Lex Fridman Podcast - #138 – Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand and the Philosophy of Objectivism

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

Yaron Brook is a objectivist philosopher, podcaster, and author. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off premium - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod to get 3 months free - Cash App: https://cash.app/ and use code LexPodcast to get $10 EPISODE LINKS: Yaron's Twitter: https://twitter.com/yaronbrook Yaron Brook Show (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/user/ybrook Free Market Revolution (book): https://amzn.to/32H0oLb Equal is Unfair (book): https://amzn.to/32K3NsC PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (06:28) - Principles of a life well lived (14:35) - Free will (20:50) - Nature of reality (29:28) - Ayn Rand (1:01:11) - Objectivism (1:26:29) - Godel Incompleteness Theorem (1:31:36) - Capitalism (2:01:22) - Virtue of selfishness (2:11:27) - Win-win (2:17:31) - Anarchy (2:36:24) - Tribalism and division (2:40:42) - Objectivism and Jordan Peterson on personal responsibility

The following is a conversation with Iran Brooke, one of the best known objectives, philosophers and thinkers in the world. Objectivism is the philosophical system developed by Ayn Rand, that she first expressed in her fiction books, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, and later in Nonfiction Essays and Books. Yaran is the current chairman of the board at the Ironware and Institute, host of the Iran Brook Show and the co-author of Free Market Revolution, equal is unfair and several other books where he analyzes systems of government, human behavior and the human condition from the perspective of objectivism.

Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Blinkist, an app I use for reading through summaries of books, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet, and cash app. The app I use to send my native friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I first read Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead early in college, along with many other literary and philosophical works from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, Locke, Foucault, Wiggenstein, and of course all the great existentialists from Kiergogard to Kamu.

I always had an open mind, curious to learn and explore the ideas of thinkers throughout history, no matter how mundane or radical or even dangerous they were considered to be. Iron Rand was, and I think still is a divisive figure. Some people lover, some people dislike, or even dismisser. I prefer to look past what some may consider to be the flaws of the person, and consider with an open mind that ideas she presents, and Yaran now describes and applies in his philosophical discussions. In general, I hope that you will be patient and understanding as I venture out across

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you get $10 and cash out will also donate to $10 first, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young minds around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Yaron Brooke. Let me ask the biggest possible question first. Sure. What are the principles of a life well-lived? I think it's to live with thought that is to live a rational life to think it through. I think so many people In a sense zombies out there they're alive But I don't really alive because their mind is not focused. Their mind is not You know focused on what do I need to do in order to live a great life?

So too many people just go through the motions of living rather than really embrace life. So I think the secret to living a great life is to take it seriously. And what it means to take it seriously is to use the one tool that makes us human. The one tool that provides us with all the values that we have, our mind, our reason. And to use it, apply it, to living. People apply it to their work. They apply it to their math problems, to science, to programming. But imagine if they use that same energy,

that same focus, that same concentration, to actually living life and choosing values that they should pursue, that would change the world. And it would change day of life. Yeah, actually, you know, I wear the silly suit and tie. It symbolizes it to me always. It makes me feel like I'm taking the moment really seriously. I think that's really, that's right.

And each one of us has different ways to kind of condition our consciousness. I'm serious now. And for you, it's a sudden time. It's a conditioning of your consciousness to now I focus, now I'm at work, now I'm doing my thing. And I think that's terrific. And I wish everybody took that look. I mean, it's a cliche, but we only live once every minute of your life, you never can never live again. This is really valuable. And when people don't have that deep respect

for their own life, for their own time, for their own mind, and if they did, again, you know, one could only imagine, look at how productive people are, look at amazing things they've produced, and they do, and they work. And if they apply that to everything, wow. So you kind of talk about reason.

