The following is a conversation with Iran Brook, one of the best known objectivist philosophers

and thinkers in the world. Objectivism is the philosophical system developed by Ayn Rand that

she first expressed in her fiction books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and later

in nonfiction essays and books. Yaron is the current chairman of the board at the Ayn Rand

Institute, host of the Yaron Brook show, and the coauthor of Free Market Revolution, Equal is Unfair,

and several other books where he analyzes systems of government, human behavior, and the human

condition from the perspective of objectivism. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by

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ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet,

and CashApp, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in

the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I

first read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead early in college, along with many other literary

and philosophical works from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, Locke, Foucault, Wittgenstein, and of course,

all the great existentialists, from Kierkegaard to Camus. I always had an open mind, curious to

learn and explore the ideas of thinkers throughout history, no matter how mundane or radical or

even dangerous they were considered to be. Ayn Rand was, and I think still is, a divisive figure.

Some people love her, some people dislike or even dismiss her. I prefer to look past what some may

consider to be the flaws of the person and consider with an open mind the ideas she presents,

and Yaron now describes and applies in his philosophical discussions. In general, I hope

that you will be patient and understanding as I venture out across the space of ideas and the

ever widening Orverton window, pulling at the thread of curiosity, sometimes saying stupid

things, but always striving to understand how we can better build a better world together.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and up a podcast,

follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman.

And now, here's my conversation with Yaron Rook. Let me ask the biggest possible question

first. Sure. What are the principles of a life well lived?

I think it's to live with thought, that is, to live a rational life, to think it through. I think

so many people, in a sense, zombies out there, they're alive, but they're not really alive because

their mind is not focused. Their mind is not focused on what do I need to do in order to live a

great life. So too many people just go through the motions of living rather than really embrace life.

So I think the secret to living a great life is to take it seriously. And what it means to take

it seriously is to use the one tool that makes us human, the one tool that provides us with all the

values that we have, our mind, our reason, and to use it, apply it to living. People apply it to

their work. They apply it to their math problems, to science, to programming. But imagine if they

use that same energy, that same focus, that same concentration to actually living life and choosing

values that they should pursue, that would change the world. And it would change their lives.

Yeah, actually, you know, I wear the silly suit and tie. It symbolizes, to me always, it makes me

feel like I'm taking the moment really seriously. I think that's really, that's right. And each one

of us has different ways to kind of condition our consciousness. I'm serious now. And for you,

it's a suit and tie. It's a conditioning of your consciousness too. Now I'm focused. Now I'm at

work. Now I'm doing my thing. And I think that's, that's terrific. And I wish everybody took that.

Look, I mean, it's a cliche, but we only live once. Every minute of your life, you never can

ever live again. This is really valuable. And when people, people don't have that deep respect

for their own life or their own time for their own mind. And if they did, again, you know,

one could only imagine, look at how productive people are, look at the amazing things they

produce and they do in their work. And if they apply that to everything, wow.

So you kind of talk about reason. Where does the kind of existentialist idea of experience maybe,

you know, fully experiencing all the moments versus fully thinking through?

Is there an interesting line to separate the two? Like why such an emphasis on reason

for life while lived versus just enjoy like experience?

Well, because I think experience in a sense is the easy part. I'm not saying it's,

it's how we experience the life that we live. And yes, I'm all with the take time to

to, to, to value what you value. But I think I don't think that's the problem of people out

there. I don't think the problem is they're not taking time to appreciate where they are

and what they do. I think it's that they don't use their mind in this one respect

in planning their life and thinking about how to live. So the focus is on reason is because

it's our only source of knowledge. There's no other source of knowledge. We don't know anything

with, you know, that does not come from our senses and in our mind, the integration of the,

of the evidence of our senses. Now, we know stuff about ourselves. And I think it's important

to know oneself through introspection. And I can't consider that part of reasoning is to,

is to, is to introspect. But I think reason is undervalued, which is funny to say,

because it's our means of survival. It's how human beings survive. We cannot see this is

where I disagree with so many scientists and people like Sam Harris, you mentioned Sam Harris

before the show. We're not programmed to know how to hunt. We're not programmed to do agriculture.

We're not programmed to build computers and build networks on which we can podcast and do our shows.

All of that requires effort. It requires focus. It requires energy and it requires will. It

requires somebody to will it. It requires somebody to choose it. And once you make that choice,

you have to engage that choice means that you're choosing to engage your reason in discovery,

in integration, and then in work to change the world in which we live. And, you know,

human beings had to discover, figure out, solve the problem of hunting, hunting. You know,

everybody thinks, oh, that's easy. I've seen the movie. But human beings had to figure out

how to do it, right? You can't run down a bison and bite into it, right? You're not going to

catch it. You're not going to, you have no fangs to bite into it. You have to build weapons. You

have to build tools. You have to create traps. You have to have a strategy. All of that requires

reason. So the most important thing that allows human beings to survive and to thrive in every

value from the most simple to the most sophisticated, from the most material to, I believe, the most

spiritual requires thinking. So stopping and appreciating the moment is, is something that I

think is relatively easy. Once you have a plan, once you've thought it through, once you know what

your values are, there is a mistake people make, they attain their values and they just, and they

just, they don't take a moment to savor that and to appreciate that and to even pat themselves on

the back that they did it, right? But that's not what's screwing up the world. What's screwing

up the world is that people have the wrong values and they don't think about them and they don't

really focus on them and they don't have a plan for their own life and how to live it.

If we look at human nature, you're saying the fundamental big thing that we need to consider

is our capacity, like a capability to reason. So to me, reason is this massive evolutionary

achievement, right? In quotes, right? If you think about any other sophisticated animal,

everything has to be coded. Everything has to be written in, in the hard way. It has to be there.

Yeah. And they have to have a solution for the outcome. And if there's no solution,

the animal dies typically, the animal suffers in some way. Human beings have this capacity,

self program. They have this capacity. It's not, it's not a tabula rasa in the sense that there's

nothing there. Obviously we have a nature. Obviously our minds, our brains are structured in

particular way. But given that we have the ability to turn it on or turn it off. We have the ability

to commit suicide, to reject our nature, to work against our interests, not to use the tool that

evolution has provided us with, which is this mind, which is reason. So that choice, that

fundamental choice, you know, Hamlet says it, right? To be or not to be. But to be or not to be

is to think or not to think, to engage or not to engage, to focus or not to focus.

You know, in the morning, when you get up, you kind of, you know, you're not, you're not really

completely there. You're kind of out of focus and stuff. It requires an act of will to say,

okay, I'm awake. I've got stuff to do. Some people never do that. Some people live in that haze.

And they never engage that mind. And when you're, when you're sitting and try to solve a complex

computer problem or math problem, you have to turn something on. You have to, in a sense,

it exerts certain energy to focus on the problem, to do it. And that is not determined in a sense

that you have to focus. You choose to focus and you could choose not to focus.

And that choice is more powerful than any other, like parts of our brain that we've borrowed from

fish and from our evolutionary origins, like this, whatever this crazy little leap in evolution is

that allowed us to think is more powerful than anything else. So I think neuroscientists

pretend they know a lot more about the brain than they really do.

And that we know, and we don't know that much yet about how the brain functions and what's

efficient, you know, all this stuff. So I think what, what exists there is a lot of potentialities.

But the beauty of the human brain is it's, it's potentialities that we have to manifest through

our choices. It's there, it's sitting there. And yes, there's certain things that can evoke

certain senses, certain feelings. I'm not even saying emotions, because I think emotions are

too complex to have been programmed into our mind. But I don't think so. You know,

there's this big issue of evolutionary psychology is huge right now. And it's a big issue.

You know, I find it, to a large extent, as way too early and in storytelling about expo

storytelling about, about stuff, we still don't, you know, so for example, I would like to say

for evolutionary psychology, differentiate between things like inclinations, feelings,

emotions, sensations, thoughts, concepts, ideas. What of those, the programmed and what of those

are developed and chosen and a product of reason? I think anything from emotion to abstract ideas

is all chosen is all a product of reason. And everything before that, we might have

been programmed for. But the fact is, so clearly a sensation is not a product of, you know,

is something that we feel because that's how our biology works. So until we have these categories,

and until we can clearly specify what is what and where do they come from, the whole discussion

in evolutionary psychology seems to be rambling. It doesn't seem to be scientific. So we have to

define our terms, you know, which is the basis of science, you have to have some, some clear

definitions about what we're talking about. When you ask them these questions, there's never really

a coherent answer about what is it exactly. And everybody is afraid of the issue of free will.

And I think, I think to some extent, I mean, Harris has this, and I don't want to misrepresent

anything Harris has, because I, you know, I'm a fan and I like a lot of his stuff. But on the one

hand, he is obviously intellectually active and wants to change our minds. So he believes that

we have some capacity to choose. On the other hand, he's undermining that capacity to choose by

saying it's just determined, so you're going to choose what you choose. You have no say in it,

there's actually no you. So it's, you know, so the, and that's to me completely unscientific,

that's completely him, you know, pulling it out of nowhere, we all experience the fact that we have

an eye. That kind of certainty saying that we do not have that fundamental choice that reason

provides is unfounded currently. Look, there's a sense in which it can never be

contradicted, because it's a product of your experience. It's not a product of your experience,

you can experience it directly. So no science will ever prove that this table isn't here.

I can see it, it's here, right? I can feel it. I know I have free will because I can

introspect it. In a sense, I can see it. I can see myself engaging it. And that is as valid

as the evidence of my senses. Now, I can't point at it so that you can see the same thing I'm seeing,

but you can do the same thing in your own consciousness and you can identify the same

thing. And to deny that in the name of science is to get things upside down. You start with that.

And that's the beginning of science. The beginning of science is the identification

that I choose and that I can reason. And now I need to figure out the mechanism,

the rules of reasoning, the rules of logic, how does this work, and that's where science comes from.

Of course, it's possible that science, from my place of AI, would be able to,

if we were able to engineer consciousness or understand, I mean, it's very difficult

because we're so far away from it now, but understand how the actual mechanism of that

consciousness emerges. And in fact, this table is not real, that we can determine that

exactly how our mind constructs the reality that we perceive, then you can start to make

interesting. But our mind doesn't construct the reality that we perceive. The reality we perceive

is there. We perceive a reality that exists. Now, we perceive it in particular ways given

the nature of our senses, right? A bat perceives this table differently, but it's still the same

table with the same characteristics and the same identity. It's just a matter of we use

eyes, they use a radar system, they use sound waves to perceive it, but it's still there.

Existence exists whether we exist or not. And so you could create, I mean, I don't know how,

and I don't know if it's possible, but let's say you could create a consciousness, right?

And I suspect that to do that, you would have to use biology, not just electronics,

but the way outside my expertise. Because consciousness, as far as we know, is a phenomenon

of life. And you would have to figure out how to create life before you created consciousness,

I think. But if you did that, then that wouldn't change anything. All it would say is we have

another conscious being cool. That's great. But it wouldn't change the nature of our

consciousness. Our consciousness is what it is. But respect. So that's very interesting. I think

this is a good way to set the table for discussion of objectivism is let me at least

challenge a thought experiment, which is, I don't know if you're familiar with Donald

Hoffman's work about reality. So his idea is that we're just our perception is just an interface

to reality. So Donald Hoffman is the is the guy you see, Irvine? Yeah. Yes, I've met Donald,

and I've seen his video. And look, Donald is not invented anything new. This goes back to ancient

philosophy. Let me just stating. Yes. In case people aren't familiar. I mean, it's a fascinating

thought experiment to me, like out of the box thinking, perhaps literally, is that,

you know, there's a different there's a gap between the world as we perceive it and the

world as it actually exists. And I think that's for the philosophy of objectivism is a really

important gap to close. So can you maybe at least try to entertain the idea that

that there is more to reality than our minds can perceive? Well, I don't understand what more means,

right? Of course, there's more to reality than what our senses perceive. That is, for example,

I don't know, certain certain elements have radiation, right? Uranium has ready. I can't

perceive radiation. The beauty of human reason is I can, I can through experimentation discover

the phenomena of radiation, then actually measure radiation. And I don't worry about it. I can't

perceive the world the way a bat perceives the world. And I might not be able to see certain

things that, but I can, we've created radar. So a way understand how a bat perceives the world.

And I can mimic it through a radar screen and create an images like the bat. It's consciousness

somehow perceives it, right? So the beauty of human reason is our capacity to understand the

world beyond what our senses give us directly. At the end, everything comes in through our senses,

but we can understand things that our senses don't provide us. But what he's doing is he's

doing something very different. He is saying what our senses provides us might have nothing to do

with the reality out there. That is just a random arbitrary nonsensical statement. And he actually

has a whole evolutionary explanation for it. He runs some simulations, the simulations seem,

I mean, I'm not an expert in this field, but they seem silly to me. They don't seem to reflect.

And look, all he's doing is taking Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which articulate exactly the same

cause. And he's giving it a venue of evolutionary ideas. I'm not an expert in evolution and I'm

an unexplored on epistemology, which is what this is. So to me, as a semi layman, it doesn't make

any sense. And you know, I'm actually, you know, I have this year on book show. I don't know if

I'm allowed to pitch it, but I've got this year on book show. Let me pause on YouTube. I'm a huge fan.

I listen to it very often as a small aside. The cool thing about reason, which you practice,

is you have a systematic way of thinking through basically anything. And that's so fun to listen

to. I mean, it's rare that I think there's flaws in your logic, but even then it's fun. Cause I'm

like disagreeing with the screen. And it's great when somebody disagrees with me and they give

good arguments because that makes it challenging. So one of the shows I want to do in the next few

weeks is one of my philosophers, bring one of my philosopher friends to discuss the video that

Hoffman, where he presents his theory, because it surprises me how seductive it is. And it seems to

be so, first of all, completely counterintuitive, but because, you know, somehow we managed to

cross the road and not get hit by the car. And if our sensors did not provide us any information

about what's actually going on in reality, how do we do that? And not to mention build computers,

not to mention flight to the moon and actually land on the moon. And if reality is not giving us

information about the moon, if our sensors are not giving us information about the moon,

how did we get there? You know, and where did we go? Maybe we didn't go anyway.

