back to indexMichael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy | Lex Fridman Podcast #178
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The following is a conversation with Michael Mallis and Yaron Brook, Michael's third time
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on this podcast and Yaron's second, but together for the first time.
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Michael is an anarchist, political thinker, host of a podcast called You're Welcome and
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author of Dear Reader, The New Right and two upcoming books Anarchist Handbook and The
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Yaron is an objectivist philosopher, chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, host of The Yaron
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Brook Show and coauthor of The Free Market Revolution and Equal is Unfair.
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Quick mention of our sponsors, Ground News, Public Goods, Athletic Greens, Brave and Four
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that this conversation is a kind of experiment.
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Both Michael and Yaron are thoughtful and passionate, united in part by an interest
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in the history and philosophy of Ayn Rand, but they are also very different in style.
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Good conversation, like good food, is often made delicious by pairing of contrasting elements.
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For example, someone suggested I try a peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwich, which apparently
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Among the three of us, I don't know who's the peanut butter, who's the bacon and who's
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the banana, I'm guessing it's probably me, I'm the banana, but I hope the final result,
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the final dish, if you will, is equally delicious.
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We talk through, I think, a lot of interesting ideas, sometimes disagreeing, sometimes even
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in rare cases saying something humorous, including dark humor, especially in Michael's case.
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All three of us are sensitive to the suffering in the world today and throughout human history.
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We think about it, we talk about it, and we deal with it in different ways.
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Be patient with us.
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Whether you agree, disagree, enjoy or dislike the result, I hope you feel listened, you're
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a wiser person on the other end of it, I know I was.
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Mostly, I really enjoyed this conversation because no matter what Michael and Yaron believe,
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underneath it all, they're genuine, kind human beings that I'm lucky to be able to
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hang out with and learn from.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast and here's my conversation with Michael Malus and Yaron
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I've been a huge fan of the two of you for the longest time.
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Are we recording now?
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Or are you just talking?
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I'm not recording at all.
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He's not going to compliment us if it's not part of the show.
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Yes, he does, all the time.
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He speaks very highly of me.
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You, I don't know.
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He only does this to me on the show.
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Objectivists don't like charity, so don't compliment him, he won't think it's sincere.
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So it's an incredible honor that the both of you would show up here.
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If we, let me just ask this sort of profound philosophical question.
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How well do you think we would get along if we were stuck on a desert island together?
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What would life be like?
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I thought the original question you had, that you sent us this question, was how long would
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it take for us to murder one another or something like that.
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There was murder in the question, if I remember.
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I, I, listen, he sent us homework, right?
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All these questions.
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I didn't spend four years at Patrick Henry University to do homework.
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To answer your question, I think it would be very easy for us to live together in a
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desert island in terms of interpersonal.
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I know, and I say this because I know a lot of people who have been the show's survivor.
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So they, and I know a little bit about the dynamics.
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So when you have people who are intelligent, who are going to have the same goals, I mean,
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there's space to go away if I'm annoyed at you, I don't think it would be that hard at
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What's our goals on a desert island?
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Survival, basically.
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Survival and getting out of there, right?
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You don't want to stay on the desert island.
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So yeah, I don't, I don't think, I think that's true of any three, you know, semi rational
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people who, you know, who basically share the goal that they want to survive.
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They want to thrive.
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They want to get off of the island.
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Why would there be conflict?
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I mean, there would be conflict, but, and there can be conflict, but they'd find ways
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I don't have this negative view of human beings, particularly not as individuals.
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It's when they get into mobs and groups and collectives that ideology can really motivate
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them to do horrible things.
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One of the things that really drives me crazy is how sinister an impact the book Lord of
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the Flies has had on our culture.
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I read it in high school.
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It's a superb book.
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That's not even a question, but it's not accurate.
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We see in many situations where people are trapped together under difficult circumstances.
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Obviously that book's about children that very quickly it is not about conflict.
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It very quickly becomes about cooperation.
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Let's work together.
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We all have the same goal.
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This is not a time to worry about other things.
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It really, the human beings, the animal instinct that kicks in is the social animal and I'm
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going to shut up and go over there and have a, like stomp my feet instead of arguing with
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your own because we're really trapped in the situation and we need to make it work.
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Well, and to the extent that they're bad people, bad people are dealt with, right?
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So this is true of all of, you know, how did we survive as a species, right?
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How have we survived as a species?
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We've been on a desert island in a sense as a species forever.
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They survived by cooperation.
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They survived by dealing with bad people.
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Civilization is created by people cooperating and working together and allowing individuals
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to thrive within the group and when bad people arise, they deal with them, right?
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Now sometimes these groups get captured by bad people and bad ideas and probably from
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day one that was going on, right?
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The whole tribe is probably a bad idea to begin with, but you know, underneath it all,
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the fact is that to survive as a species, we need to think, we need to be rational and
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if we don't have any respect for reason, then we would all die.
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So that's a hopeful message, but where does that go wrong?
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So with three people we might get along, we would focus on the basics of life, we have
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Once women are introduced, their incessant irrationalism and less of their hormones for
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Look, three of us on a desert island would be nice, but without women, it wouldn't be
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I'm going to edit out half the things Michael said through this broadcast.
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As you know, I used to run the Ayn Rand Institute.
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She was a woman last time I looked.
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Oh, wait a minute.
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You know, you know exactly what I'm going to say.
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When Ludwig von Mises or Hazlitt, I don't know who it was, Mises was praising Ayn Rand
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and I think it was Hazlitt who said it to her.
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He said, Ludwig von Mises said, you're the smartest man I've ever met.
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And Ayn Rand said, did he say man?
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No, she viewed as a compliment.
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But she wanted to be clear that he said man.
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I took it as her perceiving him as seeing her as a full equal.
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Oh, I think that's right.
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I think that's right.
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Plus, I think the perception out there, the perception in the culture of man as being
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rational was a compliment to her because that was affirming that he viewed her as a rational.
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Yeah, because Mises is old school.
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He's an older Eastern European guy, so he would definitely have these rigid views.
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Like his wife, I read her autobiography, Margit von Mises, and basically he made her his secretary
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to the point where if he's typing something or he had something handwritten, she had to
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And if she made a typo, he would tear up the page, she had to start from the beginning.
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But it's like, this is the role of the man, this is the role of the woman.
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So for him to regard her, this was kind of a breaking through moment.
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Not that she was secretly misogynist.
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So I think we go wrong when people try to understand the world around them and come
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up with wrong ideas.
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And it's natural that they would come up with wrong ideas because it's hard to figure out
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So we start with trying to come up with mystical explanations for the existence of the things
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And that I think very quickly leads to some people being able to communicate with the
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mystical stuff out there and some people not being able to communicate and some people
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wanting to control other people and using those pseudo explanations as a way to control.
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So you always have, Rand called it Attila and the witch doctor.
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You always have a witch doctor, the mystic, the philosopher, the intellectual, the philosopher
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king, and you have an Attila, you have somebody who wants control of the people, who's willing
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to use force to control other people.
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And when those two get together, that's when things go bad.
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And unfortunately, 95, 98% of human history is when those two are together.
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And so the not having them together, having the right ideas, and the right ideas are ones
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that are not exclusive to those guys and where we don't allow Attila to have that kind of
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physical power over us, that's an exception and that's rare and that's what needs to be
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Stalin's not personally killing people.
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Hitler's not personally killing people.
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Charles Manson's not personally killing people.
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They need their goons.
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They need their goons, but also they don't have original ideas.
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Everything Stalin says is original to him, right?
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He needs a Marx, even Lenin, right?
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They all need a Marx, right?
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And Marx needs a particular line of thinkers that come before him that set him up for these
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So Stalin both needs his goons, even though he's somewhat of a goon, particularly Stalin.
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Yeah, he's a bank robber, yeah.
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And then, so take Lenin, Lenin I think is a better example because Lenin's more intellectual
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Lenin needs his goons, he needs his Stalins, but Lenin also needs his Marx.
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And we don't want to let Marx off the hook because Marx knows, I think, implicitly that
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his ideas have to lead to Lenin and Stalin.
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His ideas are not neutral.
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I don't think it's implicit at all.
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I think Marx very much glorified revolution, blood and terror, this is not implicit in
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I mean, there are letters between him and Engels where they talk about which peoples
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will have to be eliminated because they don't have that proletarian thing, right?
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So I think certain peoples in Southern Europe are not appropriate for the utopia to come
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and will have to be gone.
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And Marx also had this concept which we still see today in garbled ways of polylogism, which
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is if you're a capitalist and I'm bourgeois or I'm a worker, your logic is different than
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It's really going to be impossible for us to communicate.
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And at a certain point, you're going to have to be liquidated.
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And they pretend that doesn't mean murdered, but it means murdered.
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And very quickly, everyone becomes a capitalist or bourgeois.
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And then you have the Holodomor and things like this.
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No, he knows exactly where it's going to lead.
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And this is why people say, oh, Marx is not evil.
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He just wrote books.
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No, it's the people who write books who are responsible for the way history evolves.
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And they know the bad guys certainly know the consequence of their ideas, and they need
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to bear the moral responsibility for what happens when the ideas are implemented.
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Can I ask a question?
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Because I think I know more about Rand than Yaron does.
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The gauntlet has been thrown down.
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Who did Ayn Rand say is the most evil man who ever lived?
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I mean, it's a big deal that Immanuel Kant is.
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And most people don't understand why, because if you read Kant, there's certain passages
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in Kant that sound pretty liberal, they sound pretty, it sounds like he's for the individual,
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he sounds like he's for the American Revolution, things like that.
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But when you actually read his philosophy and what he's trying to defend and what he's
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trying to undermine, he's trying to undermine the foundations that make the revolution possible,
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that make freedom and individualism possible.
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He's trying to destroy the Enlightenment.
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And the Enlightenment are those ideas that make freedom, individualism feasible.
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He's trying to undermine reason.
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And without reason, we're nothing.
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We can't survive as a species.
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And that's why she thought he was the most evil person, because his ideas undermine the
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very foundations of what it requires to be a human being, reason and individualism.
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Those are the things he's trying to eviscerate.
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I know you've talked about Hoffman before.
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So Hoffman is a modern day attempt to, Donald Hoffman, Donald Hoffman is the University
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of California, Irvine, a neurologist, a neuroscientist, something like that.
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So I met him once and we were at one of these conferences where you do a quick intro, you
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sit and you do a quick intro.
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His introduction was, I've just written a book that proves that evolution has conditioned
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us not to see reality.
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That is very Kantian.
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And he is basically just presenting pseudoscience to defend Kant's position about epistemology
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and about metaphysics.
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And there's nothing original there.
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And he puts up a bunch of equations and he says, I ran a simulation and it proves I'm
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So Yaron is a little bit frustrated with Donald Hoffman's work.
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I'm not frustrated.
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I just think it's completely wrong and it's anti life, anti mind, anti evolution.
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I think he's an anti evolutionist at the end.
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And I think it, you know, anytime you say, look, here's the important point.
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Anytime you say reality doesn't exist, well, who are you?
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What do you mean by reality?
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What do any of your words mean?
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What does anything you say even mean if it doesn't refer to something that's actually
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out there in reality?
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I try to defend this point of view because in a certain kind of sense, I hear it as being
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humble in the face of the uncertainty that's around us.
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Sort of, you know, when you speak with the confidence of Ayn Rand and yourself, that
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reason can be like this weapon that cuts through all the bullshit of the world and makes us
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like have an ethical moral life and all those kinds of things.
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You kind of assume that reason is a superpower that has no limits.
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Wait, hold on, hold on a second.
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But I got this one.
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See this is already leading to a murder by words and we've been only talking for 20 minutes.
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The three of us wouldn't get together, we wouldn't get along together on an island.
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We'll just make him our slave.
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We're all going to get along.
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He's just going to do the work.
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But I'm afraid I cannot provide any value as a slave, so this is not going to end well
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We could provide value as dinner.
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That's the problem I'm trying to get to.
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That's a solution.
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But Donald Hoffman says that there is like he makes an argument that exactly as you said,
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that what we perceive is not, is very, very far from actual physical reality.
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In fact, we're not able to perceive the physical reality at all.
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And he also makes the bigger claim that evolution prefers beings who are not attached to reality.
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So like evolution created creatures that are basically functioning way outside of what
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the physical reality is.
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Because there's a lot to unpack here and I hate all of it.
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First of all, no, no, I'm serious.
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First of all, when you were making that comment about how, you know, reason is a superpower
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beyond limit, you're being ironic, but it's true.
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And I'll give you one example, which is astronomy.
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If you look at the physical size of the universe, it's literally in one sense incomprehensible.
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So he's right in the sense that I do not understand and none of us understand what it means for
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93 million miles away for the sun to be.
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It makes no, it's a number on another screen, right?
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That said, the fact that my mind, and I'm not one of the great thinkers of all time
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is getting there, is capable of appreciating what the sun means, what heliocentrism means.
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The fact that we can, you know, you're a math person that you could look at galaxies and
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reduce it to 10 to the 64th power in terms of distance that shows the unlimited capacity
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of the human mind and reason.
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Number two is if he says that evolution favors those who are not in touch with reality, and
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I don't know in what context he's saying that because that sentence could mean a lot of
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Evolution is what guides, reality is what guides evolution.
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Evolution works because you are fitted to the reality of the situation around you.
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It's not that someone is sitting down and says, well, I'm going to add a fin to this
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animal and that fin helps it swim.
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I engineered a check mark.
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It's that mutations occur.
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The vast majority of these mutations are against reality.
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They do not further this animal's life or this plant's life or this fungus's life, but
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the ones that are in touch with reality, such as, okay, it's really cold here.
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There's no predators here.
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If I could figure out, and I'm using that term very loosely, a way where I could survive
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in the cold, I don't have predation.
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It's really great.
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The fact that unconsciously and mindlessly this process can force the mutation and evolution
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of the form precisely means that they're in touch with reality.
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Now, if he means the consciousness is not in touch with reality, that's another thing
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that I really hate.
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You're referring to the reality as like the biological reality of evolution, but all of
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that is based on many other layers of abstraction that ultimately has quantum mechanics underneath
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it all, and he's saying somewhere along the layers, you start to lose more and more and
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more attachment to the actual.
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Can I add one more sentence?
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I do not, I despise the idea, I say despise, I'm not using this, I'm not joking, the idea
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that the reality we don't live in is somehow more real than this.
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That is a very dangerous idea to say, well, quantum works in this way, and I'm sure he's
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correct and none of us disagree with that.
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What we perceive, macro, works in a different way, well, that's the real reality and this
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This is the real reality.
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That is a different type, a subset, but no one's living there, and humanity is the starting
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It's a subset that has to integrate with this world.
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There isn't two worlds, one in the quantum world and one here.
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They're integrated.
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Now, we might not have the scientific knowledge to know how they're integrated, but so what?
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We know that there's only one reality and that's this one.
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He has this difference.
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He says, evolution matches up to fitness, not to reality, and he creates this dichotomy
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between fitness and reality, but that's complete nonsense.
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There is no such thing as a concept of fitness outside of fitness to what?
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Fitness and reality are the same thing.
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They're not separate things.
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The whole way he sets this up intellectually is wrong, I think to some extent dishonest,
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and certainly philosophically corrupt.
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Again, he's accepted Kant's ideas, and everybody pretty much has accepted Kant's ideas for
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the last 200 years, and they give it a different facade.
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He's giving it an evolutionary facade, but it's just a facade for the same idea, and
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that is that somehow because we have eyes, we cannot see, because the light waves are
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going through a medium, and that medium necessarily distorted.
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The medium changes the resolution at which you see.
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If I take off my glasses, I'm seeing it a little differently.
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The thing is still there, and the thing is still there in the way I see it, because I'm
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grasping the handle and lifting the cup.
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That's not an illusion.
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That is a real cup.
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So do you think some things are more real than others?
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For example, money.
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There's a bunch of things that seem real.
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This is not an Animal Farm reference.
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Is this going to be about love?
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There's nothing as real as love, right Lex?
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Love is a fundamental part of the quantum mechanics, yes.
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There are some things that have become reality because we humans, in a collective sense,
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You can't believe something collectively.
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Now it doesn't become real.
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What does it mean to say something's real?
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That is, you can, so love, for example, love's a good example, right?
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Love is an abstraction, right?
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It's not something I can touch.
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It's not something I can see, but it's certainly something you would feel.
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Not something you can hit.
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We love differently.
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I don't think that's true.
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I think I'm just too honest about it.
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You can't hit love.
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You can't, love is an abstraction.
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Yes, it's real because I feel it.
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It's an existent, but it's not an existent in the same sense as this cup is.
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So abstractions are real, but at the end of the day, all abstractions have to be able
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to be reduced to actual concrete so you can either see it.
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I really don't like criticizing someone whose work I haven't read secondhand.
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So I want to take this away from speaking about him personally, because I'm not familiar
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That makes me like him.
