain issues you cannot have disagreement.
link |
Slavery, for example, this is why we had a civil war.
link |
But let me, one other argument against anarchy.
link |
Markets exist where force has been eliminated.
link |
Sorry, can you say that again?
link |
Markets exist where the rule of force has been eliminated.
link |
The rule of force?
link |
So a market will exist if we know
link |
that you can't pull a gun on me and just take my stuff.
link |
I am willing to engage in transaction with you
link |
if we have an implicit understanding
link |
that we're not gonna use force against each other.
link |
So force has something special to it.
link |
It's a special, it overrides,
link |
because we are still agreeing we can manipulate each other.
link |
But force we can't.
link |
so there's something fundamental about violence.
link |
Force is a fundamental force.
link |
It's the anti reason.
link |
It's the anti life.
link |
It's the anti force against another person.
link |
And it's what it does is shuts down the mind.
link |
So in order to have a market,
link |
you have to extract force.
link |
That's fascinating.
link |
How can you have a market in force?
link |
When I, there's an Instagram channel called nature's metal
link |
where it has all these videos of animals,
link |
basically having a market of force.
link |
But that shuts down the ability to reason
link |
and animals don't need to because they can't.
link |
So the innovation that is human beings
link |
is our capacity to reason.
link |
And therefore the relegation of force to the animals.
link |
We don't do force.
link |
Civilization is what we don't have force.
link |
And so what you have is you cannot have a market in that,
link |
which a market requires the elimination of it.
link |
And I don't debate formally these guys,
link |
but I interact with them all the time, right?
link |
And you get these absurd arguments where,
link |
David Friedman will say, that's Milton Friedman's son.
link |
He will say something like, well, in Somalia,
link |
in the Northern part of Somalia
link |
where they have no government,
link |
you have all these wonderful,
link |
you have these tribal tribunals of these tribes
link |
and they resolve disputes.
link |
Barbarically, they use Sharia law.
link |
They have no respect for individual rights,
link |
no respect for property.
link |
And the only reason they have any authority
link |
is because they have guns and they have power
link |
and they have force and they do it barbarically.
link |
There's nothing civilizing about the courts of Somalian
link |
and they write about pirates because they view force.
link |
They don't view force as something unique
link |
that must be extracted from human life.
link |
And that's why anarchy has to devolve into violence
link |
because it treats forces just,
link |
what's the big deal with negotiating over guns?
link |
So we covered a lot of high level philosophy,
link |
but I'd like to touch on the troubles, the chaos of the day.
link |
A couple of things.
link |
And I really trying to find a hopeful path way out.
link |
So one is the current coronavirus pandemic,
link |
or in particular, not the virus,
link |
but our handling of it.
link |
Is there something philosophically, politically
link |
that you would like to see,
link |
that you would like to recommend,
link |
that you would like to maybe give a hopeful message
link |
if we take that kind of trajectory
link |
we might be able to get out?
link |
Because I'm kind of worried about the economic pain
link |
that people are feeling that there's this quiet suffering.
link |
I mean, I agree with you completely.
link |
There is a quiet suffering.
link |
I mean, I know people.
link |
I go to a lot of restaurants.
link |
One of the things we love to do is eat out.
link |
My wife doesn't like cooking anymore.
link |
We don't have kids in the house anymore,
link |
so she doesn't have to.
link |
So we go out a lot.
link |
We go to restaurants.
link |
And because we have our favorites and we go to them a lot,
link |
we get to know the owners of the restaurant, the chef.
link |
And it's just heartbreaking.
link |
These people put their life, their blood, sweat, and tears.
link |
I mean, real blood, sweat, and tears into these projects.
link |
Restaurants are super difficult to manage.
link |
Most of them go bankrupt anyway.
link |
And the restaurants, we go to a good restaurant.
link |
So they've done a good job
link |
and they offer unique value.
link |
And they shut them down.
link |
And many of them will never open.
link |
Something like the estimate 50, 60% of restaurants
link |
in some places won't open.
link |
These are people's lives.
link |
These are people's capital.
link |
These are people's effort.
link |
These are people's love.
link |
Love what they do.
link |
Particularly if they're the chef as well.
link |
And it's disappeared.
link |
And what are they gonna do with their lives now?
link |
They're gonna live off the government
link |
the way our politicians would like them.