It's just, it's nonsensical to me. And it's a very bad place philosophically,

because it basically says there is no objective standard for anything. There's no objective

reality. You can come up with anything, you could argue anything, and there's no methodology, right?

My I believe that at the end of the day, what reason allows us to do is provides us with a

methodology for truth. And at the end of the day, for every claim that I make, I should be able to

boil it down to C. Yeah, look, the evidence of the senses is right then once you take that away,

knowledge is gone. And truth is gone. And that opens it up to, you know, complete disaster.

So, you know, to me, why it's compelling to at least entertain this idea, first of all,

it shakes up the mind a little bit to force you to go back to first principles and, you know,

ask the question, what do I really know? And the second part of that that I really enjoy

is it's a reminder that we know very little to be a little bit more humble. So if reality doesn't

exist at all, is before you start thinking about it, I think it's a really nice wake up call to

think wait a minute. I don't really know much about this universe, that humbleness. I think

something I'd like to ask you about in terms of reason, when you you can become very confident in

your ability to understand the world, if you practice reason often, and I feel like it can

lead you astray, because you can start to think it's so I love psychology. And psychologists have

the certainty about understanding the human condition, which is undeserved. You know,

you run a study with 50 people, and you think you can understand the source of all these

psychiatric disorders, all these kinds of things. That's similar kind of trouble. I feel like you

can get into when you overreach with reason. So I don't think there is such a thing as

overreaching with reason, but there are bad applications of reason. They're bad uses of

reason or the pretense of using reason. I think a lot of these psychological studies

are pretense of using reason. And these psychologists have never really taken a serious stat class,

or a serious econometrics class, or they use statistics in weird ways. They just don't make

any sense. And that's not reason. That's just bad thinking. So I don't think you can do too much

good thinking. And that's what reason is. It's good thinking. Now, the fact that you

try to use reason does not guarantee you won't make mistakes. It doesn't guarantee you won't be

wrong. It doesn't guarantee you won't go down a rabbit hole and completely get it wrong. But it

does give you the only existing mechanism to fix it, which is going back to reality,

going back to facts, going back to reason, and getting out of the rabbit hole and getting

out back to reality. So I agree with you that it's interesting to think about these,

what I consider crazy ideas, because it, oh wait, what is my argument about them? If I don't really

have a good argument about them, then do I know what I know? So in that sense, it's always nice

to be challenged and pushed. And you know, the nice thing about objectivism is everybody's

doing that to me all the time, right? Because nobody agrees with me on anything. So I'm constantly

being challenged, whether it's by Hoffman on metaphysics and epistemology, right, on the

very foundations of analogy and ethics, everybody constantly, and in politics all the time. So

I find that it's part of, you know, I prefer that everybody, there's a sense in which I prefer

that everybody agreed with me, right? Because I think we live in a better world. But there's a

sense in which that disagreement makes it, at least up to a point, makes it interesting and

challenging and forces you to be able to rethink or to confirm your own thinking and to challenge

their thinking. Can you try to do the impossible task and give a whirlwind introduction to

Ayn Rand, the many sides of Ayn Rand? So Ayn Rand, the human being, Ayn Rand, the novelist,

and Ayn Rand, the philosopher. So who was Ayn Rand? Sure. So her life story is one that I

think is fascinating, but it also lends itself to this integration of all of these things.

She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905, to kind of a middle class family, Jewish family,

they owned a pharmacy, her father owned a pharmacy. And, you know, she grew up, she grew up, she was

a very, she knew what she wanted to do and what she wanted to be from a very young age. I think

from the age of nine, she knew she wanted to be a writer. She wanted to write stories. That was

the thing she wanted to do. And, you know, she focused her life after that on this goal of I

want to be a novelist, I want to write. And the philosophy was incidental to that, in a sense,

at least until some point in her life. She witnessed the Russian revolution. Literally,

it happened outside. They lived in St. Petersburg, where the first kind of demonstrations and of

the revolution happened. So she witnessed it. She lived through it as a teenager, went to school

under the Soviets. For a while, they were under kind of the, on the Black Sea, where the opposition

government was ruling, and then they would go back and forth between the communes and the whites.

But she experienced what communism was like. She saw the pharmacy being taken away from a family.

She saw their apartment being taken away or other families being brought into the

apartment they already lived in. And it was very clear, given her nature, given her views,

even at a very young age, that she would not survive the system. So a lot of effort was put

into how do we get, how does she get out? And her family was really helpful in this.

And she had a cousin in, a cousin in Chicago, and she had been studying kind of film

at the university. And this is in her 20s? This is in her 20s, early 20s. And Lenin, there was a

small window where Lenin was allowing some people to leave under certain circumstances. And she

managed to get out to go do research on film in the United States. Everybody knew, everybody who

knew her knew she would never come back. That this was a one way ticket. And she got out,

she made it to Chicago, spent a few weeks in Chicago, and then headed to Hollywood.

She wanted to write scripts. That was the goal. Here's this short woman from Russia with a strong

accent, learning English, showing up in Hollywood. And I want to be a script writer.

In English. In English, writing in English. And this is kind of one of these fairy tale stories,

but it's true. She shows up at the Cecil B. DeMille studios. And she has a letter of introduction

from her cousin in Chicago, who owns a movie theater. And this is in the 19, the late 1920s.

And she shows up there with this letter and they say, you know, don't call us, we'll call you kind

of thing. Right. And she steps out. And there's this massive convertible. And in the convertible

is Cecil B. DeMille. And he's driving slowly past her right at the entrance of the studio.

And she stares at him and he stops the car and he says, you know, why are you staring at me?

And she says, you know, she tells him a story for Russia and you know, I want to want to make it

in the movies. I want to be a script writer one day. And he says, well, if you want to, if you

want that, you don't get in the car. She gets in the car and he takes her to the back lot of his

studio where they're filming The King of Kings, the story of Jesus. And he says he has a pass for

a week. If you want to be, if you want to write for the movies, you better know how movies are made.

And she basically spends a week and then she spends more time there. She manages to get an

extension. She lands up being an extra in the movie. So you can see my man there. And

it's one of the masses when Jesus is walking by. And she meets her future husband on the set

of The King of Kings. She lands up getting married, getting her American citizenship that way.

And she lands up doing odds and ends jobs in Hollywood, living in a tiny little apartment,

somehow making a living. Her husband was an actor. He was, you know, struggling actors

were difficult times. And in the evenings, studying English, writing, writing, writing,

writing and studying and studying and studying. And she finally makes it by writing a play

that is successful in, in LA and ultimately goes to Broadway. And she writes her first

novel is a novel called We the Living, which is the most autobiographical of all her novels.

It's about a young woman in the Soviet Union. It's a powerful story, a very moving story,

and probably, if not the best, one of the best portrayals of life under communism.

So you would recommend the book.

Definitely recommend We the Living. It's her first, first novel. She wrote in the 30s.

And it didn't go anywhere. Because if you think about the intelligentsia, the people who

mattered, the people who wrote book reviews, this is a time of Durante, who's the New York Times guy

in Moscow who's praising Stalin to the hills and the success. So the novel fails, but,

but she's got a novel out. She writes a small novel let called Anthem. A lot of people have

read that and it's, it's read in high schools. It's, it's kind of dystopian novel. And it's

won't, it doesn't get published in the US gets published in the UK. UK is very interested in

dystopian novels, Animal Farm in 1984. 84 is published a couple of years after, I think,

after Anthem. There's reason to believe he read, he read Anthem.

In George Orwell, right? In Animal Farm. Yeah.

Just the small side, Animal Farm is probably top. I mean, I would, it's weird to say, but I would

say it's my favorite book. Have you seen this movie out now called Mr. Jones?

No. Oh, you've got to see Mr. Jones.

What's Mr. Jones? Sorry for my ignorance.

No, no, it's a movie. It hasn't got any publicity, which is tragic because it's a really good movie.

It's both brilliantly made. It's made by a Polish director, but it's in English.

It's a, it's a true story and, and George Orwell's Animal Farm is featured in it in the sense that

during the story, George Orwell was writing Animal Farm and, and he's the narrator is reading off

sections of Animal Farm as the movie is progressing. Yeah.

And the movie is a true story about the first western journalist to discover and to write

about the famine in Ukraine. And so he goes to Moscow and then he gets on a train and he finds

himself in Ukraine and it's, it's, it's beautifully and horrifically made. So the horror of the famine

is brilliantly conveyed. And then, and it's a true story. It's a very moving story, very powerful

story. And, and just very well made movie. So it's, it's tragic in my view that not more people

are seeing it. That's true. I was actually recently just complaining that there's not enough

content on the, the famine, the thirties of, you know, of, of stuff. There's so much on Hitler.

Like I love the reading. I'm reading, it's so long. It's been taking me forever. The, the rise and

falls of Third Reich. Yeah. I love it. I've got the book to compliment that, that you have to read.

It's called the ominous parallels. It's Leonard Peacock and it's the ominous parallels. And it's

about, it's about the causes of the rise of, of, of Hitler, but a philosophical causes. So whereas

the rise and fall is more of a kind of the existential kind of what happened. But really

delving into the intellectual, intellectual currents that led to the rise of Hitler. And

maybe highly recommend that. And basically suggesting how it might rise another.

That's the ominous parallels. So the parallel he draws is to the United States. And he says,

those same intellectual forces are rising in the United States. And this is, this was published,

I think in published in 81, 82, it was published in 82. So it's published a long time ago. And yet

you look around us and it's unbelievably predictive, sadly, about the state of the world.

So I haven't finished that story. I don't want to, I don't know if you want me to.

No, no, no. But on that point, I'll have to, let's please return to it. But let's now, for now,

let's talk. But let me also say just, just because I don't want to forget about Mr. Jones,

it is true, the point you made, that tons of movies that are anti fascist, anti Nazi.

And that's good. But they're way too few movies that anti communist, just almost not.

And it's very interesting. And if you remind me later, I'll tell you a story about that.

But so she publishes Anthem. And then she starts, and she's doing okay in Hollywood.

And she's doing okay with, with the play. And then she starts on her, on the book,

The Fountainhead. And she writes The Fountainhead. And it comes out, she finishes it in 1945.

And she's, she sends it to publishers. And publisher after publisher after publisher,

turn it down. And it takes 12 publishers before this, this editor reads it and says,

I want to publish this book. And he basically tells his bosses, if you don't publish this book,

I'm leaving. And they don't really believe in the book. So they published just a few copies,

they don't do a mad look. And the book becomes a bestseller from word of mouth.

And they land up having to publish more and more and more. And, and it's, you know,

she's basically gone from this immigrant who comes here with very little command of English,

and, and to all kinds of odds and ends jobs in Hollywood to, you know, writing one of the

seminal, I think, book American books, she is an American author. I mean, if you read The Fountainhead,

it's not Russian. This is not Dostoevsky.

It feels, it feels like a symbol of what America is in the 20th century. And I mean,

probably maybe you can, so there's a famous kind of sexual rape scene in there. Is that,

is that like a lesson you want to throw in some controversial stuff to make your philosophical

books work out? I mean, is that why, why was it so popular? Do you have a sense?

Well, because I think it illustrated, first of all, because I think the character is a,

a fantastic, it's got a real hero. And I think it, the whole book is basically

illustrating this massive conflict that I think went on in America then is going on today. And

it goes on in a big scale politics, all the way down to the scale of the choices you make in your

life. And, and the, the issue is individualism versus collectivism. Should you live for yourself?

Should you live for your values? Should you pursue your passions? Should you, or should

you do what your mother tells you? Should you follow your mother's passions? And that's, and it's,

it's, it's very, very much an individual, a book about individuals and people relate to that.

But it obviously has this massive implications to the world outside. And at the time of collectivism,

just having been defeated, communist, well, not fascism and, and, and, and, you know, the United

States representing individualism, right, as defeated, defeated collectivism. But where

collectivist ideas are still popular in the form of socialism and communism. And for the individual,

this constant struggle between what people tell me to do, what society tells me to do,

what my mother tells me to do, and what I think I should do. I think it's unbelievably appealing,

particularly to young people who's trying to figure out what they want to do in life,

trying to figure out what's important in life. It had this enormous appeal, it's romantic,

it's bigger than life, the characters are big heroes. It's very American in that sense. It's

about individualism. It's about the triumph of individualism. And so I think that's what related,

and it had this big romantic element from the, I mean, when I use romantic, I use it kind of in

the sense of a movement in art. But it also has this romantic element in the sense of a relationship

between a man and a woman who's, that's very intriguing. It's not only that there's a, I would

say almost rape scene, right? I would say, but it's also that this woman is hard to understand.

I mean, I've, I've read it more than once and I still can't quite figure out Dominique, right?

Because she loves him and she wants to destroy him and she marries other people. I mean,

think about that too. Here she's writing a book in the 1940s. There's lots of sex. There's a woman

who marries more than one person, has having sex with more than one person, very unconventional.