Where does the kind of existentialist idea of experience, maybe, you know, fully experiencing all the moments versus fully thinking through? Is there an interesting line to separate the two? Like, why such an emphasis on reason for life will live versus just enjoy, like experience? Well, because I think experience in a sense is the easy part. I'm not saying it's how we experience the life that we live. And yes, I'm all with the take time to value what you value. But I think I don't think that's the problem of people out there. I don't think the problem is they don't take any time to appreciate

where they are and what they do. I think it's that they don't use their mind in this one respect in planning their life and thinking about how to live. So the focus is on reason is because it's our only source of knowledge. There's no other source of knowledge. We don't know anything with it, you know, that does not come from our senses in our mind, the integration of the evidence of our senses. Now we know stuff about ourselves and I think it's important to know oneself through

introspection, and I consider that part of reasoning, is the introspect. But I think reason is undervalued, which is funny to say, because it's our means of survival, it's how human beings survive. We cannot see this is where I disagree with so many scientists and people like Sam Harris, you mentioned Sam Harris before the show. We're not programmed to know how to hunt. We're not programmed to do agriculture. We're not programmed to build computers and build networks on which we can podcast and do our shows. computers and build networks on which we can podcast and do our shows. All of that requires effort. It requires focus. It requires energy and it requires will. It requires somebody to will it. It requires somebody to choose it. And once you make that choice, you have to engage that choice means that you're choosing to engage your reason in discovery,

in integration, and then in work to change the world in which we live. And human beings at the discover, figure out, solve the problem of hunting. Hunting, you know, everybody thinks, oh, that's easy. I've seen the movie. But human beings had to figure out how to do it, right? You, you, you can't run down a bison and bite into it, right? You're not going to catch it. You're not going to, you have no thanks to bite into it. You have to build weapons. You have to build tools. You have to create traps. You have to have a strategy. All of that requires reason. So the most important thing that allows you to be survived and to thrive in every value

for the most simple to the most sophisticated, for the most material to, I believe, the most spiritual requires thinking. So, stopping and appreciating the moment is something that I think is relatively easy once you have a plan, once you've thought it through, once you know what your values are, there is a mistake people make, they attain their values and they just, and they don't take a moment to save that and to appreciate that and to even pat themselves on the back that they did it, right? But that's not what's screwing up the world. What's screwing up the world is that people

have the wrong values and they don't think about them and they don't really focus on them and they don't have a plan for their own life and how to live it. If we look at human nature, you're saying the fundamental big thing that we need to consider is our capacity, like capability to reason. So to me, reason is this massive evolutionary achievement, right, in quotes, right. If you think about any other sophisticated animal, everything has to be coded. Everything has to be written in the hard way. It has to be there. And they have to have a solution, a very outcome.

And if there's no solution, the animal dies typically, the animal suffers in some way. Human beings have this capacity self-programmed. They have this capacity. There's not it's not a top low rassa in the sense that there's nothing there. Obviously we have a nature. Obviously our minds, our brains are structured in a particular way. But given that, in a particular way. But given that, we have the ability to turn it on, or turn it off. We have the ability to commit suicide, to reject our nature, to work against our interests, not to use the tool that evolution has provided us,

which is this mind, which is reason. So that choice, that fundamental choice, Hamlet says it, right, to be or not to be, but to be or not to be is to think or not to think, to engage or not to engage, to focus or not to focus, you know, in the morning when you get up, you kind of, you know, you're not, you know, really completely there, you're kind of out of focus and stuff. It requires an act of will to say, okay, I'm awake. I've got stuff to do. Some people never do that. Some people live in that haze, and they never engage that mind. And when you're sitting and try to solve a complex computer problem, problem or math problem, you have to turn something on. You have to, in a sense, exerts certain energy to focus on the problem, to do it.

And that is not determined, in a sense that you have to focus. You choose to focus, and you could choose not to focus. And that choice is more powerful than any other, like, parts of our brain that we've borrowed from fish and from our evolutionary origins, like this, whatever this crazy little leap in evolution is that allowed us to think is more of anything else. So I think newer scientists pretend they know a lot more about the brain than they really do. And we know very well. That's fired.

I agree with you. And we don't know that much yet about how the brain functions and what's efficient, what, you know, all this stuff. So I think what exists there is a lot of potentialities. But the beauty of the human brain is, it's potentialities that we have to manifest through our choices.

