The following is a conversation with Michael Mallis and Yaron Brook, Michael's third time

on this podcast and Yaron's second, but together for the first time.

Michael is an anarchist, political thinker, host of a podcast called You're Welcome and

author of Dear Reader, The New Right and two upcoming books Anarchist Handbook and The

White Pill.

Yaron is an objectivist philosopher, chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, host of The Yaron

Brook Show and coauthor of The Free Market Revolution and Equal is Unfair.

Quick mention of our sponsors, Ground News, Public Goods, Athletic Greens, Brave and Four

Sigmatic.

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that this conversation is a kind of experiment.

Both Michael and Yaron are thoughtful and passionate, united in part by an interest

in the history and philosophy of Ayn Rand, but they are also very different in style.

Good conversation, like good food, is often made delicious by pairing of contrasting elements.

For example, someone suggested I try a peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwich, which apparently

is very good.

Among the three of us, I don't know who's the peanut butter, who's the bacon and who's

the banana, I'm guessing it's probably me, I'm the banana, but I hope the final result,

the final dish, if you will, is equally delicious.

We talk through, I think, a lot of interesting ideas, sometimes disagreeing, sometimes even

in rare cases saying something humorous, including dark humor, especially in Michael's case.

All three of us are sensitive to the suffering in the world today and throughout human history.

We think about it, we talk about it, and we deal with it in different ways.

Be patient with us.

Whether you agree, disagree, enjoy or dislike the result, I hope you feel listened, you're

a wiser person on the other end of it, I know I was.

Mostly, I really enjoyed this conversation because no matter what Michael and Yaron believe,

underneath it all, they're genuine, kind human beings that I'm lucky to be able to

hang out with and learn from.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast and here's my conversation with Michael Malus and Yaron

Rook.

I've been a huge fan of the two of you for the longest time.

Are we recording now?

Is it starting?

Or are you just talking?

I'm not recording at all.

He's not going to compliment us if it's not part of the show.

Yes, he does, all the time.

He speaks very highly of me.

You, I don't know.

I'm not sure.

He only does this to me on the show.

Objectivists don't like charity, so don't compliment him, he won't think it's sincere.

So it's an incredible honor that the both of you would show up here.

If we, let me just ask this sort of profound philosophical question.

How well do you think we would get along if we were stuck on a desert island together?

What would life be like?

I thought the original question you had, that you sent us this question, was how long would

it take for us to murder one another or something like that.

There was murder in the question, if I remember.

I, I, listen, he sent us homework, right?

All these questions.

I ignored it.

I didn't spend four years at Patrick Henry University to do homework.

To answer your question, I think it would be very easy for us to live together in a

desert island in terms of interpersonal.

I know, and I say this because I know a lot of people who have been the show's survivor.

So they, and I know a little bit about the dynamics.

So when you have people who are intelligent, who are going to have the same goals, I mean,

there's space to go away if I'm annoyed at you, I don't think it would be that hard at

all.

What's our goals on a desert island?

Food, shelter.

Survival.

Survival.

Survival, basically.

Survival and getting out of there, right?

You don't want to stay on the desert island.

So yeah, I don't, I don't think, I think that's true of any three, you know, semi rational

people who, you know, who basically share the goal that they want to survive.

They want to thrive.

They want to get off of the island.

Why would there be conflict?

I mean, there would be conflict, but, and there can be conflict, but they'd find ways

to deal with it.

I don't have this negative view of human beings, particularly not as individuals.

It's when they get into mobs and groups and collectives that ideology can really motivate

them to do horrible things.

One of the things that really drives me crazy is how sinister an impact the book Lord of

the Flies has had on our culture.

I read it in high school.

It's a superb book.

That's not even a question, but it's not accurate.

We see in many situations where people are trapped together under difficult circumstances.

Obviously that book's about children that very quickly it is not about conflict.

It very quickly becomes about cooperation.

Let's work together.

We all have the same goal.

This is not a time to worry about other things.

It really, the human beings, the animal instinct that kicks in is the social animal and I'm

going to shut up and go over there and have a, like stomp my feet instead of arguing with

your own because we're really trapped in the situation and we need to make it work.

Well, and to the extent that they're bad people, bad people are dealt with, right?

So this is true of all of, you know, how did we survive as a species, right?

How have we survived as a species?

We've been on a desert island in a sense as a species forever.

Tribes survived.

They survived by cooperation.

They survived by dealing with bad people.

Civilization is created by people cooperating and working together and allowing individuals

to thrive within the group and when bad people arise, they deal with them, right?

Now sometimes these groups get captured by bad people and bad ideas and probably from

day one that was going on, right?

The whole tribe is probably a bad idea to begin with, but you know, underneath it all,

the fact is that to survive as a species, we need to think, we need to be rational and

if we don't have any respect for reason, then we would all die.

We would die off.

So that's a hopeful message, but where does that go wrong?

So with three people we might get along, we would focus on the basics of life, we have

similar goals.

Once women are introduced, their incessant irrationalism and less of their hormones for

SOL.

Look, three of us on a desert island would be nice, but without women, it wouldn't be

fun.

I'm going to edit out half the things Michael said through this broadcast.

As you know, I used to run the Ayn Rand Institute.

She was a woman last time I looked.

Oh, wait a minute.

You know, you know exactly what I'm going to say.

When Ludwig von Mises or Hazlitt, I don't know who it was, Mises was praising Ayn Rand

and I think it was Hazlitt who said it to her.

He said, Ludwig von Mises said, you're the smartest man I've ever met.

And Ayn Rand said, did he say man?

Right?

No, she viewed as a compliment.

Right.

But she wanted to be clear that he said man.

She was excited.

Yes.

Absolutely.

I took it as her perceiving him as seeing her as a full equal.

Oh, I think that's right.

I think that's right.

Plus, I think the perception out there, the perception in the culture of man as being

rational was a compliment to her because that was affirming that he viewed her as a rational.

Yeah, because Mises is old school.

He's an older Eastern European guy, so he would definitely have these rigid views.

Like his wife, I read her autobiography, Margit von Mises, and basically he made her his secretary

to the point where if he's typing something or he had something handwritten, she had to

type it out.

And if she made a typo, he would tear up the page, she had to start from the beginning.

But it's like, this is the role of the man, this is the role of the woman.

So for him to regard her, this was kind of a breaking through moment.

Not that she was secretly misogynist.

So I think we go wrong when people try to understand the world around them and come

up with wrong ideas.

And it's natural that they would come up with wrong ideas because it's hard to figure out

what's right.

So we start with trying to come up with mystical explanations for the existence of the things

around us.

And that I think very quickly leads to some people being able to communicate with the

mystical stuff out there and some people not being able to communicate and some people

wanting to control other people and using those pseudo explanations as a way to control.

So you always have, Rand called it Attila and the witch doctor.

You always have a witch doctor, the mystic, the philosopher, the intellectual, the philosopher

king, and you have an Attila, you have somebody who wants control of the people, who's willing

to use force to control other people.

And when those two get together, that's when things go bad.

And unfortunately, 95, 98% of human history is when those two are together.

And so the not having them together, having the right ideas, and the right ideas are ones

that are not exclusive to those guys and where we don't allow Attila to have that kind of

physical power over us, that's an exception and that's rare and that's what needs to be

defended.

Yeah.

Stalin's not personally killing people.

Hitler's not personally killing people.

Charles Manson's not personally killing people.

They need their goons.

They need their goons, but also they don't have original ideas.

Everything Stalin says is original to him, right?

He needs a Marx, even Lenin, right?

They all need a Marx, right?

And Marx needs a particular line of thinkers that come before him that set him up for these

kind of ideas.

So Stalin both needs his goons, even though he's somewhat of a goon, particularly Stalin.

Yeah, he's a bank robber, yeah.

And then, so take Lenin, Lenin I think is a better example because Lenin's more intellectual

if you will.

Lenin needs his goons, he needs his Stalins, but Lenin also needs his Marx.