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That makes him like him less.
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Now you're back talking about evolutionary fitness again.
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I think there's disingenuousness when we talk about the word real in terms of ideas are
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real versus the cup is real, and you try to switch back between those two meanings, and
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it's a little bit of linguistic wordplay that is trying to force a point that's not accurate,
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Well, I think the issue is, and what he's challenging is, and what Kant is challenging
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is, do we know reality?
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And I think the answer is yes, we do.
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Now, do we know everything about reality?
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We can't, for example, sense what a bat senses as reality.
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A bat observes reality through, what is it?
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Sound waves, right?
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So it has a different sense, but it's the same reality.
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It's still a table.
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The bat's spatial relationship to the table is different than ours, but the object is
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still the same object.
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But how do you know that's true?
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Are you not just hoping that's true or assuming that's true?
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That's what no means.
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No means I have identified an aspect of reality.
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That's literally the definition of knowledge.
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Now if you say, how are you certain?
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Well, that's a whole other question, but one of the reasons I know it was certain is because
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And I know this is going to happen.
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And if I tell you, if you go downstairs, you're going to see, you know, Mr. Jones and you
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walk downstairs and I see Mr. Jones, at the very least, you know, something's going on
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So what about all the things that mess with our perception?
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For example, we've talked about psychedelics before.
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Talked about in dreams where you'd be detached from this, I mean, there's certain things
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that happen to your brain to where you're not able to perceive.
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So you're not perceiving reality.
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So your brain is creating a different reality.
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How do you know it's not real?
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How do you know the elves will meet in the...
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Because partially because I need to take a drug in order to do it, because I'm asleep
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when I'm dreaming.
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That is clearly a creation of our mind.
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Let's get to the psychedelics.
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I think you're going to be thinking I'm joking a lot more than I am this episode.
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I'm going to be the humorist objectivist.
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He could be the court jester.
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In terms of psychedelic, when people are perceiving these elves, these machine elves, these other
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entities, whether they could either be real or not, I don't know.
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But the point is that doesn't go to his broader point because if these beings exist and the
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only way to perceive them is to take a drug, they still exist.
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For example, if I'm walking outside in the woods at night and there's a deer and I can't
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see it, but if I put on night vision goggles, I can see it.
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That deer was there the entire time.
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It's not that the night vision goggles caused the deer to appear.
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You can recreate it not only using night vision goggles, but you can then use sonar.
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You can use other mechanisms by which to prove that the deer is there.
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The thing with psychedelics is that...I don't know because maybe I'm the least experienced
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with psychedelics here probably.
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My guess is every time you take the psychedelic, you have exactly the same experience of the
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Second, are there other mechanisms, other scientific mechanisms by which I can find
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the deer out there other than the psychedelics?
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We don't know yet.
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Well, we don't know yet.
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This is Occam's Razor, right?
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The simplest explanation here is the most likely, and that is that you've taken something
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that's messing with the chemicals in the brain, something is being...that your brain can project.
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Nobody's arguing that the dream is real and reality is not, or if they are, I think they're
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The dream is a dream.
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Your brain is creating an image of telling you a story.
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Psychedelics are simulating the same thing.
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That's probably what's going on until there's evidence to the contrary.
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Let me disagree with you a little bit, because let's take Adderall, for example.
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No one here disagrees.
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That's something much more simpler and less out of this world.
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I think what he might be speaking to, I know Joe Rogan talks about this and other people
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in this space, is that when you take certain drugs, it changes your perception.
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It doesn't have to be otherworldly, it changes your perception of what's around you.
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And as an example, what they talk about is, the three of us are talking, there's lots
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of other stuff in the room, we're only aware of it vaguely on a personal level.
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So it changes the...
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Hold on, let me finish.
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No, I don't do that.
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You're about to start.
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This is back to the desert island of murder.
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No, but we just resolved it within three seconds.
link |
He's trying to get us to feed on the truth.
link |
Yeah, it's not going to happen.
link |
I'm trying to create murder.
link |
No one has asthma.
link |
It's going to be fine.
link |
Because if the two of you murder each other, there's more food for me.
link |
Well, ratings would go up.
link |
You robots eat alcohol.
link |
Ratings would go up.
link |
Viewership would go up.
link |
Yeah, it's good for the ratings.
link |
But if you take, for example, Adderall or speed, right?
link |
People like you focus on things, you perceive things that aren't there.
link |
But that doesn't mean those things weren't there to begin with.
link |
There are absolutely ways to change human perception chemically, through glasses, through
link |
None of that changes the fact that the reality underneath it is real and is causing this
link |
And it has a particular nature, right?
link |
And all it's doing is changing the focus, right?
link |
So if I take off my glasses, I'm seeing the same thing.
link |
I'm just seeing something's out of focus and maybe in the distance, I can't see something.
link |
And then I put it on.
link |
That thing was always there.
link |
It's just the sensitivity I have to it has changed.
link |
And it's absolutely not sensitive to everything equally.
link |
And drugs can change the relative sensitivities.
link |
It doesn't change reality.
link |
It changes our ability to focus on reality.
link |
Let me give you one great example, the microscope.
link |
I forget who it was.
link |
His name was with an L, the scientist who discovered it.
link |
He had a drop of water and he's seeing monsters, the protozoa in this drop of water.
link |
For him, it must have been, it is like a drug experience, like, wait a minute, I'm drinking
link |
And there's alien beings whose shapes are completely crazy in this water.
link |
Those beings were always there.
link |
Those beings were there before any of us were here.
link |
They've been there for billions of years.
link |
But because he had this apparatus, now he's able to see protozoa.
link |
No one's arguing protozoa are extradimensional, no one's arguing the supernatural, amoebas
link |
are well studied, paramecia, all the other lots.
link |
So if these elves, the machine elves are real, and the only way to perceive them is through
link |
DMT or something like that, that doesn't contradict the broader point that they've always been
link |
there and this is the mechanism for perceiving them.
link |
So here's the word I was looking for, it's the word actually Greg taught me this, so
link |
So it's resolution, right?
link |
So it's resolution.
link |
My resolution changes with the glasses.
link |
My resolution gets finer with the microscope.
link |
So there's probably some bacteria here on the table.
link |
There's no doubt about it.
link |
I can't use the microscope to not see them, but they're either there or they're not there.
link |
And I have the tools to discover whether they are there or they're not there.
link |
And that's called a microscope.
link |
Now there could be even smaller beings that even with a microscope, I won't be able to
link |
define, but that's completely arbitrary to claim that, that they're there until I find
link |
a tool to be able to discover it.
link |
The same with what you see if you're seeing other beings when you're taking psychedelics.
link |
Unless you find another tool to be able to see them with, the simplest assumption is
link |
probably the truest assumption.
link |
But even the not simplest assumption doesn't contradict the broader point.
link |
Which is again, reality is what it is.
link |
If it turns out that there are these creatures that you can only see with psychedelics, and
link |
there are these creatures that you can only see with psychedelics, and our resolution
link |
while we're not on psychedelics is not fine enough to observe them.
link |
That doesn't change the fact that we evolved to survive in reality as it is.
link |
What do you do with the possibility that our resolution as it currently stands is really,
link |
No, but you don't know that.
link |
We know it completely.
link |
Compared to the future possibilities like artificial intelligence.
link |
Hundreds of years.
link |
It is crappy compared to the future.
link |
But that's not relevant.
link |
Or just the magnitude of crappy.
link |
No, but here I'll use the standard that Hoffman uses, evolution, right?
link |
The reason I know that our resolution is phenomenal, it's phenomenally good, right?
link |
Because look at us, we're sitting here comfortably in an apartment with air conditioning and
link |
in warm Austin with microphones and we did all this stuff, we're really good at survival
link |
and changing the environment.
link |
Indeed, if you look at the species that we know of, there's not a species that come anywhere
link |
close to our ability to deal with reality, to observe reality, to understand reality
link |
Now in the future, well, we'll come up with machines that can figure out stuff that we
link |
have no clue about today.
link |
That's only because we're so well suited to reality that can we create those machines.
link |
And I promise you, in the future, it's going to be much more what you're saying.
link |
That's how it's going to happen.
link |
No, but the thing is, when the creatures from the future look back to the things we're saying
link |
now, what Aydin Rand is saying, what you're saying with certainty, do you think they'll
link |
laugh at the level of how much confusion there was, how much inaccuracy?
link |
Let me get this one.
link |
You know what they're going to do?
link |
They're going to either read Aristotle or read any of these great geniuses of the past.
link |
It's like these people didn't have electricity.
link |
They didn't have warm clothes or anything, and they're able to figure out the diameter
link |
Like the creativity to be and to get it within a few miles.
link |
The creativity and to figure out the speed of light when you don't even have a stopwatch.
link |
When you look back, a lot of it's nonsense, but it's like when you're talking to a kid.
link |
They would disregard the nonsense, and when they get something right, it's awe.
link |
So it's never a numbers game, right?
link |
So it's the few that validate and justify the rest.
link |
So when you look at Aristotle, he's talking about there was one of those causes which
link |
is like time travel and it doesn't really make sense.
link |
But you look at the rest of this stuff or even Plato or any of these greats, it's like,
link |
oh my, this is an amazing miracle.
link |
I wouldn't say literally miracle, I got you, everyone.
link |
But at the same time, yeah, a lot of these other people had stupid ideas.
link |
You care about those great, great minds and how they moved us all forward.
link |
To this day, we still study Pythagoras.
link |
And it's not even just the sciences and the math.
link |
Think about the philosophy.
link |
How much is there to learn from reading Aristotle or Plato or Socrates when you disagree with
link |
How many giants have there been in all of human history that have had the minds of Socrates
link |
or Plato and Aristotle?
link |
A thousand years where they look back at Plato and Aristotle and admire them?
link |
Well, they find certain things that are wrong, yes, but certain things that Aristotle discovered
link |
are absolutely right and will always be right.
link |
Certain things that Ayn Rand discovered will always be right.
link |
I think a lot of what she came up with, will some things be discovered to be wrong?
link |
You know, that wouldn't shock me.
link |
But the genius and the truth that we know today is amazing.
link |
It's stunning to be pessimistic about us because in the future we'll know more.
link |
Not pessimistic, but more humble.
link |
There's no reason to be humble.
link |
I mean, I really think humility is a vice, not a virtue.
link |
What's there to be humble about?
link |
But the word humble has different meanings.
link |
I know what it's going to get.
link |
I mean, humility in a sense of not appreciating the genius and the ability and the success
link |
and all the stuff that we as individuals, I think, in our lives, but as a culture, as
link |
a movement, if you think about movement in terms of those of us who respect reason have
link |
achieved in spite of the odds, we should be proud of that and pride as the virtue.
link |
Humility in the sense of, yeah, I know there's more to know.
link |
I know there's a lot more to know and in the future we'll know more.
link |
But I don't think that's the way...
link |
See, I take humility as the way the Christians use it, which is the other way.
link |
And I think it's a real vice.
link |
It's don't think of yourself too much just because you can think that's no big deal or
link |
just because you can create this stuff.
link |
Your achievements are a big deal and you should take credit for them.
link |
So be careful with the word humility because the real meaning is the Christian meaning,
link |
which is a very, very bad meaning.
link |
Let me be a little pedantic because there's no such thing as real meaning, right?
link |
So there's different meanings.
link |
This is semantics, but here's another real meaning that you're not going to disagree
link |
with, which is the smartest person on earth is ignorant of 99.9% of knowledge, right?
link |
So if I meet someone who is less intelligent than me and less informed than me, it is still
link |
certain that this person has things to teach me.
link |
If I go to a mechanic and maybe this guy's dumb as rocks.
link |
I don't know anything about cars.
link |
What he tells me about that car is good.
link |
I could take it to the bank.
link |
He's going to be in a position to inform me.
link |
So one of the reasons humility is extremely important is very often you have people and
link |
you see this very much in academia who think you know exactly where I'm going around who
link |
think they're know what else and they think, oh, I have this degree.
link |
You've never been formally educated.
link |
Therefore not only you dumb and uneducated and you're wrong.
link |
And it's like this person might be have won a great example of this.
link |
And this is an example you might not like is a lot of times you have these native populations
link |
and they'll have a better understanding of the animals around them, the plants, the fruits,
link |
And you'd have these scientists and be like, oh, they're talking about this monster in
link |
This giant, this giant ape.
link |
It was the gorilla.
link |
But you know, you dismiss them because, oh, these are stupid, ignorant, whatever people
link |
that's kind of changed to some extent.
link |
But that is an aspect of humility that I think behooves especially highly intelligent people
link |
because there is such a presumption to be dismissive of people who you regard as less
link |
But they're often right.
link |
I agree with all of the concrete examples.
link |
I just think we should come up with a better word than humility.
link |
And I don't have one because I'm not I'm not a woodsmith.
link |
This is not my strength.
link |
But humility, humility is a is a word from the Christian ethics.
link |
And it means something very specific in the field of ethics.
link |
And it means the opposite of of what I think virtue requires.
link |
It's to put you down.
link |
It's to it's to it's to resist pride.
link |
And I think pride is a very important thing.
link |
But again, you have to define your terms properly.
link |
Hating myself has has been quite useful for me as well, but that's because you're Russian
link |
So by what this changes, you know, this is this is what happens, right?
link |
We're brought up to, you know, to to feel exactly that way in a good Russian boy.
link |
But as long as you're good.
link |
Check if it's kosher.
link |
This is Ukrainian, my friend.
link |
That is really simple.
link |
You know, me and Sinai were born in the same town.
link |
My dad is Ukrainian.
link |
So I don't think I don't think self self.
link |
What did you how did you define it?
link |
I think self hate is quite destructive.
link |
Speak for yourself.
link |
I think that humility is quite destructive.
link |
Humility in the sense of I'm no big deal.
link |
I mean, if you've achieved something in life, you are a big deal.
link |
You are a big deal because, you know, look, you got the two of us to fly into town just
link |
to sit down here and have a conversation with you.
link |
You're a big deal.
link |
That says more about you than me.
link |
We're just desperate.
link |
We're lonely and depraved.
link |
I might be desperate.
link |
I'm starting to question your ability to reason with the decisions you're making on the on
link |
the aspect of and I should mention that The Idiot by Dostoevsky is one of my favorite
link |
novels and there is a Christian ethic that runs through that.
link |
I mean, because because, yeah, I mean, particularly but I hate to bring this up, but particularly
link |
Russians and particularly Russian Jews and particularly Eastern European Jews are incredibly
link |
There's a there's a there's a real Christian theme in in Judaism that's that's about guilt.
link |
Guilt is not there's no guilt in Judaism.
link |
King David doesn't feel any guilt.
link |
There's no guilt in the in the Old Testament.
link |
Once Christianity has an impact on Judaism, we're raised to feel this way.
link |
We're raised to be humble.
link |
We're raised not to feel special.
link |
We were raised to think we're no big deal and to and our mothers put us down and and
link |
use that against us and try to inflict guilt on us.
link |
They raise us up and then they knock us down.
link |
It's a mechanism, but it's it's a cultural mechanism.
link |
And I think it's very destructive to self esteem and to happiness.
link |
Let me and I'll give you a great he's absolutely right with what he just said.
link |
Because like my family, for example, it still doesn't really understand how I could pay
link |
the rent because I don't go into an office.
link |
And like when I started out trying to be a writer, the immediate reaction isn't which
link |
is a lot of times I talk to kids, right, and they have these aspirations.
link |
And I'll tell them, go for it while you're young.
link |
If you fail, you'll go to your grave with like I tried my best.
link |
I didn't make it happen.
link |
Whereas if you don't try and never achieve, you are going to feel horrible for the rest
link |
And this is the example I use all the time.
link |
I bring up many times I go go to any bookstore and look at all those terrible, terrible books
link |
on the shelves that you wonder, how is this a book that could be you?
link |
You could be that crappy writer.
link |
But the thing is, in that culture that Yaron was talking about, you tell your family, I'm
link |
going to be a writer.
link |
Who do you think you are?
link |
Why do you think you're going to be?
link |
You're no Stephen King.
link |
And it's like, why do you have to be Stephen King?
link |
Why can't you just be a mediocre, crappy writer making the rent?
link |
The best that you can be.
link |
But even that is an amazing accomplishment.
link |
If I don't have to go to an office and I write books that not that many people read, this
link |
is the story of my life, at the same time, I do have pride because I made this happen.
link |
You can be the best version.
link |
I mean, this is a cliche, but you can be the best version of yourself.
link |
It's not a competition.
link |
And yet our Jewish mothers, that's not what they aspire us to be.
link |
They aspire us to be the best version of what they imagine, what the culture imagines, what
link |
society imagined, not what, it's not about you in their minds.
link |
And I've seen it, I see it all around me.
link |
People putting their kids down, putting themselves down.
link |
I've never told this story, I'm going to tell it now.