It's there, it's sitting there. And yes, there's certain things that are going to evoke certain senses, certain feelings. I'm not even saying emotions because I think emotions are too complex to have been programmed into our mind. But I don't think so, you know, there's this big issue of evolutionary psychology is huge right now and it's a big issue. evolutionary psychology is huge right now and it's a big issue. I find it to a large extent as way too early and storytelling about expo, storytelling about stuff. We still don't, you know, so for example, I would like to see if evolutionary psychology differentiate between things like inclinations, feelings,

emotions, sensations, thoughts, concepts, ideas. What are those, the program and what are those are developed and chosen in a product of reason? I think anything from emotion to abstract ideas is all chosen is all the product of reason. And everything before that we might have been programmed for. But the fact is so clearly a sensation is not a product of, you know, is something that we feel because that's how our biology looks. So until we have these categories, and until we can clearly specify what is what and where did they come from, the whole discussion and evolution psychology

seems to be rambling, it doesn't seem to be scientific. So we have to define our terms, which is the basis of science. You have to have some clear definitions about what we're talking about. It, when you ask them these questions, there's never really a coherent answer about what is it exactly?

And everybody is afraid of the issue of free will. And I think to some extent, I mean, Harris has this, and I don't want to misrepresent anything, Harris has, because I'm a fan, and I like a lot of his stuff. But on the one hand, he is obviously intellectually active and wants to change our minds. So he believes that we have some capacity to choose.

On the other hand, he's undermining that capacity to choose by saying it's just determined. So you're gonna choose what you choose. You have no say in it. There's actually no you. And that's to me completely on scientific. That's completely him, you know, pulling it out of no way. We all experience the fact that we have an eye.

That kind of certainty saying that we do not have that fundamental choice that reason provides is unfounded currently. You look, there's a sense in which it can never be contradicted because it's a product of your experience. It's not a product of your experience. You can experience it directly.

So no science will ever prove that this table isn't here. I can see it. It's here. I can feel it. I know I have free work because I can introspect it. In a sense, I can see it. I can see myself engaging it. And that is as valid as the evidence of my senses. Now, I can't point at it so that you can see the same thing I'm seeing. But you can do the same thing in your own consciousness and

you can identify the same thing. And to deny that in the name of science is to get things upside down. You start with that. And that's the beginning of science. The beginning of science is the identification that I choose and that I can reason. And now I need to figure out the mechanism, the rules of reasoning, the rules of logic, how does this work, and that's where science comes from. Of course, it's possible that science, like from my place of AI, would be able to, if we were able to engineer consciousness or understand, I mean, it's very difficult, because

we're so far away from it now, but understand how the actual mechanism of that consciousness emerges, then in fact this table is not real. That we can determine that it exactly how our mind constructs the reality that we perceive. Then you can start to make interesting but our mind doesn't construct the reality that we perceive. The reality would perceive is there. We perceive a reality that exists. Yeah. Now, and we perceive it in particular ways given the nature of our senses, right? A bat perceives this table differently, but it's still the same table with the same characteristics

and the same identity. It's just a matter of we use eyes, they use a radar system to, you know, they use sound waves to perceive it, but it's still there, existence exists where the we exist are not. And so you could create, I mean, I don't know how, and I don't know if it's possible, but let's say you could create a consciousness, right? And I, I expect that to do that, you would have to use biology, not just electronics, but you know, the way outside Mike's disease. Because consciousness, as far as we know, is a phenomena of life and you would have to figure out how to create life before you created

consciousness, I think. But if you did that, then that wouldn't change anything. All it would say is we have another consciousness being cool. That's great. But it wouldn't change the nature of our consciousness. Our consciousness is what it is, but respect. So that's very interesting. I think this is a good way to set the table for discussion of objectivism. Let me at least challenge a thought experiment, which is, I don't know if you're familiar with Donald Hoffman's work about reality. So his idea is that We're just our perception is just an interface to reality. So Donald Hoffman is the is the guy you see a fine. Yeah, I've met Donald And I've seen this video and look Donald is not invented anything new. This goes back to ancient philosophy. Let me just stating