And we don't want to let Marx off the hook because Marx knows, I think, implicitly that

his ideas have to lead to Lenin and Stalin.

His ideas are not neutral.

I don't think it's implicit at all.

I think Marx very much glorified revolution, blood and terror, this is not implicit in

the slightest.

No, absolutely.

I mean, there are letters between him and Engels where they talk about which peoples

will have to be eliminated because they don't have that proletarian thing, right?

So I think certain peoples in Southern Europe are not appropriate for the utopia to come

and will have to be gone.

And Marx also had this concept which we still see today in garbled ways of polylogism, which

is if you're a capitalist and I'm bourgeois or I'm a worker, your logic is different than

mine.

It's really going to be impossible for us to communicate.

And at a certain point, you're going to have to be liquidated.

And they pretend that doesn't mean murdered, but it means murdered.

And very quickly, everyone becomes a capitalist or bourgeois.

And then you have the Holodomor and things like this.

No, he knows exactly where it's going to lead.

And this is why people say, oh, Marx is not evil.

He just wrote books.

No, it's the people who write books who are responsible for the way history evolves.

And they know the bad guys certainly know the consequence of their ideas, and they need

to bear the moral responsibility for what happens when the ideas are implemented.

Here's a way.

Can I ask a question?

Yeah.

Because I think I know more about Rand than Yaron does.

So let's see.

Oh.

Okay.

The gauntlet has been thrown down.

Who did Ayn Rand say is the most evil man who ever lived?

Immanuel Kant.

That's right.

Correct.

No, that I know.

I mean, it's a big deal that Immanuel Kant is.

And most people don't understand why, because if you read Kant, there's certain passages

in Kant that sound pretty liberal, they sound pretty, it sounds like he's for the individual,

he sounds like he's for the American Revolution, things like that.

But when you actually read his philosophy and what he's trying to defend and what he's

trying to undermine, he's trying to undermine the foundations that make the revolution possible,

that make freedom and individualism possible.

He's trying to destroy the Enlightenment.

And the Enlightenment are those ideas that make freedom, individualism feasible.

He's trying to undermine reason.

And without reason, we're nothing.

We can't survive as a species.

And that's why she thought he was the most evil person, because his ideas undermine the

very foundations of what it requires to be a human being, reason and individualism.

Those are the things he's trying to eviscerate.

I know you've talked about Hoffman before.

So Hoffman is a modern day attempt to, Donald Hoffman, Donald Hoffman is the University

of California, Irvine, a neurologist, a neuroscientist, something like that.

So I met him once and we were at one of these conferences where you do a quick intro, you

sit and you do a quick intro.

His introduction was, I've just written a book that proves that evolution has conditioned

us not to see reality.

That is very Kantian.

Yeah.

And he is basically just presenting pseudoscience to defend Kant's position about epistemology

and about metaphysics.

And there's nothing original there.

And he puts up a bunch of equations and he says, I ran a simulation and it proves I'm

right.

So Yaron is a little bit frustrated with Donald Hoffman's work.

Let me...

I'm not frustrated.

I just think it's completely wrong and it's anti life, anti mind, anti evolution.

I think he's an anti evolutionist at the end.

And I think it, you know, anytime you say, look, here's the important point.

Anytime you say reality doesn't exist, well, who are you?

What do you mean by reality?

What do any of your words mean?

What does anything you say even mean if it doesn't refer to something that's actually

out there in reality?

I try to defend this point of view because in a certain kind of sense, I hear it as being

humble in the face of the uncertainty that's around us.

Sort of, you know, when you speak with the confidence of Ayn Rand and yourself, that

reason can be like this weapon that cuts through all the bullshit of the world and makes us

like have an ethical moral life and all those kinds of things.

You kind of assume that reason is a superpower that has no limits.

Wait, hold on, hold on a second.

But I got this one.

See this is already leading to a murder by words and we've been only talking for 20 minutes.

The three of us wouldn't get together, we wouldn't get along together on an island.

We'll just make him our slave.

We're all going to get along.

He's just going to do the work.

But I'm afraid I cannot provide any value as a slave, so this is not going to end well

for me.

We could provide value as dinner.

That's the problem I'm trying to get to.

That's a solution.

Okay.

But Donald Hoffman says that there is like he makes an argument that exactly as you said,

that what we perceive is not, is very, very far from actual physical reality.

In fact, we're not able to perceive the physical reality at all.

And he also makes the bigger claim that evolution prefers beings who are not attached to reality.

So like evolution created creatures that are basically functioning way outside of what

the physical reality is.

I got this.

I got this.

Okay.

Because there's a lot to unpack here and I hate all of it.

Okay.

First of all, no, no, I'm serious.

First of all, when you were making that comment about how, you know, reason is a superpower

beyond limit, you're being ironic, but it's true.

And I'll give you one example, which is astronomy.

If you look at the physical size of the universe, it's literally in one sense incomprehensible.

So he's right in the sense that I do not understand and none of us understand what it means for

93 million miles away for the sun to be.

It makes no, it's a number on another screen, right?

That said, the fact that my mind, and I'm not one of the great thinkers of all time

is getting there, is capable of appreciating what the sun means, what heliocentrism means.

The fact that we can, you know, you're a math person that you could look at galaxies and

reduce it to 10 to the 64th power in terms of distance that shows the unlimited capacity

of the human mind and reason.

Number one.

Number two is if he says that evolution favors those who are not in touch with reality, and

I don't know in what context he's saying that because that sentence could mean a lot of

different things.

Evolution is what guides, reality is what guides evolution.

Evolution works because you are fitted to the reality of the situation around you.

It's not that someone is sitting down and says, well, I'm going to add a fin to this

animal and that fin helps it swim.

I engineered a check mark.

It's that mutations occur.

The vast majority of these mutations are against reality.

They do not further this animal's life or this plant's life or this fungus's life, but

the ones that are in touch with reality, such as, okay, it's really cold here.

There's no predators here.

If I could figure out, and I'm using that term very loosely, a way where I could survive

in the cold, I don't have predation.

It's really great.

The fact that unconsciously and mindlessly this process can force the mutation and evolution

of the form precisely means that they're in touch with reality.

Now, if he means the consciousness is not in touch with reality, that's another thing

that I really hate.

You're referring to the reality as like the biological reality of evolution, but all of

that is based on many other layers of abstraction that ultimately has quantum mechanics underneath

it all, and he's saying somewhere along the layers, you start to lose more and more and

more attachment to the actual.

Hold on.

Can I add one more sentence?

Sure, sure.

I do not, I despise the idea, I say despise, I'm not using this, I'm not joking, the idea

that the reality we don't live in is somehow more real than this.

That is a very dangerous idea to say, well, quantum works in this way, and I'm sure he's

correct and none of us disagree with that.

What we perceive, macro, works in a different way, well, that's the real reality and this

is fake.

Bullshit.

Yeah.

This is the real reality.

That is a different type, a subset, but no one's living there, and humanity is the starting

point.

It's a subset that has to integrate with this world.

There isn't two worlds, one in the quantum world and one here.

They're integrated.

Now, we might not have the scientific knowledge to know how they're integrated, but so what?

We know that there's only one reality and that's this one.

He has this difference.

He says, evolution matches up to fitness, not to reality, and he creates this dichotomy

between fitness and reality, but that's complete nonsense.

There is no such thing as a concept of fitness outside of fitness to what?

To reality.

Fitness and reality are the same thing.

They're not separate things.

The whole way he sets this up intellectually is wrong, I think to some extent dishonest,

and certainly philosophically corrupt.

It's Kantian.

Again, he's accepted Kant's ideas, and everybody pretty much has accepted Kant's ideas for

the last 200 years, and they give it a different facade.

He's giving it an evolutionary facade, but it's just a facade for the same idea, and

that is that somehow because we have eyes, we cannot see, because the light waves are

going through a medium, and that medium necessarily distorted.

The medium changes the resolution at which you see.

If I take off my glasses, I'm seeing it a little differently.

The thing is still there, and the thing is still there in the way I see it, because I'm

grasping the handle and lifting the cup.

