The following is a conversation with Michael Malis and Yaron Brooke, Michael's third time

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

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

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

White Pill.

Yaron is an objectivist philosopher, chairman of the Einrand Institute, host of the Yaron

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

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

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

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

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

and philosophy of Einrand, but they are also very different in style.

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

elements.

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

is very good.

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

the banana.

I'm guessing it's probably me, I'm the banana.

But I hope the final result, the final dish, if you will, is equally delicious.

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

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

case.

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

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

Be patient with us.

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

a wiser person on the other end of it.

I know I was.

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

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

out with and learn from.

This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here's my conversation with Michael Malis and Yaron

Rook.

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

Are we recording now?

Is it starting?

Or are you just talking?

I'm not recording at all.

I'm not going to compliment this if it's not part of the show.

Yes, he does.

All the time.

He speaks very highly of me.

Big charity.

I'm not sure.

He only does this to me on the show.

Objectives don't like charities, so don't compliment him, he won't think it's sincere.

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

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

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

What would life be like?

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

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

There was murder in the question, if I remember.

Listen, he sent us homework, right?

All these questions.

I ignored it.

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

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

island in terms of interpersonal.

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

And I know a little bit about the dynamics.

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

there's space to go away if I'm annoyed at you.

I don't think it would be that hard at all.

What's our goals on a desert island?

Food, shelter, survival.

Survival.

Survival, basically.

Survival and getting out of it, right?

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

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

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

They want to thrive.

They want to get off of the island.

Why would they be conflict?

Yes.

They can be conflict, and they can be conflict, but they find ways to deal with it.

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

they get into mobs and groups and collectives that ideology can really motivate them to

do horrible things.

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

Flies has had on our culture.

I read in high school, it's a superb book.

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

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

obviously that book is about children, that very quickly, it is not about conflict.

It very quickly becomes about cooperation.

Let's work together.

We all have the same goal.

This is not a time to worry about other things.

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

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

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

Well, to the extent that they're bad people, bad people are dealt with.

This is true of all of, how did we survive as a species?

How have we survived as a species?

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

Tribe survived.

They survived by cooperation.

They survived by dealing with bad people.

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

to thrive within the group.

When bad people arise, they deal with them.

Sometimes these groups get captured by bad people and bad ideas and probably from day

one that was going on, the whole tribe is probably a bad idea to begin with.

Underneath it all, the fact is that to survive as a species, we need to think.

We need to be rational.

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

We would die off.

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

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

similar goals.

Once women are introduced, they're incessant in rationalism and less of their hormones

or SOL.

Look, the University of the Desert Island would be nice, but without women, it wouldn't

be fun.

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

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

She was a woman last time I looked.

Oh, wait a minute.

You know exactly what I'm going to say.

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

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

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

And Ayn Rand said, did he say man?

Right?

No, she viewed as a compliment.

All right.

But she wanted to be clear that he said man.

She was excited.

Absolutely.

She was.

She was.

She was her perceiving him as seeing her as a full equal.

Oh, I think that's right.

I think that's right.

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

rational, you know, was a compliment to her because that was affirming that he viewed

her as a rational.

Yeah.

Because Mises's old school, he's an older Eastern European guy, so he would definitely

have these rigid views like his wife, I read her autobiography, Margit von Mises, and basically

he made her his secretary to the point where like he's typing something or he had something

handwritten.

She had to type it out.

And if she made a typo, he would tear up the page.

She had to start from the beginning, but it's like, this is the role of the man, this

is the role of the woman.

So for him to regard her, this was kind of a breaking through moment, not that she was

secretly misogynist.

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

up with wrong ideas.

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

out what's right.

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

around us.

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

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

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

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

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

you know, king is a unity of the, and you have an attila, you have somebody who wants

control of the people, who's willing to use force to control other people.

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

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

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

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

physical power over us.

That's an exception and that's rare and that's what needs to be defended.

Yeah.

Stalin's not personally killing people.

Hitler's not personally killing people.

Charles Manson's not personally killing people.

They need their goons.

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

Nothing Stalin says is original to him, right?

He needs a Marx, even Lenin, right?

They all need a Marx, right?

They all, and Marx needs a particular line of thinkers that come before him that set

him up for these kinds of ideas.

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

He has a bankrupt real.

Yeah.

Lenin, Lenin, I think is a better example because Lenin's more intellectual, if you

will, but Lenin needs his goons, he needs his Stalin's, but Lenin also needs his Marx.

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

his ideas have to lead to Lenin and Stalin.

His ideas are not neutral.

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

I think Marx very much glorified revolution, blood and terror.

This is not implicit.

No, absolutely.

There are letters between him and Engels where they talk about which peoples will have to

be eliminated because they don't have that proletariat thing, right?

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

to come and will have to be gone.

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

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

than mine.

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

And at a certain point, you're going to have to be liquidated and they pretend that doesn't

mean murdered, but it means murdered.

And very quickly, everyone becomes a capitalist or bourgeois and then you have the hall of

the morn, things like this.

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

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

He just wrote books.

No.

It's the people who write books who are responsible for the way history evolves.

And they know.

They know the bad guys certainly know the consequence of their ideas.

And they need to bear the moral responsibility for what happens when their ideas are implemented.

Here's a way.

Can I ask a question?

Yeah.

Because I think I know more about Rand and Yaron.

So let's see.

Oh, the gauntlet has been thrown down.

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

Emmanuel Conte.

That's right.

Correct.

No, that I know.

I mean, it's a big deal that Emmanuel Conte is.

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

in Conte that sound pretty liberal.

They sound pretty.

He's for the individual.

It sounds like he's for the individual.

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

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

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

that make freedom and individualism possible.

He's trying to destroy the Enlightenment.

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

He's trying to undermine reason.

And without reason, we're nothing, we're not, we can't survive as a species.

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

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

Those are the things she's trying to eviscerate.

I know you've, you've talked about Hoffman before.

So Hoffman is a modern day attempt to Donald Hoffman.

Donald Hoffman.

Donald Hoffman is the University of California, Ovine, a neurologist, a neuroscientist, something

like that.

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

said, and you do a quick intro.

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

us not to see reality.

Okay, that is very content.

Yeah.

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

and about, and about metaphysics.

And there's nothing, there's nothing original there.

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

right.

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

Let me, let me.

I'm frustrated.

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

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

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

Anytime you say reality doesn't exist, or that you perceive it, well, who are you?

What do you mean by, what are any of your words mean?

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

out there in reality?

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

as a being humble in the face of the uncertainty that's around us, sort of, you know, when

you speak with the confidence of Ayn Rand and yourself, that reason can be like this

weapon that cuts through all the bullshit of the world and makes us like have an ethical

moral life and all those kinds of things.

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

Wait, hold on.

Hold on a second, okay.

But, but...

I got this one.

See, this is already leading to a murder by words.

Yeah.

And we've been only talking for 20 minutes.

It just wouldn't get along together.

It wouldn't get along together on an island.

No, we just make him our slave.

We're all going to get along.

He's just going to do the work.

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

to end well for me.

We can provide value as dinner.

That's the problem.

I'm trying to get there.

That's a solution.

Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

the physical reality is.

Okay.

Now I got this.

I got this.

Okay.

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

All right.

Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

93 million miles away for the sun to be.

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

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

he's capable, yet there, is capable of appreciating what the sun means, what heliocentrism means.

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

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

of the human mind and reason.

Number one, number two is if he says that evolution favors those who are not in touch

with reality, and I don't know in what context he's saying that because that sentence could

mean a lot of different things, evolution is what guides, reality is what guides evolution.

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

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

animal and that fin helps it swim, swim, I engineer a check mark.

It's that mutations occur, the vast majority of mutations are against reality, they do

not further this animal's life or this plant's life or this fungus's life, but the ones that

are in touch with reality such as, okay, it's really cold here, there's no predators here,

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

in the cold, I don't have predation, it's really great.

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

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

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

that I really hate.

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

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

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

more attachment to the actual.

How about one more second?

Sure, sure.

I do not, I despise the idea.

I say despise, I'm not using this, I'm not joking, the idea that the reality we don't

live in is somehow more real than this.

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

correct and none of us disagree with that.

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

is fake, bullshit.

This is the real reality.

That is a different type of a subset, but no one's living there.

And humanity is the starting point.

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

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

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

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

He has this difference.

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

fitness and reality, but that's complete nonsense.

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

To reality.

Fitness and reality are the same thing, they're not separate things.

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

and certainly philosophically corrupt.

And it's Kantian, again, he's accepted Kant's ideas and everybody pretty much has accepted

Kant's ideas for the last 200 years and they give it a different facade and he's giving

it an evolutionary facade, but it's just a facade for the same idea and that is that

somehow because we have eyes, we cannot see because the light waves are going through

a medium and that medium necessarily distorted.

The medium changes the resolution at which you see, right?

Like if I take off my glasses, I'm seeing it a little differently, but the thing is

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

grasping the handle and lifting the cup.

That's not an illusion.

That is a real cup.

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

For example, money, there's a bunch of things that seem real, this is not an animal farm

reference.

Is this going to be about love?

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

What is love?

Love is a fundamental part of the quantum mechanics, yes, no, no, no, no.

Is there some things that have become reality because we humans in a collective sense believe

it?

You can't believe something collectively.

Now it doesn't become real.

What does it mean to say something's real?

That is you can, so love for example, it loves a good example, right?