link |
Bigger and bigger stimulus plans
link |
so we can hand checks to people
link |
to get them used to living off of us rather than.
link |
It's disgusting and it's offensive
link |
and it's unbelievably sad.
link |
And this is where it comes to this.
link |
I care about other people.
link |
I mean, this idea that objectivists don't care.
link |
I mean, I love these people who provide me with pleasure
link |
of eating wonderful food in a great environment.
link |
And there's something inspiring about them too.
link |
Like when I see a great restaurant owner,
link |
I wanna do better with my own stuff.
link |
They're inspiring.
link |
Anybody who does it is excellent.
link |
I love sports because it's the one realm
link |
in which you'd still value and celebrate excellence.
link |
But I try to celebrate excellence everything in my life.
link |
So I try to be nice to these people.
link |
And with COVID, we went more to restaurants,
link |
we did more takeout stuff.
link |
We made an effort, particularly the restaurants,
link |
we really love to keep them going,
link |
to encourage them, to support them.
link |
The problem is philosophy drives the world.
link |
The response to COVID has been worse than pathetic.
link |
And it's driven by philosophy.
link |
It's driven by disrespect to science,
link |
ignorance and disrespect of statistics,
link |
a disrespect of individual human decision making.
link |
Government has to decide everything for us.
link |
And just throughout the process and a disrespect of markets
link |
because we didn't let markets work to facilitate
link |
what we needed in order to deal with this virus.
link |
If you look at the place, it's interesting
link |
that the only place on the planet
link |
that's done well with this are parts of Asia, right?
link |
Taiwan did phenomenally with this.
link |
And the vice president of Taiwan is an epidemiologist.
link |
So he knew what he was doing.
link |
And they got it right from the beginning.
link |
South Korea did amazing, even Hong Kong and Singapore.
link |
Hong Kong is just very few deaths.
link |
And the economy wasn't shut down in any of those places.
link |
There were no lockdowns in any of those places.
link |
The CDC had plans before this happened
link |
on how to deal with good plans.
link |
Indeed, if you ask people around the world before the pandemic
link |
which country is best prepared for a pandemic,
link |
they would have said the United States
link |
because of the CDC's plans
link |
and all of our emergency reserves and all that
link |
And yet all of that went out the window
link |
because people panicked, people didn't think,
link |
go back to reason, people were arrogant,
link |
refused to use the tools that they had at their disposal
link |
to deal with this.
link |
So you deal with pandemics, it's very simple
link |
how you deal with pandemics.
link |
And this is how South Korea and Taiwan and everywhere,
link |
you deal with them by testing, tracing and isolating.
link |
And you do it well and you do it vigorously
link |
and you do it on scale if you have to.
link |
And you scale up to do it and we have the wealth to do that.
link |
So one question I have, it's a difficult one.
link |
So I talk about love a lot
link |
and you've just talked about Donald Trump,
link |
I guarantee you though this particular segment
link |
will be full of division from the internet.
link |
But I believe that should be and can be fixed.
link |
What I'm referring to in particular is the division
link |
because we've talked about the value of reason.
link |
And what I've noticed on the internet
link |
is the division shuts down reason.
link |
So when people hear you say Trump,
link |
actually the first sentence you said about Trump,
link |
they'll hear Trump and their ears will perk up
link |
and they'll immediately start in that first sentence,
link |
they'll say, is he a Trump supporter or a Trump?
link |
They're not interested in anything else after that.
link |
And then after that, that's it.
link |
And what, how do, so my question is,
link |
you as one of the beacons of intellectualism,
link |
quite honestly, I mean, it sounds silly to say,
link |
but you are a beacon of reason.
link |
How do we bring people together long enough
link |
to where we can reason?
link |
I mean, there's no easy way out of this
link |
because the fact that people have become tribal
link |
and they have, very tribal.
link |
And the tribe, in the tribe reason doesn't matter.
link |
It's all about emotion.
link |
It's all about belonging or not belonging.
link |
And you don't wanna stand out.
link |
You don't wanna have a different opinion.
link |
And it's all about belonging.
link |
It took us decades to get back to tribalism
link |
where we were hundreds of years ago.
link |
It took millennium to get out of tribalism.
link |
It took the enlightenment
link |
to get us to the point of individualism,
link |
where we think in reason, respect for reason.
link |
Before that, we were all tribal.
link |
So it took the enlightenment to get us out of it.