That's not an illusion.

That is a real cup.

So do you think some things are more real than others?

For example, money.

There's a bunch of things that seem real.

This is not an Animal Farm reference.

Is this going to be about love?

There's nothing as real as love, right Lex?

Love is a fundamental part of the quantum mechanics, yes.

No.

No.

No.

There are some things that have become reality because we humans, in a collective sense,

believe it.

You can't believe something collectively.

Now it doesn't become real.

What does it mean to say something's real?

That is, you can, so love, for example, love's a good example, right?

Love is an abstraction, right?

It's not something I can touch.

It's not something I can see, but it's certainly something you would feel.

Not something you can hit.

We love differently.

You and I.

I don't think that's true.

I think I'm just too honest about it.

You can't hit love.

You can't, love is an abstraction.

So is love real?

Yes, it's real because I feel it.

It's an existent, but it's not an existent in the same sense as this cup is.

So abstractions are real, but at the end of the day, all abstractions have to be able

to be reduced to actual concrete so you can either see it.

I really don't like criticizing someone whose work I haven't read secondhand.

So I want to take this away from speaking about him personally, because I'm not familiar

with his work.

He is a nice guy.

That makes me like him.

That makes him like him less.

Now you're back talking about evolutionary fitness again.

I think there's disingenuousness when we talk about the word real in terms of ideas are

real versus the cup is real, and you try to switch back between those two meanings, and

it's a little bit of linguistic wordplay that is trying to force a point that's not accurate,

in my opinion.

Well, I think the issue is, and what he's challenging is, and what Kant is challenging

is, do we know reality?

And I think the answer is yes, we do.

We know reality.

We observe it.

Now, do we know everything about reality?

No.

We can't, for example, sense what a bat senses as reality.

A bat observes reality through, what is it?

Sonar.

Sound waves, right?

Yeah.

Through sonar.

Right?

So it has a different sense, but it's the same reality.

It's still a table.

The bat's spatial relationship to the table is different than ours, but the object is

still the same object.

But how do you know that's true?

Are you not just hoping that's true or assuming that's true?

That's what no means.

No means I have identified an aspect of reality.

That's literally the definition of knowledge.

Now if you say, how are you certain?

Well, that's a whole other question, but one of the reasons I know it was certain is because

this happens.

Yes.

Okay.

And I know this is going to happen.

And if I tell you, if you go downstairs, you're going to see, you know, Mr. Jones and you

walk downstairs and I see Mr. Jones, at the very least, you know, something's going on

there.

So what about all the things that mess with our perception?

For example, we've talked about psychedelics before.

Talked about in dreams where you'd be detached from this, I mean, there's certain things

that happen to your brain to where you're not able to perceive.

So you're not perceiving reality.

That's right.

So your brain is creating a different reality.

It's not real.

How do you know it's not real?

How do you know the elves will meet in the...

Because partially because I need to take a drug in order to do it, because I'm asleep

when I'm dreaming.

It's not reality.

That is clearly a creation of our mind.

It's not a creed.

Hold on.

Let's get to the psychedelics.

The drug is real.

I think you're going to be thinking I'm joking a lot more than I am this episode.

I'm going to be the humorist objectivist.

He could be the court jester.

In terms of psychedelic, when people are perceiving these elves, these machine elves, these other

entities, whether they could either be real or not, I don't know.

But the point is that doesn't go to his broader point because if these beings exist and the

only way to perceive them is to take a drug, they still exist.

This is just...

For example, if I'm walking outside in the woods at night and there's a deer and I can't

see it, but if I put on night vision goggles, I can see it.

That deer was there the entire time.

It's not that the night vision goggles caused the deer to appear.

You can recreate it not only using night vision goggles, but you can then use sonar.

You can use other mechanisms by which to prove that the deer is there.

The thing with psychedelics is that...I don't know because maybe I'm the least experienced

with psychedelics here probably.

My guess is every time you take the psychedelic, you have exactly the same experience of the

deer.

No.

Second, are there other mechanisms, other scientific mechanisms by which I can find

the deer out there other than the psychedelics?

We don't know yet.

So...

Well, we don't know yet.

Well, but the...

This is Occam's Razor, right?

The simplest explanation here is the most likely, and that is that you've taken something

that's messing with the chemicals in the brain, something is being...that your brain can project.

We dream.

Nobody's arguing that the dream is real and reality is not, or if they are, I think they're

nuts.

The dream is a dream.

Your brain is creating an image of telling you a story.

Psychedelics are simulating the same thing.

That's probably what's going on until there's evidence to the contrary.

Well, hold on.

Let me disagree with you a little bit, because let's take Adderall, for example.

No one here disagrees.

That's something much more simpler and less out of this world.

I think what he might be speaking to, I know Joe Rogan talks about this and other people

in this space, is that when you take certain drugs, it changes your perception.

It doesn't have to be otherworldly, it changes your perception of what's around you.

And as an example, what they talk about is, the three of us are talking, there's lots

of other stuff in the room, we're only aware of it vaguely on a personal level.

So it changes the...

Hold on, let me finish.

No, I don't do that.

I'm Israeli.

You're about to start.

This is back to the desert island of murder.

No, but we just resolved it within three seconds.

We did.

There's no conch.

He's trying to get us to feed on the truth.

Yeah, it's not going to happen.

Exactly.

I'm trying to create murder.

No one has asthma.

It's going to be fine.

Because if the two of you murder each other, there's more food for me.

There's no food.

You're all...

Well, ratings would go up.

You robots eat alcohol.

Ratings would go up.

Viewership would go up.

Yeah, it's good for the ratings.

Yeah.

But if you take, for example, Adderall or speed, right?

People like you focus on things, you perceive things that aren't there.

But that doesn't mean those things weren't there to begin with.

There are absolutely ways to change human perception chemically, through glasses, through

getting drunk.

None of that changes the fact that the reality underneath it is real and is causing this

effect.

Absolutely.

And it has a particular nature, right?

And all it's doing is changing the focus, right?

So if I take off my glasses, I'm seeing the same thing.

I'm just seeing something's out of focus and maybe in the distance, I can't see something.

It's just gone.

And then I put it on.

There it is.

That thing was always there.

It's just the sensitivity I have to it has changed.

And it's absolutely not sensitive to everything equally.

And drugs can change the relative sensitivities.

It doesn't change reality.

It changes our ability to focus on reality.

Let me give you one great example, the microscope.

I forget who it was.

His name was with an L, the scientist who discovered it.

He had a drop of water and he's seeing monsters, the protozoa in this drop of water.

For him, it must have been, it is like a drug experience, like, wait a minute, I'm drinking

this.

And there's alien beings whose shapes are completely crazy in this water.

Those beings were always there.

Those beings were there before any of us were here.

They've been there for billions of years.

But because he had this apparatus, now he's able to see protozoa.

No one's arguing protozoa are extradimensional, no one's arguing the supernatural, amoebas

are well studied, paramecia, all the other lots.

So if these elves, the machine elves are real, and the only way to perceive them is through

DMT or something like that, that doesn't contradict the broader point that they've always been

there and this is the mechanism for perceiving them.

So here's the word I was looking for, it's the word actually Greg taught me this, so

Greg Salamieri.

So it's resolution, right?

So it's resolution.

My resolution changes with the glasses.

My resolution gets finer with the microscope.

So there's probably some bacteria here on the table.

100%.

Right?

There's no doubt about it.

I can't see them.

I can't use the microscope to not see them, but they're either there or they're not there.

And I have the tools to discover whether they are there or they're not there.

And that's called a microscope.

Now there could be even smaller beings that even with a microscope, I won't be able to

define, but that's completely arbitrary to claim that, that they're there until I find

a tool to be able to discover it.

The same with what you see if you're seeing other beings when you're taking psychedelics.

Unless you find another tool to be able to see them with, the simplest assumption is

probably the truest assumption.

But even the not simplest assumption doesn't contradict the broader point.

No.

Which is again, reality is what it is.