Love is an abstraction, right?

It's not something I can touch, it's not something I can see, but it's certainly something you

could feel.

I can't, right?

We love differently.

I don't think that's true.

I think I have to start honest about it.

I can't get love.

You can't, love is an abstraction.

So is it love real?

Yes, it's real because I feel it.

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

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

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

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

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

with his work.

He is a nice guy.

That makes me like him.

No, I meant him.

That makes him like him less.

Now you're back talking about fitness, evolutionary fitness.

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

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

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

accurate, in my opinion.

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

know reality?

And I think the answer is yes, we do.

We know reality.

We observe it.

Now, do we know everything about reality?

No, we can't, for example, sense what a bat senses as reality.

A bat observes reality through sound waves, through sonar.

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

It's still a table.

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

still the same object.

But how do you know that's true?

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

That's what no means.

No means I have identified an aspect of reality.

That's literally definition of knowledge.

Now if you say, how are you certain, well, that's a whole other question, but one of

the reasons I know it was certain is because this happens, and I know this is going to

happen.

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

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

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

For example, we've talked about psychedelics before, talked about in dreams, or detached

from this, I mean, there's certain things that happen to your brain to where you're

not able to perceive.

So you're not perceiving reality.

That's right.

So your brain is creating a different reality.

It's not real.

That's...

How do you know it's not real?

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

Because I need it, because partially because I need to take a drug in order to do it.

Because I'm asleep when I'm dreaming.

It's not reality.

That is clearly a creation of our mind.

It's not a...

Hold on.

Let's get to psychedelics.

The drug is real.

Okay.

If you are...

I'm not...

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

I'm going to be the humorous subjectivist.

He could be the court jester.

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

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

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

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

This is just...

It's for example, if I'm walking outside in the woods at night, and there's a deer,

and I can't see it, but if I put on night vision goggles, I can see it, that deer was

there the entire time.

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

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

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

The thing with psychedelics is that...

Now, I don't know, because maybe I'm the least experienced with psychedelics here, probably.

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

deer.

No.

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

a deer out there other than the psychedelics?

We don't know yet.

Well, we don't know yet.

But this is Arkham's razor, right?

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

that's messing with the chemical in the brain, something is being...

Your brain can project.

We dream.

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

nuts.

The dream is a dream.

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

It's assimilating the same thing.

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

Well, hold on.

I'm going to disagree with you a little bit, because let's take Adderall, for example.

No one here disagrees.

That could have something much more simpler than, unless, you know, out of this world.

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

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

It doesn't have to be otherworldly.

It changes your perception of what's around you.

And as an example, what they talk about is that three of us are talking.

There's lots of other stuff in the room.

We're only aware of it vaguely on a personal level.

So let me finish.

Let me finish.

Hold on.

Let me finish.

No, I don't do that.

I'm Israeli.

You're about to start.

This is back to the desert island of murder.

No, but we just resolved it within three seconds.

We didn't.

There's no, there's no punk.

He's trying to get us.

Yeah, it's not going to happen.

I'm trying.

Exactly.

I'm trying to create murder.

No one has asthma.

It's going to be fine.

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

There's no.

You're all, you broke, broke on the alcohol.

Waitings would go up.

You or ship would go up.

For the ratings.

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

getting drunk.

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

effect.

Absolutely.

And it has a particular nature, right?

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

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

I'm just seeing some things out of focus.

And maybe in a distance, I can't see something.

It just, it's gone.

And then I put it on.

There it is.

That thing was always there.

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

And it's absolutely not sensitive to everything equally.

And drugs can change the relative sensitivities.

It doesn't change reality.

It changes our ability to focus on reality.

Let me give you one great example.

The microscope.

I forget who it was.

His name was with an L. The scientist who discovered it.

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

For him, it must have been, it is like a drug experience.

Like, wait a minute.

I'm drinking this.

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

Those beings were always there.

Those beings were there before any of us were here.

They've been there for billions of years.

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

No one's arguing protozoa are extra dimensional.

No one's arguing the supernatural.

Amoebas are well studied, paramecia, all the other lots.

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

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

always been there.

And this is the mechanism for perceiving them.

So here's the word I was looking for.

It's a word actually Greg, Greg taught me this.

So Greg Salamiere.

So it's resolution, right?

So it's resolution.

My resolution changes with the glasses.

My resolution gets final with the microscope.

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

100%.

There's no doubt about it.

I don't see them.

So I need a microscope to not see them, but they're either there or they're not there.

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

And that's called a microscope.

Now they could be even smaller beings that even with a microscope, I wouldn't be able

to define.

But that's completely arbitrary to claim that, that they're there until I find a tool to

be able to discover it.

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

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

probably the truest assumption.

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

No.

Which is, again, if it turns out that there are these creatures that you can only see

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

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

So what?

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

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

really crappy?

That basically...

Well, it's not.

But you don't know that.

No, we know it completely.

Compared to who?

Compared to the future possibilities, like artificial intelligence.

It is true.

It is crappy.

Compared to the future.

That's true.

But that's not relevant.

Much, much.

Or it's a magnitude.

But here I'll use the standard that Hoffman uses, evolution, right?

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

Because look at us.

We're sitting here comfortably in an apartment with air conditioning, in warm Austin with

microphones, and we're good at all this stuff.

Really good at survival and changing the environment.

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

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

and to shape it.

The future, well, we'll come up with machines that can figure out stuff that we have no

clue about today.

Yeah, but that's only because we're so well suited to reality that can we create those

machines?

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

That's how it's going to happen.

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

saying now, what I ran is saying, what you're saying with certainty, do you think they'll

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

No.

No, no.

Let me get this one.

What do they do?

They're going to do what you do when any of us read Aristotle or read any of these great

geniuses of the past.

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

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

of the earth, the creativity to be, and to get it within a few miles, the creativity

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

When you look back, a lot of it's nonsense, but at the same, it's like when you're talking

to a kid, you disregard the nonsense, and when they get something right, it's awe.

It's never a numbers game.

It's the few that validate and justify the rest.

When you look at Aristotle, and he's talking about the, there was one of those causes which

is time travel, and it doesn't really make sense, but you look at the rest of his stuff

or even played or any of these greats, it's like, oh my, this is an amazing miracle.

I wouldn't say literally miracle, I got you everyone, but at the same time, a lot of these

other people had stupid ideas.

You don't care.

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

We still study Pythagoras.

Of course.

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

Think about the philosophy.

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

them?

I mean, how many giants have there been in all of human history that have had the minds

of a Socrates, a Plato, and an Aristotle, a thousand years where they look back at Plato

and Aristotle and admire them?

Absolutely.

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

are absolutely right and will always be right.

Certain things that I invented discovered will always be right.

I think a lot of what he came up with, well, some things would be discovered to be wrong.

Yeah.

You know, that wouldn't shock me.

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

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

Not pessimistic, but more humble.

There's no reason to be humble.

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

What's it to be humble about?

Look at life.

This is amazing.

No, but the word humble has different meanings.

No, I know.

I was going to get, I was going to get, I mean, humility in a sense of, you know, humility

in a sense of not appreciating the genius and the ability and the success and all the

stuff that we as individuals, I think in our lives, but as a culture, as a movement, if

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

spite of the odds, we should be proud of that and pride is the virtue.

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

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

Sure.

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

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

And I think it's a real vice.

It's don't think of yourself too much just because you can think, you know, that's not

a big deal.

Just because you can create this, it is a big deal.

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

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

which is a very, very bad meaning.

Hold on.

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

So there's different meanings.

Okay, hold on.

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

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

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

certain that this person has things to teach me.

If I go to a mechanic and maybe this guy is dumb as rocks, I don't know anything about

cars.

What he tells me about that car is that I could take it to the bank.

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

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

you see this very much in academia who think, you know, we're exactly wrong going around,

who think they're know it all.

And they think, oh, I have this degree, you're a layman, you've never been formally educated.

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

And it's like, this person might be have, one, a great example of this, and this is an example

you never mind that like, is a lot of times you have these native populations and they'll

have a better understanding of the animals around them, the plants, the fruits, whatever,

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

the woods.

Yeah, whatever.

This giant, this giant ape.

But it was real.

Yeah.

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

That's kind of changed to some extent, but that is an aspect of humility that I think

behooves especially highly intelligent people because there is such a presumption to be

dismissive of people who you regard as less than, but they're often right.

So I agree with all of the concrete examples.

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

And I don't have one because I'm not a wood smith, I'm not, this is not my strength.

But humility is a word from the Christian ethics, and it means something very specific

in the field of ethics, and it means the opposite of what I think virtue requires.

It's the meaning, it's to put you down, it's to resist pride, and I think pride is a very

important thing.

I don't know, Iran.

But again, you have to define your terms properly.

Hating myself has been quite useful for me as a...

Well, but that's because you're Russian and Jewish.

So by...

What?

This changes everything.

This is what happens, right?

We're brought up to feel exactly that way.

That has been a good Russian boy.

So we got him.

Oh my God.

What is this?

What is this?

What is this?

What is this?

What is this?

What is this?

What is this?

What is this?

What is this?

What is this?

What is this?

What is this?

What is this coscia?

Did you check if it's coscia?

This is Ukrainian, my friend.

Oh.

Oh my God.

That is a sin.

I'm not gonna scare you.

That is really sinful.

You know me, you didn't say I was born in the same town.