Yeah, yes, of course in case people aren't familiar. I mean, it's a fascinating thought experiment to me, like out of the box thinking perhaps literally, is that there's a gap between the world as we perceive it and the world as it actually exists. And I think that's for the philosophy ofjectivism, it's a really important gap to close. So can you maybe at least try to entertain the idea that there's more to reality

than our minds can perceive? Well, I don't understand what more means, right? Of course, there's more to reality than what our senses perceive. That is, for example, I don't know, certain elements have radiation, right? Uranium has radiation. I can't perceive radiation. The beauty of human reason is I can, I can through experimentation discover the phenomena of radiation, then actually measure radiation. And I don't worry about it. I can't perceive the world the way a bat perceives the world.

And I might not be able to see certain things, but I can, we've created radars. So A way to understand how a bat perceives the world. And I can mimic it through a radar screen and create an images like the bat, it's conscious of somehow perceives it, right? So the beauty of human reason is our capacity to understand the world beyond what our senses give us directly at the end.

Everything comes in through our senses, but we can understand things that our senses don't provide us, but what he's doing is doing something very different. He is saying what our census provides us might have nothing to do with the reality out there. That is just a random arbitrary, nonsensical statement. And he actually has a whole evolution of explanation for it. He runs some simulations, simulations seem, I mean, I'm not an expert in this field, but they seem silly to me. They don't seem to reflect.

And look, all he's doing is taking Imanual Cons philosophy, which particularly exactly the same cause. And he's giving it a venue of evolutionary ideas. I'm not an expert in evolution and I'm an expert on epistemology, which is what this is. So, to me, as a semi-laymon, it doesn't make any sense. And, you know, I actually, you know, I have this year on Bookshow,

I don't know if I'm allowed to pitch it, but I've got this year on Bookshow on. I'm super sorry, let me pause on YouTube. I'm a huge fan of the year on Bookshow. I listen to very often as a small aside, the cool thing about reason, which you practice, is you have a systematic way of thinking through basically anything. Yes.

And that's so fun to listen to. I mean, it's rare that I think there's flaws in your logic, but even then it's fun. Yeah. Because I'm like disagreeing with the screen. When I'm, and it's great when somebody disagrees with me and they give good arguments because that makes it challenging. And you know, so, so one of the shows I want to do in the next few weeks is one of my philosophy, being one of my philosophy friends

to discuss the video that, that Hoffman, where he presents his theory. Because it surprises me how seductive it is. And it seems to be so, first of all, completely counterintuitive, but because, you know, somehow we managed to cross the road and not get hit by the car. And if our senses did not provide us any information about what's actually going on in reality, how do we do that? And not to mention built computers, not to mention flight to the moon and actually land on the moon. If reality is not giving us information

about the moon, if our senses are not giving us information about the moon, how did we get there? And where did we go? Maybe we didn't go anyway. It's just, it's nonsensical to me, and it's a very bad place philosophically, because it basically says there is no objective standard for anything. There is no objective reality. You can come up with anything, you could argue anything, and there's no methodology, right? My, I believe that at the end of the day, what reason allows us to do is provide us with a methodology for truth. And at the end of the day for every claim that I make, I should be able to boil it down to sea. Yeah, look, the evidence of the census is right then. Once you take that away, knowledge is gone.

And truth is gone, and that opens it up to, you know, complete disaster. So, you know, to me, why it's compelling to at least entertain this idea. First of all, it shakes up the mind a little bit to force you to go back to first principles and ask the question, what do I really know? The second part of that that I really enjoy is it's a reminder that we know very little to be a little bit more humble. So if

reality doesn't exist at all, before you start thinking about it, I think it's a really nice wake-up call to think, wait a minute, I don't really know much about this universe. That humbleness. I think something I'd like to ask you about in terms of reason when you You can become very confident In your ability to understand the world if you practice reason off on and I feel like you can lead you astray Because you can start to think it's so I love psychology and Psychologists have the certainty about understanding the human condition which is undeserved. You know, you're on a study with 50 people and you think you can understand