link |
When I graduated college, I was a temp for a while because I didn't know what I wanted
link |
And when you're a temp, it's like playing roulette.
link |
You're going to have jobs that pay well, that suck, and pay well that are great or that
link |
are great that don't pay well and suck and pay poorly.
link |
But it's you and you're 21, you have that kind of space.
link |
And my grandmother was talking to her brother, you know, he's talking about his kids, she's
link |
talking about me, she's, you know, from Odessa.
link |
And she told me she lied to him about how much money I was making.
link |
And that's something I've never brought up and it still hurts me.
link |
Because it's like, your approval of me should be a function of my character, my happiness.
link |
And the fact that you feel ashamed over how much money I'm making, especially at this
link |
point in my life, I thought was very, really misplaced priorities.
link |
I don't know what to make of that.
link |
I think there's a huge benefit to the humility, terms aside, for believing that others can
link |
Everybody, everybody can teach you a lot.
link |
I think we all agree on that.
link |
I just mentioned that, the mechanic.
link |
Exactly the point.
link |
But for that, I do believe you have to not constantly sort of break your ego apart and
link |
constantly question whether you know anything about this world and sort of there's a negativity
link |
with it that I think is very useful.
link |
And it's also very fulfilling, just constantly.
link |
It's the other way around.
link |
I find that the more, the more I know, the more I know I know, the easier it is for me
link |
to learn from other people.
link |
The broader a context I have, the more curious I become, the more areas I know.
link |
You know, it's true that the more you know, the more areas you know you don't know.
link |
And the more I find myself attracted to people who can teach me something about things I
link |
Whereas if I was ignorant, if I truly believed I didn't know anything, I don't know how I
link |
It would really completely challenge everything, everything about life for me.
link |
Where would I even start?
link |
You wouldn't know where to start.
link |
So no, I think, and if you don't recognize what you know, you don't have a full appreciation
link |
So really building a recognition of what do I know, right?
link |
And how much do I know is really crucial to living.
link |
And I'll tell you something else that furthers my life enormously is when you reach a certain
link |
point in your career in your life, and you're talking to people who are a lot younger, and
link |
they might be smart, driven, intelligent, they lack data.
link |
When you're 23, you don't know how to speak corporate, you don't know what the code words
link |
So if I am in a position to sit down with this kid and be like, do X, Y, and Z, and
link |
here's why I'm coming to this conclusion.
link |
This is the information that released me this conclusion.
link |
And I can save them from some of the suffering I went through.
link |
That is very gratifying.
link |
It's making the world a better place.
link |
And it's also the opposite in a sense of humility, because like, in this context, I'm an expert,
link |
or at least knowledgeable enough that I'm comfortable giving you advice.
link |
And look, everything I do is about me knowing stuff that other people don't.
link |
And I know a lot of stuff other people don't, and I do.
link |
I'm a teacher at heart, always have been.
link |
It turns out, I didn't know that early on, but I like becoming an expert and then trying
link |
It doesn't mean I know everything.
link |
Quite the contrary.
link |
Again, the more I know, the more I know that the certain things I don't know and the certain
link |
areas of expertise I don't have.
link |
But look, pride is a broader concept than that.
link |
Pride is about, and humility is the opposite of pride.
link |
And Christianity has that right.
link |
Pride is about taking your life seriously.
link |
Pride is about wanting to be really good at living, wanting to have the knowledge.
link |
And I think what you're describing is, you're describing as I'm constantly learning.
link |
Sometimes I have to challenge myself, I have to question what I believe in order to gain
link |
That's all good, but that is a drive that is driven by pride.
link |
There are lots of people out there that don't want to know, because they don't have that
link |
They don't have that commitment to live, the commitment to achieving something.
link |
And I'm going to say something else that I think is crucial.
link |
Humility is extremely important when it comes to politics.
link |
Because if you feel comfortable telling someone you've never met how to live their life, that
link |
is a complete lack of humility.
link |
I lack it, obviously, because I tell people how to live all the time.
link |
Not through force.
link |
Not through force.
link |
That's what I'm saying.
link |
And of course, not in the concrete.
link |
I don't tell them, you know, move to, although I do tell them to move to Austin, but I don't
link |
tell them this is what you do as a profession.
link |
But I give them the principles, because I think they're principles of how to live.
link |
They're making the choice.
link |
Politically, what I'm saying is it shows a lack of humility to be like, I've never met
link |
This is how I'm going to take money from him.
link |
See, but I don't see that humility.
link |
There's nothing...
link |
No, it's the lack of humility.
link |
No, but it's not even a lack of humility, because it's...
link |
Who am I to tell them how to live?
link |
That's lack of humility.
link |
No, of course you're not.
link |
No, who are you to tell them how to live is an issue of...
link |
It's an issue of force and rights and a bunch of different things.
link |
I don't think it's a lack of humility there.
link |
I think it's a lack of being a human being.
link |
I think it's, who gives you the right to dictate to somebody else how to live their lives?
link |
Yeah, but that's a lack of humility, if you think you have that right.
link |
Again, we're using humility in a very different way.
link |
No, we're using the same way, because the person who feels comfortable, they think,
link |
I know better than you how you should live your life to the point where I'm a couple
link |
forcing you, because I know it's gonna be best for you in the long run.
link |
And the answer is you don't know.
link |
Right, but that's a lack of humility.
link |
I think in your mind, you're on humility somehow tied to the Christian concept, the humility,
link |
and so you're kind of allergic to the word.
link |
Well, absolutely, because it's part of...
link |
If you look at the cardinal virtues, the cardinal sins in Christianity, pride is a cardinal
link |
sin and humility is a cardinal virtue, but they don't mean it in the sense, because they're
link |
happy to tell you how to live, right?
link |
They're happy to be philosopher kings over your life, and they believe that's being humble.
link |
And you should be humble, by the way, in listening to the Pope or listening to God, because what
link |
God knows everything, so you should shut up and do what you're told.
link |
That's the sense in which I don't think you should be humble.
link |
I mean, it's a sense in which I always use the example of Abraham, right?
link |
God comes to Abraham and says, go kill your oldest son, your only son, right?
link |
And what does Abraham do?
link |
He says, yes, sir.
link |
And he's a moral hero, for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he's a moral hero, because he follows
link |
orders, because he's humble.
link |
I would tell God to go to hell.
link |
I'm not killing my son.
link |
I mean, he killed his son, so it's only fair.
link |
Well, this is before he killed his son, so I didn't know that, right?
link |
No, but part of the evil, part of the evil of Christianity is that he's killed his son
link |
in the most torturous form of death possible.
link |
I mean, the whole story of Jesus is one of the most immoral, unjust stories ever told,
link |
and that Christians elevate this to a position of...
link |
I'd love to have this conversation with Jordan, right?
link |
The idea of elevating...
link |
That'll never happen.
link |
But elevating Jesus, exactly, elevating Jesus to a superhero status for one of the most
link |
immoral acts in human history is horrific.
link |
So yeah, I mean, I'm opposed to God sacrificing his own son, never mind my son, but let him
link |
go do it to his own son.
link |
But he didn't kill Isaac.
link |
He killed the goat.
link |
The story's about Abraham, not about God.
link |
First of all, God is mean, right, to put Abraham through that.
link |
But Abraham has to assume that he's going to kill his son, and he lifts his...
link |
He's going to do it, and he stopped.
link |
So the whole point is obedience.
link |
That's what humility leads to.
link |
It leads to the opposite of the story you were telling.
link |
It leads to people saying, yes, I should be told what to do.
link |
Where's the authority who actually knows something?
link |
I don't know anything.
link |
No, I know a lot, and I know a lot about my life.
link |
So you stay away from my life because I have pride in my life.
link |
The science is settled, right?
link |
Look at these experts.
link |
Who am I to argue with these experts?
link |
They tell me to drink dog pee.
link |
I'm going to drink...
link |
What am I, not drink dog pee?
link |
Let's go back to the island.
link |
Speaking of which...
link |
We're on an island again?
link |
We're back to the island.
link |
And let's go to the island.
link |
I live on an island.
link |
Everything is an island in some context.
link |
Like Earth is an island.
link |
This universe is an island in a multiverse.
link |
There's no multiverses.
link |
There's only one universe.
link |
So let's invite Jordan Peterson to this island.
link |
I don't know, Lex says something as big of a following almost as Jordan does.
link |
I know his family actually through Jim Keller, who's his relative.
link |
And I just talked to Sam, who is perhaps a little bit aligned in some sense on your perspective
link |
on religion and so on.
link |
So let me ask, is there some...
link |
I thought you were talking about baseball.
link |
I just talked to Sam.
link |
Let's talk about humility.
link |
Let's talk about humility, Lex.
link |
I was talking to Barack.
link |
You might know him.
link |
Humility went out the window.
link |
I'm just a natural language processing model that I assume that once I mentioned Jordan
link |
Peterson, it becomes an obvious statement what Sam means.
link |
This is how neural networks think.
link |
This is how robots think, Michael, you should know this.
link |
I thought by now you'd be a scholar.
link |
For the sake of the audience.
link |
Everything can teach you something, even the robot.
link |
So do you think there's value in religion or broader?
link |
Do you think there's value in myth?
link |
And as we've been talking about the value of reason, do you think it's possible to argue
link |
in society as we grow the population of our little island that there's some value of common
link |
myths, of common stories, of common religion?
link |
There is no value today.
link |
So human beings need explanations, right?
link |
They need a philosophy to guide their life.
link |
They need some explanation of what's going on in the world, right?
link |
And it's no accident that the early religions had a river god and they had a sun god and
link |
a moon god because everything they didn't understand, they made god, right?
link |
So they had multiple gods because they didn't understand very much.
link |
As human understanding evolved, it increased, as we knew reality more, right?
link |
We came to the conclusion of, you know, this is very inefficient to have all these gods.
link |
This is a genius of Judaism, right?
link |
Let's just have one bucket to put all the stuff we don't know in and we'll call it one
link |
god and then we don't, as we gain new knowledge, we can just take it out of the bucket that's
link |
god and put it into the bucket of science.
link |
At some point, though, at some point, and that point suddenly came during the scientific
link |
revolution, I think, we could come to the conclusion that, no, we don't need this bucket
link |
that's called god to explain the things that we don't know.
link |
We can say we don't know and we're learning.
link |
And slowly our knowledge is increasing and yet there's a lot more that we don't know,
link |
but we don't need to throw it into some bucket that's called god in order to have it.
link |
And I think that's true for morality and it's true for everything else, right?
link |
As we gain the tools to understand what morality requires, we don't need a set of commandments.
link |
We can figure out morality from human nature and from reality.
link |
So I don't think we need religion anymore.
link |
I think religion needed to die probably about 200 years ago and was dying, I think, up until
link |
It seemed to be dying.
link |
Kant's missions, as he says, is to revive religion against attack of reason in the Enlightenment.
link |
Now mythology is a little different because it depends what you mean by mythology.
link |
Certainly we need stories and certainly we need art.
link |
And Rand writes about this a lot and she's an artist and she writes in...
link |
I'm a huge fan of the Romantic Manifesto, which I think is one of her underappreciated
link |
So I think we have a real need, right?
link |
As a conceptual being, we have a need for aesthetic experiences.
link |
We have a need to concretize abstractions, to concretize abstract ideas, to concretize
link |
the complex nature of the world out there.
link |
And that's what painting sculpture, to an extent music, but painting sculpture literature
link |
So to the extent that mythology serves that purpose, it's just art, right?
link |
To the extent that it serves another purpose, that is that it's a way for the gods to communicate
link |
with us or it fits some kind of preexisting mental construct that we have as, again, kind
link |
of a conscientious perspective, right?
link |
That we have these categorical imperatives and this mythology links up to that.
link |
Then I think it's false, it's not helpful and destructive.
link |
So I believe religion today is a destructive force on planet Earth.
link |
I think it's always been a destructive force.
link |
It was just a necessary force, right?
link |
You needed an explanation.
link |
People needed something to believe in.
link |
Once you get philosophy and once you get philosophy that starts explaining real life, real world,
link |
you don't need religion anymore and indeed it becomes a destructive force.
link |
And you look around the world today, it's an unbelievably destructive force.
link |
Everywhere it touches is bad for life.
link |
Again, mythology depends, art is essential, very, very crucial to human existence.
link |
I mean, I'd love to hear what you think, but you don't see religion and philosophy and
link |
mythology as just a continuous spectrum?
link |
So religion is a primitive form of philosophy.
link |
It's prephilosophical.
link |
Where I thought Rand was going to go and he didn't go was that I think he, I agree with
link |
what he's going to say, Rand was a mythologizer.
link |
In certain specific contexts Atlas Shrugged is a myth.
link |
It's one thing to sit down and say, these are the people who move us forward.
link |
These are the values that are important.
link |
When you experience it through a story, through a movie, through a TV show, a poem or a painting,
link |
it affects you in a very visceral, very different way.
link |
Talk about American history.
link |
You have the founding fathers, then you have the myth of the founding fathers.
link |
Now, unfortunately the term myth often means lie, but it could mean in a useful sense,
link |
an abstraction to help you systematize and concretize ideas.
link |
So you have the myth of Reagan, you have the myth of Thatcher, the reality often falls
link |
But when you look at how these different figures are mythologized, not only is it very inspirational
link |
on a personal level, very motivating on a personal level, it's also a great way to concretize
link |
ideas because just how humans think, it's one thing to think about ideas, but when you
link |
see someone who embodies these ideas, Miss America, I was saying earlier, I had an aster
link |
on my show, these people might be jerks.
link |
But when you look at them, one specific aspect of their life and you extrapolate it, that
link |
could be to anyone very motivating.
link |
And it's very important for people to have the belief that happiness and achievement
link |
is possible because it's very hard to keep that in mind, especially if you're depressed,
link |
if you're anxious, you're unemployed, you don't have a girlfriend, you think it's going
link |
to be like this forever.
link |
And then you look at someone's story and they're like, you know what, that astronaut interview,
link |
Clayton Anderson, he applied 13 times, didn't get a call back, applied the 14th time, got
link |
a call back, didn't get the job, 15th time he get the job.
link |
He talks to kids and he goes, listen, apply 13 times.
link |
Even if you don't get the call back, you'll still feel I'm doing something.
link |
And having heard him and the myth of Clayton Anderson, this is going to tell people, yeah,
link |
And it's not just happiness, it's the fact that virtue works, that the integrity, I mean,
link |
what's the power of the fountainhead?
link |
I know you love the fountainhead.
link |
Part of the power of the fountainhead is how it works, absolute commitment to integrity.
link |
He is committed to integrity and he's happy.
link |
And it's very rare in life to see that, to actually see a concrete of that.
link |
And it's very hard to hold it in your mind.
link |
Yes, I'm going to be stuck in the quarry or I'm going to be stuck doing this horrible
link |
But if I stick to my principles, I'm going to be how it works.
link |
Now I've got that concrete.
link |
I know I can immediately relate to that success.
link |
So I think art is essential.
link |
And I think in a sense, what we do to Thatcher and Reagan is art.
link |
You have to be careful in true stories, not to diverge too far from reality because then
link |
when you discover the reality, you don't want to whitewash it, and particularly when it
link |
has political implications and then it's really bad.
link |
So particularly with Reagan and Thatcher, you have to be careful because they want anyone
link |
near as good as people try to make them out to be.
link |
But these are powerful, powerful, powerful stories and people are moved by it.
link |
And the integration of emotion with reason is crucial.
link |
One of the goals to be happy is to bring your emotions in line with your thinking.
link |
And I think that stories and arts more broadly, and when I go and see Michelangelo's David,
link |
it does the same thing to me.
link |
I can stand up to anybody because he did.
link |
And look, he succeeded.
link |
And it makes sense that he could.
link |
So this is a really interesting idea of bringing your emotion in line with your thinking, with
link |
So Ben Shapiro famously has this saying, how do you like that transition, Michael?
link |
He's not Ben, it's Ben Shapiro.
link |
Someone is not taking your calls.
link |
I guess it's a daily, don't take the caller.
link |
Back to the island with the murder.
link |
We would know who would be committing the murder.
link |
I have the suit for it.
link |
So he has the saying of facts don't care about your feelings.
link |
And I've always felt badly about that statement somehow, like it was incomplete.
link |
So it's interesting that you mentioned bringing your emotions in line with your thinking.
link |
What do you think about that statement?
link |
What Ben is doing in a loose way is attacking Kantianism because Kant, it's almost impossible
link |
for Westerners who aren't schooled in this to understand the idea of philosophical idealism
link |
because it sounds so crazy that you're like, these great minds of all time can't really
link |
I must be missing something.
link |
So when we hear idealism, we think John F. Kennedy is a good example.
link |
You aspire things.
link |
You think life can be better than it is.
link |
That's not what it means in a philosophical sense.
link |
In philosophical idealism, it means ideas are more real than reality.