Okay.

My dad is Ukrainian.

Don't get mad.

So...

I don't think...

I don't think self...

Self...

What did you...

How did you define it?

You...

Self hate?

Yeah, I think...

I think Self hate is quite destructive.

I think that humility is quite destructive. Humility in the sense of I'm no big deal. No,

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

you know, look, you got the two of us to fly into town just to sit down here and have a

conversation with you. You're a big deal. That says more about you than me. We're just

we're lonely to pray. I'm starting to question your ability to reason with the decisions

you're making. What on the on the aspect of and I should mention that the idiot by Dusty

Eskies is one of my favorite novels. And there is a Christian ethic that runs through that.

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

but particularly Russians and particularly Russian Jews and particularly Eastern European Jews

are incredibly Christian. There is a there's a there's a real Christian theme in in Judaism

that's that's about guilt. Guilt is not there's no guilt in Judaism. David doesn't feel any guilt

Solomon does. There's no guilt in the Old Testament. Plenty of guilt. Once Christianity has an

impact on Judaism, we're raised to feel this way. We're raised to be humble. We're raised not to

feel special. We were raised to think we're no big deal into and our mothers put us down and use

that against us and try to inflict guilt on us. They raise us up and then they knock us down.

It's a mechanism, but it's a cultural mechanism. And I think it's very destructive to self

esteem and to happiness. And I'll give you a great he's absolutely right with what he just said.

I disagree. Well, yeah, why? Why is he right? Because like my family, for example,

it still doesn't really understand how I could pay the rent because I don't go into an office.

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

times I talk to kids, right? And they won't have these aspirations and I'll tell them go for it

while you're young. If you fail, you'll go to your grave with like I tried my best. I didn't make

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

rest of your life. And this is the example I use all the time. I bring up many times I go go to

any bookstore and look at all those terrible, terrible books on the shelves that you wonder,

how's this a book? That could be you. You could be that crappy writer. But the thing is in that

culture that Yaron was talking about, you tell your family, I'm going to be a writer. Who do you

think you are? Why do you think you're going to be you? You're no Stephen King. And it's like,

why do you have to be Stephen King? Why can't you just be a mediocre, crappy writer making the rent?

It's the best that you can be. But even that is an amazing accomplishment. If I don't have to go to

an office and I write books that not that many people read, this is a story of my life, at the same

time, I do have pride because I made this happen. You can be the best version. I mean, this is a

cliche, but you can be the best version of yourself. It's not a competition. And yet our Jewish

mothers, that's not what they aspire us to be. They aspire us to be the best version of what they

imagine, what the culture imagines, you know, what what what what society imagine, not what not

what it's not about you in their minds. And and I've seen it, I see, I see it all around me,

people putting their kids down, putting themselves down. It's not healthy. I've never

told the story. I'm going to tell it now. When I graduated college, I was a temp for a while,

because I didn't know what I wanted to do. Right. And when you're a temp, it's like playing roulette.

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

that don't pay well and suck and pay poorly. But it's you and your 21, you have that that kind

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

she's talking about me, she's, you know, from Odessa. And she told me she lied to him about how

much money I was making. And that's something I've never brought up. And it still hurts me,

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

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

my life, I thought was very really misplaced priorities. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know.

I don't know what to make of that. I think there's a huge benefit to the humility terms aside for

believing that others can teach you a lot. Everybody can teach you a lot. I just mentioned

that. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. The point. But for that, I do believe you have to not

constantly sort of break your ego apart and constantly question whether you know anything

about this world and sort of there's a negativity with it that that I think is very useful. And

it's also very fulfilling just constantly. I don't know. It's the other way around. I find

that the more the more I know, the more I know, the easier it is for me to learn from other

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

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

find myself attracted to people who can teach me something about things I don't know. Whereas,

if I was ignorant, if I truly believed I didn't know anything, I don't know how I would live.

It would really completely challenge everything about life for me. Where would I even start?

You wouldn't know where to start. So no, I think, and if you don't recognize what you know,

you don't have a full appreciation of yourself. So really building a recognition of what do I

know? And how much do I know? It's really crucial to living. And I'll tell you something else that

furthers my life enormously is when you reach a certain point in your career and your life and

you're talking to people who are a lot younger, and they might be smart, driven, intelligent,

they lack data. When you're 23, you don't know how to speak corporate, you don't know what the

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

and here's why I'm coming to this conclusion. This is the information that released me this

conclusion. And I can save them from some of the suffering I went through. That is very gratifying.

It's making the world a better place. And it's also the opposite in a sense of humility because

like in this context, I'm an expert, or I'm at least knowledgeable enough that I'm comfortable

giving you advice. Yeah. And look, everything I do is about me knowing stuff that other people

don't. And I know a lot of stuff other people don't. And I do. And it's fun. It's I'm a teacher. I'm a

teacher at heart always happy. It turns out I didn't know that early on. But you know, I like

becoming an expert and then and then trying to teach people doesn't mean I know everything.

Quite the contrary. Again, the more I know, the more I know that the certain things I don't know

and the certain areas of expertise I don't have. But look, pride is a broader concept than that.

Pride is about and humility is the opposite of pride. And Christianity has that right. Pride is

about taking your life seriously. Pride is about wanting to be really good at living, wanting to

have the knowledge. And I think what you're describing is you're describing as I'm constantly

learning. Sometimes I have to read a challenge myself. I have to question what I believed in

to gain you knowledge. That's all good. But that is that is a drive that is driven by pride.

You want to know that lots of people out there that don't want to know because they don't have

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

And I'm going to say something else that I think is crucial. Humility is extremely important when

it comes to politics. Because if you feel comfortable telling someone you've never met,

how to live their life, that is a complete lack of humility.

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

Not through the force. Not through force. That's what I'm saying.

Not and of course, not in the concrete. I don't tell them, you know, move to,

although I do tell them to do it often, but I don't tell them this is what you do as a profession.

But I give them the principles because I think they're making a choice. That's my point.

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

This is how I'm going to take money from him. But I don't see that humility. There's nothing.

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

Who am I to tell him how to live? That's lack of humility.

No. Who are you to tell him how to live is an issue of, it's an issue of force and rights and

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

being a human being. It could be both. Sure. I think it's, who gives you the right to dictate

to somebody else how to live their lives? Yeah, but that's a lack of humility if you think you

have that right. Again, we're using humility in a very different way. No, we're using the same way.

Because the person who feels comfortable, they think, I know, I know better than you how you

should live your life to the point where a couple forcing you because I know it's going to be best

for you in the long run. And the answer is you don't know. Right, but that's a lack of humility.

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

so you're kind of allergic to the word. Well, absolutely, because it's part of, if you look at

the cardinal virtues, the cardinal sins in Christianity, pride is a cardinal sin and humility

is a cardinal virtue. But they don't mean it in the sense because they're happy to tell you how

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

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

because what do you know? You know nothing. God knows everything. So you should shut up

and do what you're told. That's the sense in which I don't think you should be humble.

I mean, it's a sense in which I was using the example of Abraham. God comes to Abraham and says,

go kill your eldest son, your only son. Go kill him. It's like, and what does Abraham

do? He says, yes, sir, I'll follow. And he's a moral hero for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

He's a moral hero because he follows orders because he's humble. I would tell God to go to hell.

Screw you. I'm not killing my son. He's no way. I mean, he killed his sons. That's only fair.

Well, this is before he kills us. I didn't know that. But no, but part of the evil,

part of the evil of Christianity is that he's killed his son in the most torturous form of

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

and that Christians elevate this to a position of, I'd love to have this conversation with

Jordan, right? Jordan Peterson, the idea of elevating. That'll never happen. No, it won't.

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

acts in human history is horrific. So yeah, I mean, I'm opposed to God sacrificing his own son,

never mind my son. Let him go do it to his own son. But he didn't kill Isaac. He killed the goat.

The story's about Abraham, not about God. First of all, God is mean, right, to put Abraham through

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

And he stopped. So the whole point is obedience. That's what humility leads to. It leads to the

opposite of the story you were telling. It leads to people saying, yes, I should be told what to do.

Where's the authority who actually knows something? I don't know anything. No, I know a lot. And I

know a lot about my life. So you stay away from my life because I have pride in my life.

The science is settled, right? Look at these experts. Who am I to argue with these experts?

They tell me to drink dog pee. I'm going to drink, what am I, not drink dog pee?

Yes. Let's go back to the island. We're on island again.

Back to the island. And let's go to the island. Let's, let's,

I live on an island. Everything's an island in some context. Like Earth is an island.

This universe is an island in a multiverse. There's no multiverses. There's only one universe.

All right. So let's invite Jordan Peterson to this island. You wish. Hold on. Hold on a sec.

Hey girl. What's you doing? Lex? Lex Friedman? Look him up. Lex who?

Lex who? I don't know. Lex says he's big of a following almost as Jordan.

I know, I know Jordan. I know his family actually through Jim Keller,

who is his relative. He's an engineer. So, and I just talked to Sam who

is perhaps a little bit aligned in some sense on your perspective on religion and so on.

So let me ask, is there some? Religion, yes, but other things.

Sam Harris. Sam Harris. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Sam Harris.

He's on first name relations with these guys. Look at this inside baseball. I just talked to Sam.

I thought, I thought, let's talk about humility. Let's talk about humility like my buddy Sam.