the source of all these sacred attributes, the source of all these kinds of things. And that's similar kind of trouble. I feel like you can get into it when you when you overreach with reason. So I don't think there is such a thing as overreaching with reason, but there are bad applications of reason. They're bad uses of reason or the pretence of using reason. I think a lot of these psychological studies are pretence of using reason and these psychologists have never really taken a serious stat class or serious econometrics class. So they use statistics in weird ways

that just don't make any sense. And that's a miss, that's not reason, right? That's just bad thinking, right? So I don't think you can do too much good thinking. And that's what reason is, it's good thinking. And now, that, the fact that you try to use reason, does not guarantee you won't make mistakes. It doesn't guarantee you won't be wrong. It doesn't guarantee you won't go down a rabbit hole and completely get it wrong.

But it does give you the only existing mechanism to fix it, which is going back to reality, going back to facts, going back to reason and getting out of the rabbit hole and getting up back to reason and getting out of the rabbit hole and getting up back to reality. So I agree with you that it's interesting to think about these, what I consider crazy ideas because it, oh wait, what is my argument about them? If I don't really have a good argument about them, then do I know what I know? So in that sense, it's always nice to be challenged and pushed and oriented. You know, the nice thing about objectiveism, it's always nice to be challenged and pushed and an oriented, you know, the nice thing about objectiveism is everybody's doing that to me all the time, right?

Because nobody agrees with me on anything. So I'm constantly being challenged, whether it's in bihopman on metaphysics and epistemology, right? On the very foundations of biology, in ethics, everybody constantly, and in politics all the time. So I find that it's part of, you know, I prefer that everybody, there's a sense in which I prefer that everybody agreed with me, right? Because I think we live in a better world. But there's a sense in which that disagreement makes it, at least up to a point, makes it interesting and challenging

and forces you to be able to rethink or to confirm your own thinking and to challenge their thinking. Can you try to do the impossible task and give a whirlwind introduction to I and Rand, the many sides of I and Rand, so I and Rand the human being, I and Rand the novelist, and I and ran the philosopher. So who was I ran? Sure, so your life story is one that I think is fascinating and but it also lends itself to this integration

of all of these things. She was born in St. Petersburg, Russian 1905 to kind of a middle class family, Jewish family, they owned a pharmacy, a father owned a pharmacy. And you know, she grew up, she grew up, she was a very, she knew what she wanted to do and what she wanted to be from a very young age, I think from the age of nine, she knew she wanted to be a writer, she wanted to write stories. That was the thing she wanted to do. And you know, she focused her life after that on this goal of I want to be a novelist. I want to write. And the philosophy was incidental to that, in a sense, at least until some point in her life.

She witnessed the Russian Revolution literally had happened outside. They lived in St. Petersburg where the first kind of demonstrations and of the revolution happened. So she witnessed it. She lived through it as a teenager, went to school under the Soviets. For a while, they were under kind of the, in the Black Sea where the opposition government was ruling and then they would go back and forth between the Communists and the whites. But she experienced what Communism was like. She saw the pharmacy being taken away from her family. She saw their apartment being taken away or other families being brought into the apartment they were already lived in. And it was very clear, given her nature,

given her views, even at a very young age, that she would not survive the system. So a lot of effort was put into how does she get out and her family was really helpful in this. And she had a cousin in Chicago, and she had been studying kind of film at the university and in her 20s.

This is in her 20s early 20s and Lenin there was a small window where Lenin was allowing some people to leave under circumstances and she managed to get out to go do research on film in the United States. Everybody knew, everybody who knew her knew she would never come back. That this was a one-way ticket and she got out, she made it to Chicago, spent a few weeks in Chicago and then headed a Hollywood. She wanted to write scripts. That was the goal. Here's this was the goal. Here's this short woman from Russia with a strong accent, learning English, showing up in Hollywood, and I want to be a script writer. In English.