link |
That I have this idea, then this comes along.
link |
It's the reality that isn't correct.
link |
My idea is still correct.
link |
A good example of this that you see all the time on the internet is when they refer to
link |
Mitt Romney and John McCain as rhinos, Republicans in name only.
link |
And it's like, who is more a real Republican?
link |
The nominee of the party, the Senator, the governor of the party, or some person in your
link |
mind who has never existed and there's no evidence for them existing.
link |
So what Kant did is he bifurcated reality into what we see around us, the phenomenal
link |
world, but then it's inferior.
link |
The real world, the noumenal world, we can't access it because we have eyes.
link |
We only see the thing as it appears, not as it is in itself.
link |
And because of this, everything we know is a shadow and is secondary.
link |
And that's Plato, straight out of Plato.
link |
And the real reality is this realm of ideas.
link |
So when Ben is saying facts don't care about your feelings, what he is really saying is
link |
reality comes first.
link |
Your feelings have to be a response or a reaction to it.
link |
You can't say, this is how I feel.
link |
This table doesn't care.
link |
You can yell at it all day long.
link |
It will still be indifferent to your emotional state because it comes first.
link |
So it's a great statement.
link |
I think he's cribbing it from Ayn Rand in a sense, and there's a sense in which he is.
link |
I mean, who popularized that kind of idea?
link |
And Ben has read Ayn Rand quite extensively.
link |
Not enough to reference her.
link |
That's the way the army goes.
link |
So yeah, obviously.
link |
He may be read enough, but didn't understand enough.
link |
But so it's absolutely reality.
link |
Reality is unaffected by your emotional state and your feelings about it.
link |
And this is a great claim against the idealism, the philosophical idealism of much of the
link |
world out there, both left and right.
link |
I think politically, culturally, the left and right are detached from reality.
link |
They live in a different dimension, in a different space that they are creating in their own
link |
minds that has nothing to do with the real world.
link |
And when they fail, they make stuff up to justify their failure, right?
link |
So all of really the ideas that are promulgated today on both sides are this kind of detached
link |
We're putting emotions or ideas before reality itself.
link |
But I believe that emotions are responses.
link |
The responses to reality conditioned by our existing concepts.
link |
You're going to have to talk slowly to talk emotions to Lex because he doesn't really
link |
understand what that is.
link |
I don't understand.
link |
That's a really, you got to really taste your words.
link |
But he's big on love?
link |
But he's big on love?
link |
He's trying to learn.
link |
Pretty big on love.
link |
I'm all in, I'm a love maximalist.
link |
I mean, I could create, we could create an environment on this island where you would
link |
really feel emotions.
link |
Like fear is an emotion.
link |
That's the metaphysical terror.
link |
We could easily terrorize you to the point where you felt fear, right?
link |
So we could teach him about emotion.
link |
But emotions are a response to reality.
link |
So some people, for example, you could take five different people and show them exactly
link |
And some of them would feel fear and some of them would actually feel indifferent and
link |
other people might feel love, right?
link |
I think Leonard Peacock uses the example of looking through a microscope and seeing a,
link |
I don't know, a virus or bacteria.
link |
And for one, it's a scientist, he's made a new discovery.
link |
He feels pride and love and awe.
link |
The one has no clue, right, and he's looking at this and it means nothing to them and somebody
link |
else might look at it and it's a bacteria and they feel fear because of what it could
link |
So it's conditioned by what you know, what your values are and your level of knowledge
link |
and what the thing is out there in reality.
link |
And it's that into, so your emotions respond to that.
link |
So aligning your emotions with your reason is making sure that your emotions are really
link |
conditioned by what you know explicitly versus what you've internalized implicitly that
link |
you might not agree with anymore.
link |
You know, things might happen in your childhood and they probably do, right, where you get
link |
I don't know, I'm afraid of dogs and maybe when I was a five year old, some dogs jumped
link |
at me and I don't even remember it, right?
link |
But I came to a conclusion when I was five, dogs bad, dogs dangerous, right?
link |
And now anytime I see a dog, oh my God, that bringing my emotions aligned with reality,
link |
right, with my ideas is no, now I understand dogs don't have to be scary.
link |
I can work through this and there are various techniques and hopefully if there is such
link |
a science of psychology, but in psychology to get you to the point where you can get
link |
rid of that fear and align your emotion now with your explicit ideas, and that's what
link |
And let me build on that, talking about your friend Putin, I think I mentioned this before
link |
at least maybe on the show, he was meeting with Angela Merkel.
link |
Oh, Vladimir, please.
link |
Yeah, Vlad, my boy Vlad.
link |
He was meeting with Angela Merkel, Angela Merkel has a fear of dogs, so he brought out
link |
his big Labrador Retriever, now for people who don't know, Labradors are very big dogs,
link |
but they're also like the least aggressive, it's like you could punch them in the face,
link |
That dog is not going to be more likely to attack just because she's scared.
link |
And I know they say animals can sense fear, domesticated dogs, if they see you're scared,
link |
they're not going to be aggressive, they're going to try to play.
link |
I remember when I was a kid, there was this dog, Rex, this German Shepherd, I'm five,
link |
this dog is gigantic, and I'm sitting on the couch, the German Shepherds have been bred
link |
for intelligence, they're very bright dogs, they're very good with kids, he's sitting
link |
next to me, this thing is three times my size.
link |
He very gently puts his paw on my leg to be like, kid, he can sense my fear, he's like,
link |
I'm not going to do it, I want to be your friend, I'm still freaking out.
link |
He licks my hand, it's just very scary, you know, animals are so bright, but that's the
link |
thing is, in terms of facts don't care about your feelings, that dog is not more likely
link |
to attack someone because their emotion is so intense.
link |
It's not that I feel something very strongly, therefore, this thing is more likely to happen.
link |
So my intensity of my emotion does not in any way correlate, when you're being irrational,
link |
to the likelihood of that thing actually happening.
link |
Now, you could have a dog that does respond to your emotion, right?
link |
But then it's, but then it's not, that's part of reality, right?
link |
That's a fact of reality that certain dogs respond to certain emotions.
link |
But isn't this emotion a part of reality, like, okay, let me say a word.
link |
So part of that, I would even say, don't let your emotion about your emotion, right, because
link |
sometimes you have an emotion about your emotion, don't be repressed, and identify the emotion
link |
as reality, and evaluate it, don't judge it, evaluate it.
link |
Is it a rational emotion?
link |
Is it consistent with my, like, if I'm afraid of these dogs, if I feel that fear, is it
link |
rational to be afraid of these dogs?
link |
But you're speaking to your own individual trajectory as a human being as you grow through
link |
the world and try to understand reality and connect yourself through reason to reality.
link |
What I'm talking about is a term like lived experience.
link |
When you observe and analyze the, you know, conversations with other people to try to
link |
understand how other people see the world, doesn't emotion fundamentally integrate into
link |
Like, isn't emotion lived experience?
link |
So everybody experiences the same reality, but the way they experience it might be very
link |
And that has to do with what?
link |
It doesn't have to do with…
link |
With their values, with their conclusions, with their ideas, with their experiences,
link |
with a million different things, right?
link |
But at the end of the day, it's about the conclusions that they come to, which are then
link |
shaping their emotions.
link |
But look, emotions are not something to be avoided or ignored.
link |
That is, I can sense your emotions to some extent, right?
link |
I can sense his emotions.
link |
I can sense Michael's emotions, and that's part of the fact of reality, right?
link |
So if Michael responds to something that I view as really, really important, right?
link |
If we were standing in front of Michelangelo's David, and Michael responds to Michelangelo's
link |
David and goes, eh, and turned his back to it and walked away, that would be really meaningful
link |
That I would respond emotionally to that, and cognitively I would say, what is it about
link |
Michael that makes him, you know, respond this way?
link |
That gives me a lot of information about him.
link |
So emotions are information laden, right?
link |
But they are not primary.
link |
They are responses, responses to something.
link |
So one must be very aware of one's own emotions, recognize them, and analyze them.
link |
And one should be aware of other people's emotions, if they're important to you, if
link |
they're not important to you.
link |
It doesn't matter, right?
link |
You don't care about a stranger's emotion, you know, like a stranger walks up to Michael
link |
and Michelangelo's David and said, eh, and walks away, and I go, okay, I'm glad you're
link |
Now, I don't know what Michael's response to Michelangelo's David was or is, so I'm
link |
a little worried about what he's gonna say.
link |
You got candy too, that was great.
link |
Hey, hey, I thought I was special.
link |
Do I get Ukrainian candy?
link |
I don't know, I can't read either.
link |
What's this say, Joshua?
link |
What does that say to him?
link |
Is this Ukrainian candy as well?
link |
I thought it was sent to me from…
link |
Do you know that Atlas Shrugged was the bestselling book in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016?
link |
Do you know Atlas Shrugged was translated to Russian by someone who's now a crypto like
link |
billionaire and he made like six copies and I have one of them and I sent it to my great
link |
No, they're more than six, but yeah.
link |
Oh, but they were like…
link |
Because I have a copy too.
link |
Not I personally, the institute has a copy.
link |
I sent it to my great grandma and she said, why is he sending me this, I wanna read books
link |
And I'm like, you know what?
link |
This is about love.
link |
That's what you should have said.
link |
What's that, what does that say?
link |
So this says it's…
link |
It has vitamins and minerals.
link |
If it's in Russian, I don't believe it.
link |
It just sounds really strange to read like health information in Russian, I'm already
link |
But look, there's a Yorshik like you have.
link |
I mean, I'm much, I like Kiev much more than I like Moscow.
link |
But this is, this is not, it's like hard candy.
link |
I think this, some of my friends sent me that's made with blood to give the kids iron.
link |
Like with chocolate.
link |
I'm keeping both of these.
link |
Can I take something you're talking about with emotion?
link |
Something that is very pernicious in terms of emotion is people denying the validity
link |
of their own emotions.
link |
And here's one example, someone could be in an abusive relationship or have had an
link |
abusive childhood and they think, well, I didn't have a black eye.
link |
We had dinner on the table.
link |
It wasn't abusive because you hear some other story.
link |
So they feel their emotion is invalid or like, oh, he never lays hands on me.
link |
He gets drunk and is mean to me.
link |
He's still basically a good person.
link |
You're denying that emotion.
link |
And that emotion is a response to something real.
link |
There's an expression, I have friends who are in 12 step programs.
link |
There's an expression there, which I think is very profound, which is if it's hysterical,
link |
Meaning if some minor incident is having an extreme disproportionate impact on you, think,
link |
ask yourself, why am I responding in such an extreme way to some minor thing?
link |
And I will tell you 10 times out of 10, you'll go back and you'll be like, oh, I'm feeling
link |
now like I felt when I was eight and my dad came home and he was a total jerk and I didn't
link |
do anything wrong.
link |
And he thought I had, and I was complete powerless.
link |
And now I'm in the same situation, my boss.
link |
I'm not that eight year old in one sense I am, in another sense I'm not, but I feel the
link |
same way I did as a kid.
link |
And this is a very useful mechanism in terms of furthering one's happiness because you
link |
kind of deprogram all those things that you picked up as a child.
link |
But it's also, you know, if you're feeling something wrong, even though you're trying
link |
to rationalize in a way, you know, it's not abusive because he's not hitting me.
link |
No, the emotion is telling you something real about what's going on.
link |
So acknowledge it and fix the situation, right?
link |
So one of the powers emotions give you is they send you signals about something that
link |
might not be in cognition yet.
link |
And when you examine their emotion, it brings it to cognition and now you can act on it.
link |
So maybe the boss is abusive, but I didn't really think of it in those terms of my emotions
link |
is sending me signals.
link |
And now that I signal it, I'm going to resign.
link |
I'm going to find a better, another job.
link |
I'm going to complain to his boss or whatever.
link |
I'm going to take action.
link |
Why do you think Ayn Rand is such a controversial figure?
link |
Last time I spoke with you on this particular podcast, the, the amount of emails I've gotten
link |
positive and negative and certainly negative, I don't usually get negative emails.
link |
I can't, I can't relate.
link |
I'm sure mine were all positive or only positive.
link |
It was mostly women sending pictures for me to forward to you because you didn't send
link |
Oh, it's the wrong email address.
link |
Oh, so this is love.
link |
But why do you think she's such a divisive figure?
link |
Why do you think she provokes such emotion in both the positive and the negative side?
link |
I'd love to hear both of your viewpoints on this.
link |
Well, I think on the negative side and both on the positive and the negative side, I think
link |
it's because she's radical.
link |
She's consistently radical.
link |
She upends the, the premises, the ideas that are prevalent in the culture that were brought
link |
up on the, that, that are like, you know, they're like milk and, and, and, you know,
link |
the basic stuff that we're, we're growing up.
link |
You have to be altruistic.
link |
You have to live for other people.
link |
That's just basic stuff.
link |
Nobody challenges that.
link |
Nobody questions it.
link |
And if they do question it, they usually question it from the perspective of a cynic or a bad
link |
You mentioned the book, the Joker, right.
link |
Before we started, right.
link |
You know, I'm going to upend the world because I don't care about other people.
link |
So, so they're presented with these two alternatives and it's real in people's lives, right?
link |
You either live for other people or you're a evil SOB and you know, yeah, most people
link |
in either one of those, but the ethic is right here.
link |
It's living for other people.
link |
And when you challenge that, they have no way cognitively to go with that.
link |
And the only place they can go with that cognitively is to the Joker.
link |
It's the evil guy.
link |
It's the somebody who wants to smash everything and destroy because they don't have this alternative
link |
conception of, oh no, you can be rationally self interested and that does not involve
link |
destruction and that does not involve, you know, just exploiting other people.
link |
They can't conceptualize that.
link |
It's not in their framework.
link |
So it's the fact that she's so consistently on the side of self interest, for example,
link |
on the side of capitalism, on the side of freedom.
link |
It's the fact that she dismisses faith to the extent that she does or to the extent
link |
that I do, right, that alienates people because that is completely different from what they
link |
Now the flip side of that is it's also really interesting to some people.
link |
So you know, a lot of, you got some positives, right?
link |
And I got a lot of positives from that appearance.
link |
I know a lot of people came to my podcast because I appeared on your show.
link |
Because they hear something that's completely fresh, new, different, they've never heard
link |
It appeals to something in them that maybe, you know, a lot of people say I read Ayn Rand
link |
and it confirmed everything I believed.
link |
Now for me it didn't.
link |
It was the opposite.
link |
It turned upside down everything I believed, but there are a lot of people out there that
link |
do have a sense that something's wrong in the world, that altruism is wrong, that socialism,
link |
just the stuff and religion is wrong, but they don't have an alternative.
link |
It hasn't coalesced.
link |
And they listen to a lot of podcasts because they're trying to get ideas of what is it
link |
that I'm sensing that's wrong out there?
link |
And suddenly somebody comes out and gives them some clear explanation of things and
link |
they go, wow, that's what I've been looking for my whole life.
link |
So that's the positive for people.
link |
You know, and I read Ayn Rand, it just all made sense.
link |
It all clicked and it all, and it made clear that everything I believed to that point was
link |
It just didn't, it didn't integrate.
link |
And I always knew to some extent it didn't integrate, but there was no alternative, so
link |
What else was there?
link |
I remember saying to myself as a kid, probably 15, why should I, why is this, why is morality
link |
all about other people?
link |
Well, that's just the way it is, right?
link |
And I couldn't, couldn't come up with an explanation.
link |
She gave me the explanation and she gave me the explanation why it's wrong to do that.
link |
And I think, so I think that's why people respond.
link |
It's just too radical.
link |
It can't fit into their cognitive framework that they have been brought up on, that they've
link |
been educated on, that just their whole life revolves around.
link |
Michael, you don't bring up Ayn Rand that much in conversation, except as kind of references
link |
every once in a while as part of the humor of just the general flow in the music of the
link |
way you like to talk.
link |
Well, why do you think you don't integrate her into your philosophy when you're like
link |
explaining ideas and all those kinds of things?
link |
Like, why is she not, you know, a popular reference point for discussion of ideas?
link |
Because I, I don't know if Yaron's going to agree with or can agree with me.
link |
I think for a certain percentage of the population, actually I talked to someone from the Ayn
link |
Rand Institute, I forgot his name, older guy with glasses and he didn't disagree with me.
link |
He said, this is changing.
link |
He said, I think for a certain percentage of the population who are uninformed about
link |
her work, higher than 10%, less than 50%, you mentioned Ayn Rand, they have been trained
link |
to think this is identical Scientology.
link |
So as soon as her name comes up, it's like, okay, I'm out the door.
link |
I'm not going to have anything to do with this.
link |
And everyone who follows her is a crazy person.
link |
That's one thing that has happened.
link |
Another thing is Rand in her personality was very aggressive and antagonistic.
link |
She was for a long time, the lone voice in the wilderness being like, this isn't like
link |
one of her big adversaries in a certain sense is Milton Friedman.