She's having married, she's having sex with work, even though she's not married to work,

this is 1945. And it's, it's very jarring to people. It's very unexpected, but it's also a book of

its time. It's about individuals pursuing their passion, pursuing their life and not caring about

convention and, and what people think, but doing what they think is right. And, and, and so, so I

think it's, it's, it's, I encourage everybody to read this, obviously. So that was, was that the

first time she articulated, started, articulated something that sounded like a philosophy of

individualism? I mean, the philosophy is there in We The Living, right? Because at the end of the day,

the woman is the hero of We The Living is this individualist stuck in Soviet Union. So she's

struggling with these things. So the theme is there already. It's not as fleshed out. It's not

as articulated philosophically. And it's certainly then anthem, which is a dystopian novel, where

the dystopia in the future has, has, there's no I. Everything is we. And it's about one guy who

breaks out of that. I don't want to give it away, but, but it breaks out of that. So these themes

are running. And then we have, and they've been published, some of the early Iron Man stories

that she was writing in preparation for writing her novel stories, she was writing when she first

came to America, and you can see these same philosophical elements, even in the male female

relationships and the passion and the, you know, you, in the conflict, you see them even in those

early pieces. And she's just developing them. It's same philosophically, she's developing her

philosophy with her literature. And of course, after the fountainhead, she starts on what turns

out to be her Magnus Opus, which is Atlas Shrugged, which takes her 12 years to publish by the time,

of course, she brings that out. Every publisher in New York wants to publish it because the

fountainhead has been such a huge success. They don't quite understand it. They don't know what

to do with Atlas Shrugged, but they're eager to get it out there. And indeed, it's when it's

published, it becomes an instant bestseller. And the thing about the, particularly the

fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, but true of even Anthem and Wither Living, she is one of the only

dead authors that sell more after they've died than when they were alive. Now, you know, that's

true, maybe music, we listen to more Beethoven than when he was alive, but it's not true typically

of novelists. And yet here we are, you know, was it 50, you know, 60 years after the 63 years

after the publication of Atlas Shrugged and it sells probably more today than it sold when

it was a bestseller when it first came out. Is it true that it's like one of the most

sold books in history? No. Okay. I've heard this kind of statement. Tom Clancy book comes out,

sells more than Atlas Shrugged. But I've read it. I've heard statements like this. So there was a

very, and I shouldn't say this, but it's the truth. I'll say it, a very unscientific study done

by the Smithsonian Institute, probably in the early 90s, that basically surveyed CEOs

and asked them, what was the most influential book on you? And Atlas Shrugged came out as number two,

the second most influential book and CEOs in the country. But there's so many flaws in the study.

One was, you want to guess what the number one book, Bible, the Bible, but the Bible was like,

you know, so maybe they surveyed 100 people. I don't know what the exact numbers were,

but let's say it's 100 people and 60 said the Bible and 10 said Atlas Shrugged and

there were a bunch of books over it. So, you know, I don't. That's again,

the psychology discussion we were having. Exactly. Well, and it's one thing I've

learned and maybe COVID has taught me and nobody, you know, there are very few people

who know how to do statistics and almost nobody knows how to think probabilistically,

that is think in terms of probabilities, that it is a skill, it's a hard skill.

And everybody thinks they know it. I see doctors thinking they're statisticians and giving whole

analyses of the data on COVID and they don't have a clue what they're talking about,

not because they're not good doctors, because they're not good statisticians. It's not,

you know, people think that they have one skill and therefore it translates immediately into

another skill and it's just not true. So, I've been astounded at how bad people are at that.

For people who haven't read any of the books that we're just discussing,

what would you recommend? What book would you recommend they read and maybe also just elaborate

what mindset should they enter the reading of that book with?

So, I would recommend everybody read Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and in that order,

so it would depend on where you are in life, right? So, it depends on who you are and what you

are. So, Fountainhead is a more personal story. For many people, it's their favorite and for

many people, it was their first book and they wouldn't replace that, right? If Atlas Shrugged

is a, it's about the world. It's about what impacts the world, how the world functions, how

it's a bigger book in the sense of the scope. If you're interested in politics and you're interested

in the world, read Atlas Shrugged first. If you're mainly focused on your life, your career,

what you want to do with yourself, start with Fountainhead. I still think you should read both

because I think they are, I mean, to me, they were life altering and to many, many people,

they're life altering and you should go into reading them with an open mind, I'd say.

And with a, put aside everything you've heard about Iron Man, put aside any, even if it's

true, just put it aside, even what I just said about Iron Man, put it aside. Just read the book

as a book and let it move you and let, let, let your thoughts, let it shape how you think. And,

and it'll have, you know, it either have, you'll either have a response to it or you won't. But

I think most people have a very strong response to it. And then the question is,

do they, are they willing to respond to the philosophy? Are they willing to integrate

the philosophy? Are they willing to think through the philosophy or not? Because I know a lot of

people who completely disagree with the philosophy, philosophy, right here in Hollywood, right? Lots

of people here in Hollywood love the fountainhead. Interesting. Oliver Stone, who is, I think, a

avowed Marxist, right? I think he's, I think he's admitted to being a Marxist. He is. His movies

certainly reflect a Marxist theme. Is a huge fan of the fountainhead and is actually his dream

project he has set in public. His dream project is to make the fountainhead. Now he would completely

change it as movie directors do. And he's actually outlined what his script would look like. And

it would be a disaster for the ideas of the, but he loves the story because to him, the story is

about autistic integrity. And that's what he catches on. And what he hates about the story is

the individualism. And I think that his movie ends with Howard Walk joining some kind of commune

of architects that do it for the love and don't do it for the money. Interesting. But so yeah,

so you can connect with you without the philosophy. And before we get into the philosophy, staying

on Iron Rand, I'll tell you sort of my own personal experience. And I think it's one that

people share. I've experienced this with two people, Iron Rand and Nietzsche.

Yeah. When I brought up Iron Rand when I was in my early twenties,

the number of eye rolls I got from sort of, you know, like advisors and so on that

of dismissal, I've seen that later in life about more, more specific concepts in artificial

intelligence and technical where people decided this is, this is a set of ideas that are acceptable

and these sets of ideas are not. And they dismissed Iron Rand without giving me any justification

of why they dismissed her, except, Oh, that's something you're into when you're

19 or 20. That's same thing people say about Nietzsche. Well, that's just something you do

when you're in college and you take an intro to philosophy course. So, and I've never really

heard anybody cleanly articulate their opposition to Iron Rand in my own private little circles and

so on. Maybe one question I just want to ask is why is there such an opposition to Iron Rand?

And maybe another way to ask the same thing is what's misunderstood about Iron Rand.

So, we haven't talked about the philosophy, so it's hard to answer right now.

We can return to it if you think that's the right way to go. Well, let me give a broad

answer and then we'll do the philosophy and then we'll return to it because I think it's

important to know something about her ideas. I think her philosophy challenges everything.

It really does. It shakes up the world. It challenges so many of our preconceptions.

It challenges so many of the things that people take for granted as truth.

From religion to morality to politics to almost everything, there's never quite been a thinker

like her in the sense of really challenging everything and doing it systematically and

having a complete philosophy that is a challenge to everything that has come before her. Now,

I'm not saying they're on threads that connect. They are in politics. There might be a thread

in morality that might be thread. But on everything, there's just never been like it. And people are

afraid of that because it challenges them to the core. She's basically telling you to rethink

almost everything. And that is that people reject. The other thing that it does, and this goes to

this point about, oh yeah, that's what you do when you're 14, 15, right? She points out to them

that they've lost something. They've lost their idealism. They've lost their youthful idealism.

What makes youthfulness meaningful, other than we're in better physical shape,

starting to feel because I'm getting older? When we're young,

sometime in the teen years, there's something that happens to human consciousness.

We almost awaken anew, right? We suddenly discover that we can think for ourselves.

We suddenly discover that not everything our parents and our teachers tell us is true.

We suddenly discover that this tool, our minds, is suddenly available to us to discover the world

and to discover truth. And it is a time of idealism. It's a time of, whoa, I want to, you know,

the better teenagers. I want to know about the world. I want to go out there. I don't believe

my parents. I don't believe my teachers. And this is healthy. This is fantastic. And I want to go out

there and experiment. And that gets us into trouble, right? We do stupid things when we're

teenagers. Why? Because we're experimenting. It's the experiential part of it, right? We want to go

and experience life. But we're learning. It's part of the learning process. And we become risk

takers because we want to experience. But the risk is something we need to learn because we need

to learn where the boundaries are. And one of the damages that helicopter parents do is they

prevent us from taking those risks. So we don't learn about the world and we don't learn about

where the boundaries are. So the teenage years of these years of wonder, they're depressing when

you're in them for a variety of reasons, which I think primarily have to do with the culture,

but also with oneself. But they are exciting, the periods of discovery. And people get excited

about ideas and good ideas, bad ideas, all kinds of ideas. And then what happens? We settle. We

compromise. Whether that happens in college, where we're taught that nothing exists and nothing

matters and stop being, be an idolist, be a cynic, be whatever. Or whether it happens when we get

married and get a job and have kids and they're too busy and can't think about ideals and forget

and just get into the norm of conventional life or whether it's because a mother pesters us to

get married and have kids and do all the things that she wanted us to do. We give up on those ideals.

And there's a sense in which Ayn Rand reminds them that they gave up.

That's so beautifully put and so true. It's worth pausing on that

this dismissal, people forget the beauty of that curiosity. That's true in the scientific field

too, is the youthful joy of like everything is possible and we can understand it with the tools

of our mind. Yes. And that's what it's all about. That's what Ayn Rand's ideas at the end of the

day all blow down to is that confidence and that passion and that curiosity and that interest.

And if you think about what academia does to so many of us, we go into academia and we're

excited about, we're going to learn stuff, we're going to discover things. And then they stick

you into sub sub field and examining some minutiae that's insignificant and unimportant.

And to get published, you have to be conventional. You have to do what everybody else does. And then

there's the tenure process of seven years where they put you through this torture to write papers

that fit into a certain mold. And by the time you're done, you're in your mid 30s and you've

done nothing, you discovered nothing, you're all in this minutiae in this stuff. And it's destructive

in whiz, holding on to that passion, holding on to that knowledge and that confidence is hard.

And when people do away with it, they become cynical and they become part of the system

and they inflict the same pain on the next guy that they suffered because that's part of how it

works. Yeah, this happens in artificial intelligence. This happens when like

a young person shows up and with like fire in their eyes and they say,

I want to understand the nature of intelligence and everybody rolls their eyes.

Well, for these same reasons, because they've spent so many years on the very specific set of

questions that kind of they compete over and they write papers over and they have conferences about,

and it's true those that incremental research is the way you make progress,

answering the question of what is intelligence, exceptionally difficult.

But when you mock it, you actually destroy the realities. When we look like centuries from now,

we'll look back at this time for this particular field of artificial intelligence,

it will be the people who will be remembered will be the people who've asked the question

and made it their life journey of what is intelligence and actually had the chance to

succeed. Most will fail asking that question, but the ones that like had a chance of succeeding

and had that throughout their whole life. And I suppose the same is true for philosophy.

It's in every field. It's asking the big questions and staying curious and staying

passionate and staying excited and accepting failure, accepting that you're not going to

get it first time, you're not going to get the whole thing. But and sometimes you have to do

the minutiae work. And I'm not here to say nobody should specialize and you shouldn't do the minutiae,

you have to do that. But there has to be a way to do that work and keep the passion and keep it all

integrated. That's another thing. I mean, we don't live in a culture that integrates, right?

We live in a culture that is all that is all about, you know, this minutiae and not and,

you know, medicine is another field where you specialize in the kidney. I mean, the kidneys

connected to other things, you've got to, and we don't have a holistic view of these things.

And I'm sure not officially intelligence, you're not going to make the big leaps forward

without a holistic view of what it is you're trying to achieve. And maybe that's the question,

what is intelligence? But that's the kind of questions you have to ask to make big leaps

forward to really move the field in a positive direction. And it's the people who can think

that way, who move fields and move technology, move anything, anything is, everything is like.

But just like you said, it's painful because underlying that kind of questioning is,

well, maybe the work I've done for the past 20 years was a dead end. And you have to kind of

face that even just, it might not be true, but even just facing that reality is just,

it's a painful feeling. Absolutely. But it's, that's part of the reason why it's important to

enjoy the work that you do. Right. So that even if it doesn't completely worked out,

at least you enjoyed the process, right? It was not a waste because you enjoyed the process.

And if you learn as any entrepreneur knows this, right? And if you learn from the waste of time,

from the errors, from the mistakes, then you can build on them and make things even better,

right? And so the next 20 years, I'm a massive success.

Can we, another impossible task, so you did wonderfully on talking about Iran,

and the other impossible task of giving a whirlwind overview of the philosophy of

objectivism, the philosophy of Iran. Yeah. So luckily she did it in an essay,

or she talks about doing her philosophy on one foot. But let me integrate it with the literature

and with her life a little bit. She wanted to be a writer, but her goal, she had a particular

goal in her writing. She was an idealist, right? She wanted to portray the ideal man.

So one of the things you do when you want to design is what is an ideal man? You have to

ask that question. What does that mean? You might have a sense of it. You might have,

so in glimpses of it in other people's literature, but what is it? So she starts reading philosophy

to try to figure out what a philosopher say about the ideal man. And what she finds

horrifies her in terms of the view of most philosophers of man. And she's attracted,

certainly when she's young, to Nietzsche, because Nietzsche at least has a vision

of grandeur for man, even though his philosophy is very flawed and has other problems and

contradicting man in many ways. But at least he has that vision of what is possible to man.

And she's attracted to that romantic vision, that idealistic vision. So she discovers in writing,

in particularly in writing Atlas Shrugged, but even in the front in it, that she's going to

have to develop her own philosophy. She's going to have to discover these ideas for herself,

because they're not fully articulated anywhere else. The glimpses again of it in Aristotle,

in Nietzsche, but they're not fully fleshed out. So to a large extent, she develops a philosophy

for a very practical purpose, to write, to write a novel about the ideal man. And

Atlas Shrugged is the manifestation of that. By the way, sorry, to interrupt.

As a little aside, she does, when you say man, you mean human. And because we'll bring this up

often, she does, maybe you can elaborate of how she specifically uses man and he in the work.

We live in a time now, with gender and so on. Well, she did that in the sense that everybody

did it during her period of time. It's only in modern times where we do he slash she. Historically,

when you said he, human being, unless the particular context implied that it was a...

But in Iron Man's case, in this case, in this one sentence, she probably meant man.

Not that because she viewed that there are differences between men and women,

we're not the same, which I know comes at a shock to many people. But she's working on a character.

She was working on a particular vision. She considered herself a man worshiper and a man,

not human being, a male. Male. She worshipped manhood, if you will, the hero in man. And she

wanted to fully understand what that was. Now, it has massive implications for an ideal woman.

And I think she does portray the ideal woman in Atlas Shrugged in the character of Dagny.