In English, writing in English. This is one of these fairy tale stories, but it's true. She shows up at the Cesar B. Demil Studios. She has a lot of introduction from Subit de Mil studios. And she has a letter of introduction from her cousin in Chicago who owns a movie theater. And this is in the late 1920s. And she shows up there with this letter and they say, you know, don't call us, we'll call you kind of thing. And she steps out. And there's this massive convertible and in the convertible is Cicabit de Mille and he's driving slowly past the right at the entrance of the studio and she stays at him and he stops the con.

He says, you know, why are you staring at me? And she says, you know, she tells him a story of a Russian, you know, wanna make it in the movies, I wanna be a script writer one day and he says, well, if you wanna, if you want that, you don't get in the car. You know, she gets in the car and he takes her to the back lot of his studio with her filming The King of Kings, the story of Jesus. And he says, he has a pass for a week. If you want to be if you want to write for the movies, you better know how movies are made. And she basically spends

a week and then she spends more time there. She managed to get some extension. She lands up being an extra in the movie so you can see Iron Man there and one of the masses when Jesus is walking by. She meets her future husband on the set of the King of King. She lands up getting married, getting her American citizenship that way. And she lands up doing odds and ends jobs in Hollywood living in a tiny little apartment. Somehow making a living, her husband was an actor. He was struggling actors or difficult times. And in the evenings, studying English, writing, writing, writing, writing, and studying, and studying, and studying. She finally makes it by writing a play that that is successful in in LA and ultimately goes to Broadway and she writes her first novel is a novel called We The Living which is the most autobiographical of all her novels. It's about a young woman in the Soviet Union. It's a powerful story, a very moving story.

And probably, if not the best, one of the best portrayals of life under communism. And so you would recommend the book? Definitely recommend We The Living. It's a first novel. She wrote in the 30s. And it didn't go anyway. Because if you think about the intelligence here, the people who

mattered, the people who wrote book reviews, this is a time of Duonte, who's the New York Times guy in Moscow, who's praising Stalin to the hills and the success. So the novel fails, but she's got it in of a lot. She writes a small novel that called Anthem. A lot of people have read that and it's read in high schools. It's kind of dystopian novel and it doesn't get published in the US. It's published in the UK. UK is very interested in dystopian novels.

Animal Farm in 1984. 84 is published a couple years after I think, after Anthem. There's reason to believe he read Anthem. And George Rowe will write in the animal farm. Yeah. Just the small side animal farm is probably top. I mean, it's weird to say, but I would say it's my favorite book. Have you seen this movie out now called Mr. Jones?

No. Or you've got to see Mr. Jones. What's Mr. Jones? Sorry for my ignorance. No, no, it's a movie. It hasn't got any publicity, which is tragic, because it's a really good movie. It's both brilliantly made.

It's made by a Polish director, but it's in English. It's a true story, and JoJo Welles' animal farm is featured in it in the sense that during the story, George O'Wales writing animal farm and the narrator is reading off sections of animal farm as the movie is all interesting. And the movie is a true story about the first Western journalist to discover and to write about the famine in Ukraine. And so he goes to Moscow and then he gets on a train and he finds himself in Ukraine and it's beautifully and horrifically made. So the horror of the famine is brilliantly conveyed.

And then, and it's a true story, it's a very moving story, very powerful story. And just very well made movies. It's tragic in my view that not more people are seeing it. That's interesting. I was actually recently just complaining that there's not enough content on the famine, the thirties of, you know, of stuff. There's so much on Hitler, like I love the reading.

I'm reading, it's so long, it's been taking me forever the the rise and falls of the right Yeah, I love it. I've got the book to compliment that that you have to read. It's called the ominous parallels It's Lenin peacoff and it's the ominous parallels and it's about it's about the causes of the rise of Hitler but a philosophical causes so whereas the rise in fall is more of a kind of the existential kind of what happened, but really delving into the intellectual currents that led to the rise of Hitler. And maybe highly recommend that.

And basically suggesting how it might rise another. That's the ominous parallel. So the parallel he draws is to the United States. And he says those same intellectual forces are rising in the United States. And this is published I think in, published in 82, it was published in 82. So it's published a long time ago.