link |
We've been in the enlightenment for about 250 years,
link |
influenced by the enlightenment and it's fading.
link |
The impact is fading.
link |
So what would we need to get out of it?
link |
We need self esteem.
link |
People join a tribe
link |
because they don't trust their own mind.
link |
People join a tribe
link |
because they're afraid to stand on their own two feet.
link |
They're afraid to think for themselves.
link |
They're afraid to be different.
link |
They're afraid to be unique.
link |
They're afraid to be an individual.
link |
People need self esteem.
link |
To gain self esteem,
link |
they have to have respect for rationality.
link |
They have to think and they have to achieve
link |
and they have to recognize that achievement.
link |
To do that, they have to have respect for thinking.
link |
They have to have to respect for reason.
link |
And we have to, and think about the schools.
link |
We have to have schools that teach people to think,
link |
teach people to value their mind.
link |
We have schools that teach people to feel
link |
and value their feelings.
link |
We have groups of six year olds sitting around a circle
link |
discussing politics.
link |
They don't know anything.
link |
See, you don't know anything when you're ignorant.
link |
Yes, you can feel,
link |
but your feelings are useless as decision making tools.
link |
But we emphasize emotion.
link |
It's all about socialization and emotion.
link |
This is why they talk about this generation of snowflakes.
link |
They can't hear anything that they're opposed to
link |
because they've not learned how to use their mind,
link |
So it boils down to teaching people how to think two things,
link |
how to think and how to care about themselves.
link |
So it's thinking of self esteem and the connected,
link |
because when you think, you achieve,
link |
which gains you self esteem.
link |
When you have self esteem,
link |
it's easier to think for yourself.
link |
And I don't know how you do that quickly.
link |
I mean, I think leadership matters.
link |
So, you know, part of what I try to do
link |
is try to encourage people to do those things.
link |
But I am a small voice.
link |
You asked me when,
link |
early on you said we should talk about
link |
why I'm not more famous.
link |
You know, my following is not big.
link |
It's very small in the scope of things.
link |
Well, yours and objectivism and that question,
link |
could you linger on it for a moment?
link |
Why isn't objectivism more famous?
link |
I think because it's so challenging.
link |
It's not challenging.
link |
It's not challenging to me, right?
link |
When I first encountered objectivism,
link |
it's like after the first shock
link |
and after the first kind of,
link |
none of this can be true.
link |
And fighting it, once I got it,
link |
It required years of studying,
link |
but it was easy in the sense of,
link |
yes, this makes sense.
link |
But it's challenging because it upends everything.
link |
It really says what my mother taught me is wrong.
link |
And what my politicians say left and right is wrong.
link |
There's not a single politician
link |
on which I agree with on almost anything, right?
link |
Because on the fundamentals we disagree.
link |
And what my teachers are telling me is wrong.
link |
And what Jesus said is wrong.
link |
so you talk about politics and all that kind of stuff,
link |
but you know, most people don't care.
link |
The more powerful thing about objectivism
link |
is the practical of my life,
link |
of how I revolutionized my life.
link |
And that feels to be like a very important and appealing,
link |
you know, get your shit together.
link |
Yeah, but this is why Jordan Peterson
link |
is so much more successful than we are, right?
link |
Make your bed or whatever.
link |
Yeah, because his personal responsibility is shallow.
link |
It's make your bed, stand up straight.
link |
That's what my mother told me when I was growing up.
link |
There's nothing new about Jordan Peterson.
link |
He says, embrace Christianity.
link |
Christianity is fine, right?
link |
Just do these few things and you'll be fine.
link |
And by the way, he says, happiness, you know,
link |
you either have it or you don't.
link |
You know, it's random.
link |
You don't actually,
link |
you can't bring about your own happiness.
link |
So he's given people an easy out.
link |
People want easy outs.
link |
People buy self help books
link |
that give them five principles
link |
or living in, you know, shallow.
link |
I'm telling them, think,
link |
stand on your own two feet, be independent.
link |
Don't listen to your mother.
link |
Do your own thing, but thoughtfully,
link |
not based on emotions.
link |
So you're responsible not just
link |
for a set of particular habits and so on.
link |
You're responsible for everything.
link |
Yes, and you're responsible.
link |
Here's the big one, right?
link |
You're responsible for shaping your own soul.
link |
Your consciousness,
link |
you get to decide what it's going to be like.