If it turns out that there are these creatures that you can only see with psychedelics, and

there are these creatures that you can only see with psychedelics, and our resolution

while we're not on psychedelics is not fine enough to observe them.

So what?

That doesn't change the fact that we evolved to survive in reality as it is.

What do you do with the possibility that our resolution as it currently stands is really,

really crappy?

That basically.

Well, it's not.

No, but you don't know that.

No, we know it.

We know it completely.

Compared to who?

Exactly.

Compared to the future possibilities like artificial intelligence.

It is true.

Hundreds of years.

It is crappy compared to the future.

That's true.

Fine.

But that's not relevant.

Much, much.

Yes.

Or just the magnitude of crappy.

Of course.

No, but here I'll use the standard that Hoffman uses, evolution, right?

The reason I know that our resolution is phenomenal, it's phenomenally good, right?

Because look at us, we're sitting here comfortably in an apartment with air conditioning and

in warm Austin with microphones and we did all this stuff, we're really good at survival

and changing the environment.

Indeed, if you look at the species that we know of, there's not a species that come anywhere

close to our ability to deal with reality, to observe reality, to understand reality

and to shape it.

Now in the future, well, we'll come up with machines that can figure out stuff that we

have no clue about today.

That's only because we're so well suited to reality that can we create those machines.

And I promise you, in the future, it's going to be much more what you're saying.

That's how it's going to happen.

No, but the thing is, when the creatures from the future look back to the things we're saying

now, what Aydin Rand is saying, what you're saying with certainty, do you think they'll

laugh at the level of how much confusion there was, how much inaccuracy?

Did you?

No.

No, no.

Let me get this one.

You know what they're going to do?

Yes.

They're going to either read Aristotle or read any of these great geniuses of the past.

It's like these people didn't have electricity.

They didn't have warm clothes or anything, and they're able to figure out the diameter

of the Earth.

Like the creativity to be and to get it within a few miles.

The creativity and to figure out the speed of light when you don't even have a stopwatch.

When you look back, a lot of it's nonsense, but it's like when you're talking to a kid.

They would disregard the nonsense, and when they get something right, it's awe.

So it's never a numbers game, right?

So it's the few that validate and justify the rest.

So when you look at Aristotle, he's talking about there was one of those causes which

is like time travel and it doesn't really make sense.

But you look at the rest of this stuff or even Plato or any of these greats, it's like,

oh my, this is an amazing miracle.

I wouldn't say literally miracle, I got you, everyone.

But at the same time, yeah, a lot of these other people had stupid ideas.

You don't care.

You care about those great, great minds and how they moved us all forward.

To this day, we still study Pythagoras.

And it's not even just the sciences and the math.

Think about the philosophy.

How much is there to learn from reading Aristotle or Plato or Socrates when you disagree with

them?

How many giants have there been in all of human history that have had the minds of Socrates

or Plato and Aristotle?

A thousand years where they look back at Plato and Aristotle and admire them?

Absolutely.

Well, they find certain things that are wrong, yes, but certain things that Aristotle discovered

are absolutely right and will always be right.

Certain things that Ayn Rand discovered will always be right.

I think a lot of what she came up with, will some things be discovered to be wrong?

Yeah.

You know, that wouldn't shock me.

But the genius and the truth that we know today is amazing.

It's stunning to be pessimistic about us because in the future we'll know more.

Not pessimistic, but more humble.

There's no reason to be humble.

I mean, I really think humility is a vice, not a virtue.

What's there to be humble about?

Look at life.

This is amazing.

We should be...

But the word humble has different meanings.

I know.

I know.

Okay.

I know what it's going to get.

I mean, humility in a sense of not appreciating the genius and the ability and the success

and all the stuff that we as individuals, I think, in our lives, but as a culture, as

a movement, if you think about movement in terms of those of us who respect reason have

achieved in spite of the odds, we should be proud of that and pride as the virtue.

Humility in the sense of, yeah, I know there's more to know.

I know there's a lot more to know and in the future we'll know more.

Sure.

But I don't think that's the way...

See, I take humility as the way the Christians use it, which is the other way.

And I think it's a real vice.

It's don't think of yourself too much just because you can think that's no big deal or

just because you can create this stuff.

It is a big deal.

Your achievements are a big deal and you should take credit for them.

So be careful with the word humility because the real meaning is the Christian meaning,

which is a very, very bad meaning.

Hold on.

Let me be a little pedantic because there's no such thing as real meaning, right?

So there's different meanings.

Okay.

Hold on.

This is semantics, but here's another real meaning that you're not going to disagree

with, which is the smartest person on earth is ignorant of 99.9% of knowledge, right?

So if I meet someone who is less intelligent than me and less informed than me, it is still

certain that this person has things to teach me.

If I go to a mechanic and maybe this guy's dumb as rocks.

I don't know anything about cars.

What he tells me about that car is good.

I could take it to the bank.

He's going to be in a position to inform me.

So one of the reasons humility is extremely important is very often you have people and

you see this very much in academia who think you know exactly where I'm going around who

think they're know what else and they think, oh, I have this degree.

You're a layman.

You've never been formally educated.

Therefore not only you dumb and uneducated and you're wrong.

And it's like this person might be have won a great example of this.

And this is an example you might not like is a lot of times you have these native populations

and they'll have a better understanding of the animals around them, the plants, the fruits,

whatever.

And you'd have these scientists and be like, oh, they're talking about this monster in

the woods.

Yeah, whatever.

This giant, this giant ape.

But it was real.

It was the gorilla.

But you know, you dismiss them because, oh, these are stupid, ignorant, whatever people

that's kind of changed to some extent.

But that is an aspect of humility that I think behooves especially highly intelligent people

because there is such a presumption to be dismissive of people who you regard as less

than.

But they're often right.

So I agree.

I agree with all of the concrete examples.

I just think we should come up with a better word than humility.

And I don't have one because I'm not I'm not a woodsmith.

I'm not.

This is not my strength.

But humility, humility is a is a word from the Christian ethics.

And it means something very specific in the field of ethics.

And it means the opposite of of what I think virtue requires.

It's demeaning.

It's to put you down.

It's to it's to it's to resist pride.

And I think pride is a very important thing.

I don't know.

You're on.

But again, you have to define your terms properly.

Hating myself has has been quite useful for me as well, but that's because you're Russian

and Jewish.

So by what this changes, you know, this is this is what happens, right?

We're brought up to, you know, to to feel exactly that way in a good Russian boy.

So we got him.

Oh, my God.

What is this?

What is this?

Gimmat again.

What is this?

Gimmat again.

What is that?

What it says?

Yeah.

Gimmat again.

I can't.

I can't.

I'm blind.

Yeah.

But as long as you're good.

But is it kosher?

Yes, it is.

Check if it's kosher.

This is Ukrainian, my friend.

Oh, oh, my God.

That is a sin.

How dare you?

That is really simple.

You know, me and Sinai were born in the same town.

I'm kidding.

My dad is Ukrainian.

Don't get mad.

So I don't think I don't think self self.

What did you how did you define it?

Self hate?

Yeah.

I think self hate is quite destructive.

Speak for yourself.

I think that humility is quite destructive.

Humility in the sense of I'm no big deal.

No.

I mean, if you've achieved something in life, you are a big deal.

You are a big deal because, you know, look, you got the two of us to fly into town just

to sit down here and have a conversation with you.

You're a big deal.

That says more about you than me.

We're just desperate.

We're lonely and depraved.

I'm not lonely.

I might be desperate.

I'm starting to question your ability to reason with the decisions you're making on the on

the aspect of and I should mention that The Idiot by Dostoevsky is one of my favorite

novels and there is a Christian ethic that runs through that.

I mean, because because, yeah, I mean, particularly but I hate to bring this up, but particularly

Russians and particularly Russian Jews and particularly Eastern European Jews are incredibly

Christian.

There's a there's a there's a real Christian theme in in Judaism that's that's about guilt.

Guilt is not there's no guilt in Judaism.

King David doesn't feel any guilt.

Solomon doesn't.