And yet you look around us and it's unbelievably predictive sadly about the state of the world. So I finished Iron Man story. I don't want to, I don't know if you want me to. No, no, no, but on that point, I'll have to let's please return to it, but let's now for now. Let me also say just because I don't forget about Mr. Jones, it is true the point you made It is true, the point you made, that tons of movies that are anti-fascist, anti-naughty, and that's good. But there are way too few movies that are anti-communist, just almost not.

And it's very interesting, and if you remind me later, I'll tell you a story about that. But so she publishes Anthem, and then she starts, and she's doing okay in Hollywood, and she's doing okay in Hollywood, and she's doing okay with the play. And then she starts on her, on the book The Fountainhead, and she writes The Fountainhead. And it comes out, she finishes it in 1945.

And she sends it to publishers, and publisher after publish it after publish it to turn it down. And it takes 12 publishers before this this editor reads it and says, I want to publish this book. And he basically tells his bosses, if you don't publish it, it's a book. I'm leaving. And they don't really believe in the book. So they publish just a few copies. They don't do a math, and the book becomes a best seller from Word of mouth.

And they land up having to publish more and more and more. And it's, you know, she's basically gone from this immigrant who comes here with very little command of English and to all kinds of odds and edge jobs in Hollywood. To writing one of the seminal, I think, American books, she is an American author. I mean, if you read the fountain head, it's not Russian. This is not dusty Yvesky. It feels like a symbol of what America is in the 20th century.

And I mean, probably, maybe you can, so there's a famous kind of sexual rape scene in there. Is that like a lesson you wanna throw in some controversial stuff to make your philosophical books work out? I mean, is that why was it so popular? Do you have a sense? Well, because I think it illustrated, first of all,

because I think the characters are fantastic. It's got a real hero. And I think the whole book is basically illustrating this massive conflict that I think went on in America then, is going on today and it goes on in a big scale politics, all the way down to the scale of the choices you make in your life.

And the issue is individualism versus collectivism. Should you live for yourself? Should you live for your values? Should you pursue your passions? Should you do what your mother tells you? Should you follow your mother's passions? And that's, and it's very, very much an individual, a book about individuals and people relate to that. But it obviously has this massive implications to the world outside, and at the time of collectivism just having been defeated, well, not aism and in, you know, the United States representing individualism right as defeated, defeated collectivism. But we're collectivist ideas are still popular in the form of socialism and communism.

And for the individual this constant struggle between what people tell me to do, what society tells me to do, what my mother tells me to do, and what I think I should do, I think it's unbelievably appealing, particularly to young people who are trying to figure out what they want to do in life, trying to figure out what's important in life. It had this enormous appeal, which romantic, it's bigger than life, the characters, the big heroes. It's very American in that sense. It's about individualism.

It's about the triumph of individualism. And so I think that's what related. And it had this big romantic element from the, I mean, when I use romantic, I use it kind of in the sense of a movement in art. But it also has this romantic element in the sense of a relationship between a man and a woman who's, that's very intriguing. It's not only that there's a, I would say almost rape scene, right?

I would say but it's also that this woman is hard to understand. I mean, I've read it more than once And I still can't quite figure out Dominique, right? Because she loves him and she wants to destroy him and she marries other people I mean think about that too. Here. she's writing a book in the 1940s. There's lots of sex. There's a woman who marries more than one person has having sex with more than one person. Very unconventional. She's having married, she's having sex with her

or even though she's not married to her. This is 1945. And it's very jarring to people. It's very unexpected, but it's also a book of its time. It's about individuals pursuing their passion, pursuing their life, and not caring about convention and what people think, but doing what they think is right. And so I think it's, it's, I encourage everybody to read it, obviously. So that was, was that the first time shared articulated, articulated something that sounded like a philosophy of individualism. I mean, the philosophy is there in we the living, right?