I was talking to Barack. You might know him. Yeah. I, I simply. You're gonna let you in out the window.

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

it becomes an obvious statement what Sam means. This is how neural networks think.

This is how robots think. Michael, you should know this. I thought by now you'd be a scholar.

For the sake of the audience. Humility. Everything can teach you something even a robot.

Okay. So do you think there's value in religion or broader? Do you think there's value in myth?

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

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

myths, of common stories, of common religion? There was value. There is no value today.

So human beings need explanations, right? They need a philosophy to guide their life. They need

ethics. They need some explanation of what's going on in the world, right? And it's no accident

that the early religions had a river god and they had a sun god and a moon god because everything

they didn't understand, they made god, right? So they had multiple gods because they didn't

understand very much. As human understanding evolved, increased, as we knew reality more,

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

This is a genius of Judaism, right? Let's just have one bucket to put all the stuff we don't

know in and we'll call it one god. And then we don't, as we gain new knowledge, we can just take

it out of the bucket that's god and put it into the bucket of science. At some point, though,

at some point, and that point suddenly came during the scientific revolution, I think,

we could come to the conclusion that, no, we don't need this bucket that's called god to

explain the things that we don't know. We can say we don't know. And we're learning. And slowly,

the knowledge is increasing. And yet there's a lot more that we don't know. But we don't need

to throw it into some bucket that's called god in order to have it. And I think that's true

for morality and it's true for everything else, right? As we gain the tools to understand what

morality requires, we don't need a set of commandments. We can figure out morality from

human nature and from reality. So I don't think we need religion anymore. I think religion needed

to die probably about 200 years ago and was dying, I think, up until Kant. It seemed to be dying.

And one of Kant's missions, as he says, is to revive religion against the attack of reason

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

mythology. Certainly, we need stories. And certainly, we need art. Art is a, Rand writes

about this a lot. And, you know, she's an artist and she writes in, I'm a huge fan of the Romantic

Manifesto, which I think is one of her underappreciated masterpieces. Oh, I hate it. Okay. Yeah.

So I think we have a real need, right, as a conceptual being. We have a need for aesthetic

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

to concretize the complex nature of the world out there. And that's what painting, sculpture,

to some extent, music, but painting, sculpture, literature does for us. So to the extent that

mythology serves that purpose, it's just art, right? To the extent that it serves another

purpose, that is that it's a way for the gods to communicate with us or it fits some kind of

preexisting mental construct that we have, again, kind of a Kantian perspective, right,

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

Then I think it's false. It's not helpful and destructive. So I believe religion today

is a destructive force on planet Earth. I think it's always been a destructive force.

It was just a necessary force, right? You needed an explanation. People needed something to believe

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

real world, you don't need religion anymore and indeed it becomes a destructive force. And you

look around the world today, it's an unbelievably destructive force. Every way it touches is bad

for life. Again, mythology depends. Art is essential, very, very crucial in the human

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

mythology as just a continuous spectrum. Yeah. So religion is a primitive form of philosophy.

But I don't think... It's prephilosophical.

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

what he's going to say. Rand was a mythologizer. In a certain specific context, Atlas shrugged

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

These are the values that are important. When you experience it through a story,

through a movie, through a TV show, a poem, or a painting, it affects you in a very visceral,

very different way. Talk about American history. You have the Founding Fathers,

then you have the myth of the Founding Fathers. Now, unfortunately, the term myth often means lie,

but it could mean, in a useful sense, an abstraction to help you systematize and

concretize ideas. So you have the myth of Reagan. You have the myth of Thatcher. The reality often

falls very short. But when you look at how these different figures are mythologized,

not only is it very inspirational on a personal level, very motivating on a personal level,

it's also a great way to concretize ideas because just how humans think. It's one thing to think

about ideas, but when you see someone who embodies these ideas, Miss America. I was saying earlier,

I had an asterisk on my show. These people might be jerks, but when you look at them,

one specific aspect of their life and you extrapolate it, that can be to anyone, very

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

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

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

this forever. And then you look at someone's story and they're like, you know what, that

astronaut of your Clayton Anderson, he applied 13 times, didn't get a callback, applied the 14th

time, got a callback, didn't get the job, 15th time he get the job, he talks to kids and he goes,

listen, apply 13 times. Even if you don't get the callback, you'll still feel I'm doing something

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

you know what, that could be me. Absolutely. And it's not just happiness. It's the fact that

virtue works, integrity. I mean, what's the power of the fontan? I know you love the fontan.

Part of the power of the fontan head is Howard Rock's absolute commitment to integrity.

He is committed to integrity and he gets, and he's happy, right? And it's very rare in life

to see that, to actually see a concrete of that. And it's very hard to hold it in your mind.

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

if I stick to my principles, I'm going to be Howard Rock. Now I've got that concrete. I

know I can, I can immediately relate to that success. So I think art is essential. And I think

in a sense what we do to Thatcher and Reagan is odd. You have to be careful in true stories,

not to diverge too far from reality. Because then when you discover the reality, you don't want to

whitewash it. And particularly when it has political implications, and then it's really bad. So

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

near as good as people try to make them out to be. But these, these are powerful, powerful, powerful

stories. And, and people are moved by it. And the integration of emotion with reason is crucial,

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

And I think that stories and art more broadly. And I, you know, when I go and see Michelangelo's

David, it does the same thing to me. You know, I can stand up to anybody because he did. And look,

he succeeded. And, and it makes sense that he could, right? So there's a really interesting idea

of bringing your emotion in line with your thinking, with your reasoning. So Ben Shapiro

famously has this saying, how do you like that transition, Michael? You gave me props. I know

you did. He's not Ben, it's Ben Shapiro. Yeah. Someone is not taking your calls. Benny, Benny.

I guess it's the daily don't take the caller. Back to the island with the murder. I think we

know, we would know who would be committing the murder. I have the suit for it. So he has the

saying of facts don't care about your feelings. And that always, I've always felt

badly about that statement somehow, like it was incomplete. So it's interesting to that you mention

bringing your emotions in line with your thinking. Like, what do you think about that statement?

I got this one. What Ben is doing, Ben, Ben, what he's doing in a loose way is attacking

Kantianism. Cause Kant, there's this, it's, it's almost impossible for Westerners who aren't schooled

in this to understand the idea of philosophical idealism. Cause it sounds so crazy that you're

like, these great minds of all time can't really be saying this. I must be missing something.

So the idea, when we hear idealism, we think John F. Kennedy, right? As an example, you aspire

things, you think life could be better than it is. That's not what it means in a philosophical

sense. And philosophical idealism, it means ideas are more real than reality. That I have this idea,

then this comes along. It's the reality that isn't correct. My idea is still correct. A good example

of this that you see all the time on the internet is when they refer to Mitt Romney and John McCain

as rhinos, Republicans in name only. And it's like, what is, who is more a real Republican?

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

who has never existed and there's no evidence for them existing. So what Kant did is he bifurcated

reality into what we see around us, the phenomenal world, but then it's inferior. The real world,

the noumenal world, we can't access it. Because we have eyes, we only see the thing as it appears,

not as it is in itself. And because of this, everything we know is a shadow and is secondary.

And that's Plato. Straight out of Plato. Right. And the real reality is this realm of ideas.

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

reality comes first, your feelings have to be a response or a reaction to it. You can't say,

this is how I feel. This table doesn't care. You can yell at it all day long. It will still be

indifferent to your emotional state because it comes first. So it's a great statement. I think

he's cribbing it from Ayn Rand in a sense. And I love it. There's a sense in which he is. I mean,

who popularized that kind of idea? And Ben is read Ayn Rand quite extensively. Not enough.

Not enough. Well, not enough to reference. That's where the yarmulke is. So yeah, obviously.

He may be read enough, but didn't understand enough. But so it's absolutely reality.

Reality is unaffected by your emotional state and your feelings about it. And this is a great

claim against the idealism, the philosophical idealism of much of the world out there, both left

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

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

that has nothing to do with the real world. And when they fail, they make stuff up to justify

their failure. So all of really the ideas that are promulgated today on both sides

are this kind of detached from reality. We're putting emotions or ideas before reality itself.

But I believe that, you know, our emotions are responses. They're responses to reality conditioned

by our existing concepts. You're going to have to talk slowly to talk emotions to Lex because he

doesn't really understand. I don't understand. So really, you got to really... But he's big on love.

What is love? But he's big on love. He's trying to learn. He's pretty big on love. I'm all in,

I'm a love maximalist. I mean, we could create an environment on this island where you would

really feel emotions. Like fear is an emotion. We could easily call you to the point where you

felt fear, right? So we could teach him about emotions. But emotions are responses to reality.

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

thing. And some of them would feel fear, and some of them would actually, you know, feel indifferent

and other people might feel love, right? I think Leonard Peacuff uses the example of looking through

a microscope and seeing a, I don't know, a virus or bacteria. And for one, it's a scientist. He's

made a new discovery. He feels pride and love. And, you know, the one has no clue, right? And

he's looking at this and it means nothing to them. And somebody else might look at it,

and, you know, it's a bacteria, you know, and they feel fear because of what it could do to them.

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

and what the thing is out there in reality. And it's that into, so your emotions respond to that.