There's no guilt in the in the Old Testament.

Plenty of guilt.

Once Christianity has an impact on Judaism, we're raised to feel this way.

We're raised to be humble.

We're raised not to feel special.

We were raised to think we're no big deal and to and our mothers put us down and and

use that against us and try to inflict guilt on us.

They raise us up and then they knock us down.

It's a mechanism, but it's it's a cultural mechanism.

And I think it's very destructive to self esteem and to happiness.

Let me and I'll give you a great he's absolutely right with what he just said.

I disagree.

Oh, yeah.

Why?

Why is he right?

Because like my family, for example, it still doesn't really understand how I could pay

the rent because I don't go into an office.

And like when I started out trying to be a writer, the immediate reaction isn't which

is a lot of times I talk to kids, right, and they have these aspirations.

And I'll tell them, go for it while you're young.

If you fail, you'll go to your grave with like I tried my best.

I didn't make it happen.

Whereas if you don't try and never achieve, you are going to feel horrible for the rest

of your life.

And this is the example I use all the time.

I bring up many times I go go to any bookstore and look at all those terrible, terrible books

on the shelves that you wonder, how is this a book that could be you?

You could be that crappy writer.

But the thing is, in that culture that Yaron was talking about, you tell your family, I'm

going to be a writer.

Who do you think you are?

Why do you think you're going to be?

You're no Stephen King.

And it's like, why do you have to be Stephen King?

Why can't you just be a mediocre, crappy writer making the rent?

The best that you can be.

But even that is an amazing accomplishment.

Yeah, absolutely.

If I don't have to go to an office and I write books that not that many people read, this

is the story of my life, at the same time, I do have pride because I made this happen.

You can be the best version.

I mean, this is a cliche, but you can be the best version of yourself.

It's not a competition.

And yet our Jewish mothers, that's not what they aspire us to be.

They aspire us to be the best version of what they imagine, what the culture imagines, what

society imagined, not what, it's not about you in their minds.

And I've seen it, I see it all around me.

People putting their kids down, putting themselves down.

It's not healthy.

I've never told this story, I'm going to tell it now.

When I graduated college, I was a temp for a while because I didn't know what I wanted

to do.

Right?

And when you're a temp, it's like playing roulette.

You're going to have jobs that pay well, that suck, and pay well that are great or that

are great that don't pay well and suck and pay poorly.

But it's you and you're 21, you have that kind of space.

And my grandmother was talking to her brother, you know, he's talking about his kids, she's

talking about me, she's, you know, from Odessa.

And she told me she lied to him about how much money I was making.

And that's something I've never brought up and it still hurts me.

Because it's like, your approval of me should be a function of my character, my happiness.

And the fact that you feel ashamed over how much money I'm making, especially at this

point in my life, I thought was very, really misplaced priorities.

Yeah, absolutely.

I don't know.

I don't know what to make of that.

I think there's a huge benefit to the humility, terms aside, for believing that others can

teach you a lot.

Everybody, everybody can teach you a lot.

I think we all agree on that.

I just mentioned that, the mechanic.

No, you do.

Exactly.

Exactly the point.

But for that, I do believe you have to not constantly sort of break your ego apart and

constantly question whether you know anything about this world and sort of there's a negativity

with it that I think is very useful.

And it's also very fulfilling, just constantly.

I don't know.

It's the other way around.

I find that the more, the more I know, the more I know I know, the easier it is for me

to learn from other people.

The broader a context I have, the more curious I become, the more areas I know.

You know, it's true that the more you know, the more areas you know you don't know.

And the more I find myself attracted to people who can teach me something about things I

don't know.

Whereas if I was ignorant, if I truly believed I didn't know anything, I don't know how I

would live.

It would really completely challenge everything, everything about life for me.

Where would I even start?

You wouldn't know where to start.

So no, I think, and if you don't recognize what you know, you don't have a full appreciation

of yourself.

So really building a recognition of what do I know, right?

And how much do I know is really crucial to living.

And I'll tell you something else that furthers my life enormously is when you reach a certain

point in your career in your life, and you're talking to people who are a lot younger, and

they might be smart, driven, intelligent, they lack data.

When you're 23, you don't know how to speak corporate, you don't know what the code words

are.

So if I am in a position to sit down with this kid and be like, do X, Y, and Z, and

here's why I'm coming to this conclusion.

This is the information that released me this conclusion.

And I can save them from some of the suffering I went through.

That is very gratifying.

It's making the world a better place.

And it's also the opposite in a sense of humility, because like, in this context, I'm an expert,

or at least knowledgeable enough that I'm comfortable giving you advice.

Yeah.

And look, everything I do is about me knowing stuff that other people don't.

And I know a lot of stuff other people don't, and I do.

And it's fun.

I'm a teacher.

I'm a teacher at heart, always have been.

It turns out, I didn't know that early on, but I like becoming an expert and then trying

to teach people.

It doesn't mean I know everything.

Quite the contrary.

Again, the more I know, the more I know that the certain things I don't know and the certain

areas of expertise I don't have.

But look, pride is a broader concept than that.

Pride is about, and humility is the opposite of pride.

And Christianity has that right.

Pride is about taking your life seriously.

Pride is about wanting to be really good at living, wanting to have the knowledge.

And I think what you're describing is, you're describing as I'm constantly learning.

Sometimes I have to challenge myself, I have to question what I believe in order to gain

new knowledge.

That's all good, but that is a drive that is driven by pride.

You want to know.

There are lots of people out there that don't want to know, because they don't have that

pride.

They don't have that commitment to live, the commitment to achieving something.

And I'm going to say something else that I think is crucial.

Humility is extremely important when it comes to politics.

Because if you feel comfortable telling someone you've never met how to live their life, that

is a complete lack of humility.

I lack it, obviously, because I tell people how to live all the time.

Not through force.

Not through force.

That's what I'm saying.

And of course, not in the concrete.

I don't tell them, you know, move to, although I do tell them to move to Austin, but I don't

tell them this is what you do as a profession.

But I give them the principles, because I think they're principles of how to live.

They're making the choice.

That's my point.

Politically, what I'm saying is it shows a lack of humility to be like, I've never met

this person.

This is how I'm going to take money from him.

I'm going to...

See, but I don't see that humility.

There's nothing...

No, it's the lack of humility.

No, but it's not even a lack of humility, because it's...

Who am I to tell them how to live?

That's lack of humility.

No, of course you're not.

No, who are you to tell them how to live is an issue of...

It's an issue of force and rights and a bunch of different things.

I don't think it's a lack of humility there.

I think it's a lack of being a human being.

It can be both.

Sure.

I think it's, who gives you the right to dictate to somebody else how to live their lives?

Yeah, but that's a lack of humility, if you think you have that right.

Again, we're using humility in a very different way.

No, we're using the same way, because the person who feels comfortable, they think,

I know better than you how you should live your life to the point where I'm a couple

forcing you, because I know it's gonna be best for you in the long run.

And the answer is you don't know.

Right, but that's a lack of humility.

I think in your mind, you're on humility somehow tied to the Christian concept, the humility,

and so you're kind of allergic to the word.

Well, absolutely, because it's part of...

If you look at the cardinal virtues, the cardinal sins in Christianity, pride is a cardinal

sin and humility is a cardinal virtue, but they don't mean it in the sense, because they're

happy to tell you how to live, right?

They're happy to be philosopher kings over your life, and they believe that's being humble.

And you should be humble, by the way, in listening to the Pope or listening to God, because what

do you know?

You know nothing.

God knows everything, so you should shut up and do what you're told.

That's the sense in which I don't think you should be humble.

I mean, it's a sense in which I always use the example of Abraham, right?

God comes to Abraham and says, go kill your oldest son, your only son, right?

Your only son.

Go kill him.

It's like...

And what does Abraham do?

He says, yes, sir.

I'll follow...

And he's a moral hero, for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he's a moral hero, because he follows

orders, because he's humble.

I would tell God to go to hell.

Screw you.

I'm not killing my son.

There's no way.

But he killed...