But her goal is... I think her selfish goal for what she wanted to get out of the novel

is that excitement, partially sexual, about seeing your ideal manifest in reality of what you perceive

as that which you would be attracted to, fully, intellectually, physically, sexually,

in every aspect of your life. That's what she's trying to bring into it.

So there was no ambiguity of gender. So there was a masculinity and a femininity in her work.

Very much so. And if you read the novels, you see that. You see that. Now, remember,

this is in the context of, in Atlas Shrugged, she is portraying a woman who runs a railroad,

the most masculine of all jobs you could imagine, running a railroad better than any man could run

in. And achieving huge success better than any other man out there. But for her, even Dagny

needs somebody to... needs a man in some sense to look up to. And that's the character whose name

I won't mention because it gives away too much of the plot. But they have to... I like how you do

that. You're good. You're not. A lot of practice. A lot of practice. Brilliant. Because you convey

all the important things without giving away plot lines. That's beautiful. You're a master.

So she's very much... She described herself once as a male chauvinist.

Okay. She very... She likes the idea of a man opening a door for her. But more metaphysically,

she identifies something in the difference between a way a man relates to a woman and

a woman relates to a man. It's not the same. And let's not take too far of a tangent, but I just,

as a side comment, to me, she represented... She was a feminist to me. But perhaps there's a...

Perhaps technically, you disagree with that, whatever. But the... That to me represented

strong... She had some of the strongest female characters in the history of literature.

Again, this is a woman running a railroad in 1957. And not just a woman running a railroad.

And this is true of The Fountainhead as well. A woman who is sexually, in a sense, assertive,

sexually open. This is not a woman who... This is a woman who embraces her sexuality.

And sex is important in life. This is why it's coming up. It was important in the novels.

It's important in life. And for her, one's attitude towards sex is her reflection. One's

attitude towards life and what attitude towards pleasure, which is an important part of life.

And she thought that was an incredibly important thing. And so she has these assertive, powerful,

sexual women who live their lives on their terms 100% who seek a man to look up to.

Yeah. Now, there's a psychologically complex... It's more psychology than

philosophy. It's psychologically complex and not my area of expertise. But this is...

There's something... And she would argue there's something fundamentally different about a male

and a woman, about a male and female, psychologically in their attitude towards one another.

Yeah. But as a side note, I say that I would say that I don't know, philosophically,

if her ideas about gender are interesting, I think her other philosophical ideas are much

more interesting. But reading wise, the stories it created, the tension it created,

that was pretty powerful. I mean, that's pretty powerful stuff.

I'll speculate that the reason it's so powerful is because it reflects something in reality.

Yeah. That's true. There's a thread that at least...

And look, it's really important to say, I think she was the first feminist in a sense. I think,

in a sense, the feminist that provoked feminism into something that it shouldn't be. But in the

sense of men and women are capable, she was the first one who really put that into a novel and

showed it. To me, as a boy, when I was reading Alice Schrag, I think I read that before,

Fountainhead. That was one of the early introductions, at least if an American woman had

examples of my own life for Russian women, but of a badass lady. I love engineering.

I had loved that she could... Here's a lady that's running the show. So that, at least to me, was an

example of a really strong woman. But objectivism. Objectivism. So she developed it for a novel.

She spent the latter part of her life after the publication of Alice Schrag really articulating

her philosophy. So that's what she did. She applied it to politics, to life, to gender,

to all these issues from 1957 until she died in 1982. So the objectivism was born out of the later

parts of Alice Schrag. Yes, definitely. It was there all the time, but it was fleshed out during

the latter parts of Alice Schrag and then articulated for the next 20 years. So what is

objectivism? So objectivism... So there are five branches in philosophy. And so I'm going to

just go through the branches. You start with metaphysics, the nature of reality.

And objectivism argues that reality is what it is. It kind of goes... Hawkins back to Aristotle,

Law of Identity. A is A. You can wish it to be B, but wishes do not make something real.

Reality is what it is, and it is the primary. And it's not manipulated, directed by consciousness.

Consciousness is there to observe, to give us information about reality. That is the purpose

of consciousness. It is the nature of it. So in metaphysics, existence exists. The law of

identity, the law of causality, things are... The things act based on their nature, not randomly,

not arbitrarily, but based on their nature. And then we have the tool to know reality.

This is epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Our tool to know reality is reason. It's our

senses and our capacity to integrate the information we get from our senses and to

integrate it into new knowledge and to conceptualize it. And that is uniquely human.

We don't know the truth from revelation. We don't know truth from our emotions.

Our emotions are interesting. Our emotions tell us something about ourselves,

but our emotions are not tools of cognition. They don't tell us the truth about what's out there,

about what's in reality. So reason is our means of knowledge, and therefore,

reason is our means of survival. Only individuals reason, just in the same way that only individuals

can eat. We don't have a collective stomach. Nobody can eat for me. And therefore, nobody can think

for me. We don't have a collective mind. There's no collective consciousness. It's bizarre that

people talk about these collectivized aspects of the mind. They don't talk about collective

feats and collective stomachs and collective things. But so we all think for ourselves,

and it is our fundamental basic responsibility to live our lives, to live, to choose,

once we choose to live, to live our lives to the best of our ability. So in morality, she is an

egoist. She believes that the purpose of morality is to provide you with a code of values and

virtues, to guide your life for the purpose of your own success. Your own survival, your own

thriving, your own happiness. Happiness is the moral purpose of your life. The purpose of morality

is to guide you towards a happy life. Your own happiness. Your own happiness. Absolutely. Your

own happiness. So she rejects the idea that she should live for other people, that she should

live for the purpose of other people's happiness. Your purpose is not to make them happier, to

make them anything. Your purpose is your own happiness. But she also rejects the idea that

you could argue maybe the Nechayana idea of you should use other people for your own purposes.

Right? So every person is an end in himself. Every person's moral responsibility is their own

happiness. And you shouldn't use other people for your own, shouldn't exploit other people

for your own happiness. And you shouldn't allow yourself to be exploited for other people.

Every individual is responsible for themselves. And what is it that allows us to be happy?

What is it that facilitates human flourishing, human success, human survival? Well, it's the

use of our minds, right? It goes back to reason. And what does reason require in order to be

successful, in order to work effectively? It requires freedom. So the enemy of reason,

the enemy of reason is force. The enemy of reason is coercion. The enemy of reason is

authority, right? The Catholic Church doing what they did to Galileo, right? That restricts

Galileo's thinking, right? When he's in a house arrest, is he going to come up with

a new theory? Is he going to discover new truths? No, it's the punishment is too, you know,

it's too dangerous. So force, coercion are enemies of reason. And what reason needs is

to be free, to think, to discover, to innovate, to break out of convention.

So we need to create an environment in which individuals are free to reason, to free to think.

And to do that, we come up with a concept, historically, we've come up with a concept

of individual rights. Individual rights define the fact that we should be left alone,

free to pursue our values, using our reason, free of what? Free of coercion, force, authority.

And that the job of government is to make sure that we are free. The whole point of government,

the whole point of when we come in a social context, the whole point of establishing

government in that context is to secure that freedom. It's to make sure that I don't use

coercion on you. The government is supposed to stop me, is supposed to intervene before I can do

that, or if I've already done it, to prevent me from doing it again. So the purpose of government

is to protect our freedom, to think and to act based on our thoughts. It's to leave individuals

free to pursue their values, to pursue their happiness, to pursue their rational thought,

and to be left alone to do it. And so she rejects socialism, which basically assumes

some kind of collective goal, assumes the sacrifice of the individual to the group,

assumes that your moral purpose in life is the well being of other people rather than your own.

And she rejects all form of statism, all form of government that is overly,

that is involved in any aspect other than to protect us from forced coercion and authority.

And she rejects anarchy, and we can talk about that. I think you had a question in the list

of questions you sent me about anarchy. So I'm happy to discuss that.

I'm just like a malice about anarchy. So I don't know if you're familiar with him.

Yes, I'm familiar with him. So, yeah, so she completely rejects anarchy.

Anarchy is completely inconsistent with her point of view, and we can talk about why if you want.

So there's some perfect place where freedom is maximized, so systems of government.

Absolutely. And she thought that the American system of government came close in its idea,

obviously founded with original sin, with the sin of slavery. But in its conception,

the declaration of dependence is about as perfect a political document as one could write.

I think the greatest political document in human history,

but really articulated almost perfectly and beautifully. And that the American system of

government with the Texas balances, which is with its emphasis on individual rights,

with its emphasis on freedom, with its emphasis on leaving individual freedom, pursue their

happiness and explicit recognition of happiness as a goal, individual happiness,

was the model. It wasn't perfect. There are a lot of problems to a large extent because the founders

had mixed philosophical premises. So there were alien premises introduced into the founding

of the country, slavery obviously being the biggest problem. But it was close. And we need

to build on that to create an ideal political system that will, yes, maximize the freedom

of individuals to do exactly this. And then of course she had, so that's kind of, that's

the manifestation of this individualism in a political realm. And she had a theory of art.

She had a theory of aesthetics, which is the fifth branch of she have metaphysics of

epistemology, ethics and politics. And the fifth branch is aesthetics. And she viewed art as an

essential human need, a fuel for the human spirit. And that just like any human need,

it had certain principles that it had to abide by. That is just like there's nutrition, right? So

some food is good for you and some food is bad for you, some food, some stuff is poison.

She believed the same is true of art, that art had an identity, which is very controversial today,

right? Today, if you put a frame around it, it is art, right? If you put a urinal in a museum,

it becomes art, which she thought was evil and ludicrous. And she rejected completely that art

had an identity and that it served a certain function that human beings needed it. And if it

didn't have, not only did it have the identity, but that function was served well by some art

and poorly by other art. And then there's a whole realm of stuff that's not art,

basically, all of all of what today is considered modern art, she would consider as not being art,

you know, splashing paint on a canvas, not art. So she had very clear ideas. She articulated them

not. So I would say not in conventional philosophical form. So she didn't write

philosophical essays using the philosopher's language. It's partially why I think philosophers

have never taken it seriously. They're actually accessible to us. We can actually read them.

And she integrates the philosophy in what I think are amazing ways with psychology,

with history, with economics, with politics, with what's going on in the world.

And she has dozens and dozens and dozens of essays that she wrote. Many of them were aggregated into

books. I particularly recommend books like The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism, The Unknown

Ideal, and Philosophy Who Needs It. And, you know, I think it's a beautiful philosophy.

You know, I know you're big on love. I think it's a philosophy of love. We can talk about that.

Essentially, it's about love. That's what the philosophy is all about when it applies,

in terms of applying to self. And, you know, I think it's sad that so few people read it,

and so few intellectuals take it seriously and are willing to engage with it.

Let me ask, that was incredible. But after that beautiful whirlwind overview, let me ask the

most shallow of questions, which is the name Objectivism, of where, like, how should people

think about the name being rooted? Why not individualism? What are the options? If we're,

like, had a branding meeting right now. Sure. So she actually had a branding meeting. So she

did this. She went through the exercise. Objectivism, I do not think, I don't know all the details,

but I don't think Objectivism was the first name she came with. The problem was that the

other names were taken, and they were not positive implications. So, for example,

rationalism could have been a good word, because she's an advocate of rational thought,

or reasonism. But reasonism sounds weird, right? The ism, because of too many S's, I guess.

Rationalism, but it was already a philosophy, and it was a philosophy inconsistent with hers,

because it was what she considered a false view of reason, of rationality.

Realityism, you know, just doesn't work. So she came on Objectivism, and I think, actually,

it's a great word. It's a great name, because it has two aspects to it. And this is a unique view

of what Objectivity actually means. Inobjectivism, inobjectivity is the idea of an independent

reality. There is truth. There's actually something out there, and then there's the

role of consciousness. There is the role of figuring out the truth. The truth doesn't just

hit you. The truth is not in the thing. You have to discover it. It's that a consciousness

applied to, that's what Objectivity is, right? It's you discovering the truth in reality. It's

your consciousness interacting. And thereby posing the individual in that sense.

And only the individual could do it. Now, the problem with individualism

is it would have made the philosophy too political. And she always said, so she said,

she said, I'm an advocate of capitalism, because I'm really an advocate for rational

egoism. But I'm an advocate for rational egoism, really, because I'm an advocate for reason.

So she viewed the essential of her philosophy as being this reason and her particular view of

reason. And she has a whole book. She has a book called Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,

which I encourage any scientist, mathematician, anybody interested in science to read, because it

is a total force on, in a sense, what it means to hold concepts and what it means to discover new

discoveries and to use concepts and how we use concepts. And she has a theory of concepts that

is completely new, that is completely revolutionary. And I think is essential for the philosophy of

science. And therefore, ultimately, for the more abstract we get with scientific discoveries,

the easier it is to detach them from reality and to detach them from truth,

the easier it is to be inside our heads, instead of about what's real. And they're probably examples

from metaphysics that fit that. And I think what she teaches in the book is how to ground your

concepts and how to bring them into grounding in reality. So Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

and note that it's only an introduction, because one of the things she realized, one of the things

that I think a lot of her critics don't give enough credit for, is the philosophy is there's no end,

right? It's always growing. There's always new discoveries. There's always it's, you know,

it's like science. There's always new things. And there's a ton of work to do in philosophy.

And particularly in epistemology and the theory of knowledge that she was actually

given your interest in mathematics, she was, she actually saw a lot of parallels between

math and concept formation. And she was actually, you know, in the years before she died,

she was taking private lessons in mathematics, in algebra, and calculus, because she believed

that there was real insight in understanding algebra in calculus to philosophy into epistemology.