link |
And she really hated how Milton Friedman was like, oh, you know, having rent control is
link |
And she's like, inefficient?
link |
We're talking about mass homelessness and people dying.
link |
And you're talking about this, like what color tie goes with this color shirt?
link |
And in fact, it's hilarious.
link |
There was an organization called the Foundation for Economic Education fee.
link |
Leonard Reed was the head of this.
link |
And there were a series of letters and she was helping him.
link |
She was much more philosophically grounded in certain contexts than he was.
link |
And there was an essay, a pamphlet that he published called Roofs or Ceilings.
link |
It was cowritten by Milton Friedman, later Nobel prize winner and George Stigler, also
link |
later Nobel prize winner.
link |
And basically the argument was, well, if the government controls all housing, how's that
link |
going to work out?
link |
And she's sitting there and she's typing in all caps.
link |
So you know, she's holding on the shift key and doing this on a typewriter and being like
link |
And you can imagine her with her cigarette holder, apoplectic, being like, how is an
link |
organization ostensibly devoted to free enterprise discussing this Stalinist idea in the most
link |
She's like, have I taught you not?
link |
And what's amazing is, so at Fee, they only have her letters because she sent them to
link |
The Ayn Rand Institute must have Leonard Reed's letters.
link |
I was able to, knowing Rand enough, predict exactly what the conversation would go like
link |
because he also did something she didn't approve of, which is he asked other people for feedback
link |
And she goes, I gave this to you to read.
link |
Who are you shopping around to some jerk that I don't, I need their approval.
link |
What are you doing?
link |
So it was a very interesting situation, but so that's one issue.
link |
I remember this is Ayn Rand when she's young.
link |
She wasn't that young.
link |
It was in the 40s.
link |
She's relatively young, right?
link |
It's before Atlas Shrugged.
link |
It was before Atlas Shrugged.
link |
So it's before she's super famous.
link |
And before this is, the found has been published, but you know, she's trying to work with others
link |
and they are disappointing her left and right.
link |
And also when you are a, what she takes away from bad people is you have these kids, right?
link |
And you're going to sit down with them and they're going to be like, yeah, I'm going
link |
to take your guns.
link |
I'm going to lock you in your house.
link |
I'm going to take 60% of your income and all this other stuff.
link |
And they might, up to reading Rand, they might sit down and have a discussion.
link |
And Rand goes, Hey, you know what?
link |
You didn't have to give them an answer.
link |
You could say, go to hell.
link |
We're not having this conversation and you have no right to one second of my life.
link |
And this is not a legitimate opener.
link |
This is a declaration of war.
link |
This isn't like, it's not like if I sit down with you, I run like, Hey, Ron, here are my
link |
plans for your wife.
link |
This isn't a conversation we're having.
link |
Oh, I'm going to make you unsafe in your house.
link |
This is not a discussion.
link |
So what happens is these people who five minutes ago were able to have a debate with this kid
link |
because people read Rand when they're young often.
link |
And now that kid is like, yeah, I'm not even talking to you.
link |
Whereas in reality, it's that person's fault because that person had no right, although
link |
they've been trained to the contrary of our culture to believe, yeah, I'm going to sit
link |
down and we're just going to equally have a discussion over your own life.
link |
And you have one vote and I have one vote and we're going to know Lex has a vote and
link |
that's just how it's going to be and Rand's not having it.
link |
So I think those are two issues.
link |
And there's some other things which, which I don't need to get into.
link |
But I, I, because one of the things that Rand said consisting of her life is that her philosophy
link |
is an integrated whole, right?
link |
So to be an objectivist isn't just like, I like Atlas shrugged.
link |
It means I accept objectivism as a totality.
link |
Since I do not, I don't, I think it is proper to be respectful to her wishes and not constantly
link |
be, especially given that I've somewhat of a platform to be like Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand,
link |
Ayn Rand, because I don't think Ayn Rand would have liked it if I was talking about Ayn Rand
link |
So how do you, how do you deprogram?
link |
Because I don't like to bring up Ayn Rand just because I do see what, like how people
link |
roll their eyes essentially.
link |
So how do you, what's the upside, exactly.
link |
But what is that pro, can we, can you speak to that programming that people have?
link |
I mean, look, at the end of the day, if you talk about the ideas and the ideas make sense
link |
and people are attracted to the ideas, then you say, oh, by the way, and this came from
link |
Ayn Rand, that's how you deprogram them, right?
link |
If you make the ideas prevalent in the culture, if people start viewing self interest as something
link |
that's kind of, that's interesting and worthwhile and something worth investigating, and they
link |
said, oh, that came from Ayn Rand, then I think, I think then we'll, we'll deprogram
link |
them and get them and get them changing their minds about these things.
link |
And also, you know, going on shows where people are going to watch your show no matter who
link |
So, uh, even though now you do, you, if you put, you put Ayn Rand in the title that immediately
link |
reduces the number of people who watch, so, so in the future you shouldn't, but, uh, you
link |
put Michael Malice in the title and then at least the, the female population, the female
link |
to, you know, absolutely, just to see, but so, so you go and you try to make them as
link |
credible as possible to as many people as possible over time.
link |
And ultimately, I don't think the culture will have this response to her.
link |
They might still disagree with her, but I think over time, and already you're seeing
link |
it, younger people, I think today are far less, there was a generation who never read
link |
Ayn Rand and was like this, bring out the garlic and the crosses.
link |
We don't want to have anything to do with it then.
link |
And I think today there are many more people who've read her and might disagree or not
link |
And then there were a lot of people who haven't read her, but who are not opposed to it or
link |
willing to have an, to engage.
link |
So I think it's changing already.
link |
And I think in 20 years it'll be completely different.
link |
And just two more things that she does that I think it says that I think people find very,
link |
very off putting given our culture.
link |
One is she will, basically you could sit down with Rand and be like, your fear is not in
link |
any way a hold on my freedom.
link |
Just that one sentence.
link |
And for a lot of people that's very off putting and very harsh, it's correct.
link |
But for them, it's just like, wait a minute, I'm still scared.
link |
It's like, I don't care.
link |
Like for example, like with lockdowns and things like this, it's like, well, I'm scared
link |
and maybe I have a right to be scared.
link |
Or like, I'm scared that you have a gun in your house.
link |
And it's like, I respect that you're scared.
link |
At the end, as you say at the end of the day, this is my house.
link |
I'm going to live my life as I please, as long as I don't hurt other people.
link |
Well, you are hurting me because I'm scared.
link |
This is the feeling versus fact.
link |
So that is one situation.
link |
This is like a feeling versus freedom, essentially.
link |
Yes, where Rand is, that puts a lot of people off.
link |
I also think that historically, a lot of people who were drawn to her are drawn to her for
link |
the wrong reasons.
link |
That a lot of times, like Howard Rourke, the hero, we're gonna still say hero.
link |
You're supposed to say protagonist, but hero.
link |
The hero of the fountainhead, he's extremely intelligent, but he's also extremely uncompromising.
link |
What often ends up happening is you'll have a young kid who is somewhat intelligent, but
link |
then they pick up the personality and now you're someone I can't work with.
link |
And then it's like, you're not Howard Rourke, relax.
link |
You're not that skilled.
link |
You're not that talented.
link |
But because the character has to do personification and have certain aspects together, when kids
link |
read that, they might get the wrong idea.
link |
That's not Rand's fault.
link |
And it's more than that.
link |
It's so, I completely agree with that, but it's even broader than that.
link |
So here is, in my view, one of the geniuses of the millennium presenting a philosophy.
link |
And she's got not just the questions, in my view, she's got the answers.
link |
And you're reading them at 16 and you're reading the answers.
link |
You don't know at 16 that this is true.
link |
You might have a sense that it's true, but you don't have the life experience, the learned
link |
You don't have the facts, you don't have the knowledge.
link |
You're picking up truth.
link |
It's just being absorbed.
link |
You're accepting it as true, but you don't know it's true.
link |
And then you go out into the world advocating for it, which we all did, or at least I did,
link |
And you're obnoxious.
link |
You can't prove what you're arguing for because you don't have the experience.
link |
It took me, I don't know, 10, 20 years, probably 20, to figure out that I really do think what
link |
she said was true, but I didn't know when I was 16.
link |
When I was 16, I just absorbed these ideas and accepted them, in a sense, with some connection
link |
to reality, but in a sense, on faith, at least presented it that way.
link |
And as a consequence, you come off as a detached from reality, obnoxious human being.
link |
And I think a lot of young objectivists are, and it's hard not to be, because you are.
link |
You're confronted with genius.
link |
And you're not a genius.
link |
I certainly am not a genius.
link |
And I'm confronted with just genius and have all this information in my head now.
link |
I can't articulate it.
link |
And it's hard to deal with yourself.
link |
There's an inside joke.
link |
No, you said I'm confronted with genius.
link |
I mean, I'm confronted with you guys.
link |
I'm at an age where I know how to deal with geniuses.
link |
But there's something else.
link |
This is not why people don't like her, but there's something that the Fountainhead does,
link |
which I think is very, and I don't blame her, but it's a bad consequence.
link |
If you read the Fountainhead and you're young and you're intelligent and talented, the message
link |
at least I got, and I know I'm not alone, is you are going to think that you're going
link |
to be a pariah, that a lot of people are going to be against you, and you're basically doomed
link |
for a short period of being isolated and alone.
link |
And that may have been the case when Fountainhead was written.
link |
But I think now with the internet, and in my experience, both as a youth and someone
link |
who's a little bit older, I didn't appreciate, and you're not going to get it from that book,
link |
and you can't get it through that book because it has to have a certain narrative, how many
link |
people who are a little older are giddy when they find young talent, how inspiring it is,
link |
how exciting it is.
link |
Like when you talk to these kids who are doing things on the internet or writing or whatever
link |
achievement, you want them to flourish.
link |
You're not threatened by them as the antagonists of the Fountainhead are, and that doesn't
link |
come through in the Fountainhead because it depends on your profession, right?
link |
I mean, some of these parts of the world are better than others.
link |
If you're an artist, at least the way I conceive of art, and you want to go study art today,
link |
you're going to be pouped and look down on and so on.
link |
I mean, in my generation, when I read Iron Man, there was no internet, and I was in Israel,
link |
so we were isolated, and there was nobody else who had shared their ideas, and you did
link |
feel that kind of isolation.
link |
But Roark gave you, to me, he didn't teach me about you're going to be isolated because
link |
partially because I wasn't, maybe I was humble, right?
link |
When I read Atlas Shrugged, I identified with Eddie Willis.
link |
When I read the Fountainhead, I didn't identify with Howard Roark.
link |
How old were you when you read the Fountainhead?
link |
So I read Atlas when I was 16.
link |
I probably read the Fountainhead when I was 16 and a half, 17, something like that.
link |
That is unfathomable crime.
link |
You read the Fountainhead after Atlas Shrugged?
link |
If anyone listening to this, if you read the Fountainhead after Atlas Shrugged, that is
link |
No, for me, reading Atlas Shrugged was much more important.
link |
It is more important, but my point is, I think the Fountainhead in many ways is redundant
link |
in certain aspects if you read Atlas Shrugged first, and because the Fountainhead is such
link |
a masterful book and such a personal book.
link |
I agree with that.
link |
So ideally, you would read the Fountainhead.
link |
That's what I'm saying, yes.
link |
And here's the other thing people don't appreciate, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
link |
People think Rand's always about politics, politics, politics, politics, but the Fountainhead
link |
is not a political book at all.
link |
It's about, well, she talks about politics in Mansoul, sure.
link |
But it's about ethics, how important everyone has to have a moral code.
link |
That's the other thing why people find Rand off putting.
link |
If you have young people who now find it very important to live a moral life, who are like,
link |
what does that mean to have morality, to have ethics, to live with integrity for people
link |
who have gotten a little older, who have made these little sacrifices, who are like, I'm
link |
not going to fight at work.
link |
Do I really need to look for another job?
link |
Yeah, my wife's kind of getting annoying, but am I going to make a fight about it?
link |
These little sacrifices that they make every day.
link |
And big ones, absolutely.
link |
So when you have someone who's forcing you to look in the mirror and say, those little
link |
sacrifices and big sacrifices you made, you did the wrong thing and you're evading that you betrayed your unconscious.
link |
That to many people, I think, is very threatening.
link |
But this is why so many people say that Ayn Rand is for 14 year old boys.
link |
You grow out of it.
link |
And there's a reason why it appeals to 14 as a little young, but 16, 18.
link |
It's because those are the ages where we're still open to idealism.
link |
In a positive sense, to beautiful things, to ideals, to seeking perfection, to seeking
link |
I think as you grow older, most people become cynical.
link |
They give up on their ideals.
link |
Because their ideals were wrong and their ideals failed.
link |
My parents were socialists when they were young.
link |
Those ideas failed.
link |
So where do you go from socialism if your ideals fail?
link |
Which is horrible.
link |
All adults, almost all adults out there are cynical.
link |
And that is failed idealism.
link |
When they look at the young people, they see their idealism, oh, well, I was idealistic
link |
And they don't question the idea, well, they're good ideals and they're bad ideals, they're
link |
right ideals and they're wrong ideals.
link |
And that's why they attribute it to youth.
link |
So it's a threat to a lot of people, a lot of people who it's too late for.
link |
For some people, it's too late to change their minds.
link |
And they're too invested in the job, in the wife, in the compromises.
link |
And they're too invested in the comfort.
link |
Too invested in a compromise, too invested in a comfort.
link |
And they know that they shouldn't be.
link |
They know they should change.
link |
And these young people are challenging that.
link |
And that is really, really scary for them.
link |
And that's why they reject it without too much consideration.
link |
One of the things Rand, the working title for Fountainhead was Secondhand Lives.
link |
And Rand had two definitions of selfishness in that book.
link |
One is selfishness in the sense of my life is the most important thing.
link |
It's not the only important thing.
link |
My family would be number two friends.
link |
They certainly are extremely high values, but you can't have these secondary values
link |
without the first value.
link |
But in the context of my life, right?
link |
Because your family might not be a value, right?
link |
You might hate your parents.
link |
The point being selfishness.
link |
Then there's the other kind of selfishness, which is Peter Keating, one of the villains
link |
of the book, which is he's selfish in that he's greedy.
link |
He's looking out for number one, but he has no values.
link |
He has no sense of character.
link |
He just wants to be wealthy.
link |
He wants to have a beautiful wife.
link |
He wants to have a big house.
link |
He couldn't tell you because other people have it and he wants to have it more than
link |
His sense of reference is other people.
link |
He's living secondhand.
link |
The problem with that is a lot of young people read Rand and when they start arguing online,
link |
they just start trying to talk like Rand.
link |
Whereas Rand would be like, be original, be an innovator.
link |
If you want to argue for objectivism in Rand's views, take her ideas, articulate them in
link |
That's a good way of showing that you understand what she thinks, but what they end up doing
link |
is just talking like her.
link |
It sounds dated and comical and that's going to be off putting because it's like Rand wouldn't
link |
expect someone else to sound like Rand.
link |
She's her own person.
link |
She of course wouldn't view Keating as selfish in any sense because, or even greedy, greed
link |
Well, he was selfish in the old school sense.
link |
Yeah, he's selfish in the old, but even there, it's not as if he has some passion and he's
link |
going after passion no matter what, I'm going to light, cheat, steal.
link |
His passion is painting and he doesn't pursue his passion.
link |
He pursues what his mother wants him to pursue and he pursues money and he's completely second
link |
handed in the sense that he follows other people's values, not his own.
link |
Can we actually just backtrack and can we define some of these ideas that Ayn Rand
link |
is known for of selfishness, selfishness, egoism, egotism, greed?
link |
Those all, basically all of those words are seen as negative in society and Ayn Rand has
link |
been reclaiming in her work those words.
link |
So can you speak to what they mean?
link |
I think she's trying to, and Yaron might disagree, I think she's trying to be needlessly provocative
link |
and it's off putting and on one hand, maybe you want to be a provocateur because that
link |
gives you people like, what does this woman mean?
link |
On the other hand, many people are going to be viscerally put off.
link |
When Ayn Rand was on Donahue in 1979, he asked her explicitly, define to me the virtue of
link |
selfishness, which is the title of her collection of essays as well.
link |
And she, this is Rand, immediately says, use a different word, self esteem.
link |
And it's like, yeah, it's like, why are you championing this word, which has extremely
link |
negative connotations?
link |
Whereas if you just say, and this is thanks to her and her work, my life matters, my values
link |
matter, I'm not going to apologize for that.
link |
That is a lot less off putting than this caricature of Rand, which is I'm for, when people hear
link |
I'm for selfishness, they hear, oh, someone's bleeding out in the corner, but I want to
link |
She condemned that.
link |
She says, I'm against this kind of sociopathy.
link |
That's absolutely crazy.
link |
But that word selfishness.