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

by what you know explicitly versus what you've internalized implicitly that you might not agree

with anymore. You know, things might happen in your childhood, and they probably do,

right, where you get a trauma. I don't know. I'm afraid of dogs. And maybe when I was a

five year old, some dogs jumped me. And I don't even remember it, right? But I came to a conclusion

when I was five, dogs bad, dogs dangerous. And now anytime I see a dog, oh my God, that

bringing my emotions aligned with reality, right, with my ideas is, no, now I understand dogs don't

have to be scary. I can work through this, various techniques, and hopefully if there

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

of that fear and align your emotion now with your explicit ideas. And that's what I mean by that.

And let me build on that. We're talking about your friend, Putin. I think I mentioned this

before, maybe on the show. He was meeting with Angela Merkel.

Oh, Vladimir, please.

Yeah, Vlad. My boy, Vlad. He was meeting with Angela Merkel.

Angela Merkel has a fear of dogs. So he brought out his big Labrador retriever. Now for people

who don't know, Labradors are very big dogs, but they're also like the least aggressive.

It's like you could punch them in the face. They don't care. That dog

is not going to be more likely to attack just because she's scared. And it's kind of, I know

they say animals can sense fear domesticated dogs. If they see you're scared, they're not

going to be aggressive. They're going to try to play. I remember when I was a kid, I will never

forget. There was this dog, Rex, this German Shepherd. I'm five. This dog is gigantic. And

I'm sitting on the couch. The German Shepherds have been bred for intelligence. They're very

bright dogs. They're very good with kids. He's sitting next to me. This thing is three times my

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

I'm not going to do it. Like I want to be your friend. I'm still freaking out. He licks my hand

is just very scary. You know, animals are so bright, but that's the thing is in terms of

facts don't care about your feelings. That dog is not more likely to attack someone

because their emotion is so intense. It's not that I feel something very strongly.

Therefore, this thing is more likely to happen. So my intensity of my motion does not in any way

correlate when you're being irrational to the likelihood of that thing actually happening.

No, you could have a dog that does respond to your emotion, right? But then it's,

but then it's not part of reality. That's a fact of reality that certain dogs respond to certain

emotions. But isn't this emotion a part of reality? Like, okay, let me say a word. So part of that,

I would even say, don't let your emotion about your emotion, right? Because sometimes you have

an emotion about your emotion. Don't be repressed. Don't be repressed and identify the emotion as

reality and evaluated. Don't judge it evaluated. Is it a rational emotion? Is it consistent with my,

like if I'm afraid of these dogs, if I feel that fear, is it rational to be afraid of these dogs?

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

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

I'm talking about is a term like lived experience. When you observe and analyze the, you know,

conversations with other people to try to understand how other people see the world,

doesn't emotion fundamentally integrate into that? Like, is an emotion lived experience?

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

and that has to do with what? Doesn't have to do with... With their values, with their conclusions,

with their ideas, with their experiences, with a million different things. But at the end of the

day, it's about the conclusions that they come to, which are then shaping their emotions. But

look, emotions are not something to be avoided or ignored. That is, I can sense your emotions to

some extent, right? Okay, it is Lex. I can sense his emotions. I can sense Michael's emotions.

And that's part of the facts of reality, right? So if Michael responds to something that I view

as really, really important, right? If we were standing in front of Michelangelo's David,

a Michael's response to Michelangelo's David was, yeah, and turned his back to it and walked away.

That would be really meaningful to me, right? That I would respond emotionally to that and

cognitively, I would say, what is it about Michael that makes him, you know, respond this way? That

is, that is, that gives me a lot of information about him. So emotions are information laden,

right? But they are not primary. They are responses, responses to something. So once,

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

one should be aware of other people's emotions. If they're important to you, if they're not important

to you, it doesn't matter, right? You don't care about a stranger's emotion. Yeah, like a stranger

walks up to Michelangelo's David and said, eh, and walks away, and I go, okay, glad you're a stranger.

But it's, now, now, I've known you when Michael's response to Michelangelo's David was or is,

so I'm a little worried about what he's going to say. You got candy too, because that was great.

Hey. Do I get Ukrainian? I don't know. I can't read either. What's this thing,

Josh, what does that say to him? Is this Ukrainian candy as well? I thought it was

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

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

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

No, they're more than six, but yeah, because I have a copy too. Okay.

Not, I personally, the institute has a copy. I sent it to my great grandma, and she said,

why is he sending me this? I want to read books about love. And I'm like, you know what?

It's just about love. That's what you should have said.

What's that? Is that say? So this says it's, it has vitamins and minerals.

If it's in Russian, I don't believe it. It sounds really strange to read like health

information in Russian, but there's already this stressful of it.

Look, there's a Yorker like you have. Exactly. I mean, I'm much, I like

he doesn't mean it more than I like Moscow. Wow, strong words. But this is, this is not,

it's like hard candy. I don't know. I don't know. I think this, some of my friends sent me

that's made with blood to give the kids iron. Whose blood? Like cow blood. Oh, like with chocolate.

All right. You can keep it. That's all you. All right. I'm keeping both of you.

Can I, can I, can I take all of it? Something you're talking about with emotion.

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

their own emotions. And here's one example. Someone could be in an abusive relationship

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

We had dinner on the table. It wasn't abusive because you hear some other story.

So they feel their emotion isn't valid or like, oh, he never lays hands on me.

He gets drunk and is mean to me. He's still basically a good person.

You're denying that emotion and that emotion is a response to something real. There's an

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

think is very profound, which is if it's hysterical, it's historical. Meaning if some minor incident

is having an extreme disproportionate impact on you, think ask yourself, why am I responding

in such an extreme way to some minor thing? And I will tell you 10 times out of 10,

you'll go back and you'll be like, oh, I'm feeling now like I felt when I was eight and my dad came

home and he was a total jerk and I didn't do anything wrong and he thought I had and I was

complete powerless. And now I'm in the same situation. My boss, I'm not that eight year old

and one since I am another since I'm not, but I feel the same way I did as a kid. And this is

a very useful mechanism in terms of furthering one's happiness because you kind of deep program

all those things that you've picked up as a child. But it's also, you know, if you're feeling

something wrong, even though you're trying to rationalize in a way, you know, it's not abusive

because he's not hitting me. No, the emotion is telling you something real about what's going on.

So acknowledge it and fix the situation, right? So one of the powers emotions give you is they

send you signals about something that might not be in cognition yet. And when you examine their

motion, it brings it to cognition and now you can act on it. So maybe the boss is abusive,

but I didn't really think of it in those terms and my emotions are sending me signals. And now

that I signal it, I'm going to resign. I'm going to find a better job. I'm going to complain to

his boss or whatever. I'm going to take action. Why do you think Ayn Rand is such a controversial

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

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

Yeah, but yeah, I can't, I can't relate. I'm sure mine were positive or only positive.

It was mostly women sending pictures for me to forward to you because

you didn't send me anything. I can't. Oh, it's the wrong email address.

I kept bouncing while sending it to you. Oh, so this is love.

Love hurts. Okay. Yeah. No, I, well, why do you think she's such a divisive figure?

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

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

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

I think it's because she's radical. She's consistently radical. She upends the, the

premises, the ideas that are prevalent in the culture that were brought up on that, that, that are

like, you know, they're like milk and, and, and, and, and, you know, the basic stuff that we're,

we're growing up. You have to be altruistic. You have to live for the people. That's just

basic stuff. Nobody challenges that. Nobody questions it. And if they do question it,

they usually question it from the perspective of a cynic or a bad guy, right? You mentioned the

Joker, right? Before we started, right? You know, I'm going to upend the world because I don't care

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

people's lives, right? You either live for other people or you're an evil SOB. And, you know,

yeah, most people in either one of those, but the ethic is right here. It's, it's living for the

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

place they can go with that cognitively is to the Joker. It's to the evil guy. It's the somebody

who wants to smash everything and destroy it because they don't have this alternative conception of,

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

not involve, you know, they're exploiting other people. They can't conceptualize that. It's not

in their framework. So, it's the fact that she's so consistently on the side of self interest,

for example, on the side of capitalism, on the side of freedom. It's the fact that she dismisses

faith to the extent that she does or to the extent that I do, right? That alienates people because

that is completely different from what they brought up. Now, the flip side of that is,

it's also really interesting to some people. So, you know, a lot of you got some positives,

right? And I got a lot of positives on that appearance. So, I know a lot of people came

to my podcast because I appeared on your show. Why? Because they hear something that's completely

fresh, new, different. They've never heard before. It appeals to something in them that maybe, you

know, a lot of people say, I read, I ran and it confirmed everything I believed. Now, for me,

it didn't. It was the opposite. It turned upside down everything I believe. But there are a lot

of people out there that who have a sense that something's wrong in the world, that altruism

is wrong, that socialism, that just the stuff and religion is wrong, but they don't have an

alternative. It hasn't coalesced. And they listened to a lot of podcasts because they're trying to

get ideas of what is it, what is it that I'm sensing that's wrong out there? And suddenly,

somebody comes out and gives them some clear explanation of things and they go, wow,

that's what I've been looking for my whole life. So, that's the positive for people.

You know, and I read, I ran, it just all made sense. It all clicked. And it made clear that

everything I believed to that point was just wrong. It just didn't integrate. And I always knew,

to some extent, it didn't integrate. But there was an alternative. So, I believed it. What else

was there? I remember saying to myself as a kid, probably 15, why should I, why is this,

why is Moraleo about other people? Why is that? Well, that's just the way it is. And I couldn't

come up with an explanation. She gave me the explanation. And she gave me the explanation

why it's wrong to do that. And I think, so I think that's why people respond. It's just too

radical. It can't fit into their cognitive framework that they're being brought up on,

that they've been educated on, that just their whole life revolves around.