And she also was very interested in neuroscience, because she believed that that had a lot to tell

us about epistemology, but also about music, therefore about aesthetics. So, I mean, she

recognized the importance of all these different fields and how in the beauty of philosophy is

it should be integrating all of them. And one of the sad things about the world in which we live

is again, we view these things as silos. We don't view them as integrating. We don't have teams of

people from different arena, you know, different fields, you know, discovering things, we become

like ants, specialized. So, she was definitely like that. And she was constantly curious, constantly

interested in new discoveries and new ideas and how this could expand the scope of her

philosophy and application of her philosophy. There's like a million topics that I can talk

to you, but since you mentioned math, I'm almost only got three hours. I'm almost curious. I don't

know if you're familiar with Gaol's incompleteness theorem. I'm not, unfortunately. Okay. It was a

powerful proof that any axiomatic systems, when you start from a bunch of axioms, that there will,

in that system, provably must be an inconsistency. So, that was this painful like stab

in the idea of mathematics that, no, if we start with a set of assumptions, kind of like

Admiran started with objectivism, there will have to be at least one contradiction.

See, I intuitively, I'm going to say that's false.

Philosophically, but in math, it's just true. And that's,

it's a question about how you define, again, definitions matter, and you have to be careful

on how you define axioms. And you have to be careful about what you define as an inconsistency,

and what that means to say there's an inconsistency. And I don't know, I'm not going to say more than

that, because I don't know. But I'm suspicious that there is some, and this is the power of

philosophy, and this is why I said before, concept formation is so important. And understanding

concept formation is so important for particularly, again, mathematics, because it's such an abstract

field. And it's so easy to lose grounding in reality, that if you properly define axioms,

and you properly define what you're doing in math, whether that is true. And I don't think it is.

This is, yeah, we'll leave it as an open mystery, because actually this audience,

you know, there's literally over 100,000 people that have PhDs. And so they know

Gato's the complete theorem. I have this intuition that there's something different to you mathematics

and philosophy, that I'd love to hear from people, like what exactly is that difference? Because

there's a precision to mathematics that philosophy doesn't have. But that precision

gets you in trouble. It somehow actually takes you away from truth. Like the very constraints of

the language used in mathematics actually puts a constraint on the capture of truth that it's

able to do. I'm going to argue that that is a total product of the way you're conceptualizing

the terms within mathematics. It's not in reality. Yes. So you would argue it's in the

fact that mathematics in as much as it's detached from reality that you can do these kinds of things.

Yes. And that mathematicians have come up with concepts that they haven't grounded in reality

properly, that allows them to go off in places that don't lead to truth. That's right. That don't

lead to truth. But I encourage you then, I encourage you to do one of these podcasts with

one of our philosophers who know more about this stuff. And if you move to Austin,

I've got somebody I'd recommend to you. Can you throw a name out or no?

Yeah. I would talk to Greg so, Mary. When we say our, can you say what you mean by our?

I'd say people who are affiliated with the Ironman Institute are philosophers who are

affiliated with Objectivism. And Greg is one of our brightest and he's an Austin,

he's just got a position at UT, is at the University of Texas. And he, and he would want

on Kogate would be another one who actually works at the Institute and a chief philosophy officer

at the Institute. That's awesome. And, and, and there are others who specialize in philosophy of

science who, who I think Greg could probably give you a lead. But, but these are unbelievably

smart people who know this part of the philosophy much better than I do.

What, can you just briefly perhaps say what is the Ironman Institute?

Yeah. So the Ironman Institute was an organization founded three years after Ironman died. She died

in 1982. And it was founded in 1985 to promote her ideas, to make sure that ideas and her novels

continued in the culture and were relevant. Well, they're relevant, but what the people

saw the relevance. So our mission is to get people to read her books, to engage in the ideas.

We teach, we have the Objectivist Academic Center where we teach the philosophy,

primarily to graduate students and others who take the ideas seriously and really want a deep

understanding of the philosophy. And we apply the ideas. So we take the ideas and apply them to

ethics, to philosophy, to issues of the day, which is more my strength and more what, what I tend to

do. I've, you know, I've never, I've never formally studied philosophy. So all my education

philosophy is informal. And, you know, I'm an engineer and a finance guy. That's, that's my

background. So I'm a numbers guy. Well, let me, I feel pretty under educated. I have a pretty open

mind, which sometimes can be painful on the internet because people mock me or, you know,

you know, if I say something nuanced about communism, people, people immediately kind

of put you in a bin or something like that. It's, it hurts to be open minded to say, I don't know,

to ask the question, why is communism or Marxism so problematic? Why is capitalism

problematic and so on? But let me nevertheless go into that direction with you. Maybe let's talk

about capitalism a little bit. How does objectivism compare or relate to the idea of capitalism?

Well, first we have to define what capitalism is. Because again, people use capitalism in all

kinds of ways. And I know you had Ray Dalio on your show once. I haven't, I need to listen to that

episode episode. But Ray has no clue what capitalism is. And that's, that's, that's, that's his big

problem. So when he, when he says there are real problems today in capitalism, he's not talking

about capitalism. He's talking about problems in the world today. And I agree with many of the

problems, but they have nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism is this is a social

political economic system in which all property is privately owned and in which the only role of

government is the protection of individual rights. I think it's the ideal system. I think it's the

right system for the reasons we talked about earlier. It's a system that leaves you as an

individual to pursue your values, your life, your happiness, free of coercion and force.

And if you get to decide what happens to you, and I get to decide if to help you or not, right?

If you, let's say you fall flat on your face, people always say, well, what about the poor?

Well, if you, if you care about the poor, help them. Just don't, you know, what do you need a

government for? You know, I always ask audiences, okay, if there's a, if there's a poor kid who

can't afford to go to school and all the schools are private because capitalism has been instituted

and he can't go to school, would you be willing to participate in a fund that pays for his education?

Every hand in the room goes up. So what do you need government for? Just let's, let's, let's get

all the money together and pay for his schooling. So the point is that what capitalism does is

leave individuals free to make their own decisions. And as long as they're not violating other people's

rights, in other words, as long as they're not using coercion force on other people,

then leave them alone. And, and people are going to make mistakes and people are going to screw

up their lives and people are going to commit suicide, people are going to do terrible things to

themselves. That is fundamentally their problem. And if you want to help, you under capitalism are

free to help. It's just the only thing that doesn't happen under capitalism is you don't get to impose

your will on other people. How's that a bad thing? So the question then is how does the

implementation of capitalism deviate from its ideal in practice? I mean, this is what is the

question with a lot of systems is how does it start to then fail? So one thing, maybe you can

correct me or inform me. It seems like information is very important. Like being able to make decisions

to be free, you have to have access, full access of all the information you need to make

rational decisions. No, that can't be because it can't be right because none of us has full access

to all the information we need. I mean, what does that even mean? And how big, how much of the scope

do you want to do? Let's just start there. Yeah. So you need to have access to information. So one

of the big criticisms of capitalism is this asymmetrical information. The drug maker has

more information about the drug than the drug buyer, pharmaceutical drugs. True, it's a problem.

Well, I wonder if one can think about an entrepreneur can think about how to solve

that problem. See, I view any one of these challenges to capitalism as an opportunity for

an entrepreneur to make money. And they have the freedom to do it. Yeah. So imagine an entrepreneur

steps in and says, I will test all the drugs that drug companies make, and I will provide you for a

fee with the answer. And how do I know he's not, he's not going to be corrupted. Well, there'll be

other ones and they'll compete. And who am I to tell which one of these is the right one? Well,

it won't be you really getting the information from them. It'll be a doctor. The doctors need

that information. So the doctor who has some expertise in medicine will be evaluating which

rating agency to use to evaluate the drugs and which ones then to recommend to you. So do we

need an FDA? Do we need a government that siphons all the information to one source that does all

the research, all the thing and has a clear incentive, by the way, not to approve drugs.

There's only because they don't make any money from it. Nobody pays them for the information.

Nobody pays them to be accurate. They're bureaucrats at the end of the day. And what is a

bureaucrat? What's the main focus of a bureaucrat? Even if they go in with the best of intentions,

which I'm sure all the scientists at the FDA have the best of intention, what's their incentive?

The system builds in this incentive not to screw up. Because one drug gets value and does damage.

You lose your job. But if a hundred drugs that could kill cancer tomorrow don't ever get to market,

nobody's going to come after you. Yeah. And you're saying that's not a mechanism that's

conducive to it? The marketplace is competition. So if you won't approve the drug, if I still think

it's possible, I will. And it's not zero one. You see the other thing that happens with the

FDA is zero one. It's either approved or it's not approved. Or it's approved for this, but it's not

approved for that. But what if a drug came out and you said, you told the doctors,

this drug in 10% of the cases can cause patients an increased risk of heart disease.

You and your patients should. We're not forcing you, but you should. It's your medical responsibility

to evaluate that and decide if the drug is appropriate or not. Why don't I get to make

that choice if I want to take on the 10% risk of heart disease? So there was a drug and right

now I forget the name, but it was a drug against pain, particularly for arthritic pain. And it

worked. It reduced pain dramatically. And some people tried everything and this was the only drug

that reduced their pain. And it turned out that in 10% of the cases, it caused the elevated risk.

Didn't kill people necessarily, but it caused elevated risk of heart disease.

Okay. What did the FDA do? It banned the drug. Some people, I know a lot of people who said

living with pain is much worse than taking on a 10% risk. Again, probabilities, right? People

don't think in those numbers. 10% risk of maybe getting heart disease. Why don't I get to make

that choice? Why does some bureaucrat make that choice for me? That's capitalism. Capitalism gives

you the choice. Not you as an ignorant person. You with your doctor and a whole marketplace,

which is not created to provide you with information. And think about a world where we

didn't have all these regulations and controls. The amount of opportunities that would exist

to create, to provide information, to educate you about that information would mushroom

dramatically. Bloomberg, the billionaire, Bloomberg, how did he make his money? He made

his money by providing financial information, by creating this service called Bloomberg that

you buy a terminal and you get all this amazing information. And he was before computers,

desktop computers. I mean, he was very early on in that whole computing revolution,

but his focus was providing financial information to professionals.

And you hire a professional to manage your money. That's the way it's supposed to be.

So you as an individual cannot have all the knowledge you need in medicine,

all the knowledge you need in finance, all the knowledge you need in every aspect of your life.

You can't do that. You have to delegate. And you hire a doctor. Now, you should be able to figure

out if the doctor's good or not. You should be able to ask doctors for reasons for why you have to

make the decision at the end. But that's why you have a doctor. That's why you have a financial

advisor. That's why you have different people who you're delegating certain aspects of your life,

too. But you want choices. And what the marketplace provides is those choices.

So let me then, this is what I do. I'll make a dumb case for things. And then you shut me down.

And then the internet says how dumb Lex is. This is good. This is how it works.

Good. It's shutting down. And they're foolish in blaming you for the question because you're here

to ask me questions. Let me make a case for socialism. It's going to be bad because that's

the only case there is for socialism. That's reality. So perhaps it's not a case for socialism,

but just a certain notion that inequality, the wealth inequality, that the bigger the gap between

the poorest or the average and the richest, the more painful it is to be average. Psychologically

speaking, if you know that there is the CEOs of companies make 300, 1,000, 1 million times more

than you do, that makes life for a large part of the population less fulfilling. That there's a

relative notion to the experience of our life that even though everybody's life has gotten better

over the past decades and centuries, it may feel actually worse because you know that life could

be so, so much better in life to the CEOs that that gap is fundamentally a thing that is undesirable

in a society. Everything about that is wrong. I like to start off like that. So my wife likes

to remind me that as well as we've done in life, we are actually from a wealth perspective closer

to a homeless person than we are to Bill Gates. Just a math, right? Just a math, right?

It's a good ego check. When I look at Bill Gates, I get a smile on my face. I love Bill Gates. I've

never met Bill Gates. I love Bill Gates. I love what he stands for. I love that he has a hundred

billion dollars. I love that he has built a trampoline room in his house where his kids can

jump up and down in a trampoline in a safe environment. Can we take another billionaire?

Because I'm not sure if you're paying attention, but there's all kinds of conspiracy theories about

Bill Gates. Well, but that's part of the story, right? They have to pull him down because people

resent him for other reasons. That's strange. But yes, we can take Jeff Bezos. We can take,

you know, my favorite, just because I like a lot about him was Steve Jobs.

I mean, I love these people. And I can't, they're very few billionaires I don't love.

In the sense that I appreciate everything they've done for me, for people I cherish and love,

they've made the world a better place. Why would it ever cross my mind that they make me look bad

because they're richer than me or that I don't have what they have? They've made me so much richer

that they've made inventions that used to cost millions and millions and millions of dollars

accessible to me. I mean, this is a simple computer in my pocket. Now, but think about it,

right? What is the difference between, and I'll get to the essence of your point in a minute,

but think about what the difference is between me and Bill Gates in terms of, because it's true

that in terms of wealth, I'm closer to the homeless person. But in terms of my day to day

life, I'm closer to Bill Gates. You know, we both live in a nice house. His is nicer.

His is nicer, but we live in a nice house. His is bigger, but mine is plenty big. We both drive

cars. His is nicer, but we both drive cars, cars. 100 years ago, what cars? We both can

fly, get on a plane in Los Angeles and fly to New York and get there in about the same time.

We're both flying private. The only difference is my private plane I share with 300 other people

and his, but it's accessible. It's relatively comfortable. Again, in the perspective of 50

years ago, 100 years ago, it's unimaginable that I could fly like that for such a low fee.

We live very similar lives in that sense. So I don't resent him. So first of all,

I'm an exception to the supposed rule that people resent. I don't think anybody,

I don't think people do resent unless they're taught to resent. And this is the key. People are

taught. And I've seen this in America. And this is, to me, the most horrible, shocking thing that

has happened in America over the last 40 years, I came to America. So I'm an immigrant. I came to

America from Israel in 1987. And I came here because I thought this was the place where I could,

where I'd had the most opportunities and it is most opportunities. And I came here because I

believed there was a certain American spirit of individualism and exactly the opposite of what

you just described. A sense of, I live my life. It's my happiness. I'm not looking at my neighbor.

I'm not competing with the Joneses. The American dream is my dream. My two kids, my dog, my station

wagon, not because other people have it because I want it. And that sense. And when I came here

in the 80s, you had that. You had, you still had it. It was less than I think it had been in the

past. But you had that spirit. There was no envy. There was no resentment. There were rich people

and they were celebrated. There was still this admiration for entrepreneurs and admiration

for success. Not by everybody, certainly not by the intellectuals, but by the average person.