link |
If it goes a mistake to be provocative in this one dimension, to go and to stick with
link |
I mean, she's stuck with this idea of selfishness and so on.
link |
She's stuck with this term and it's, I often use terms for provocative effect.
link |
Yes, this is true.
link |
You're a master, you're a scholar of the trolling arts.
link |
But I think this is one example where the costs outweigh the benefits.
link |
And go ahead, Yaron.
link |
Yes, I'm open to that idea, but I don't think that's right.
link |
When you actually dig deeper into what people object to, they're not objecting to the word.
link |
They're objecting to the ideas.
link |
And she addresses this explicitly in The Virtue of Selfishness in the, I think, the introduction.
link |
I got to ask for clarification.
link |
You're saying they're objecting to the ideas, but when they talk about her, they're not
link |
talking about her actual ideas.
link |
They're talking about the caricature.
link |
But the caricature is a defense mechanism not to have to deal with the ideas, right?
link |
So they create the caricature in order to ignore the ideas and some of them do it consciously.
link |
Like when people like Krugman and others do this, they know exactly what they're doing.
link |
But Krugman is Ellsworth Tewi.
link |
Yes, he's the perfect Ellsworth Tewi.
link |
And he knows Ayn Rand.
link |
He's read Ayn Rand.
link |
And he knows she's the enemy in some sense.
link |
Check out our episode with Krugman.
link |
I think it's number 90.
link |
It was a great conversation.
link |
Didn't get as many views as me, but what are you going to do?
link |
Well, he got a Nobel Prize, so what you got?
link |
I've got a ticket to heaven.
link |
Yasser Alford has a Nobel Prize.
link |
And Hitler was a Times Man of the Year for a few times.
link |
That really bothers me when people bring that up.
link |
Yeah, Time of the Year...
link |
It's called a joke, Michael.
link |
Man of the Year is not representative of good.
link |
It represents the most influential person of that year, and Hitler was.
link |
Wait, what were you upset about?
link |
When people like, well, look at Time Magazine.
link |
They called Hitler Man of the Year.
link |
This guy's awesome.
link |
They said this is the guy who moved the world the most.
link |
It's not like he was Stalin.
link |
I don't go out there.
link |
Now, that's who they like.
link |
Hitler's terrible.
link |
I'm not even joking.
link |
The attitude of people between Nazism and fascism and communism is stunning.
link |
In my upcoming book, I have all the receipts how the things that they were saying about
link |
Stalin at the time are, if you look back, it's unconscionable, and these people have
link |
had no accountability in the positive direction.
link |
That's not even at the time, and we need to get back to the selfishness stuff, but it's
link |
not even at the time.
link |
I think I've told this story.
link |
I was in the green room going on John Stossel's show, and I saw a bunch of libertarians in
link |
the green room all hanging out, and this guy walks in, this young guy walks in, and somebody
link |
says to me, he's a communist.
link |
I said, what do you mean?
link |
They said, no, no, he's a card carrying member of the Communist Party.
link |
I said, and that's okay with you guys?
link |
They go, yeah, yeah, he's a nice guy.
link |
I'm like, no, this is not acceptable.
link |
Let me quote Rand.
link |
Rand said she would rather talk to a philosophical Marxist, right?
link |
Did she not say this?
link |
Yeah, but this is a communist in the context of 21st century, right?
link |
Well, in the sense that we know exactly what, we know exactly.
link |
Yeah, yeah, that's...
link |
And this guy has the blood of 100 million people on his hands.
link |
I'm not letting him off the hook.
link |
So I engage with this guy, and literally we get into this... I'm telling him what I think
link |
of his ideas, and therefore what I think of him, and the people from the wardrobe department
link |
come out, and their chairs are put aside in this little gladiator ring.
link |
It's like the libertarians are sitting there amused, because to them it's just... I'm
link |
not going to name names, but to them it's just like, yeah, he's a communist, and I said
link |
at some point to them... I won't name names, because... I said at some point to them,
link |
if somebody walks into a room and says, I'm a Nazi, do you just treat him as, okay, let's
link |
go hang out and get some drinks?
link |
Because I wrote a book about this, the new write, and I did talk to Nazis, and I went
link |
to North Korea to talk to them.
link |
Yeah, because you were writing a book.
link |
But you're not going to hang out with a Nazi or a communist just like the regular person,
link |
To me, a Nazi and a communist are the same.
link |
I don't under... Okay, please explain this, because first of all, any time you have a
link |
lot of equivocation, I hate that, because I don't like equality.
link |
I think it's a bad concept.
link |
We're all sitting here as Jewish people, right?
link |
We're from the Soviet Union.
link |
To say these two things are basically the same, it's a matter of life and death for
link |
We'd be dead under Hitler.
link |
We're not doing so hot under Stalin, but we're still alive.
link |
There's some very big difference.
link |
So within the context, they're different, right?
link |
Hold on, one more thing.
link |
There's also one very big difference in that one has a lot worse of a brand name, and the
link |
other does not, even though the other should.
link |
So there's a context in which I would fear Stalin more than Hitler.
link |
There's a different context in which I would fear Hitler, but as ideologies, they are equally
link |
Wait, wait, but...
link |
Not the same, because the difference is between communism and fascism, but as ideologies,
link |
they're equally evil.
link |
They both view the individual as insignificant, unimportant, and they both basically want
link |
to kill any independent minded...
link |
Well, you're equating communism with Stalinism, so you're equating...
link |
No, I'm equating communism... I don't know what Stalinism is.
link |
Stalinism is one version of communism, I'm sure there are others.
link |
Communism is an evil ideology, no matter who practices it.
link |
I don't think that's... I think that's too loose, because here's one example.
link |
The first person who went to the Soviet Union from the left and denounced it was Emma Goldman.
link |
She was an anarcho communist, right?
link |
So she went there, she got deported from the United States.
link |
She went to Lenin to his face.
link |
Hold on, let me finish.
link |
You're already dismissing what I'm saying.
link |
Your body language, your emotions.
link |
History doesn't carry your feelings either.
link |
She goes to Lenin, she goes, we're supposed to be about free speech.
link |
We're supposed to be about the individual freedom.
link |
What are you doing?
link |
And he goes, free speech is a bourgeois extravagance.
link |
You can't have it during a revolution, too bad.
link |
She comes back to the West.
link |
Oh no, yeah, of course.
link |
She's more consistent with the idea.
link |
Yeah, he's more consistent.
link |
She's a compromise.
link |
Yeah, you're right.
link |
Well, she comes back to the West, the big red Emma, the big hero of the left.
link |
And she goes, you guys, this is a complete, not, she didn't say bad.
link |
She was very random.
link |
She goes, this is pure evil.
link |
This is horrifying.
link |
What they're doing to the workers, which you supposedly care about, completely oppressing.
link |
And when one person described, they go, when she got up to talk, it was a standing ovation.
link |
And when she was finished, you could hear a pin drop because she wasn't some capitalist.
link |
She wasn't some bourgeois conservative.
link |
She was as hard left for violent revolution as it gets.
link |
And so I don't think she, as a communist, is an evil person.
link |
Because if she wasn't evading, and with Rand, and I think in reality, the essence of evil
link |
is evasion, is ignoring the facts of reality, is putting your feelings ahead of your facts.
link |
She would realize that what was going on in the Soviet Union was the inevitable consequence
link |
That could be just she's dumb.
link |
So she could have changed her mind.
link |
She could have, coming back to the Soviet Union, said, these ideas are wrong.
link |
I now repudiate my ideas, not just of implementation, but my ideas.
link |
And then I would have said, yeah, she had been mistaken before, and now she's confronted
link |
But if she stayed a leftist, if she stayed a leftist to that extent, not just a mild leftist,
link |
then I think she's dishonest and therefore immoral.
link |
But you're using three words identically.
link |
You're saying dishonest, immoral, and evil.
link |
So evil is more – is an extreme form of immorality, right?
link |
The ideology she holds is still evil because the ideology –
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Maybe she's delusional.
link |
She might be delusional.
link |
But delusional and evil are the same.
link |
But she can be delusional.
link |
She cannot be delusional.
link |
See, I'm willing to accept a delusion before she's gone to the Soviet Union and seen it.
link |
Once she's gone to see it, I don't think that excuse holds anymore.
link |
I think now she's being confronted and she's lying to herself about the implications of
link |
Logically, it's inevitable that what happens in the Soviet Union has to happen in any communist
link |
So to play a little bit of a devil's advocate here, is it logically inevitable?
link |
Is it – can you imagine that there is communist systems where the consequences we've seen
link |
in the 20th century are not the consequences we get?
link |
In future societies, under different conditions, under different – with the internet, different
link |
communication schemes, different set of resources.
link |
As long as human beings are what we are.
link |
Now the Borg – you remember the Borg from Star Trek or whatever the series was?
link |
It's the highest of compliments.
link |
In this household.
link |
The Borg is the highest of lex.
link |
Now we're talking.
link |
The Borg is communist, right?
link |
The Borg is a different species.
link |
It has a different biology.
link |
It has a business – different form of consciousness.
link |
Now whether such a being could survive evolution is a question.
link |
Whether such a –
link |
They don't have to be intelligent.
link |
Yeah, but then the question is can you have free will, human cognitive cognition and be
link |
Maybe in another planet.
link |
But human beings –
link |
You've got to take DMT to meet the Borg.
link |
So human beings – no, communism is anti – the reason communism is evil is it's
link |
anti reality, anti human nature, anti the individual, and therefore it is inherently
link |
It cannot result in anything good coming out of it.
link |
Only bad can come of it.
link |
Do you think you could have predicted that before the 20th century?
link |
Yes, and plenty of people did.
link |
Mikhail Bakunin, who was an early communist Marxist rival in 18 – this is going to be
link |
in my upcoming book – in 1860, he sat down and wrote an essay, he goes, what Marx is
link |
advocating is insane.
link |
This is going to be worse than the czar.
link |
You're talking about complete totalitarian nightmare.
link |
When you put this into practice, it's going to be something we've never seen before.
link |
It's a pure horror.
link |
Like, he was a hardcore leftist.
link |
Look, Marx predicted it, right?
link |
We talked about this.
link |
Yeah, that's true too.
link |
Marx at some point says certain people cannot be part of the proletariat and they have to
link |
So this idea of mass murder and mass killing is not new to communism, it is an inherent
link |
part of what it means.
link |
You're either proletarian or you're not.
link |
And you're – look, and in Marx, it's in Marx, right?
link |
The individual doesn't matter.
link |
Now he might matter in his utopia because he knows he's got a marketing problem.
link |
See, Marx has a marketing problem because of the fact that you have individuals.
link |
How do you convince individuals to give up their individualism, to give up the individuality?
link |
What you say is, well, we have to go through this difficult process.
link |
We have to get to this utopia.
link |
And in this utopia, I mean, he's very Christian.
link |
I mean, this is the other thing about Marx.
link |
About the end time.
link |
Marx is very Christian in everything, in his morality, in his collectivism, and in the
link |
The end times for Marx is going back to the Garden of Eden.
link |
The end time for Marx is you don't have to do anything.
link |
Food is just available.
link |
Wealth is just available.
link |
You can do your hobbies.
link |
You can do everything.
link |
You can do whatever you want, whatever feelings, whatever.
link |
So it's going back to a Garden of Eden perspective on human.
link |
So he knows what that is going to require.
link |
It's going to require this dictatorship of the proletarian to get there.
link |
And he never tells you how we get there.
link |
There's no game plan.
link |
There's a dictatorship, then there's utopia.
link |
It's like the underpants.
link |
Step one, dictatorship.
link |
Step two, question mark.
link |
Step three, utopia.
link |
And the question mark is where the action is, right?
link |
Yeah, you yada yada the important part.
link |
And people buy this garbage, right?
link |
So there's nothing of value in Marx.
link |
I mean, let me be very clear.
link |
He gets capitalism wrong.
link |
He gets the proletarian wrong.
link |
He gets the workers wrong.
link |
He gets the labor theory of value is wrong.
link |
There is nothing of value.
link |
There's nothing of value in communism.
link |
It is a wrong, unfitted to human nature ideology from beginning to end.
link |
The clarity with which you speak is just not something I, I don't think I have that clarity
link |
But I mean, it has to do with that thing that where everybody has something to teach you.
link |
I just feel like I've been reading Mein Kampf recently, for example, for the first time.
link |
Something to learn from Hitler?
link |
Well, there's a lot to learn from Hitler.
link |
About the nature of evil, about wrong ideas, not about anything good, not about anything
link |
So that's probably a really bad example.
link |
Why is Hitler different than Marx?
link |
That's a very good question.
link |
But in terms of ideas, why is Hitler different than Marx?
link |
Why do we have to assume there's something to learn from Marx, but there's nothing, but
link |
we acknowledge that there's nothing positive to learn from Hitler.
link |
Because I mean, all right.
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I can tell you something, in the sense that like, there's an interesting question is,
link |
how did this person get from step A to being able to implement the ideas?
link |
I know, everybody should read, anybody who's interested should read Marx, because it's
link |
It's important in the history and a lot of people were influenced by it.
link |
Why was it influential?
link |
What is it that he says that appeals to people?
link |
I find it interesting to see all the parallels with Christianity.
link |
I think that's why to a large extent it appeals to people because they got to give up the
link |
unimportant part of religion and got to keep the fun parts of religion, the important parts
link |
to them of religion, the morality, for example.
link |
But no, there's not something positive to learn from everybody.
link |
In Ayn Rand's view, in your view, who was worse, Stalin or Hitler?
link |
I think worse is, this is something that I'll do a Randian sin and be evasive.
link |
It really drives me crazy when people sit down and have these competitions about like,
link |
if someone who's Jewish brings up the Holocaust and someone who's African American brings
link |
up slavery, and this is a conversation that I think is pointless and very hurtful and
link |
harmful and it is really silly and ridiculous.
link |
So it might make sense in some kind of stoner context about like you're doing the math and
link |
trying to figure out, but it's like, and yeah, you could be like, what would you rather have
link |
like this kind of cancer or full blown AIDS?
link |
In short, I mean, there's gotta be life expectancy, but these are such, I'll evade your question,
link |
I think we understand, and a lot of this is a function of the propaganda at the time,
link |
and I'm not using the word propaganda in a negative sense, the horrors of Hitler and
link |
I think, and one of the things I'm trying to solve with my upcoming book, there is a
link |
very poor understanding about the horrors of Stalinism and what that meant in practice.
link |
One of the reasons I wrote Dear Reader, my North Korea book, and what I was shocked and
link |
delighted by when I started writing Dear Reader, I thought to myself, look, I have very little
link |
capacity to affect change, but I can tell stories.
link |
I can write books.
link |
This is my competency.
link |
If I move the needle in America, we got it pretty good here.
link |
If I move the needle in North Korea, this could have really profound positive consequences.
link |
I set a very limited goal, and that goal is to change the conversation about North Korea,
link |
to stop it being regarded as a laughing stock and start regarding it as an existential horror.
link |
The metaphor I use always, and we brought up earlier, was the Joker, because people
link |
look at Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Il, his father, they look at a clown disguised as a buffoon,
link |
and that's valid, and I said, this is what I can do.
link |
I can move that camera a little bit, and now that camera, instead of looking at Kim Jong
link |
Un, Kim Jong Il, you see behind him literally millions of corpses, and when you see people
link |
putting on these performances in these shows, look at these fools, then you're like, everyone
link |
those people, their kid has a gun to their head right now.
link |
If someone puts a gun to your kid's head, you're going to put on clown makeup?
link |
Put on the shoes, whatever you want.
link |
So in terms of, people do not appreciate the horrors of Stalinism.
link |
I think this is a big fault of the right wing.
link |
You can't expect necessarily the New York Times to do this because of the blood on their
link |
hands, and for a long time, I was berating conservatives, I go, this was the big right
link |
wing victory, bloodless largely, the victory of the Soviet Union.
link |
No one's talking about it, no one's informing, and let's be clear, there are very many people
link |
who are Democrats who are on the left, who are violently opposed, literally violently
link |
opposed to the Soviet Union, it's horrors, this is not necessarily a partisan issue.
link |
And I'm like, all right, I'm going to do something about it.
link |
So I know that's not really literally your question, but you know, that's kind of information
link |
Let me ask you that question if it's okay.
link |
So what, which do we, can we learn more from, from a historical perspective looking forward?
link |
From like, which has more lessons in, in how to avoid it, how to, and just general lessons
link |
about human nature.
link |
Well, I mean, I agree with Michael that it's not important who's more evil because they're
link |
both evil and they're both just so evil that the differences don't matter.
link |
What matters is what is the ideology?
link |
What is the, what is, what are the consequences?
link |
What do we understand from it?
link |
What are we worried about?
link |
What are we going to avoid?
link |
So I'm not worried about Nazism qua Nazism because everybody hates Nazism.
link |
I mean, it's uniform that that's out.