Michael, you don't bring up Ayn Rand that much in conversation, except as kind of references

every once in a while as part of the humor of just the general flow and the music of the way

you like to talk. Well, why do you think you don't integrate her into your philosophy when you're

like explaining ideas and all those kinds of things? Like, why is she not, you know, a popular

reference point for discussion of ideas? Because I, and I don't know if everyone's

going to agree with or can't agree with me. I think for a certain percentage of population,

actually, I talked to someone from the Ayn Rand Institute. I forgot his name, older guy with

glasses, and he didn't disagree with me. He said, this is changing. I said, I think for a certain

percentage of population who are uninformed about her work, higher than 10%, less than 50%,

you mentioned Ayn Rand. They have been trained to think this is identical to Scientology.

So as soon as her name comes up, it's like, okay, I'm out the door. I'm not going to have anything

to do with this. And everyone who follows her is a crazy person. That's one thing that has happened.

Another thing is Rand, in her personality, was very aggressive and antagonistic. She was, for a long

time, the lone voice in the wilderness, being like, this isn't like one of her big adversaries,

in a certain sense, is Milton Friedman. And she really hated how Milton Friedman was like, oh,

you know, having rent control is inefficient. And she's like, inefficient, we're talking about

mass homelessness and people dying. And you're talking about this, like, what color tie goes

with this color shirt? And in fact, it's hilarious. There was an organization called the Foundation

for Economic Education Fee. Leonard Reed was the head of this. And there were a series of letters,

and she was helping him. She was much more philosophically grounded in certain contexts than

he was. And there was an essay, a pamphlet that he published called Roofs or Ceilings.

It was cowritten by Milton Friedman, later Nobel Prize winner, and George Stigler,

also later Nobel Prize winner. And basically, the argument was, well, if the government controls

all housing, how's that going to work out? And she's sitting there, and she's typing in all caps.

So you know, she's holding on the shift key and doing this.

On a typewriter. On a typewriter. And being like, how, and you can imagine her with her cigarette

holder, apoplectic, being like, how is an organization ostensibly devoted to free enterprise,

discussing these, this Stalinist idea in the most casual of terms? She's like, have I taught you

not? And what's amazing is, so at fee, they only have her letters, because she sent them to read,

the iron ran astute must have Leonard Reed's letter. I was able to, knowing Rand enough,

predict exactly what the conversation would go like, because he also did something she didn't

approve of, which is he asked other people for feedback on her work. And she goes,

I gave this to you to read. Who are you shopping around to some jerk that I don't,

I need their approval. What are you doing? So it was a very interesting situation. But so that's

one issue. I remember this is a new end when she's young. She was not young. Well, I mean,

she's relatively young, right? Yeah, it's before Ashletchuk. It was before Ashletchuk. So it's

before she's super famous. And before this is the fan has been published. But, but, you know,

she's, she's trying to work with others. And they are disappointing her left and right.

Yeah. So, and also when you are a, what she takes away from bad people, you have these kids,

right? And you're going to sit down with them. And they're going to be like, yeah, I'm going to

take your guns. I'm going to lock you in your house. I'm going to take 60% of your income

and all this other stuff. And they might up to reading ran, they might sit down and have a

discussion. And ran goes, Hey, you know what? You didn't have to give them an answer. You could

say, go to hell. We're not having this conversation. And you have no right to one second of my life.

And this is not a legitimate opener. This is a declaration of war. This isn't like,

it's not like, if I sit down with you, I run like, Hey, Ron, here are my plans for your wife.

Go to hell. This isn't a conversation we're having. Oh, I'm going to make you unsafe in your

house. What? This is not a discussion. So what happens is these people who five minutes ago

were able to have a debate with this kid because people read ran when they're young often. And

now that kid is like, yeah, I'm not even talking to you. It's her fault. Whereas in reality,

it's that person's fault because that person had no right. Although they've been trained to the

contrary of our culture to believe, yeah, I'm going to sit down and we're just going to

equally have a discussion over your own life. And you have one vote and I have one vote and

we're going to go, oh, Lex has a vote. And that's, that's how it's going to be. And Rand's not having

it. So I think those are two issues. And there's some other things which, which I don't need to

get into. But I, I, because one of the things that ran set consisting of her life is that her

philosophy is an integrated whole, right? So to be an objective isn't just like, I like Atlas

shrugged. It means I accept objectivism as a totality. Since I do not, I don't, I think it is

proper to be respectful to her wishes and not constantly be, especially given that I've somewhat

of a platform to be like, I ran, I ran, I ran, I ran because I don't think I ran would have liked

it if I was talking about I ran this much. So how do you, how do you deep program? Because I,

I don't like to bring up I ran just because I do see what, like how people roll their eyes,

essentially. So how do you, what's the outside exactly? But what is that pro, can we, can you

speak to that programming that people have programming people? I mean, look, at the end of

the day, if you talk about the ideas and ideas make sense and people attract it to the ideas,

then you say, Oh, by the way, and this came from mine, man, that's how you deep program them.

Right. If you make the ideas prevalent in the culture, if people start viewing

self interest as something that's kind of interesting and worthwhile and something

with investigating, and they said, Oh, that came from my man, then I think, I think then

we'll, we'll deep program them and get them and get them changing their minds about these things.

And also, you know, going on shows where people are going to watch your show no matter who you

bring on, right? So even though now you do, if you put on you, you put on ran in the title,

that immediately reduces the number of people who watch. So, so in the future, you shouldn't

you put a mouse in the title and then at least the female population to the female to, you know,

absolutely, just to see. But so, so you go and you try to make them as credible as possible to

as many people as possible over time. It takes time. And ultimately, I don't think the culture

will have this response to her. They might still disagree with her. But I think over time, and

already you're seeing it, younger people, I think today, a far less, there was a generation who never

read I'm right. And was like this, bring out your garlic in the crosses, we don't want to have

anything to do with it. Then, and I think today, there are many more people who've read her and

might disagree or not disagree, right? And then there are a lot of people who haven't read her,

but who are not opposed to it or willing to have an engage to engage. So I think it's changing

already. And I think in 20 years, it'll be completely different. And just two more things that

she does that I think it says that I think people find very, very off putting given our culture.

One is she will basically you could sit down with Rand and be like, your fear is not in any way a

hold on my freedom. Just that one sentence. And for a lot of people that's very off putting and

very harsh, it's correct. But for them, it's just like, wait a minute, I'm still scared. It's like

I don't care. Like for example, like with lockdowns and things like this, it's like, well, I'm scared

and maybe I have a right to be scared. Or like I'm scared that you have a gun in your house.

And it's like, I respect that you're scared. I don't care at the end. As you say, at the end

of the day, this is my house. I'm going to live my life as I please as long as I don't hurt other

people. Well, you are hurting me because I'm scared. No, that's not. This is the feeling

versus fact. Yeah. Yeah. So that is one situation. It's like feeling versus freedom. Yes. Where Rand

puts a lot of people off. I also think that historically, a lot of people who were drawn

to her are drawn to her for the wrong reasons that a lot of times like Howard Rourke, the hero, we're

going to still say hero. You're supposed to say protagonist, the hero. The hero of the fountain

head, he's extremely intelligent, but he's also extremely uncompromising. What often ends up

happening is you'll have a young kid who is somewhat intelligent, but then they pick up the

personality and now you're someone I can't work with. And then it's like, you're not Howard Rourke.

Relax. You're not that skilled. You're not that talented. But because the character has to be

personification and have certain aspects together, when kids read that, they're going to might get

the wrong idea and that's not Rand's fault. And it's more than that. I completely agree with that,

but it's even broader than that. So here is, in my view, one of the geniuses of the millennium

presenting a philosophy. And she's got not just the questions, in my view, she's got the answers.

And you're reading them at 16 and you're reading the answers. You don't know at 16 that this is

true. You might have a sense that it's true, but you don't have the life experience, the learned

experience. You don't have the facts. You don't have the knowledge. You're picking up truth.

It's just being absorbed. You're accepting it as true, but you don't know it's true.

And then you go out into the world advocating for it, which we all did, or at least I did,

when I was 16. And you're obnoxious. You can't prove what you're arguing for because you don't

have the experience. It took me, I don't know, 10, 20 years, probably 20, to figure out that I

really do think what she said was true. But I didn't know when I was 16. When I was 16,

I just absorbed these ideas and accepted them in a sense, with some connection to reality,

but in a sense, on faith, at least presented it that way. And as a consequence, you come off as

a detached from reality, obnoxious human being. And I think of a lot of young objectivists,

oh, and it's hard not to be, because you are, you're confronted with genius. And you're not a

genius. I certainly am not a genius. And I'm confronted with just genius and have all this

information in my head now, I cannot articulate it. And it's hard to deal with yourself. There's

an inside joke. No, you said I'm confronted with genius, I point to us. Yeah. I'm confronted with

you guys. I'm at an age where I know how to deal with geniuses. But I'm going to say there's

something else. This is not why people don't like her, but there's something that the fountain head

does, which I think is very, and I don't, I don't blame her, but it's a bad consequence.