I have witnessed, particularly over the last 10 years, a complete transformation

and America has become like Europe. I know, are you Russian? Yeah. Yeah. It's become Russian.

In a sense where, you know, they've always done these studies. You know, I'll give you

a hundred dollars in your neighbor, a hundred dollars or give you, or is it, or give you

a thousand dollars, but your neighbor gets $10,000. And a Russian will always choose the

hundred dollars, right? He wants equality above being better himself. Americans would always choose

that gap. And that's not anymore. And it's changing because we've been told it should change.

And morally you're saying that doesn't make any sense. So there's no sense in which,

let me put another spin. I forget the book, but the sense of if you're working for Steve Jobs

and you, your hands, you're the engineer behind the iPhone. And there's a sense in which his

salary is stealing from your efforts. Because I forget the book, right? That's literally the

terminology is used. Well, this is straight out of Karl Marx. Sure. It's also straight out of

Karl Marx. But like, there's no sense morally speaking that you see that as the best.

Other way around. That engineer is stealing off of, and it's not stealing, right? It's not.

But the engineer is getting more from Steve Jobs by a lot, not by a little bit, than Steve Jobs

is getting from the engineer. The engineer, even if they're a great engineer, they're probably

other great engineers that could replace him. Would he even have a job without Steve Jobs?

Would the industry exist without Steve Jobs? Without the giants that carry these things forward?

And let me ask you this. I mean, you're a scientist. Yes. Do you resent Einstein for being

smarter than you? I mean, you and VM, are you angry with him? Would you feel negative towards him

if he was in the room right now? Or would you, if you came into the room, you'd say,

Oh my God, I mean, you interview people who I think some of them are probably smarter than you

and me. Yeah, for sure. And your attitude towards them is one of reverence. Well, one interesting

little side question there is what is the natural state of being for us humans? You kind of implied

education has polluted our minds, but like if I, because you're referring to jealousy,

the Einstein question, the Steve Jobs question, I wonder which way, if we're left without education,

would we naturally go? So there is no such thing as the natural state in that sense, right? This is

the myth of whoso is noble savage, and of John Wall's is behind the veil of ignorance. Well,

if you're ignorant, you're ignorant. You can't make any decisions. You're just ignorant.

There is no human nature that determines how you will relate to other people. You will relate to

other people based on the conclusions you come to about how to relate to other people.

You can relate to other people as values to use your terminology from the perspective of love.

This other human being is a value to me. And I want to trade with them and trade the beauty

of trade is it's win win. I want to benefit and they are going to benefit. I don't want to screw

them. I don't want them to screw me. I want us to be win win. Or you can deal with other people

as threats as enemies. Much of human history, we have done that. And therefore, as a zero sum world,

what they have, I want, I will take it. I will use force to take it. I will use political force to

take it. I will use the force of my arm to take it. I will just take it. So those are two options,

right? And they will determine whether we live in civilization or not. And they are determined by

conclusions people come to about the world and the nature of reality and the nature of morality

and the nature of politics and all these things. They are determined by philosophy. And this is

why philosophy is so important. Because so philosophy shapes its evolution doesn't do this.

It doesn't just happen. Ideas shape how we relate to other people. And you say, well, little children

do it. Well, little children don't have a funnel cortex. Why it's not relevant, right?

What happens as you develop a funnel cortex, as you develop the brain, you learn ideas. And those

ideas will shape how you relate to other people. And if you learn good ideas, you relate to other

people in a healthy, productive win win. And if you develop bad ideas, you will resent other people

and you will want their stuff. And the thing is that human progress depends on the win win

relationship. It depends on civilization depends on peace. It depends on allowing people going

back to what we talked about earlier, allowing people the freedom to think for themselves.

And anytime you try to interrupt that, you're causing damage. So this change in America is

not some reversion to a natural state. It's a shift in ideas. We, we still live the better

part of American society and the world still lives on the remnants of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment ideas, the ideas that brought about this scientific revolution,

the ideas that brought about the creation of this country. And it's the same basic ideas

that led to both of those. And as those ideas get more distant, as those ideas are not defended,

as those ideas disappear, as Enlightenment goes away, we will become more violent, more resentful,

more tribal, more obnoxious, more unpleasant, more primitive. A very specific example of this

that bothers me, I'd be curious to get your comment on. So Elon Musk is a billionaire.

Yeah. And one of the things that really, maybe it's almost a pet peeve, it really bothers me

when the press and the general public will say, well, all those rockets they're sending up there,

those are just like the toys, the games that billionaires play. That, to me,

the billionaire has become a dirty word to use, as if money can buy or has anything to do with

genius. I'm trying to articulate a specific line of question here, because it just bothers me.

I guess the question is, how do we get here and how do we get out of that? Because Elon Musk is

doing some of the most incredible things that a human being has ever participated in. He doesn't

build the rockets himself, he's getting a bunch of other geniuses together. That takes genius.

That takes genius. But where did we go and how do we get back to where Elon Musk is an inspiring

figure as opposed to a billionaire playing with some toys? So this is the role of philosophy.

It goes back to the same place. It goes back to our understanding of the world and our role in it.

And if you understand that the only way to become a billionaire, for example,

is to create value. Value for whom? Value for people who are going to consume it.

The only way to become a billionaire, the only way Elon Musk became a billionaire is through PayPal.

Now, PayPal is something we all use. PayPal is an enormous value to all of us. It's why it's

worth several billions of dollars, which Elon Musk could then earn. But you cannot become a billionaire

in a free society by exploiting people. Because you'll be laughed, nobody will deal with you.

Nobody will have any interactions with you. The only way to become a billionaire is to do billions

of win win transactions. So the only way to become a billionaire in a free society is to change the

world to make it a better place. Billionaires are the great humanitarians of our time, not because

they give charity, but because they make them billions. And it's true that money and genius

are not necessarily correlated. But you cannot become a billionaire without being super smart.

You cannot become a billionaire by figuring something out that nobody else has figured out

in whatever realm it happens to be. And that thing that you figure out has to be something

that provides immense value to other people. Where do we go wrong? We go wrong. Our culture goes

wrong because it views billionaires as selfish. And there's a sense in which, and not a sense,

it's absolutely true. The billionaire doesn't ask from my opinion on what product to launch.

Elon Musk doesn't ask others what they think you should spend his money on, what the greatest

social well being will be. I mean, there's a sense in which the Rockets are his toys.

There's a sense in which he chose that he would be inspired the most. He would have the most fun

by going to Mars and building rockets. And he probably dreamt of rockets from when he was a

kid and probably always played with rockets. And now he has the funds, the capital to be able to

deploy it. So he's being selfish. Obviously, he's being self interested. This is what Elon Musk is

about. I mean, the same with Jeff Bezos. There's no committee to decide whether to invest in

cloud computing or not. Bezos decided that. And at the end of the day, the bosses, they pursue

the values they believe are good. They create the wealth. It's their decisions. It's their mind.

And the fact is we live in a world where for 2000 plus years, self interest, even though we all do

it, to more extent or the less, we deem it as morally abhorrent. It's bad. It's wrong. I mean,

your mother probably taught you the same thing my mother taught me. Think of others first. Think

of yourself last. The good stuff is kept for the guests. You never get to use the good stuff.

It's others. That's what the focus of morality is now. No mother, even no Jewish mother,

actually believes that because they don't really want you to be last. They want you to be first

and they push you to be first. But morally, they taught their entire lives and they believe that

the right thing to say and to some extent do is to argue for sacrifice for other people. So most

people, 99% of people are torn. They know they should be self less sacrifice, live for other

people. They don't really want to. So they act selfishly in their day to day life and they feel

guilty and they can't be happy. They can't be happy and Jewish mothers and Catholic mothers are

excellent at using that guilt to manipulate you. But the guilt is inevitable because you've got these

two conflicting things, the way you want to live and the way you've been taught to live.

And what objectivism does is at the end of the day provides you with a way to unite morality,

a proper morality with what you want and to think about what you really want, to conceptualize what

you really want properly. So what you want is really good for you and what you want will really

lead to your happiness. So we reject the idea of sacrifice. We reject the idea of living for other

people. But you see, if you believe that the purpose of morality is to sacrifice for other people

and you look at Jeff Bezos, when was the last time he sacrificed anything, right? He's living

pretty well. He's got billions that he could give it all away. And yet he doesn't. How day,

you know, in my, in my talks, I often position and I'm going to use Bill Gates, sorry guys,

drop the conspiracy theory. They're all BS, complete and utter nonsense. There's not a

shred of truth. You know, I disagree with Bill Gates on everything political. I think he politically

is a complete ignoramus. But the guy's a genius when it comes to technology and when he's just

thoughtful, even in this philanthropy, he just uses his mind and I respect that even though

politically he's terrible. Anyway, think about this. Who, who had a bigger impact on the lives

of poor people in the world? Bill Gates or Mother Teresa? Bill Gates. It's not even close.

And Mother Teresa lived this altruistic life to the core. She lived it consistently.

And yet she was miserable, pathetic, horrible. She hated her life. She, she, she, she was miserable.

And most of people she helped didn't do very well because she just helped them not die.

Right. Yeah. And then Bill Gates changed all and he helped a lot of by providing technology. We

even philanthropy gets to them. The food gets them, fans, the more efficient. Yet who is the

moral saint? Saintshood is not determined based on what you do for other people. Saintshood is

based on how much, how much pain you suffer. I like to ask people to go to a museum and look at

all the paintings of saints. How many of them are smiling and are happy? They've usually got arrows

through them and holes in their body and they're just suffering a horrible death. The whole point

of the morality we are taught is that happiness is immorality. That happy people cannot be good

people and that good people suffer and that suffering is necessary for morality. Morality is

about sacrifice, self sacrifice and suffering. And at the end of the day, almost all the problems

in the world boil down to that false view. So can we try to talk about, part of it is the problem

of the word selfishness, but let's talk about the virtue of selfishness. So let's start at the fact

that for me, I really enjoy doing stuff for other people. I enjoy being cheering on the success of

others. Why? I don't know. It's deep in there. Why? Because I think you do know. If I were to really

think, I don't want to resort to like evolutionary arguments or like this. So I think... So I can

tell you why I enjoy helping others. Maybe you can go there, like one thing, because we'll

should talk about love a little bit. I'll tell you, there's a part of me that's a little bit

not rational. Like there's a gut that I follow that not everything I do is perfectly rational.

Like, for example, my dad criticizes me. He says like, you should always have a plan.

Like it should make sense. You have a strategy. And I say that, I left, I stepped down from

my full salary position at MIT. There's so many things I did without like a plan. It's a gut.

It's like, I want to start a company. Well, you know how many companies fail? I don't know.

It's just a gut. And the same thing with being kind to others is a gut. I watch the way that

karma works in this world, that the people like us, one guy I look up to is Joe Rogan,

that he does stuff for others. And that the joy he experiences, the way he sees the world, like

just the glimmer in his eyes because he does stuff for others that creates a joyful experience.

And that somehow seems to be an instructive way to, that to me is inspiring of a life while

lived. But you probably know a lot of people who have done stuff others were not happy.

True. So I don't think it's the doing stuff others that brings the happiness. It's why you

do stuff others and what else you're doing in your life and what is the proportion. But it's

why at the end of the day, which is, and it's the same. Look, you can maybe through a gut feeling

say, I want to start a company, but you better start doing thinking about how and what and all

of that. And to some extent, the why, because if you really want to be happy doing this, you may

better make sure you're doing it for the right reason. So I'm not, you know, there's something

called fast thinking, the common Daniel Kahneman. Daniel Kahneman talks about and it's, it's, it's,

you know, all the integrations you've made so far in your life cause you to have specialized

knowledge in certain things. And you can think very fast. And, and, and your gut tells you what

that, what the right answer is. It's, but it's not, it's, it's your mind is constantly evaluating

and constantly working. You want to make it as rational as you can, not in the sense that I

have to think through every time I make a decision, but that they've so programmed my mind in a sense

that the answers are the right answers, you know, in, in, in, when I get them.

So, you know, I like, I view other people as a value. Other people contribute enormously

to my life, whether it's a romantic love relationship, or whether it's a friendship

relationship, or whether it's just, you know, Jeff Bezos creating Amazon and, and delivering

goodies to my home when I get them. And, and, and people do all that, right? It's not just Jeff

Bezos. He gets the most credit, but everybody in that chain of command, everybody at Amazon

is working for me. I love that. I love the idea of a human being. I love the idea that they are

people capable of, of being an Einstein, of being, you know, and, and creating and building and making

stuff that makes my life so good. I, you know, most of us like, this is not a good room for an

example, most of us like plants, right? We like pets. I don't particularly, but people like pets. Why?

We like to see life. Yeah. Human beings are life on steroids, right? They're life with a brain.

It's amazing, right? What they can do. I love people. Now, that doesn't mean I love everybody

because there's some, they're really bad people out there who I hate, right? And I do hate.

And there are people out there that are just, I have no opinion about, but generally the idea

of a human being to me is a phenomenal idea. When I see a baby, I light up because to me,

there's a potential, you know, there's a, there's this magnificent potential that is embodied in

that. And when I see people struggling and need help, I think they're human beings that, you know,

they embody that potential. They embody that goodness. They might turn out to be bad,

but why would I ever give the presumption of that? I give them the presumption of the positive and I

cheer them on and, and I, and I, and I enjoy watching people succeed. I'm really watching

people get to the top of the mountain and produce something. Even if I don't get anything directly

from it. I enjoy that because it's part of my enjoyment of life.

So the word, see, to you, the morality of selfishness, this kind of love of other human

beings, the love of life fits into a morality of selfishness.