I mean, he killed his son, so it's only fair.

Well, this is before he killed his son, so I didn't know that, right?

No, but part of the evil, part of the evil of Christianity is that he's killed his son

in the most torturous form of death possible.

I mean, the whole story of Jesus is one of the most immoral, unjust stories ever told,

and that Christians elevate this to a position of...

I'd love to have this conversation with Jordan, right?

Jordan Peterson.

The idea of elevating...

That'll never happen.

No, it won't.

But elevating Jesus, exactly, elevating Jesus to a superhero status for one of the most

immoral acts in human history is horrific.

So yeah, I mean, I'm opposed to God sacrificing his own son, never mind my son, but let him

go do it to his own son.

But he didn't kill Isaac.

He killed the goat.

The story's about Abraham, not about God.

First of all, God is mean, right, to put Abraham through that.

But Abraham has to assume that he's going to kill his son, and he lifts his...

He's going to do it, and he stopped.

So the whole point is obedience.

That's what humility leads to.

It leads to the opposite of the story you were telling.

It leads to people saying, yes, I should be told what to do.

Where's the authority who actually knows something?

I don't know anything.

No, I know a lot, and I know a lot about my life.

The science...

So you stay away from my life because I have pride in my life.

The science is settled, right?

Look at these experts.

Who am I to argue with these experts?

They tell me to drink dog pee.

I'm going to drink...

What am I, not drink dog pee?

Yes.

Yeah.

Let's go back to the island.

Speaking of which...

We're on an island again?

We're back to the island.

Manhattan.

And let's go to the island.

Let's...

I live on an island.

Everything is an island in some context.

Like Earth is an island.

This universe is an island in a multiverse.

There's no multiverses.

There's only one universe.

All right.

So let's invite Jordan Peterson to this island.

You wish.

Hold on.

Hold on a sec.

Hey, girl.

Whatcha doing?

Lex.

Lex Friedman?

Look him up.

Lex who?

Yeah, exactly.

I don't know.

Lex who?

I don't know, Lex says something as big of a following almost as Jordan does.

I know Jordan.

I know his family actually through Jim Keller, who's his relative.

He's an engineer.

And I just talked to Sam, who is perhaps a little bit aligned in some sense on your perspective

on religion and so on.

So let me ask, is there some...

Religion, yes.

But...

Other things, no.

Sam Harris.

Sam Harris, yeah.

Oh, sorry.

Sam Harris.

I thought you were talking about baseball.

Yeah.

I just talked to Sam.

I thought...

Let's talk about humility.

Let's talk about humility, Lex.

My buddy Sam.

I was talking to Barack.

You might know him.

Yeah.

I simply...

Humility went out the window.

I'm just a natural language processing model that I assume that once I mentioned Jordan

Peterson, it becomes an obvious statement what Sam means.

This is how neural networks think.

This is how robots think, Michael, you should know this.

I thought by now you'd be a scholar.

For the sake of the audience.

Humility.

Everything can teach you something, even the robot.

Okay.

So do you think there's value in religion or broader?

Do you think there's value in myth?

And as we've been talking about the value of reason, do you think it's possible to argue

in society as we grow the population of our little island that there's some value of common

myths, of common stories, of common religion?

There was value.

There is no value today.

So human beings need explanations, right?

They need a philosophy to guide their life.

They need ethics.

They need some explanation of what's going on in the world, right?

And it's no accident that the early religions had a river god and they had a sun god and

a moon god because everything they didn't understand, they made god, right?

So they had multiple gods because they didn't understand very much.

As human understanding evolved, it increased, as we knew reality more, right?

We came to the conclusion of, you know, this is very inefficient to have all these gods.

This is a genius of Judaism, right?

Let's just have one bucket to put all the stuff we don't know in and we'll call it one

god and then we don't, as we gain new knowledge, we can just take it out of the bucket that's

god and put it into the bucket of science.

At some point, though, at some point, and that point suddenly came during the scientific

revolution, I think, we could come to the conclusion that, no, we don't need this bucket

that's called god to explain the things that we don't know.

We can say we don't know and we're learning.

And slowly our knowledge is increasing and yet there's a lot more that we don't know,

but we don't need to throw it into some bucket that's called god in order to have it.

And I think that's true for morality and it's true for everything else, right?

As we gain the tools to understand what morality requires, we don't need a set of commandments.

We can figure out morality from human nature and from reality.

So I don't think we need religion anymore.

I think religion needed to die probably about 200 years ago and was dying, I think, up until

Kant.

It seemed to be dying.

Kant's missions, as he says, is to revive religion against attack of reason in the Enlightenment.

Now mythology is a little different because it depends what you mean by mythology.

Certainly we need stories and certainly we need art.

Art is a...

And Rand writes about this a lot and she's an artist and she writes in...

I'm a huge fan of the Romantic Manifesto, which I think is one of her underappreciated

masterpieces.

Oh, I hate it.

Okay.

That's it.

Okay.

So I think we have a real need, right?

As a conceptual being, we have a need for aesthetic experiences.

We have a need to concretize abstractions, to concretize abstract ideas, to concretize

the complex nature of the world out there.

And that's what painting sculpture, to an extent music, but painting sculpture literature

does for us.

So to the extent that mythology serves that purpose, it's just art, right?

To the extent that it serves another purpose, that is that it's a way for the gods to communicate

with us or it fits some kind of preexisting mental construct that we have as, again, kind

of a conscientious perspective, right?

That we have these categorical imperatives and this mythology links up to that.

Then I think it's false, it's not helpful and destructive.

So I believe religion today is a destructive force on planet Earth.

I think it's always been a destructive force.

It was just a necessary force, right?

You needed an explanation.

People needed something to believe in.

Once you get philosophy and once you get philosophy that starts explaining real life, real world,

you don't need religion anymore and indeed it becomes a destructive force.

And you look around the world today, it's an unbelievably destructive force.

Everywhere it touches is bad for life.

Again, mythology depends, art is essential, very, very crucial to human existence.

I mean, I'd love to hear what you think, but you don't see religion and philosophy and

mythology as just a continuous spectrum?

Yeah.

So religion is a primitive form of philosophy.

It's prephilosophical.

Where I thought Rand was going to go and he didn't go was that I think he, I agree with

what he's going to say, Rand was a mythologizer.

In certain specific contexts Atlas Shrugged is a myth.

It's one thing to sit down and say, these are the people who move us forward.

These are the values that are important.

When you experience it through a story, through a movie, through a TV show, a poem or a painting,

it affects you in a very visceral, very different way.

Talk about American history.

You have the founding fathers, then you have the myth of the founding fathers.

Now, unfortunately the term myth often means lie, but it could mean in a useful sense,

an abstraction to help you systematize and concretize ideas.

So you have the myth of Reagan, you have the myth of Thatcher, the reality often falls

very short.

But when you look at how these different figures are mythologized, not only is it very inspirational

on a personal level, very motivating on a personal level, it's also a great way to concretize

ideas because just how humans think, it's one thing to think about ideas, but when you

see someone who embodies these ideas, Miss America, I was saying earlier, I had an aster

on my show, these people might be jerks.

But when you look at them, one specific aspect of their life and you extrapolate it, that

could be to anyone very motivating.

And it's very important for people to have the belief that happiness and achievement

is possible because it's very hard to keep that in mind, especially if you're depressed,

if you're anxious, you're unemployed, you don't have a girlfriend, you think it's going

to be like this forever.

And then you look at someone's story and they're like, you know what, that astronaut interview,

Clayton Anderson, he applied 13 times, didn't get a call back, applied the 14th time, got

a call back, didn't get the job, 15th time he get the job.

He talks to kids and he goes, listen, apply 13 times.

Even if you don't get the call back, you'll still feel I'm doing something.

And having heard him and the myth of Clayton Anderson, this is going to tell people, yeah,

you know what?

That could be me.

Absolutely.

And it's not just happiness, it's the fact that virtue works, that the integrity, I mean,

what's the power of the fountainhead?

I know you love the fountainhead.