If you read the fountain head and you're young and you're intelligent and talented,

the message, at least I got, and I know I'm not alone, is you are going to think that you're

going to be a pariah, that a lot of people are going to be against you. And you're going to,

you're basically doomed for a short period of being isolated and alone. And that may have been

the case when the fountain head was written. But I think now with the internet, and in my

experience, both as a youth and someone who's a little bit older, I didn't appreciate and

you're not going to get it from that book. And you can't get it through that book because it

has to have a certain narrative. How many people who are a little older are giddy when they find

young talent. How inspiring it is, how exciting it is. Like when you talk to these kids who are

doing things on the internet or writing or whatever achievement, you want them to flourish.

You don't, you're not threatened by them as the antagonists of the fountain head are.

And that doesn't come through in the fountain head because it depends on your profession, right?

I mean, parts of the world are better than others. If you're an, if you're an artist,

at least the way I conceive of art, and you want to go study art today, you're going to be

poo pooed and look down on and so on. So, so yeah, I agree. I mean, and in my generation,

when I read, I meant, you know, there was no internet. There was, and I was in Israel. So

we were isolated and there was nobody else who has shared their ideas. And he did feel that kind

of isolation. And, but rock gave you, to me, he didn't teach me about, you know, you're going to be

isolated because partially because I wasn't, maybe I was, I was humble, right? When I, when I read

Atlas Shrug, I identified with Eddie Willis. Okay. When I read the fountain head, I didn't

identify with how it worked. How old were you read the fountain head?

So I read Atlas when I was 16, I probably read a fountain head when I was 16 and a half, 17,

something like that. And I, and I, and I, and I read the fountain head after Atlas Shrug. Yeah.

If anyone listening to this, they should read it first. But for me, after Atlas Shrug, no,

that is a war crime. No, for me, reading Atlas Shrug was much more, it is more important. But,

but my point is, I think the fountain head in many ways is redundant in certain aspects. If you

read Atlas Shrug first, and because the fountain head is such a masterful book and such a personal

book, I agree, I agree with that. So ideally you would read the fountain head. That's what I'm

saying. Yes. But, and here's the other thing people don't appreciate. I'm sorry to interrupt you.

People think Rand's always about politics, politics, politics, politics, politics. The

fountain head is not a political book at all. It's about it. Well, she talks about politics

in Man's Soul. Sure. But it's about ethics, how important everyone has to have a moral code.

That's the other thing why people find Rand off putting. If you have young people

who now find it very important to live a moral life, who are like, what does that mean to have

morality, to have ethics, to live with integrity for people who have gotten a little older,

who have made these little sacrifices, who are like, I'm not going to fight at work.

Do I really need to look for another job? Yeah, my wife's kind of, you know,

getting annoying, but am I going to make a fight about it? These little sacrifices that they make

every day. And big ones. And big ones. Oh, absolutely. So when you have someone who's saying, forcing

you to look in the mirror and say, those little sacrifices and big sacrifices made you did the

wrong thing and you're evading that you betrayed your own conscious, that to many people, I think,

is very threatening. But this is why so many people say that I'm Rand is for 14 year old boys.

Yeah, right. Right. And there's a reason why there's a reason why it appeals to 14 is a little

young, but 16, 18, it's because those are the ages where we're still open to idealism,

idealism in a positive sense, right, to beautiful things, the ideals, to seeking perfection,

to seeking a great life. I think as you grow older, most people become cynical.

They give up on their ideals. Why? Because their ideals were wrong. And their ideas fail.

Right. My parents were socialists when they were young. Those ideas failed. So where do you go

from socialism to idealism? cynicism, which is horrible. Right. All adults, almost all adults

out there are cynical. And that is that is that is failed idealism. And when they look at the

young people, they see their idealism. Oh, well, that's that I was idealistic too. And they don't

question the idea. Well, they're good ideals and they're bad ideas, the right ideals and the wrong

ideals. And and that's why they attribute it to the attributed to you. So it's a threat to a lot

of people, a lot of people who it's too late for. For some people, it's too late to change

their minds. And they know it. And they're too invested in the, in the job, in the wife,

in the, in the compromises, in the comfort, in the comfort, and they're too invested in the

comfort, too, too invested in compromise, too invested in comfort. And they know that they

shouldn't be, they know they should change. And these young people are challenging that.

And that is really, really scary for them. And that's, that's why they reject it without even

without too much consideration. What one of the things ran the working title for Fountainhead

was secondhand lives. And ran had two definitions of selfishness in that book. One is selfishness

in the sense of my life is the most important thing. It's not the only important thing. My family

would be number two friends. They certainly are extremely high values. But you can't have these

secondary values at the first value. But in the context of my life, right? Because your family

might not be a value, right? You might hate your parents. Sure. The point being selfishness.

Then there's the other kind of selfishness, which is Peter Keating, one of the villains of the book,

which is he's selfish in that he's greedy. He's looking out for number one, but he has no values.

He has no sense of character. He just wants to be wealthy. He wants to have a beautiful wife.

He wants to have a big house. Why? He couldn't tell you because other people have it and he

wants to have it more than them. His sense of reference is other people. He's living second

hand. What the problem with that is, a lot of young people read rand. And when they start arguing

online, they just start trying to talk like rand. Whereas rand would be like the original,

be an innovator. If you want to argue for objectivism and rand's views, take her ideas,

articulate them in your own way. Because that's a good way of showing that you understand what

she thinks. But what they end up doing is just talking like her. It sounds dated and comical.

And that's going to be off putting because it's like, rand wouldn't expect someone else to sound

like rand. She's a person. And she of course wouldn't view Keating as selfish in any sense,

because, or even greedy, greed is a tricky word. He was selfish in the old school sense.

Yeah. He's selfish in the old, but even there, it's not as if he has some passion and he's

going after a passion no matter what. I'm getting light sheet steel. His passion is painting,

right? And he doesn't pursue his passion. He pursues what his mother wants him to pursue.

And he pursues money and he's completely second handed in the sense that he follows

other people's values, not his own. Can we actually just backtrack and can we

define some of these ideas that iron rand is known for of selfishness? Selfishness, egoism,

egotism, greed, I mean, those all basically all of those words are seen as negative in society.

And iron rand has been reclaiming in her work those words. So can you speak to what they mean?

I think she's trying to, you're on my disagree. I think she's trying to be needlessly provocative.

And it's off putting. And on one hand, maybe you want to be a provocateur because that gives

you people like, what does this woman mean? On the other hand, many people are going to be

viscerally put off. When iron rand was on Donahue in 1979, he asked her explicitly,

define to me the virtue of selfishness, which is the title of her collection of essays as well.

And she, this is rand, immediately says, use a different word, self esteem. And it's like,

yeah, it's like, why are you championing this word, which has extremely negative connotations?

Whereas if you just say, and this is thanks to her and her work, my life matters. My values

matter. I'm not going to apologize for that. That is a lot less off putting than this caricature

of rand, which is when people hear I'm for selfishness, they hear, oh, someone's bleeding

out in the corner, but I want to get a coke. That's nice. She condemned that. She says,

I'm against this kind of sociopathy. That's absolutely crazy. But that word selfishness

goes a mistake to, to, to be provocative in this one dimension, to go like and to stick with it.

I mean, she's stuck with this idea of selfishness and so on. This term. And it's I, I, I, I often use

terms for provocative effect. Yes, this is true. You're a master. You're a scholar of the trolling

arts. Thank you, sir. But I think this is one example where the costs that weigh the benefits.

And go ahead, you're on. Yes, I'm, I'm, I don't, I'm open to that idea, but I don't,

I don't think that's right. When, when you actually dig, you know, deeper into what people

object to, they're not but objecting to the word. They're objecting to the ideas. And

she addresses this explicitly in the virtue of selfishness in there. I think the introduction.

Wait, hold on. I got, I got, that's for clarification. You're saying they're objecting

to the ideas, but when they talk about her, they're not talking about her actual ideas.

They're talking about the caricature. Well, sure. But, but the caricature is a defense

mechanism. Okay. Not to, not have to deal with the ideas, right? So, so they create the caricature

in order to ignore the ideas in order to, and some of them do it consciously. Like when, when,

when people like Krugman and others do this, they know exactly what they're doing.

Well Krugman is, is Ellsworth Tui. Yes. He's, he's the perfect Ellsworth Tui. And, and he,

he knows Iron Man, he's read Iron Man and he knows she's the enemy in some sense. He knows

check out our episode with, with Krugman. I think it's number 90. It was a great conversation.

Didn't get as many views as me, but what are you going to do?

No, well, you got a Nobel Prize. So what you got?

I've got a ticket to heaven. Sorry, Paul. Yasuo Alfred has a Nobel Prize.

And Hitler was a times man of the year. Yes.

But you, you, that, that really bothers me when people bring that up. Are you really?

Yeah. Time of the year. It's called a joke, Michael. Good.

Is it? Man of the year is not representative. Good. It's, it represents the most influential

person of that year. And Hitler was. Absolutely.

Well, what were you upset about? When people like, well, look at Time Magazine,

they call Hitler man of the year. They, like you're on set. They won't say this guy's awesome.

They said, this is the guy who moved on the world.

It's not like he was. I don't, I don't go out there.

Now that's who they like. Hitler's terrible. Stalin guy. Oh, no, no, I'm not even joking.

The, the attitude between the, the attitude of people between Nazism and fascism and

communism is stunning. Like in my upcoming book, I have all the receipts how like the,

the things that they were saying about Stalin at the time are, if you look back, it's unconscionable.