Can't not. Because it, it's, it, you, there's no context in which you can truly love yourself

without loving life and loving what it means to be human. So, you know, the love of yourself is

going to manifest itself definitely in different people, but it's core. What do you love about

yourself? First of all, I love, I love that I'm alive. I love that I, you know, I love this world

and the opportunities it provides me and the, the, the fun and the excitement of discovering

something new and meeting a new person and, and having a conversation. You know, all of this is,

is, is, is immensely enjoyable. But behind all of that is, is a particular human capability

that not only I have, other people have. And the fact that they have it makes my life so much more

fun because, so it's, it's, you cannot view, you know, it's all integrated and you cannot

view yourself in isolation. Now that doesn't, that doesn't place a moral commandment on me.

Help everybody who's poor that you happen to meet in the street. It doesn't place a burden on me in

a sense that now I have this moral duty to help everybody. It leaves me free to make decisions

about who I help and who I don't. There's some people who I will not help. There's some people

who I do not wish positive things upon. Bad people should have bad outcomes. Bad people should suffer.

So, and then you have the freedom to choose who's good, who's bad within your,

your decision based on your values. Now, I think there's an objectivity to it. There's a,

there's a standard by which you should evaluate good versus bad. And that standard should be,

to what extent do they contribute a hurt human life? The standard is human life. And so when I

say, look at a Jeff Bezos, I say, he's contributed to human life. Good guy. I might disagree with

him on stuff. We might disagree about politics. We might disagree about women. I don't know what we

agree. But overall, big picture. He is pro life. Right? I look at somebody like, you know, to take

like 99.9% of our politicians. And they are pro death. They are pro destruction. They are pro

cutting corners in ways that destroy human life and human potential and human ability.

So I literally hate almost every politician out there. And I wish ill on them. Right? I don't

want them to be successful or happy. I want them all to go away. Right? Leave me alone. So

I believe in justice. I believe good things should happen to good people and bad things

should happen to bad people. So I can, I make those generalizations based on this one,

you know, on the other hand, if you know, I shouldn't say all politicians, right? So if I,

you know, I love Thomas Jefferson and, and, and George Washington, right? I love Abraham Lincoln.

I love people who fought for freedom and who believed in freedom, who had his ideas and

lived up to at least in parts of their lives to those principles. Now,

do I think Thomas Jefferson was flawed because he held slaves? Absolutely.

But the virtues way outweigh that in my view. And I understand people who don't accept that.

You don't have to also love and hate the entirety of the person. There's parts of that

person that you, that you're directing. The major part is pro life. And therefore,

I'm pro that person. And, and I think, and I said earlier, the rejectivism philosophy of love.

And I believe that because objectivism is about your life, about loving your life,

about embracing your life, about engaging with the world, about loving the world in which you live,

about win, win relationships with other people, which means to a large extent loving

the good in other people and the, and the best in other people and encouraging that and supporting

that and promoting that. So I know selfishness is a harsh word because the culture has given

it that harshness. Selfishness is a harsh word because the people who don't like selfishness

want you to believe it's a harsh word. But it's not. What does it mean? It means

focus on self. It means take care of self. It means make yourself your highest priority,

not your only priority, because in taking care of self, what would I be without my wife?

What would I be without the people who support me, who help me, who, who, who I have these

love relationships with? It is so other people are crucial. What would my life be without,

you know, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, right? A lot of things you mentioned here are just beautiful.

So one is one win. So one key thing about this selfishness and the idea of objectivism is the

philosophy of love is that you don't want parasitism. So that goes, that is unethical.

So you actually, first of all, you say win, win a lot. And I just like that terminology because

it's a good way to see life is try to maximize the number of win, win interactions. Absolutely.

That's a good way to see business actually. Well, life generally, I think every aspect of life,

you want to have a win, win relationship with your wife. Imagine if it was wouldn't lose.

Either way, if you win and she loses, how long is that going to sustain? So win, lose relationships

are not in equilibrium. What they turn into is lose, lose. Like win, lose turns into lose, lose.

And the, so the alternative, the only alternative to lose, lose is win, win.

And you win and the person you love wins. What's better than that, right?

That's the way to maximize. So like the selfishness is you're trying to maximize the win,

but the way to maximize the win is to maximize the win, win.

Yes. And it turns out, and Adam Smith understood this a long time ago, that if you focus on your own

winning while respecting other people as human beings, then everybody wins. And the beauty of

capitalism, if we go back to capitalism for a second, the beauty of capitalism is you cannot

be successful in capitalism without producing values that other people appreciate and therefore

willing to buy from you. And they buy them and this goes back to that question about the engineer

and Steve Jobs. Why is the engineer working there? Because he's getting paid more than his time is

worth to him. I know people don't like to think in those terms, but that's the reality. If his

time is worth more to him than what he's getting paid, he would leave. So he's winning. And his

apple winning, yes, because they're getting more productivity from him, they're getting more from

him than what he's actually producing. It's tough because there's the human psychology and

imperfect information. It just makes it a little messier than the clarity of thinking you have

about this. Because for sure, but not everything in life is an economic transaction. It ultimately

is close. But even if it's not an economic transaction, even if it's a relationship

transaction, when you get to a point with a friend where you're now gaining from the relationship,

friendship is going to be over. Not immediately because it takes time for these things to manifest

itself and to really absorb into it. But we change friendships, we change our loves. We fall

in and out of love. We fall out of love because we're not love. So let's go back to love. Love

is the most selfish of all emotions. Love is about what you do to me. So I love my wife because she

makes me feel better about myself. So the idea of selfless love is bizarre. So Ayn Rand used to say,

before you said, I love you, you have to say the I. And you have to know who you are and you have

to appreciate yourself. If you hate yourself, what does it mean to love somebody else?

So I love my wife because she makes me feel great about the world.

Yeah. And she lives me for the same reason. And so Ayn Rand used to use this example. Imagine

you go up to your, to be spoused the night before the wedding, and you say, you know,

I get nothing out of this relationship. I'm doing this purely as an act of noble self sacrifice.

She would slap you as she should, right? So no, we know this intuitively that love is selfish,

but we are afraid to admit it to ourselves. And why? Because the other side has convinced us

that selfishness is associated with exploiting other people. Selfishness means lying,

cheating, stealing, walking in corpses, backstabbing people. But is that ever in your

self interest? Truly, right? You know, I'll often be in front of an audience to say,

okay, how many people here have lied? I'm kidding, right? How many of you think that that if you

did that consistently, that would make your life better. Nobody thinks that, right? Because

everybody's experienced how shitty lying, not because of how it makes you feel out of a sense

of guilt. Existentially, it's just a bad strategy, right? You get caught. You have to create other

lies to cover up the previous lie. It screws up with your own psychology and your own cognition.

You know, the mind, to some extent, like a computer, right, is an integrating machine.

And in computer science, I understand there's a term called garbage in, garbage out.

Lying is garbage in. Yeah. So it's not good strategy, cheating, screwing your customers

in a business, not paying your suppliers as a businessman, not good business practices,

not good practices for being alive. So win, win is both moral and practical and the beauty of

Iron Man's philosophy. And I think this is really important, is that the moral is the practical

and the practical is the moral. And therefore, if you are moral, you will be happy.

Yeah, that's why the application of the philosophy of objectivism is so easy to practice. So like,

they ought to discuss or possible to discuss. That's why you talk about all... So clear cut.

Yeah. I'm not ambiguous about my view. And it's fundamentally practical. I mean,

that's the best of philosophies is practical. Yes. It's in a sense, teaching you how to live a good

life. And it's teaching you how to live a good life, not just as you, but as a human being.

And then for the principles that apply to you, probably apply to me as well. And if we both

share the same principles of how to live a good life, we're not going to be enemies.

You brought up anarchy earlier. It's an interesting question, because you've kind of said

politicians, I mean, part of it is a little bit joking, but politicians are, you know, not good

people. Yeah. So, but we should have some. So you have an opposition to anarchism.

So they, first of all, they weren't always not bad people. That is, I gave examples of people

who engage in political life, who I think were good people basically. And, and, but they think

they get worse over time. If the system is corrupt. And I think the system, unfortunately,

even the American system, as good as it was, was founded on quicksand and have corruption built

in. They didn't quite get it. And, and they needed an invent to get it. So I'm not blaming

them. I don't think they, they show any blame. You needed a philosophy in order to completely

fulfill the promise that is America, or the promise that is the founding of.

So the, the place where the corruption is sneaked in is the lack in some way of the

philosophy underlying the nation? Absolutely. So, so it's Christianity. It's, it's, it's, you know,

not to hit on another controversial topic. It's religion, which, which undercut their morality.

So the founders were explicitly Christian and altruistic in their morality.

Implicitly in terms of their actions, they were completely secular and they were,

they were very secular anyway, but in their morality, even they were secular. So there's

nothing in Christianity that says that they, that the, you have an inalienable right to pursue

happiness. That's unbelievably self interested in a, in a, based on, on kind of a moral philosophy

of ego, of a egoistic moral philosophy, but they didn't know that and they didn't know how to

ground it. They implicitly, they had that fast thinking, that guts that told them that this was

right. And the whole enlightenment, that period from John Locke on to really to, to, to Hume,

that period is about pursuit of happiness using reason in pursuit of the good life, right? But

they can't ground it. They don't really understand what reason is and they don't really understand

what happiness requires and they can't detach and fell for Christianity. They're not allowed to

politically and they can't, I think conceptually, you just can't make that big break. Rand is an

enlightenment thinker in that sense. She is what should have followed right after, right? She should

have come then grounded them in the secular and in the egoistic and there was the Tillion view

of morality as, as a, as a, as a code of values to basically to guide your life, to guide your life

towards happiness. That's Aristotle's view, right? So they didn't have that. So you, you know, so I

think that government is necessary. It's not a necessary evil. It's a necessary good because

it does something good. And the good that it does is it eliminates coercion from society. It

eliminates violence from society. It eliminates the use of force between individuals from society.

And that, but see the argument that Michael Malone should make. Give me a chance here.

Is why can't you apply the same kind of reasoning that you've effectively used for the rest

of mutually agreed upon institutions that are driven by capitalism, that we can't also hire

forces to protect us from the violence, to ensure the stability of society that protects us from the

violence? Why, why, why draw the line at this particular place, right? Well, because there

is no other place to draw a line and there is a line. And by the way, we draw lines other places,

right? We don't vote. We don't, we don't have, we don't determine truth and science based on

competition. Right. So that's a, that's a line. But first off, some people might say, I mean,

there's competition in a sense that you have alternate theories. But at the end of the day,

whether you decide that this he's right or he's right is not based on the market. It's based on

facts, on reality, on objective reality. You have to, you, and some people will never accept

that this person is right because they don't see the stream. So first of all, what they reject,

what most anarchists reject, even if they don't admit it or recognize it, is they object,

they, they reject objective reality. In which sense. So like, right. So there's a whole,

so the, the whole realm of law is a scientific realm to define, for example, the boundaries of

private property. It's not an issue of competition. It's not an issue of, of, of, I have one system

and you have another system. It's an issue of objective reality. And now it's more difficult

than science in a sense, because it's more difficult to prove that my conception of property is

correct and you're correct. But there has, there is a correct one. In reality, there's a correct

vision. It's more abstract. But look, somebody has to decide what property is. So I have, I have to

find, my property is defined by certain boundaries. And I have a police force and I have a judiciary

system that backs my vision. And you have a claim against my property. You have a claim

against my property. And you have a police force and a judicial system that backs your claim.

Who's right? So the, our definitions of property are different. Yeah. So our definitions of property

or a claim on the property is different. So what, what, so, so just agree on the definition of property.

And, but why should we agree, right? Your judicial system is one definition of property.

My judicial system is done. You, you think that there's no such thing as intellectual property

rights. And your whole system believes that. Yeah. And my whole system believes there is such thing.

So you are duplicating my books and handing them out to all your friends and not paying me a royalty.

Yeah. And I, I think that's wrong. My judicial system and my police force think that's wrong.

And we're both living in the same geographic area, right? So we have overlapping jurisdictions.

Now the anarchists would say, well, we'll negotiate. Why should we negotiate? My system is

actually right. There is such a thing as intellectual property rights. There's no

negotiation here. You're wrong. And you should either pay a fine or go to jail.

Yeah. But why can't, because it's a community is multiple, there's multiple parties and it's

like a majority vote. They'll, they'll hire different forces that says, yeah, Yaron is,

is onto something here with the definition of property and we'll go with that.

So anarchists pro democracy in the, in the majority rule sense, I don't think so.

Well, I think, I think anarchy, you know, so it promotes like emergent democracy, right?

Like, no, it doesn't. I'll tell you what it promotes. It promotes emergent, uh,

strife and civil war and violence, constant uninterrupted violence, because the only way

to settle the dispute between us, since we both think that we are right. And we have guns behind

us to protect that. And we have a legal system. We have a whole theory of ideas is, is you're

stealing my stuff. How do I get it back? I invade you, right? I take over, you know, and, and who's

going to, who's going to win that battle? The smartest guy? Oh, the guy with the biggest guns.

See, but the anarchists would say that they're using implied, like the state uses implied force.

They're already doing violence because they, they, they take the state as it is today,

and they refuse to engage in the conversation about what a state should and could look like.

And how we can create mechanisms to protect us from the state using those, those, but look,

this is, my view of anarchy is very simple. It's a ridiculous position. It's infantile. I mean,

I really mean this, right? And, and I'm sorry to Michael, but, and, and all the other very, very smart,

very, very smart anarchists, because anarchists is never, you won't find a dumb anarchist,

right? Because dumb people know it wouldn't work. You have to have, it's absolutely true.

You have to have a certain IQ to be an anarchist. That's true. They're all really intelligent.

All intelligence. And the reason is that you have to create such a mythology in your head.

You have to create so many rationalizations. Any Joe in the street knows it doesn't work,

because they can understand what happens with two people who are armed in the street

and have a dispute. And there's no mechanism to resolve that dispute. Yeah. That's objective.

That's separate. And this is where it gets subjective. That's objective. The whole point of

government is that it is the objective authority for determining the truth in one regard, in regard

to force, because the only alternative to determining it when it comes to force is through force.