link |
And the only tool you have is your mind.
link |
Your only tool is your mind.
link |
Well, your emotions play a tool
link |
when they're properly cultivated.
link |
They play a role in that.
link |
And the tools you have is thinking, experiencing,
link |
living, coming to the right conclusions,
link |
you know, listening to great music
link |
and watching good movies and art is very important
link |
in shaping your own soul and helping you do this.
link |
It's got a crucial role in that.
link |
And it's lonely work
link |
because it's work you do with yourself.
link |
Now, if you find somebody who you love
link |
who shares these values and you can do with them,
link |
that's great, but it's mostly lonely work.
link |
It's hard, it's challenging, it ends your world.
link |
The reward is unbelievable.
link |
But even at that, think about the enlightenment, right?
link |
So up until the enlightenment, where was truth?
link |
Truth came from a book.
link |
And there were a few people who understood the book.
link |
Most of us couldn't read and they conveyed it to us.
link |
And they just told us what to do.
link |
And in that sense, life's easy.
link |
It sucks and we die young and we have nothing
link |
and we don't enjoy it, but it's easy.
link |
And the enlightenment comes around and says,
link |
we've got this tool, it's called reason.
link |
And it allows us to discover truth about the world.
link |
It's not in a book.
link |
It's actually your reason allows you
link |
to discover stuff about the world.
link |
And I consider the first,
link |
really the first figure of the enlightenment is Newton,
link |
Because he teaches us the laws of mechanics,
link |
like how does stuff work?
link |
And people go, oh, wow, this is cool.
link |
I can use my mind.
link |
I can discover truth.
link |
Isn't that amazing?
link |
And everything opens up once you do that.
link |
Hey, if I can discover,
link |
if I understand the laws of motion,
link |
if I can understand truth in the world,
link |
how come I can't decide who I marry?
link |
I mean, everything was fixed in those days.
link |
How come I can't decide what profession I should be in?
link |
Right, everybody would belong to a guild.
link |
How come I can't decide who my political leader should be?
link |
That's, so it's all reason.
link |
It's all, once you understand the efficacy of your own mind
link |
to understand truth, to understand reality,
link |
discover truth, not understand truth, discover it.
link |
Everything opens up.
link |
Now you can take responsibility for your own life
link |
because now you have the tool to do it.
link |
But we are living in an era where postmodernism tells us
link |
there is no truth, there is no reality,
link |
and our mind is useless anyway.
link |
Critical race theory tells us
link |
that you're determined by your race
link |
and your race shapes everything
link |
and your free will is meaningless
link |
and your reason doesn't matter
link |
because reason is just shaped by your genes
link |
and shaped by the color of your skin.
link |
It's the most racist theory of all.
link |
And you've got our friend at UC Irvine telling them,
link |
oh, your senses don't tell you anything about reality.
link |
Anyway, reality is what it is.
link |
So, you know, what's the purpose of reason?
link |
It's to invent stuff, it's to make stuff up.
link |
And then what use is that?
link |
It's complete fantasy.
link |
You've basically got every philosophical,
link |
intellectual voice in the culture
link |
telling them their reason is impotent.
link |
There's like a Steven Pinker who tries,
link |
and I love Pinker and he's really good
link |
and I love his books,
link |
but, you know, he needs to be stronger about this.
link |
And there's a few people on kind of,
link |
there's a few people partially in the intellectual dark web
link |
and otherwise who are big on reason
link |
but not consistent enough and not full understanding
link |
of what it means or what it implies.
link |
And then there's little old me.
link |
There's a little old me and it's me against the world
link |
in a sense, because I'm not only willing to accept,
link |
to articulate the case for reason,
link |
but then what that implies.
link |
It implies freedom, it implies capitalism,
link |
it implies taking personal responsibility over your own life.
link |
And there are other intellectual dark web people
link |
get to reason and then, oh, politics, you can be whatever.
link |
No, you can't, you can't be a socialist and for reason.
link |
It doesn't actually, those are incompatible.
link |
And you can't be a determinist and for reason.
link |
Reason and determinism don't go together.
link |
The whole point of reason is that it's an achievement
link |
and it requires effort and it requires engagement,
link |
it requires choice.
link |
So it is, it does feel like a little old me
link |
because that's it.
link |
The allies I have are allies.
link |
I have allies among some libertarians over economics.