Part of the power of the fountainhead is how it works, absolute commitment to integrity.

He is committed to integrity and he's happy.

And it's very rare in life to see that, to actually see a concrete of that.

And it's very hard to hold it in your mind.

Yes, I'm going to be stuck in the quarry or I'm going to be stuck doing this horrible

job.

But if I stick to my principles, I'm going to be how it works.

Now I've got that concrete.

I know I can immediately relate to that success.

So I think art is essential.

And I think in a sense, what we do to Thatcher and Reagan is art.

You have to be careful in true stories, not to diverge too far from reality because then

when you discover the reality, you don't want to whitewash it, and particularly when it

has political implications and then it's really bad.

So particularly with Reagan and Thatcher, you have to be careful because they want anyone

near as good as people try to make them out to be.

But these are powerful, powerful, powerful stories and people are moved by it.

And the integration of emotion with reason is crucial.

One of the goals to be happy is to bring your emotions in line with your thinking.

And I think that stories and arts more broadly, and when I go and see Michelangelo's David,

it does the same thing to me.

I can stand up to anybody because he did.

And look, he succeeded.

And it makes sense that he could.

So this is a really interesting idea of bringing your emotion in line with your thinking, with

your reasoning.

So Ben Shapiro famously has this saying, how do you like that transition, Michael?

Give me props.

I know you do.

He's not Ben, it's Ben Shapiro.

Yeah.

Someone is not taking your calls.

Benny.

I guess it's a daily, don't take the caller.

Back to the island with the murder.

I think we know.

Murder Island.

We would know who would be committing the murder.

I have the suit for it.

So he has the saying of facts don't care about your feelings.

And I've always felt badly about that statement somehow, like it was incomplete.

So it's interesting that you mentioned bringing your emotions in line with your thinking.

What do you think about that statement?

I got this one.

What Ben is doing in a loose way is attacking Kantianism because Kant, it's almost impossible

for Westerners who aren't schooled in this to understand the idea of philosophical idealism

because it sounds so crazy that you're like, these great minds of all time can't really

be saying this.

I must be missing something.

So when we hear idealism, we think John F. Kennedy is a good example.

You aspire things.

You think life can be better than it is.

That's not what it means in a philosophical sense.

In philosophical idealism, it means ideas are more real than reality.

That I have this idea, then this comes along.

It's the reality that isn't correct.

My idea is still correct.

A good example of this that you see all the time on the internet is when they refer to

Mitt Romney and John McCain as rhinos, Republicans in name only.

And it's like, who is more a real Republican?

The nominee of the party, the Senator, the governor of the party, or some person in your

mind who has never existed and there's no evidence for them existing.

So what Kant did is he bifurcated reality into what we see around us, the phenomenal

world, but then it's inferior.

The real world, the noumenal world, we can't access it because we have eyes.

We only see the thing as it appears, not as it is in itself.

And because of this, everything we know is a shadow and is secondary.

And that's Plato, straight out of Plato.

And the real reality is this realm of ideas.

So when Ben is saying facts don't care about your feelings, what he is really saying is

reality comes first.

Your feelings have to be a response or a reaction to it.

You can't say, this is how I feel.

This table doesn't care.

You can yell at it all day long.

It will still be indifferent to your emotional state because it comes first.

So it's a great statement.

I think he's cribbing it from Ayn Rand in a sense, and there's a sense in which he is.

I mean, who popularized that kind of idea?

And Ben has read Ayn Rand quite extensively.

Not enough.

Not enough.

Well.

Not enough to reference her.

That's the way the army goes.

So yeah, obviously.

He may be read enough, but didn't understand enough.

But so it's absolutely reality.

Reality is unaffected by your emotional state and your feelings about it.

And this is a great claim against the idealism, the philosophical idealism of much of the

world out there, both left and right.

I think politically, culturally, the left and right are detached from reality.

They live in a different dimension, in a different space that they are creating in their own

minds that has nothing to do with the real world.

And when they fail, they make stuff up to justify their failure, right?

So all of really the ideas that are promulgated today on both sides are this kind of detached

from reality.

We're putting emotions or ideas before reality itself.

But I believe that emotions are responses.

The responses to reality conditioned by our existing concepts.

You're going to have to talk slowly to talk emotions to Lex because he doesn't really

understand what that is.

I don't understand.

That's a really, you got to really taste your words.

But he's big on love?

What is love?

But he's big on love?

He's trying to learn.

Pretty big on love.

I'm all in, I'm a love maximalist.

I mean, I could create, we could create an environment on this island where you would

really feel emotions.

Like fear is an emotion.

We could.

That's the metaphysical terror.

We could easily terrorize you to the point where you felt fear, right?

So we could teach him about emotion.

But emotions are a response to reality.

So some people, for example, you could take five different people and show them exactly

the same thing.

And some of them would feel fear and some of them would actually feel indifferent and

other people might feel love, right?

I think Leonard Peacock uses the example of looking through a microscope and seeing a,

I don't know, a virus or bacteria.

And for one, it's a scientist, he's made a new discovery.

He feels pride and love and awe.

The one has no clue, right, and he's looking at this and it means nothing to them and somebody

else might look at it and it's a bacteria and they feel fear because of what it could

do to them.

So it's conditioned by what you know, what your values are and your level of knowledge

and what the thing is out there in reality.

And it's that into, so your emotions respond to that.

So aligning your emotions with your reason is making sure that your emotions are really

conditioned by what you know explicitly versus what you've internalized implicitly that

you might not agree with anymore.

You know, things might happen in your childhood and they probably do, right, where you get

a trauma.

I don't know, I'm afraid of dogs and maybe when I was a five year old, some dogs jumped

at me and I don't even remember it, right?

But I came to a conclusion when I was five, dogs bad, dogs dangerous, right?

And now anytime I see a dog, oh my God, that bringing my emotions aligned with reality,

right, with my ideas is no, now I understand dogs don't have to be scary.

I can work through this and there are various techniques and hopefully if there is such

a science of psychology, but in psychology to get you to the point where you can get

rid of that fear and align your emotion now with your explicit ideas, and that's what

I mean by that.

And let me build on that, talking about your friend Putin, I think I mentioned this before

at least maybe on the show, he was meeting with Angela Merkel.

Oh, Vladimir, please.

Yeah, Vlad, my boy Vlad.

He was meeting with Angela Merkel, Angela Merkel has a fear of dogs, so he brought out

his big Labrador Retriever, now for people who don't know, Labradors are very big dogs,

but they're also like the least aggressive, it's like you could punch them in the face,

they don't care.

That dog is not going to be more likely to attack just because she's scared.

And I know they say animals can sense fear, domesticated dogs, if they see you're scared,

they're not going to be aggressive, they're going to try to play.

I remember when I was a kid, there was this dog, Rex, this German Shepherd, I'm five,

this dog is gigantic, and I'm sitting on the couch, the German Shepherds have been bred

for intelligence, they're very bright dogs, they're very good with kids, he's sitting

next to me, this thing is three times my size.

He very gently puts his paw on my leg to be like, kid, he can sense my fear, he's like,

I'm not going to do it, I want to be your friend, I'm still freaking out.

He licks my hand, it's just very scary, you know, animals are so bright, but that's the

thing is, in terms of facts don't care about your feelings, that dog is not more likely

to attack someone because their emotion is so intense.

It's not that I feel something very strongly, therefore, this thing is more likely to happen.

So my intensity of my emotion does not in any way correlate, when you're being irrational,

to the likelihood of that thing actually happening.

Now, you could have a dog that does respond to your emotion, right?

But then it's, but then it's not, that's part of reality, right?

That's a fact of reality that certain dogs respond to certain emotions.

But isn't this emotion a part of reality, like, okay, let me say a word.

So part of that, I would even say, don't let your emotion about your emotion, right, because

sometimes you have an emotion about your emotion, don't be repressed, and identify the emotion

as reality, and evaluate it, don't judge it, evaluate it.

Is it a rational emotion?