link |
Even the people I think on the far right in America are staying away from the cliches
link |
of Nazism, although some of them are stupid enough not to.
link |
But, but in the end, if, if, if the United States goes authoritarian right, it's not
link |
going to be Nazism.
link |
It'd be some other form of fascism because that is so obviously, you know, being understood
link |
as evil and bad that there's almost no understanding that the evil of communism, I mean, you brought
link |
it up earlier, right?
link |
Almost nobody understands that communism is an evil ideology, that there's, that there's
link |
nothing worthwhile there, that any, any attempt to go in that direction in any sustainable
link |
way is destructive.
link |
They are, as you mentioned, they're economists out there claiming they are communists.
link |
I mean, I find that despicable that anybody would claim to be a communist economist or
link |
communist anything, because I think that's, it's a, it's a, it's a ideology that has
link |
no basis, but we haven't learned that.
link |
So to me, communism is the much bigger threat because we still think it's some kind of beautiful
link |
ideal in, in the world around us.
link |
I think Nazism is out, but I think, I think fascism is a, is a massive threat out there
link |
because I don't think we've learned real lessons of, nobody knows what fascism is.
link |
Everybody thinks fascism is Nazism.
link |
They don't, they don't recognize that in a sense we are already fascist and that we're
link |
certainly heading in that direction.
link |
So they don't know what it is.
link |
And again, we haven't studied, and the real lesson here is we haven't studied what unifies
link |
them both because there's not a big difference between fascism and communism.
link |
There's no big difference between Nazism and communism.
link |
What does unify them?
link |
What unifies them is the common good, the public interest.
link |
What unifies them is this idea that there is some elite group of people who can run
link |
our lives for us, for the common good, for the public interest.
link |
And that you don't matter.
link |
You as an individual, you individual don't matter and they, they will dictate how you
link |
And you know, so these are philosopher kings.
link |
It goes back to Plato's philosophy, but it really unifies it.
link |
Think about communism, communism is about the sacrifice of the individual to the proletarian.
link |
Who is the proletarian?
link |
It's this collective group here.
link |
Who represents a proletarian?
link |
Well they have, somebody has to, somebody has to tell the proletarian what they believe
link |
in because they don't know, because there is no collective consciousness.
link |
So you need a Stalin and this is the point about Marxism.
link |
Marxism needs a dictator because somebody has to represent the values, the public interest,
link |
what's good for the public.
link |
Nazism needs the same thing.
link |
Just Nazism replace proletarian with Aryans, the Aryan race.
link |
And you have exactly the same thing.
link |
You need a dictator to tell us what's good for the Aryan people so we can do what's good
link |
for the Aryan people.
link |
So it's impossible to have a communist system or a fascist system without a dictator naturally
link |
It's not, it's not possible to have a George.
link |
It's not naturally, it's ideologically.
link |
It's absolutely impossible to have that on scale.
link |
You can certainly have communes where people behave communistically.
link |
Because it's not inside the ideology.
link |
Let me talk about fascism because fascism definitionally is going to have a strong man.
link |
I don't even know how it could be fascism without that.
link |
And let's talk, what you said earlier on is about how people don't know what fascism is.
link |
Fascists don't know what fascism is.
link |
So there's a superb book by John Diggins from the early seventies called Mussolini and Fascism,
link |
the view from America.
link |
So I find Mussolini to be a far more interesting figure than Hitler because he had a much more
link |
He was much more of an innovator.
link |
He was an intellectual.
link |
Which is shocking because he always comes across as a buffoon, but he was actually a
link |
Why did he not resist Hitler at all?
link |
So one of the things with fascism is it comes, it's a direct line from Kant to Mussolini.
link |
So basically there is a philosopher who I adore, who I'm sure you don't, called Schopenhauer.
link |
And Schopenhauer, the question became, Rand was not a particularly humorous person.
link |
She had some moments of wit.
link |
There's a great moment when she was on Tom Snyder show in 1980, I believe, and she's
link |
talking about Kant and she goes, Immanuel Kant and all his illegitimate children, if
link |
you catch my meaning, she mean all his bastards.
link |
But the host Tom Snyder did not pick up on it.
link |
If you watch it on YouTube, you could pick up on it.
link |
And what happened was once Kant bifurcated reality into the phenomenal world, the pure
link |
idea world and the numeral world, the question became, well, what is the nature of this world
link |
And Hegel had it meant reason.
link |
I don't know even know what that means theoretically, that the world of reason is idea and this
link |
is Schopenhauer who hated Hegel, who constantly attacked him by name and Hegel's followers
link |
He was a very big innovator in a malevolent way because he said the nature of reality,
link |
this idea is will, meaning the universe doesn't care about you and it's constantly in this
link |
reality putting urges in your mind, values.
link |
And when you denounce these values and urges, that's the basis of morality.
link |
And from there it went to Nietzsche and the will isn't mindless, it is a will to power.
link |
Mussolini took this and basically said, because the will to power is the real reality, the
link |
Kantian idea, therefore all of this is secondary.
link |
So if we will it, we can make it happen.
link |
When you have this concept of my willpower is stronger than reality and you're like,
link |
okay, how's this program going to work?
link |
We can make it happen.
link |
That was why fascism is not a very coherent ideology because explicitly, there's a book
link |
called from 1936 called The Philosophy of Fascism, which tried to codify this, 36, this
link |
is a long time ago, where they're like, we're against reason and explicitly rationality.
link |
We are for willpower, for strength, and if you are strong enough and united enough, you
link |
can force these things to work.
link |
So there's a lot that is not taught about this ideology.
link |
I highly recommend people read the books from the time.
link |
And what was fascinating about Mussolini is he was regarded as the moderate.
link |
Because the 1930s, you had the Great Depression, all the intellectuals said, this proves capitalism
link |
can't work, the Great Depression, obviously, air quotes, is capitalism's fault.
link |
Then you have the alternative, the USSR.
link |
Well, that's not tenable for us.
link |
Here comes Mussolini and Mussolini says, I'm going to take the best of both worlds.
link |
I have aspects of markets, capitalism, but I don't have this chaos, but I also don't
link |
have complete government control of the bureaucrats.
link |
I'm going to have this combination.
link |
And there was a Broadway song, You're the Top, you're Mussolini.
link |
That was later edited out because that's when he took a bad turn.
link |
But this is kind of the fascist idea.
link |
And it's about power and it's about control.
link |
That's the essence.
link |
So they don't care.
link |
Fascists don't care who owns stuff, owns in quotes, because what's important is who controls
link |
So you can own your home, but if I get to tell you when you can sell it, for how much
link |
you can sell it and what you can do on that home, then I'm in control of it.
link |
That's the essence of fascism.
link |
And if you think about it, we live today in a much more fascist economic context than
link |
We pretend that corporations are private, but when everything they do is regulated,
link |
who they can hire, how much they pay them, when and how they can fire them, what they
link |
can do in their property, it's all control.
link |
That's the way fascists start controlling everything.
link |
But it's not possible to have checks on power and balance of power at the top of fascism
link |
or communist systems.
link |
The question was whether in fascist systems or communist systems, we're saying the dictator
link |
naturally or must emerge.
link |
I don't say emerge, the dictator is the one who makes the fascist system.
link |
Yeah, fascism, well, it could emerge because for example, I think today in America we're
link |
moving much more towards fascism or socialism, and at some point that'll manifest itself
link |
in some kind of dictator.
link |
And the dictator might be different than a Mussolini or Nazis, it might be couched in
link |
some kind of pseudo constitutional American presence.
link |
It would be a lot easier for a female to be a fascist dictator in America than a male,
link |
because do you have that softness?
link |
She's not gonna come off as a strong woman, people won't see it coming, in my opinion.
link |
I think it's gonna be a nationalist, religionist, environmentalist, I think somebody who can
link |
combine those three.
link |
Well, Hitler did those, yeah.
link |
And somebody who can combine those three and articulate the case for it, I think America
link |
So you think it's possible for fascism to arise in the world again?
link |
Oh, of course, it had never went away, they just adopt the name.
link |
Because the fundamental ideas, the Kantian ideas, the ideas that are behind fascism never
link |
They're still as popular, if anything, more popular than they were back then, Marx is
link |
I think these ideas are prevalent, they're out there, and absolutely, I think America
link |
is ready for them.
link |
Again, it won't be quite in the form that we've experienced in the past, it'll be in
link |
a uniquely American form, couched at a flag, and of course, it was couched at a flag before.
link |
But no, yes, an authoritarian, some form of authoritarianism is necessary, because the
link |
fundamental principle behind both communism and fascism is the unimportance of the individual.
link |
The individual is nothing, the individual is a nobody, and the importance of the collective.
link |
The collective will, the collective soul, the collective consciousness, but the collective
link |
has no will, has no soul, has no consciousness.
link |
So somebody has to emerge to speak for the collective, otherwise, everything falls apart.
link |
So it's necessary, whether it's a committee or whether it's one person, how exactly, somebody
link |
has to speak for the collective.
link |
Even a committee doesn't function as a committee, right?
link |
Most committees, particularly when the committee is about dictating how people should live,
link |
somebody is going to, because now it becomes really, really important, somebody is going
link |
to dominate that committee and rule over it, because you don't want independent sources,
link |
independent voices, because the individual doesn't matter, the individual doesn't count.
link |
It's a natural hierarchical, so you have seven people that ostensibly have the same role,
link |
someone is going to emerge as a leader naturally, and some people are going to follow.
link |
Yeah, it's the same reason you cannot have the Richard Wolff type socialism of, and this
link |
is the more, if you will, innocent part of his ideas.
link |
Oh, why can't we have corporations all be worker owned, and everybody votes on everything,
link |
and we vote on who should be CEO, and no, communism, fascism, most ideas necessitate
link |
ultimately authoritarians, and that's most of human history.
link |
This idea of liberty, this idea of freedom, even the limited freedom we have today.
link |
It's a recent invention.
link |
It's a recent invention.
link |
It happens in little pockets throughout history.
link |
We had a little bit of this democracy stuff, partial, only a few, some people got to vote
link |
and it wasn't rights respecting, because they didn't have the concept of rights in Athens,
link |
You had it in a few Greek cities.
link |
We maybe had a version of it in Venice, we had a version of it in city states around
link |
the world, but then it was invented by the founding fathers in this country.
link |
That's what makes the founding of America so important, and so different, and such a
link |
radical thing to have happened historically.
link |
Authoritarianism is common.
link |
So I was looking at some statistics that 53% of people in the world live under authoritarian
link |
Oh, because India is democratic, so I guess they don't count India, but yes, it used to
link |
How do we change that?
link |
How do we change that?
link |
And even the authoritarianism in a country like China is a lot less than it used to be
link |
So they were better off than they were under Mao.
link |
How do we change it?
link |
We have to declare, we have to change the ethical views of people.
link |
This brings us back to selfishness, because as long as the standard of morality is the
link |
group, others, as long as the standard of value is what other people want, what other
link |
people think, as long as you are alive only to be sacrificed to the group, that's why
link |
you have to challenge Christianity.
link |
As long as the Jesus on a cross dying for other people's sin is viewed as this noble,
link |
wonderful act instead of one of the most unjust things to ever happen to anybody, as long
link |
as the common good and the public interest are the standards by which we evaluate things,
link |
we will always drift towards fascism, some form of authoritarianism.
link |
Can I answer your question?
link |
I think there's something that has to go along with what Yaron was saying, and I know he's
link |
going to agree with me, which is technology.
link |
Because if it becomes harder technologically for the authoritarian and more expensive for
link |
him to input or force his edicts, that is going to create a pocket of freedom regardless
link |
of what the masses think.
link |
And the masses, hold on let me finish, the masses as a rule are not going to be able
link |
to think in general anyway.
link |
I have a much more elitist view of mankind than Rand does.
link |
And let me give you one specific example, which I mentioned in my book that you write.
link |
Let's suppose it's 1990, not that long ago, we all remember 1990.
link |
And we're having an argument about censorship.
link |
And Yaron says, I want full freedom of the press, freedom of books, publish whatever
link |
you want, whatever, free speech.
link |
And I say, well, what about books like Mein Kampf?
link |
What about, you know, people read this the wrong idea?
link |
What about child pornography, things like this?
link |
Like, where are you going to draw the line?
link |
And we could argue along, Lex appears from the future, and he goes, hey, guys, this conversation
link |
And we're like, Lex, you look exactly the same.
link |
I'm like, yeah, of course, Robo Stone Age.
link |
And you go, I'm from the future.
link |
And I go, wait a minute, black president?
link |
And you go, look, this conversation is moot, because in a few years from now, you will
link |
be able to send any book anywhere on earth at the speed of light.
link |
You can make infinite copies in one second.
link |
And you could send it to anyone such that they can only open this book if they know
link |
And I go, well, how much is this going to cost?
link |
And I go, wait, wait, you're telling me I can make infinite copies of any book and teleport
link |
them at the speed of light anywhere for free?
link |
And you would say, yes, we would think he's insane.
link |
But that's the status quo, right?
link |
So technology has done far more to fight government censorship of literature and ideas than has
link |
spreading the right ideas.
link |
So when you have things like crypto, which makes money less accessible than a gold block
link |
in your house, when you have things like people being able to travel quickly, those are also
link |
necessary compliments to having the right ideas.
link |
And Rand herself said that she couldn't have come up with her philosophy before the Industrial
link |
So as time goes forward and we have more technology and we have more discourse.
link |
But for very different reasons, she said that, right?
link |
But it's also a lot easier to persuade people the right ideas.
link |
So I kind of agree.
link |
Maybe I'm more pessimistic or maybe I don't get the technology completely.
link |
That's because you're a boomer.
link |
I get that insult a lot.
link |
I think I'm the last year of the boomer generation.
link |
I think I hit that last.
link |
I love you so much.
link |
So the reason she said she couldn't have developed her, the reason she said she couldn't develop
link |
the philosophy without the Industrial Revolution is the link between reason and wealth was not
link |
obvious before the Industrial Revolution.
link |
And that, for example, it's not obvious to Aristotle.
link |
Aristotle doesn't see the link between rationality and wealth creation.
link |
And money is barren, interest has no productive function, bankers don't have.
link |
So you had to see it existentially to be able to see reason is the source of wealth creation.
link |
So I think that's a little different.
link |
Now, there is a sense in which, yes, technology makes it more difficult for authoritarians
link |
to achieve their authoritarianism.
link |
I'm not convinced that they can't.
link |
I didn't say can't.
link |
At a certain point, because they can turn off the electricity.
link |
I'm just saying it becomes more expensive.
link |
It becomes more expensive, no question.
link |
It becomes more expensive.
link |
And we're still beings that live in a physical reality, therefore, they can still harm us
link |
in this physical reality.
link |
But let me say this, it's going to sound as absurd.
link |
If there was technology that we could teleport anywhere on Earth at the speed of light, that
link |
would certainly go a long way towards hurting authoritarianism.
link |
If there was some way to go, and of course, they could teleport too.
link |
And this is, of course, the danger of they can use the technology too, and look at what
link |
the Chinese are doing with social scores and with monitoring people and cameras everywhere.
link |
So there's a sense in which you probably had more privacy before some of this technology.
link |
So it's not obvious to me.
link |
So to me, it's all about ideas.
link |
And if we don't get the ideas right, technology will be used for evil, yes, and it will allow
link |
some of us maybe to escape for a little while in some realms, but others not.
link |
You know, Iran and North Korea do a pretty good job shutting themselves away from technology,
link |
although a lot gets through in the Iranian, at least with Iran.
link |
I don't know about North Korea, how much gets through.
link |
It's really undermining them, which is wonderful.