link |
I have some allies in the intellectual dark web
link |
maybe over reason,
link |
but none of them are allies in the full sense.
link |
So my allies are the other objectivists,
link |
but they're not a lot of us.
link |
For people listening to this,
link |
for the few folks kind of listening to this
link |
and thinking about the trajectory of their own life,
link |
I guess the takeaway is reason is a difficult project,
link |
but a project that's worthy of taking on.
link |
Yeah, difficulties, I don't know
link |
if difficulty is the right word
link |
because difficult sounds like it's,
link |
I have to push this boulder up a hill.
link |
It's not difficult in that sense.
link |
It's difficult in the sense that it requires energy
link |
and focus, it requires effort,
link |
but it's immediately rewarding.
link |
And it rewards immediate, pretty quick, right?
link |
It takes a while to undo all the garbage that you have,
link |
but we all have that I had that took me years
link |
and years and years to get rid of certain concepts
link |
and certain emotions that I had that didn't make any sense,
link |
but it takes a long time to fully integrate that.
link |
So I don't want it to sound like it's a burden,
link |
like it's hard in that sense.
link |
It does require focus and energy.
link |
And I don't want it to sound like a Dr. Spock.
link |
I don't want to say, and I don't think I do
link |
because I'm a pretty passionate guy,
link |
but I don't want it to appeal like,
link |
oh, just forget about emotions.
link |
Emotions are how you experience the world.
link |
You want to have strong emotions.
link |
You want to live, you want to experience life strongly
link |
You just need to know that emotions are not cognition.
link |
It's another realm.
link |
It's like, don't mix the realms.
link |
Think about outcomes and then experience them.
link |
And sometimes your emotions won't coincide
link |
with what you think should be.
link |
And that means there's still more integration to be done.
link |
Yaron, as I told you offline,
link |
I've been a fan of yours for a long time.
link |
It's been, I was a little starstruck early on,
link |
getting a little more comfortable now.
link |
I believe that's gone.
link |
I highly recommend that people
link |
that haven't heard your work,
link |
listen to it through the Yaron Brook Show.
link |
The times I've disagreed with something I've heard you say
link |
is usually a first step on a journey
link |
of learning a lot more about that thing,
link |
about that viewpoint.
link |
And that's been so fulfilling.
link |
The passion, you talk about reason a lot,
link |
but the passion radiates in a way
link |
that's just contagious and uninspiring.
link |
So thank you for everything you've done for this world.
link |
It's truly an honor and a pleasure to talk to you.
link |
And my reward is that if I've had an impact
link |
on you and people like you, wow.
link |
I mean, that's amazing.
link |
When you wrote to me an email saying you've been a fan,
link |
I was blown away because I had no idea
link |
and completely unexpected.
link |
And every few months I discover,
link |
hey, I had an impact on this world
link |
and people that I would have never thought.
link |
So the only way to change the world
link |
is to change your one mind at a time.
link |
And when you have an impact on a good mind
link |
and a mind that cares about the world
link |
and a mind that goes out and does something about it,
link |
then you get the exponential growth.
link |
So through you, I've impacted other people
link |
and that's how you ultimately change everything.
link |
And so in spite of everything,
link |
I'm optimistic in a sense that I think
link |
that the progress we've made today
link |
is so universally accepted,
link |
the scientific progress, the technological progress,
link |
it can just vanish like it did when Rome collapsed.
link |
And whether it's in the United States or somewhere,
link |
progress will continue, the human project
link |
for human progress will continue.
link |
And I think these ideas,
link |
the ideas of reason and individualism
link |
will always be at the heart of it.
link |
And what we are doing is continuing
link |
the project of the Enlightenment.
link |
And it's the project that will save the human race
link |
and allow it to, for Elon Musk
link |
and for Jeff Bezos to reach the stars.
link |
Thank you for masterfully ending on a hopeful note.
link |
Yaron, a pleasure and an honor.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation
link |
with Yaron Brook and thank you to our sponsors,
link |
Blinkist, an app I use for reading
link |
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
link |
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link |
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link |
or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
link |
And now let me leave you with some words from Ayn Rand.
link |
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark
link |
in the hopeless swamps of the not quite,
link |
the not yet, and the not at all.
link |
Do not let the hero in your soul perish
link |
in lonely frustration for the life you deserved
link |
and have never been able to reach.
link |
The world you desire can be one.
link |
It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.