Is it consistent with my, like, if I'm afraid of these dogs, if I feel that fear, is it

rational to be afraid of these dogs?

But you're speaking to your own individual trajectory as a human being as you grow through

the world and try to understand reality and connect yourself through reason to reality.

What I'm talking about is a term like lived experience.

When you observe and analyze the, you know, conversations with other people to try to

understand how other people see the world, doesn't emotion fundamentally integrate into

that?

Like, isn't emotion lived experience?

So everybody experiences the same reality, but the way they experience it might be very

different.

And that has to do with what?

It doesn't have to do with…

With their values, with their conclusions, with their ideas, with their experiences,

with a million different things, right?

But is it…

But at the end of the day, it's about the conclusions that they come to, which are then

shaping their emotions.

But look, emotions are not something to be avoided or ignored.

That is, I can sense your emotions to some extent, right?

That's a lie.

Okay, it is Lex.

I can sense his emotions.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I can sense Michael's emotions, and that's part of the fact of reality, right?

So if Michael responds to something that I view as really, really important, right?

If we were standing in front of Michelangelo's David, and Michael responds to Michelangelo's

David and goes, eh, and turned his back to it and walked away, that would be really meaningful

to me, right?

That I would respond emotionally to that, and cognitively I would say, what is it about

Michael that makes him, you know, respond this way?

That is…

That gives me a lot of information about him.

So emotions are information laden, right?

But they are not primary.

They are responses, responses to something.

So one must be very aware of one's own emotions, recognize them, and analyze them.

And one should be aware of other people's emotions, if they're important to you, if

they're not important to you.

It doesn't matter, right?

You don't care about a stranger's emotion, you know, like a stranger walks up to Michael

and Michelangelo's David and said, eh, and walks away, and I go, okay, I'm glad you're

a stranger.

But it's…

Now, I don't know what Michael's response to Michelangelo's David was or is, so I'm

a little worried about what he's gonna say.

You got candy too, that was great.

Hey, hey, I thought I was special.

Do I get Ukrainian candy?

I don't know, I can't read either.

What's this say, Joshua?

What does that say to him?

Is this Ukrainian candy as well?

I thought it was sent to me from…

Do you know that Atlas Shrugged was the bestselling book in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016?

Do you know Atlas Shrugged was translated to Russian by someone who's now a crypto like

billionaire and he made like six copies and I have one of them and I sent it to my great

grandma.

No, they're more than six, but yeah.

Oh, but they were like…

Because I have a copy too.

Okay.

Not I personally, the institute has a copy.

I sent it to my great grandma and she said, why is he sending me this, I wanna read books

about love.

And I'm like, you know what?

This is about love.

Yeah.

That's what you should have said.

What's that, what does that say?

So this says it's…

It has vitamins and minerals.

If it's in Russian, I don't believe it.

It just sounds really strange to read like health information in Russian, I'm already

distressed.

But look, there's a Yorshik like you have.

Exactly.

I mean, I'm much, I like Kiev much more than I like Moscow.

Wow.

Strong words.

But this is, this is not, it's like hard candy.

I don't know.

I think this, some of my friends sent me that's made with blood to give the kids iron.

Whose blood?

Like cow blood.

Oh.

Like with chocolate.

All right.

You can keep it.

That's all you.

All right.

I'm keeping both of these.

Can I take something you're talking about with emotion?

Something that is very pernicious in terms of emotion is people denying the validity

of their own emotions.

And here's one example, someone could be in an abusive relationship or have had an

abusive childhood and they think, well, I didn't have a black eye.

We had dinner on the table.

It wasn't abusive because you hear some other story.

So they feel their emotion is invalid or like, oh, he never lays hands on me.

He gets drunk and is mean to me.

He's still basically a good person.

You're denying that emotion.

And that emotion is a response to something real.

There's an expression, I have friends who are in 12 step programs.

There's an expression there, which I think is very profound, which is if it's hysterical,

it's historical.

Meaning if some minor incident is having an extreme disproportionate impact on you, think,

ask yourself, why am I responding in such an extreme way to some minor thing?

And I will tell you 10 times out of 10, you'll go back and you'll be like, oh, I'm feeling

now like I felt when I was eight and my dad came home and he was a total jerk and I didn't

do anything wrong.

And he thought I had, and I was complete powerless.

And now I'm in the same situation, my boss.

I'm not that eight year old in one sense I am, in another sense I'm not, but I feel the

same way I did as a kid.

And this is a very useful mechanism in terms of furthering one's happiness because you

kind of deprogram all those things that you picked up as a child.

But it's also, you know, if you're feeling something wrong, even though you're trying

to rationalize in a way, you know, it's not abusive because he's not hitting me.

No, the emotion is telling you something real about what's going on.

So acknowledge it and fix the situation, right?

So one of the powers emotions give you is they send you signals about something that

might not be in cognition yet.

And when you examine their emotion, it brings it to cognition and now you can act on it.

So maybe the boss is abusive, but I didn't really think of it in those terms of my emotions

is sending me signals.

And now that I signal it, I'm going to resign.

I'm going to find a better, another job.

I'm going to complain to his boss or whatever.

I'm going to take action.

Why do you think Ayn Rand is such a controversial figure?

Last time I spoke with you on this particular podcast, the, the amount of emails I've gotten

positive and negative and certainly negative, I don't usually get negative emails.

Yeah.

I can't, I can't relate.

I'm sure mine were all positive or only positive.

It was mostly women sending pictures for me to forward to you because you didn't send

me anything.

Oh, it's the wrong email address.

Sorry.

I kept bouncing.

Oh, so this is love.

Love hurts.

Okay.

Yes.

No.

But why do you think she's such a divisive figure?

Why do you think she provokes such emotion in both the positive and the negative side?

I'd love to hear both of your viewpoints on this.

Well, I think on the negative side and both on the positive and the negative side, I think

it's because she's radical.

She's consistently radical.

She upends the, the premises, the ideas that are prevalent in the culture that were brought

up on the, that, that are like, you know, they're like milk and, and, and, you know,

the basic stuff that we're, we're growing up.

You have to be altruistic.

You have to live for other people.

That's just basic stuff.

Nobody challenges that.

Nobody questions it.

And if they do question it, they usually question it from the perspective of a cynic or a bad

guy.

Right.

You mentioned the book, the Joker, right.

Before we started, right.

You know, I'm going to upend the world because I don't care about other people.

Right.

So, so they're presented with these two alternatives and it's real in people's lives, right?

You either live for other people or you're a evil SOB and you know, yeah, most people

in either one of those, but the ethic is right here.

It's living for other people.

And when you challenge that, they have no way cognitively to go with that.

And the only place they can go with that cognitively is to the Joker.

It's the evil guy.

It's the somebody who wants to smash everything and destroy because they don't have this alternative

conception of, oh no, you can be rationally self interested and that does not involve

destruction and that does not involve, you know, just exploiting other people.

They can't conceptualize that.

It's not in their framework.

So it's the fact that she's so consistently on the side of self interest, for example,

on the side of capitalism, on the side of freedom.

It's the fact that she dismisses faith to the extent that she does or to the extent

that I do, right, that alienates people because that is completely different from what they

brought up.

Now the flip side of that is it's also really interesting to some people.

So you know, a lot of, you got some positives, right?

And I got a lot of positives from that appearance.

I know a lot of people came to my podcast because I appeared on your show.

Why?

Because they hear something that's completely fresh, new, different, they've never heard

before.

It appeals to something in them that maybe, you know, a lot of people say I read Ayn Rand

and it confirmed everything I believed.

Now for me it didn't.

It was the opposite.

It turned upside down everything I believed, but there are a lot of people out there that

do have a sense that something's wrong in the world, that altruism is wrong, that socialism,

just the stuff and religion is wrong, but they don't have an alternative.

It hasn't coalesced.

And they listen to a lot of podcasts because they're trying to get ideas of what is it

that I'm sensing that's wrong out there?

And suddenly somebody comes out and gives them some clear explanation of things and

they go, wow, that's what I've been looking for my whole life.

So that's the positive for people.