And these people have had no accountability in the positive direction.

It's not, it's not even at the time. And I, I, we need to get back to the selfishness stuff,

but it's not even at the time. So I'm, I was once, I think I've told the story. I was at,

I was in the green room going on John Stossel show. And so a bunch of libertarians, right?

Oh, in the green room, all hanging out. And this guy walks in, this young guy walks in.

And somebody says to me, you know, he's, he's a communist. I said, what do you mean?

I said, they said, no, no, he's, he's a card carrying real member of the communist party.

He's a communist. And I said, and that's okay with you guys. And they go, yeah, yeah, nice guy.

And I'm like, no, this is not acceptable.

Hold on. Let me quote Rand. Rand said she would rather talk to a philosophical Marx,

right? Did she not say this? Yeah, but this is not a, this is,

this is a communist in the context of 21st century. Right. So, so I said, well,

well, in a sense that we know exactly what we know exactly. So I'm like, this guy has the

blood of a hundred million people on his hands. I'm not letting him off the hook. So I get,

I engage with this guy and, and, and, and literally we get into this matter, you know,

I'm telling him what I, what I think of his ideas and therefore what I think of him.

Then the people from the wardrobe department come out and their chairs are put aside and,

you know, this little gladiator wing. It's like the libertarians are like sitting there amused

because to them it's just, you know, and I don't, you know, I'm not going to name names,

but to them it's just like, yeah, he's a communist. And I said, I said at some point,

and I said at some point to them, I won't name names because I said at some point to them,

if somebody walks into a room and says, I'm a Nazi, do you just treat him as, okay, let's,

let's go hang out and get some drinks? I do. I don't. I do. Cause I wrote a book about this,

then you write, and I did talk to Nazis and I went to North Korea. Cause you were writing a book.

Yeah. Right. But, but you're not, you're not going to hang out with a Nazi or a communist,

just like the regular person, right? To me, a Nazi and a communist are the same.

I don't, okay. Please explain this. Cause at first of all, any time you have equivocation,

I hate that because I don't, I don't like equality. I think it's a bad concept.

Sure. We're all sitting here as Jewish people, right? We're from the, we're from the Soviet Union.

To say these two things are basically the same. It's a matter of life and death for all of us.

We'd be dead under Hitler. We're not doing so hot under Stalin, but we're still alive.

Sure. So there's, there's some very big difference. It's one more thing. There's also one very big

difference in that one has a lot worse of a brand name and the other does not, even though the other

should. It's a brand. Yeah. Yeah. So I, so I agree. So there's a context in which I would fear

Stalin more than Hitler. There's a different context in which I would hit fear Hitler,

but as ideologies, they are equally evil. Wait, wait, but not, not the same because the difference

has been communism and fascism, but as ideologies, they're equally evil. They both view the individual

as insignificant, unimportant, and they both basically want to kill any independent minded.

Well, you're equating communism and Stalinism. So you're equal. No, I'm equating communism.

I don't know what Stalinism is. I don't care. Stalinism is one version of communism.

Communism is an evil ideology, no matter who practices it.

I don't, I don't think that's, I think that's too loose because here's one example. The first person

who went to the Soviet Union from the left and denounced it was Emma Goldman. She was an anarcho

communist, right? So she went there. She got deported from the United States. She went to Lenin

to his face. Hold on, let me finish. You're already, you're already dismissing what I'm saying.

Your body language, your emotion, your humility. History doesn't care about your feelings either.

She goes to Lenin. She goes, we're supposed to be about free speech. We're supposed to be

about the individual freedom. What are you doing? And he goes, free speeches of bourgeois

extravagance. You can't have it during a revolution. Too bad. She comes back to the west.

Wait, he's right? Yeah. Oh, no, yeah, correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's more consistent with the idea. Yeah, he's more consistent.

She's a compromise. Yeah, you're right. Well, she comes back to the west,

the big red Emma, the big hero of the left. And she goes, you guys, this is a complete,

not, she didn't say bad. She was very random. She goes, this is pure evil. This is horrifying.

What they're doing to the workers, which you supposedly care about, completely oppressing.

And one, one person described, they go, when she got up to talk, it was a standing ovation.

And when she was finished, you could hear a pin drop because she wasn't some capitalist.

She wasn't some bourgeois conservative. She was as hard left for violent revolution as it gets.

And so I don't think she, as a communist, is an evil person.

I think she is. Because, because if she, if she wasn't evading and, you know, with Rand,

and I think in reality, the essence of evil is evasion is, is ignoring the facts of reality,

is putting your feelings ahead of your facts. She would realize that what was going on in the

Soviet Union was the inevitable consequence of her ideas. So she could have, so she could have

changed her mind. She could have, coming back to the Soviet Union said, these ideas are wrong.

I now repudiate my ideas, not just of implementation, but my ideas. And then I would have said,

yeah, she had been mistaken before and now she's confronted reality. But if she stayed a leftist,

if she stayed a leftist to that extent, not just a mildly, but a leftist, then I think she's dishonest

and therefore immoral, right? But you're using three words identically. You're saying dishonest,

immoral, and evil. And I'm, so evil, so evil is more, is, is, is an extreme form of immorality,

right? So, okay, so she's, she's immoral. The ideology she holds is still evil. Because the

ideology, she might be delusional. That's delusional. But she can be delusional. She cannot be delusional.

See, I, I, I'm willing to accept a delusion before she's gone to the Soviet Union and seen it.

Once she's gone to see it, I don't think that excuse holds anymore. I think now she's been

confronted and she's lying to herself about the implications of it. Logically, it's inevitable

that what happens in the Soviet Union has to happen in any communist context.

To play a little bit of a devil's advocate here. Is it logically inevitable? Is it,

can you imagine that there is communist systems where the consequences we've seen in the 20th

century are not the, the consequences we get in, imagine future societies under different

conditions, under different, you know, with the internet, different communication schemes,

different set of reasons. As long as human beings are what we are. Now the Borg,

you remember the Borg from, from Star Trek or whatever the series was. Okay, nerd.

Yeah. I mean, I'm a nerd. Okay. The Borg is the highest of compliments. The Borg in this household.

The Borg is the highest of Lex. The Borg is communist, right? The Borg is a different species.

It has a different biology. It has a business, different form consciousness. Now, whether such

a being could, could survive evolution is a question. Whether such a, they don't have to be

intelligent. Yeah. But they, but then the question is, can you have free will? Yeah. Yeah. Human

cognitive cognition and be a Borg. I don't think so. But maybe, sure. Maybe in another planet.

But you gotta take the NT to meet the Borg. Say human beings. No. Communism is anti,

the reason communism is evil is it's anti reality, anti human nature, anti the individual.

And therefore it is inherently evil. It cannot result in anything good coming out of it. Only

bad can come of it. Do you think you could have predicted that before the 20th century?

Yes. And plenty of people did. It's not, it's not. You know who did? Mikhail Bakunin. Mikhail Bakunin,

who was an early communist, Marx's rival in 18, this is going to be in my upcoming book,

in 1860, he sat down and wrote an essay, goes, what Marx is advocating is insane. This is going to

be worse than the czar. You're talking about complete totalitarian nightmare. When you put

this into practice, it's going to be something we've never seen before. It's a pure horror.

Like he was a hardcore leftist. Look, Marx predicted it, right? Marx at some point says

certain people cannot be part of the proletariat and they have to be liquidated. So this idea of

mass murder and mass killing is not new to communism. It is an inherent part of what it means. You're

either proletarian or you're not. And you look, and in Marx, it's in Marx, right? The individual

doesn't matter. Now he might matter in his utopia because he knows he's got a marketing problem.

See, Marx has a marketing problem because the fact is you have individuals. How do you convince

individuals to give up their individualism, to give up the individuality? What you say is,

well, we have to go through this difficult process to get to this utopia. And then this utopia,

I mean, he's very Christian. I mean, this is the other thing about Marx. But the end time.

Marx is very Christian in everything, in his morality, in his collectivism and in the end

time. The end times for Marx is going back to the Garden of Eden. The end time for Marx is,

you don't have to do anything. Food is just available. Every wealth is just available.

You can do your hobbies. You can do everything. You can do whatever you want, whatever feelings,

whatever. So it's going back to a Garden of Eden perception perspective on human. So he knows what

that is going to require. It's going to require this dictatorship of the proletarian to get there.

And he never tells you how we get there, right? There's no game plan. There's a dictatorship

than these utopias. It's like the underpants notes. Step one, dictatorship. Step two, question

mark. Step three, utopia. And the question mark is what action is, right? Annihilate. Yeah, you yada,

yada, the important part. And people buy this garbage, right? So there's nothing of value in

Marx. I mean, let me be very clear. There's nothing, he gets capitalism wrong. He gets the

proletarian wrong. He gets the workers wrong. He gets the labor theory of value is wrong.

There is nothing of value. There's nothing of value in communism. It is a wrong, unfitted to

human nature ideology from beginning to end. The clarity with which you speak is just not

something I, I don't think I have that clarity about anything. So I, I mean, it has to do with

that thing that where everybody has something to teach you, I just feel like I've been reading

Mein Kampf recently, for example, for the first time, something to learn from Hitler. Well,

there's a lot to learn from Hitler about the nature of evil, about wrong ideas, not about