The only way to resolve disputes is through force or through this negotiation, which is unjust,

because if one party's right and one party's wrong, why negotiate? And, and this is the point. I'm

not against competition of governance. I'm all for competition of governance. We do that all the

time. It's called countries. The United States has a certain governance structure. The Soviet

Union had a governance structure. Mexico has a governance structure. And they're competing.

And we can observe the competition. And in my world, you could move freely from one governance

to another. If you didn't like your governance, you would move to a better governance system.

But they have to have autonomy within a geographic area. Otherwise, what you get

is complete and out of civil war. The law needs to be objective. And there needs to be one law

over a piece of ground. And if you disagree with that law, you can move somewhere else where they

may. This is why federalism is such a beautiful system. Even within the United States, we have

states. And on certain issues, we're allowed to disagree between states, like the death penalty

some states do, some states don't. Fine. And now I can move from one state if I don't like it.

But there's certain issues you cannot have disagreement. Slavery, for example, this is

why we had a civil war. But let me one other argument against Anarchy. Markets exist

where force has been eliminated. So I can say that again. Markets exist where the rule of

force has been eliminated. The rule of force. Yes. So a market will exist if we know that you

can't pull a gun on me and just take my stuff. I'm willing to engage in transaction with you if

we have an implicit understanding that we're not going to use force against each other.

So force has something special to it. Yes. It's a special. It overrides. Because we're still

agreeing we can manipulate each other. Yes. But force, we can't force kind of. So what is it

about something fundamental about violence? Force is a is a fundamental force. It's the

anti reason. It's the anti life. It's the anti force against another person. And it's what it does

is shuts down the mind. Right. So in order to have a market, you have to extract force.

How can you have a market in force? When I there's an Instagram channel called nature's

metal where it has all these videos of animals basically having a market of force. Yes.

But that shuts down the ability to reason and animals don't need to because they can't. Exactly.

So the innovation that is human beings is a capacity to reason and therefore the relegation

of force to the animals. We don't do force. Civilization is where we don't have force.

And so what you have is you cannot have a market in that which a market requires the

elimination of it. And I, you know, I, I don't debate formally these guys,

but I interact with them all the time. Right. And you get these absurd arguments where, you

know, David Friedman will say, that's Milton Friedman's son, he will say something like,

well, in Somalia, in the northern part of Somalia, where they have no government,

you have all these wonderful, you have these tribal tribunals of these tribes and they resolve

disputes. Yeah. Barbarically, they show real law. They have no respect for individual rights,

no respect for property. And the only reason they have any authority is because they have

guns and they have power and they have force. And they do it barbarically. There's nothing

civilizing about the courts of Somalia. And, and they write about pirates and because they view

force, they don't view force as something unique that must be extracted from human life.

And that's why Anarchy has to devolve into violence because it treats forces just,

what's the big deal with negotiating, you know, over guns.

So we covered a lot of high level philosophy, but I'd like to touch on

the troubles, the chaos of the day, a couple of things. And I really would,

trying to find a hopeful path way out. So one is the current coronavirus pandemic,

or in particular, not the virus, but our handling of it. Is there something philosophically,

politically, that you would like to see that you would like to recommend that you would like to

maybe give a hopeful message, if we take that kind of trajectory, we might be able to get out.

Because I'm kind of worried about the economic pain that people are feeling that there's this

quiet suffering. I mean, I agree with you completely. There is a quiet suffering. It's

horrible. I mean, I know people, you know, I go to a lot of restaurants. One of the things we

love to do is eat out. My wife doesn't like cooking anymore. We don't have kids in the house anymore,

so she doesn't have to. So we go out a lot. We go to restaurants. And because we have our favorites,

we go to them a lot. We get to know the owners of the restaurant, the chef. And it's just

heartbreaking. You know, these people put their life, you know, their blood, sweat, and tears.

I mean, real blood, sweat, and tears into these projects. Restaurants are super difficult to

manage. Most of them go bankrupt anyway. And the restaurants, we go to a good restaurant,

so they've done a good job. And they've got a unique value. And they shut them down.

And, you know, many of them will never open. You know, something like they estimate 50,

60% of restaurants in some places won't open. These are people's lives. These are people's

capital. These are people's effort. These are people's love. Talk about love. They love what

they do, particularly if they're the chef as well. And it's gone. And it's disappeared. And what are

they going to do with their lives now? They're going to live off the government the way our

politicians would like them, bigger and bigger stimulus plans so we can hand checks to people

to get them used to living off of us rather than it's disgusting and it's offensive and it's

unbelievably sad. And this is where it comes to this. I care about other people. I mean,

this idea that objectivists don't care. I mean, I love these people who provide me with pleasure

of eating wonderful food in a great environment.

There's something inspiring about them too. Like when I say great restaurants,

I want to do better with my own stuff. Yeah, exactly. It's inspiring. Anybody who does it

is excellent. I love sports because it's the one realm in which you'd still value and celebrate

excellence. But I try to celebrate excellence, everything in my life. So I try to be nice to

these people and, you know, with COVID, we went more to restaurants, if you believe it. We did

more takeout stuff. We made an effort, particularly the restaurants. We really love to keep them

going, to encourage them to support them. The problem is, the problem is philosophy drives the

world. The response to COVID has been worse than pathetic. And it's driven by philosophy.

It's driven by disrespect to science, ignorance and disrespect of statistics,

a disrespect of individual human decision making. Government has to decide everything for us.

And just throughout the process and a disrespect of markets, because we didn't let

markets work to facilitate what we needed in order to deal with this virus.

If you look at the play, it's interesting that the only place on the planet that's done well

with this, a parts of Asia, right? Taiwan did phenomenally with this. And the vice president

of Taiwan is an epidemiologist. So he knew what he was doing. And they got it right from the

beginning. South Korea did amazing. Even Hong Kong and Singapore. Hong Kong is just very few deaths.

And the economy wasn't shut down in any of those places. There were no lockdowns in any of those

places. The CDC had plans before this happened and how to deal with good plans. Indeed, if you

ask people around the world before the pandemic, which country is best prepared for a pandemic

they would have said the United States because of the CDC's plans and all of our emergency reserves

and all that and the wealth. And yet all of that went out the window because people panicked.

People didn't think, go back to reason. People were arrogant, refused to use the tools that

they had at their disposal to deal with this. So you deal with pandemics. It's very simple how

you deal with pandemics. And this is how South Korea and Taiwan interview. You deal with them by

testing, tracing and isolating. That's it. And you do it well. And you do it vigorously. And you

do it on scale if you have to. And you scale up to do it. We have the wealth to do that.

So one question I have, it's a difficult one. So I talk about love a lot. And you've just talked

about Donald Trump. I guarantee you this particular segment would be full of division from the

internet. But I believe that should be and can be fixed. What I'm referring to in particular is the

division, because we've talked about the value of reason. And what I've noticed on the internet is

the division shuts down reason. So when people hear you say Trump, actually the first sentence

you said about Trump, they'll hear Trump and their ears will perk up. And they'll immediately

start in that first sentence, they'll say, is he a Trump supporter or a Trump?

They're not interested in anything else after that. And then after that, that's it. And what,

how do, so my question is, you as one of the beacons of intellectualism, well, you're quite

honest. I mean, it sounds silly to say, but you are a beacon of reason. How do we bring people

together long enough to where we can reason? I mean, there's no easy way out of this because

the fact that people have become tribal and they have very tribal. And the tribe in the tribe

reason doesn't matter. It's all about emotion. It's all about belonging and not belonging. And

you don't want to stand out. You don't want to have a different opinion. You want to belong. And

it's all about belonging. It took us decades to get back to tribalism where we were hundreds of

years ago. It took millennium to get out of tribalism. It took the enlightenment to get

us to the point of individualism where we think for and reason, respectful reason. Before that,

we were all tribal. So it took the enlightenment to get us out of it. We've been in the enlightenment

for about 250 years influenced by the enlightenment and worth and it's fading. The impact is fading.

So what would we need to get out of it? We need self esteem.

People join a tribe because they don't trust their own mind. People join a tribe because they're afraid

to stand on their own two feet. They're afraid to think for themselves. They're afraid to be different.

They're afraid to be unique. They're afraid to be an individual. People need self esteem. To gain

self esteem, they have to have respect for rationality. They have to think and they have to

have respect for rationality. They have to think and they have to achieve and they have to recognize

that achievement. To do that, they have to be, they have to have respect for thinking. They

have to have respect for reason. And we have to think about the schools. We have to have schools

that teach people to think, teach people to value their mind. We have schools that teach people

and value their feelings. We have groups of six year olds sitting around a circle discussing politics.

What? They don't know anything. They're ignorant. So you don't know anything when you're ignorant.

Yes, you can feel, but your feelings are useless as decision making tools. But we emphasize emotion.

It's all about socialization and emotion. This is why they talk about this generation of snowflakes.

They can't hear anything that they're opposed to because they've not learned how to use their mind,

how to think. So it boils down to teaching people how to think, two things. How to think

and how to care about themselves. So it's thinking of self esteem and they're connected

because when you think, you achieve, which gains your self esteem. When you have self esteem,

it's easier to think for yourself. And I don't know how you do that quickly. I think leadership

matters. So part of what I try to do is try to encourage people to do those things. But I am

a small voice. You asked me when early on, you said we should talk about why I'm not more famous.

I'm not famous. My following is not big. It's very small in the scope of things.

Well, yours and objectivism and that question, could you linger on it for a moment?

Why isn't objectivism more famous? I think because it's so challenging. It's not challenging to me,

right? When I first encountered objectivism, it's like after the first shock and after the first

kind of, none of this can be true. This is all BS. In fighting it, once I got it,

it was easy. It was easy. It required years of studying, but it was easy in the sense of,

yes, this makes sense. But it's challenging because it upends everything. It really says

what my mother taught me is wrong. And when my politicians say left and right is wrong,

all of them, there's not a single politician on which I agree with on almost anything,

right? Because on the fundamentals, we disagree. And what my teachers are telling me is wrong.

And what Jesus said is wrong. And it's hard. But the thing is, so you talk about politics and all

that kind of stuff, but most people don't care. The more powerful thing about objectivism is the

practical of my life, of how I revolutionize my life. And that feels to be like a very

important and appealing, get your shit together. Yeah, but this is why Jordan Peterson is so

much more successful than we are, right? Make your bed or whatever. Make your bed.

Yeah, because his personal responsibility is shallow. It's make your bed, stand up straight.

It's what my mother told me when I was growing up. There's nothing new about Jordan Peterson.

And he says, embrace Christianity. Christianity is fine, right? Religion is okay. Just do these

few things and you'll be fine. And by the way, he says, happiness, you either have it or you don't.

You know, it's random. You don't actually, you can't bring about your own happiness.

So he's given people an easy out. People want easy out. People buy self help books that give

them five principles for living it, you know, shallow. I'm telling them, think, stand on your

own two feet. Be independent. Don't listen to your mother. Do your own thing. But thoughtfully,

not based on emotions. So you're responsible not just for a set of particular habits and so on.

You're responsible for everything. Yes. And you respond. Here's the big one, right?

You're responsible for shaping your own soul. Your consciousness, you get to decide what it's

going to be like. And the only tool you have is your mind. Your only reason is your mind. Well,

your emotions play a tool when they're properly cultivated. They play a role in that. And the

tools you have is thinking, experiencing, living, coming to the right conclusions,

you know, listening to great music and watching good movies and art is very important in shaping

your own soul and helping you do this. It's got a crucial role in that. But it's work. And it's

lonely work because it's what you do with yourself. Now, if you find somebody who you love, who shares

these values and you can do with them, that's great. But it's mostly lonely work. It's hard.

It's challenging. It ends your world. The reward is unbelievable. But even at the, think about,

think about the Enlightenment, right? So up until the Enlightenment, where was truth?

Truth came from our book. And there were a few people who understood the book. Most of us couldn't

read and they conveyed it to us and they just told us what to do. And in that sense, life's easy.

It sucks. And we die young and we have nothing and we don't enjoy it. But it's easy. And the

Enlightenment comes around and says, we've got this tool. It's called reason. And it allows us to

discover truth about the world. It's not in a book. It's actually your reason allows you to

discover stuff about the world. And I consider the first, really the first figure of the Enlightenment

is Newton, not Locke, right? It's a scientist because he teaches us the laws of mechanics,

like how does stuff work? And people go, oh, wow, this is cool. I can use my mind. I can discover

truth. Isn't that amazing? And everything opens up when you do that. Hey, if I can discover,

if I understand the laws of motion, if I can understand truth in the world, how come I can't

decide who I marry? I mean, everything was fixed in those lists. How come I can't decide what

profession I should be in, right? Everybody will belong to a guild. How come I can't decide who

I'm a political leader should be? So it's all reason. It's all once you understand the efficacy

of your own mind to understand truth, to understand reality, discover truth, not understand truth,

discover it. Everything opens up. Now you can take responsibility for your own life because now you

have the tool to do it. But we are living in an era where postmodernism tells us there is no truth,

there is no reality, and our mind is useless anyway. Critical race theory tells us that

you're determined by your race, and your race shapes everything, and your free will is meaningless,

and your reason doesn't matter because reason is just shaped by your genes and shaped by your

color of your skin. It's the most racist theory of all. And you've got our friend at UC Irvine

telling them, oh, your senses don't tell you anything about reality anyway. Reality is what

it is. So what's the purpose of reason? It's to invent stuff. It's to make stuff up. And what

use is that? It's complete fantasy. You've basically got every philosophical intellectual voice in the

culture telling them their reason is impotent. There's like a Steven Pinker who tries and I love

Pinker and he's really good and I love his books. But you know, he needs to be stronger about this.

And there's a few people on kind of there's a few people partially in the intellectual

doc web and otherwise who are big on reason, but not consistent enough and not full understanding

of what it means or what it implies. And then there's little old me. And it's me against the

world in a sense, because I'm not only willing to accept to articulate the case for reason,

but then what that implies. It implies freedom. It implies capitalism. It implies taking personal

responsibility over your own life. And there are other intellectual doc web people get to reason

and then oh politics, you can be whatever. No, you can't. You can't be a socialist. And for reason,