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Yeah, which is great.
link |
So yes, but it's more than that.
link |
And this is what leads me to be optimistic.
link |
It's that we live in a world today where 7 billion people basically have access to all
link |
of human knowledge, all of human knowledge.
link |
It's not like in Rome.
link |
When Rome fell, all of human knowledge disappeared.
link |
Now some of it escaped to Byzantine, some of the Byzantines had and ultimately land
link |
up with the Arabs and found its way back into Western civilization through them.
link |
But a lot of knowledge disappeared, just wiped out, right?
link |
How to build a dome, how to build a big dome, how to have...
link |
You know, in Pompeii, they had faucets, running water and faucets.
link |
They didn't have faucets for another thousand years, right?
link |
They couldn't build tall buildings once Rome came down.
link |
The Great Pyramid of Egypt was the tallest building on earth till like 1840, it was crazy.
link |
Rome was a city of a million people.
link |
Other than China, there wasn't another city of a million people in the West until London
link |
in the 19th century, 1500 years later.
link |
So it all disappeared because all of it was concentrated basically in one place.
link |
Today none of that exists because of the internet, because of universities everywhere, institutions.
link |
I mean, think about how many engineers there are in the world today, right?
link |
Who have basically all different...
link |
Basically the same level of knowledge on how to build stuff.
link |
So even if the United States went to some kind of dark ages, it's unlikely the whole
link |
world goes into that kind of dark ages.
link |
So I am optimistic in that sense that the fusion of knowledge is so broad today that
link |
other than wiping out all electricity on the planet, everything electronic on the planet,
link |
it's just, it's not going to be possible to control us all.
link |
And in that sense, technology is going to make it possible for us to survive and to
link |
stay semi free, because I don't think full freedom, but semi free.
link |
Because full freedom, you need the ideas.
link |
Because full freedom means you need some political implementation.
link |
No, full freedom means anarchy, but we know that.
link |
So we need to get into that because we can't leave without pointing out that we fundamentally
link |
disagree about that.
link |
Oh, that's beautiful to be continued on that one.
link |
Let me ask about one particular technology that I've been learning a lot about, thinking
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a lot about, talking about, which is Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general, but Bitcoin
link |
specifically, which a lot of people argue that the Bitcoin, that setting ideas aside,
link |
when you look at practical tools that governments use to manipulate its people is inflation
link |
of the monetary system, within the monetary system.
link |
And so they see Bitcoin as a way for the, for individuals to fight that, to go outside
link |
those specific government control systems and thereby sort of decentralizing power.
link |
You know, there's a case to be made historically of the 20th century that you couldn't have
link |
Stalin, you couldn't have Hitler, you couldn't have much of the evil that you see in the
link |
world if they couldn't control the monetary system.
link |
You couldn't have had the New Deal.
link |
And FDR realized this very quickly.
link |
That's why they confiscated all the gold.
link |
Everybody knows FDR is going to come in to become president and confiscate the gold.
link |
So one of the mythologies, the myths about the Great Depression is that there were all
link |
these bank runs that, well, bank runs happened because everybody was afraid that FDR would
link |
get elected to confiscate the gold.
link |
So everybody ran to the bank and took the gold.
link |
Little did they realize that he would confiscate their private holdings in their own backyards.
link |
He would force them to dig up the gold from their own backyards.
link |
But yes, one of the first things FDR did in spite of denying it throughout the campaign,
link |
right, he was asked about this over and over again and denied it.
link |
One of the first things was take over the gold and take the United States Federal Reserve
link |
off the gold standard so that they can, in a sense, print money and that he could start
link |
Yeah, what people don't realize, just to clarify what Yaron said, is FDR, this is something
link |
that's so crazy to us that we think, okay, I'm misunderstanding it.
link |
FDR made it illegal for people to own gold unless it's like a wedding ring.
link |
And before that, contracts, because inflation was a concern, I make a contract with Yaron,
link |
right, I said, okay, you're either going to pay me in $1,500 for my work or the gold
link |
equivalent because if that $1,500, you know, weimar Germany and you have hyperinflation,
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I don't want that $1,500.
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Just give me the gold bullion.
link |
And FDR said all of those clauses, he broke every contract, they don't matter.
link |
So now if I say, Yaron says, okay, you owe me three feet of drywall.
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And I go, here's three feet of drywall.
link |
And you go, wait, wait, wait, three feet is 36 inches.
link |
I go, no, no, not anymore.
link |
It's like, what am I supposed to do?
link |
And because you have, when you print more money, the value of every individual dollar
link |
matters less, it becomes that much harder to plan anything, either in the government
link |
level or in the private level, because if I'm managing outlays, if I'm trying to pay
link |
my workers, I'm trying to build factories, I'm thinking long term, and I don't know what
link |
this dollar is going to buy in 10 years, that puts an enormous incentive for me to spend
link |
it now and not save it, because if I save it, it's going to be worth a lot less.
link |
And the worst thing about inflation, and this is something I think people who are pro capitalism
link |
don't talk about enough, they do talk about it, I would just like to see it more.
link |
This by far hurts the poor, the poorest of the poor the most.
link |
When we came to this country, my mom told me they would go to 86th street in Bensonhurst
link |
with the fruit stands to buy Mika Chika, some grapes.
link |
And you go to this fruit stand, and she'd walk all the way to the other corner.
link |
And if it was three cents more a pound, or less a pound, she'd walk all the way back,
link |
because that three cents mattered.
link |
Now if I have this dollar, and it's 5% inflation or whatever, and next year it's 95 cents,
link |
me and you, the three of us might not care, but if I'm destitute hand to mouth, and I've
link |
got 5% less, that is really a material consequence of my life.
link |
So inflation really is evil, because it hurts the people for who those pennies matter.
link |
Well, one of the ways the government gets around that, and it's because they get smart
link |
to that, is they index everything, so they index your social security, they index welfare,
link |
they try to make sure, but that only makes you more dependent on them.
link |
And the people in the modern context that inflation hurts the most are savers, people
link |
trying to save money.
link |
And Fed policy right now is just horrific if you're a saver, because the Fed, the interest
link |
rates are zero, you get nothing on your saving, and cost of living is going up, maybe not
link |
at a huge level, but it is going up, and yet you can't even save to keep the value of your
link |
And the government controls, and this has massive perverse effects, because it's not
link |
just that prices go up, it's that prices don't reflect reality anymore.
link |
So some prices go up, some prices might not.
link |
Investments get distorted, things get produced that shouldn't get produced, and then people
link |
like Richard Wolff turn around and blame all the distortions, and the perversions, and
link |
the crashes, and the financial crisis on capitalism.
link |
Not on the fact that the Fed, look at the financial crisis, financial crisis was caused,
link |
you could argue by inflation, and we could get into that if you wanted, but that's probably
link |
a three hour show, just that, right?
link |
It was caused by the Federal Reserve, and yet who got blamed for the financial crisis?
link |
Who would Richard Wolff is going to jump up and down?
link |
This is a crisis of capitalism, this was caused by capitalism, but capitalism is the negation
link |
Capitalism says there should be no Fed.
link |
That's item number one on the list of the things capitalists want, is to get rid of
link |
the Fed, and then grant you guys your wish, have competition for currency, and let's see
link |
I'm skeptical, but I don't care.
link |
My point is under freedom.
link |
I don't care who wins, I just want free choices, and let the best currency win.
link |
I doubt that becomes Bitcoin, but it doesn't really matter.
link |
If I'm wrong, great.
link |
Let me add to this, and I think people appreciate, and this is a leftist, leftism at its best,
link |
that the government and the banks are in bed with each other.
link |
This I don't think is a particularly controversial statement.
link |
Well I don't like that statement, let me just say why I don't like it.
link |
I don't like it because it assumes that they're equal partners, or that there's causality
link |
goes in both directions.
link |
From day one, and this is really from day one of the establishment of the United States,
link |
banks have been regulated by the state, and the reason for that is primarily Jefferson
link |
and others, founders, distrust of finance.
link |
So from the beginning, banks have been controlled by the state.
link |
Now over time, if I'm controlling you, you won't have influence over me, because I get
link |
to, so yes, they get into bed over time, so I don't like it that they're in bed together.
link |
One is dominating over the other, and the other is participating, because what choice
link |
I should explain to you how things work when you get in bed, and it's not always equal.
link |
Okay, so let's talk about safe words, which is very Randian topic, she doesn't like those.
link |
I had to read that scene three times in the Fountainhead, because I couldn't believe what
link |
No, because I looked at the back cover, I'm like, a woman wrote this book in 1943, I
link |
must be misunderstanding the scene.
link |
She sure had a lot of shades of gray.
link |
So, no, she hated that.
link |
Only black and white.
link |
No, but what I meant is, 2008, you have the bailout of Wall Street.
link |
Whereas in 2020, we saw every medium and small business under the sun go under, there's not
link |
even a pretense that these are going to be bailed out.
link |
So the priorities of the politicians, in my view, are always going to be towards powerful
link |
entities, powerful corporations, and they're not going to be about the medium guy, the
link |
Let me just finish my point, because I see you champing at the bit.
link |
At the very least, if you have regulation, people influencing each other.
link |
With Bitcoin, and with crypto, that is not a possibility.
link |
You do not have any agency who is king of Bitcoin, who is the Federal Reserve of Bitcoin.
link |
There is no organizing organization or management team.
link |
Now, you could say this is a bad thing, but you can't say that this is a different thing
link |
to money as opposed to Federal Reserve system.
link |
So I agree with that description of Bitcoin, my problems with Bitcoin, elsewhere.
link |
Let me just say about the financial crisis, I don't like it phrased that way again.
link |
They let Lehman go under and destroyed Lehman Brothers.
link |
In the past, they destroyed Drexel Burnham because they didn't like Michael Malkin.
link |
They are vindictive.
link |
It's not an accident that the Treasury Secretary at the time was an ex chairman of Goldman
link |
Sachs, not Lehman Brothers, and Goldman hates Lehman.
link |
The next day, they bail out AIG.
link |
What I got out of financial crisis more than anything, and by the way, there wasn't a bailout,
link |
it wasn't even a bailout, because they gave money to every bank, whether they had problems
link |
And indeed, I know several bankers, including big banks, like JP Morgan and Wes Falgo, and
link |
a friend of mine, John Allison of BB&T, who told them explicitly, we don't want your money,
link |
we don't need your money, and they were basically, a gun was put to their head and they said,
link |
you don't take the money, we'll shut you down, basically, the equivalent of that.
link |
So they, A, wanted a virtue signal, so there's a big virtue signal, we're taking care of
link |
things, don't worry, we've got everything under control, even though they were completely
link |
panicking and they had no clue what they were doing.
link |
One of the things that the financial crisis really illustrated was how pathetic, ignorant,
link |
and incompetent the people at the top are, and they knew it.
link |
And they, you know, Sir Paulson goes to Congress, says, give me $700 billion, don't tell me
link |
how to use it, because I have no clue, just give it to me and give me your authoritarian
link |
power to do it any way I want.
link |
And that was not out of a sense of grandeur, that was a sense of panic, he had no idea,
link |
he had no clue, none of them did.
link |
They bailed out everybody they could, everybody under their, you know, within their periphery,
link |
when they thought it was appropriate, they were vindictive about some people like Lehman,
link |
it was complete arbitrary use of power.
link |
The bankers didn't benefit from this, indeed, many bankers that took their money lost from
link |
Bank stocks got crushed after the bailout.
link |
Before the bailout, bank stocks were doing okay, and right after top was announced, bank
link |
stocks crushed because this was bad for banks, it wasn't good for banks.
link |
This is just central planning gone amok, it's not them bailing out elites, it's them, you
link |
know, throwing money at a problem without knowing what they would actually do and what
link |
the consequences would be.
link |
But the point is, sorry, where we agree, the focus will always be on bailing out elites.
link |
But little banks got money too.
link |
No, I was saying that last year, there's no talk of saving ice and vice, saving Century
link |
21, saving all these other industries.
link |
But sure there were, if you look at it, it's just, sure there was, if you look at the,
link |
if you look at what the Fed did, the Fed was bailing out third, fourth class businesses
link |
in all kinds of areas that you wouldn't consider elitist areas, the whole PPP, the way...
link |
You're talking 2008.
link |
No, I'm talking about now.
link |
I'm talking about COVID last year.
link |
What the Fed did was unbelievable, the kind of bonds that they were buying, even 2008,
link |
even after 2008, I couldn't believe what they did last year.
link |
PPP, the Payable Protection Program was targeted at everybody, everybody got PPP.
link |
I don't think it's about bailing out elites, it's about securing their power base.
link |
And if they believe that securing their power base is Wall Street, then they'll bail out
link |
They believe securing their power base is writing checks to restaurant owners all over
link |
the country, they'll write checks to restaurant owners all over the country, which is what
link |
they did with PPP.
link |
It's all about power for them and it's whatever will achieve power, whatever will result in
link |
I don't think it's about elites.
link |
I don't see elitism in the bailouts of last year.
link |
I agree it wasn't last year.
link |
I'm saying that's one distinction between 2008 and 2020.
link |
And I do think, just one more thing, I do think getting in good bed with the elites
link |
is a great mechanism in general for maintaining one's power.
link |
Yeah, that's not a dispute.
link |
Depending on how we define it.
link |
Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah.
link |
You mentioned there's some criticism towards Bitcoin, there's a lot of excitement about
link |
the technology of Bitcoin for the resistance against this kind of central state pursuit
link |
So that's part of my criticism because I don't think it works.
link |
So yeah, I can imagine a world, I can imagine, I'd love to see a technology evolve that where
link |
money is competitive and it's a financial instrument that the government cannot touch.
link |
You think the state is too powerful?
link |
I think two things.
link |
I think right now, and maybe this won't be true in the future, right now, I think crypto
link |
It cannot function as money right now.
link |
It functions as a mechanism.
link |
It functions as a mechanism to transfer, it's a technology that allows me to transfer fiat
link |
money from place to place, but it doesn't function, and it can't because it's too volatile.
link |
I've sold things with Bitcoin.
link |
No, I know you have, but I can sell things.
link |
I can buy things and sell things with my airline model.
link |
So there are lots of ways in which you can use things as money, but it doesn't make them
link |
If you're using something as money, it's money.
link |
So let me take something you said before.
link |
And it contradicts, I think, Bitcoin.
link |
You said one of the things about money is that it's stable.
link |
I know what it's gonna buy tomorrow, right?
link |
This is why we're against inflation, because I know what the dollar today I can plan, because
link |
I don't know what Bitcoin's gonna be worth tomorrow.
link |
So I can't plan with Bitcoin.
link |
Bitcoin is way too volatile to serve right now as money.
link |
Now, the argument from Bitcoiners is, yes, it's still being adopted.
link |
At some point, it'll reach a certain crucial mass.
link |
High perfect monetization, yeah.
link |
Yes, and then it will become money, because at that point, it can be used as money, because
link |
then it'll have a stable value.
link |
Maybe right now, it's not useful as money, because I can't predict what...
link |
I can't invest in it knowing what the value will be in five years.
link |
Right now, it's an asset.
link |
It's not a monetary unit.
link |
It's much more functions as an asset.
link |
Asset's value can go up.
link |
It's functioning much more as an asset than as money.
link |
That's not in dispute.
link |
I agree with that completely.
link |
So I don't think it's money.
link |
But so I think it's still...
link |
I think it can compete as a money with something tangible.
link |
So I think in a free market, some kind of crypto backed by gold would be more successful.
link |
So Bitcoin folks argue that Bitcoin has all the same fundamental properties that does
link |
So it's backed by...
link |
There's a scarcity to it, and it's backed by proof of work, so it's backed by physical
link |
And so they say that's a very natural replacement of gold, so it doesn't need to be connected
link |
So there are two things that gold has that it doesn't have.
link |
One is gold is not finite.
link |
Gold supply actually grows over time.
link |
Bitcoin at some point is truly finite.
link |
At least unless you count the fact that you can split bitcoins and create coins, but that's
link |
a whole other question.
link |
The other one is that gold has value beyond its use as a currency, beyond its use as money.
link |
For jewelry and stuff.
link |
But you minimize that.
link |
But jewelry and stuff has been important for the human race for 100,000 years.
link |
You can find jewelry in caves, for the cavemen designed jewelry and wore them.
link |
So we obviously as human beings value jewelry a lot.
link |
And almost all jewelry evolved to be made out of gold because whatever it is within
link |
us is attracted to shiny gold in particular, shiny object generally.
link |
So there's something about gold that appeals to human beings.
link |
There's some value that gold has beyond its being a currency.
link |
It's not that Bitcoin doesn't.
link |
Now it's not enough to use it as money.
link |
Lots of things appeal to human beings.
link |
But those are two characteristics.
link |
One that it's not finite and second that it is a value beyond that Bitcoin doesn't have.
link |
Don't you think the finiteness could be framed as a feature?
link |
The scarcity of Bitcoin?
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No, because I think it creates a real problem with scarcity economically.
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It's the issue of planning.
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There is a mechanism, there's a beautiful mechanism in markets that as the supply of
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gold is in a sense the quantity of gold is...
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Prices are going down because there's too little gold, right?
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So the value of gold in a sense in dollar terms, the prices are going down.
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What happens then is there's an incentive to then go mine for more gold, right?
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Because it becomes cheaper and cheaper to mine as the price goes down.
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So you mine for more gold, so it keeps increasing and it keeps increasing basically very correlated
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to the rate of increasing productivity.
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That's the beauty of gold mining because prices are related to gold, gold is the dominant
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money and it increases at about the same rate as productivity.
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So it keeps prices relatively stable.
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You still have bouts of inflation and deflation, but it keeps it relatively stable.
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With Bitcoin it's fine at its ends, now prices will only decline.
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What rate will they decline at?
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They'll decline at the rate of productivity increases.
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It's hard to predict the rate at which productivity increases.
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For example, technological shocks can change that dramatically.
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You could get bouts of dramatic deflation, dramatic price drops that could be problematic
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in terms of planning the same problem of inflation just reversed that you had before.
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So again, it's a technical issue.
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I'm sure there are ways to get around it.