Because at the end of the day, the woman is the hero of we the living is this individualist stuck in Soviet Union, so she's struggling with these things. So the theme is there already, it's not as fleshed out, it's not as articulated philosophically. And it's certainly then anthem, which is a dystopia novel where this dystopia in the future has, there's no eye. Everything is we. And it's about one guy who breaks out of that. I don't want to give it away, but, but, but breaks out of that. So these themes are running. And then we have, and we, and they've been published some of the early Iron Man stories that she was writing in preparation for writing her novel stories she was writing when she first came to America.

And you can see these same philosophical elements, even in the male, female relationships and the compassion and the, you know, you in the conflict, you see them even in those early pieces. And she's just developing them. It's same philosophically. She's developing her philosophy with her literature. And of course, after the fountain head, she starts on what turns out to be her Magnus Opus, which is Atlas Shrugged, which thinks it's 12 years to publish. By the time, of course, she brings that out every publisher in New York wants to publish it because the fountain

head has been such a huge success. They don't quite understand it. They don't know what to do without Le Shogd, but they're eager to get it out there. And indeed, when it's published, it becomes an instant bestseller. And the thing about particularly the font hit in an Al Le Shogd, but true of Ivan Anthem and we're the living, she is one of the only dead authors that sell more after they've died than when they were still alive.

Now, you know, that's true, maybe music. We listen to more Beethoven than when he was alive, but it's not true, typically, of novelists. And yet, here we are, you know, was it 50, you know, 60 years after the 63 years after the publication of Vatler Schruggd, and it sells probably more today than it sold when it was a best seller when it first came out. Is it true that it's like one of the most sold books in history?

No, okay. I've heard this kind of statement. Tom Clancy book comes out, sells more than Battle of Shrugged. But I've heard so, they were like this. Very, and I should say this, but it's the truth, so I'll say it, a very unscientific study done by the Smithsonian Institute, probably in the early 90s, that basically surveyed CEOs

and asked them, what was the most influential book on you? And Adlisha came out as number two, the second most influential book in CEOs in the country. But there's so many flaws in the study. One, you want to guess what the number one book, Bible, the Bible. But the Bible was like, you know, so maybe they serve it 100 people. I don't know what the exact numbers were. It was like, say, it's 100 people. And 60 said the Bible and 10 said Atlas Shrug, and there were a bunch of books over there. So, you know, I don't that's again, let's psychology discussion over having. Exactly. Well, and it's one thing I've learned

and maybe COVID has taught me and and nobody, you know, they're very few people who know how to do statistics and almost nobody knows how to think probabilistically that is think in terms of probabilities, that it is a skill, it's a hard skill. And everybody thinks they know it's icy doctors thinking their statisticians and giving whole analyses of the data on COVID and they don't have a clue at their talking about, not because they're not good doctors, because they're not good statisticians. People think that they have one skill and therefore translate to immediately into another skill and it's just not true.

So I've been astounded at how bad people are at that. For people who haven't read any of the books that we're just discussing, what would you recommend? What book would you recommend they read and maybe also just elaborate what mindset should they enter the reading of that book with? So I would recommend everybody read fountainhead and out of shogt and in one order. So it would depend on where you are in life. So it depends on who you are and what you are. So fountainhead is a more personal story. life. So it depends on who you are and what you are. So found

head is a more personal story. For many people it's their favorite. And for many people who is their first book and they wouldn't replace that. Right. If at the shrug is a it's about the world. Right. It's about what impacts the world, how the world functions, how it's a bigger book in the sense of the scope. If you, that, if you're interested in politics and you're interested in the world, read out the shrug first. If you're mainly focused on your life, your career, what you want to do with yourself, start with fun here, I still think you should read both

because I think they are, I mean, to me, they were life altering and to many, many people, they're life altering. And you should go into reading them with an open mind, I'd say. And with a put aside, everything you've heard about Iron Man, put aside any, even if it's true, just put it aside, even what I just said about Iron Man, put it aside. Just read the book as a book and let it move you and let your thoughts, let it shape how you think. And it'll have, you know, either have a response to it or you won't, but I think most people

have a very strong response to it. And then the question is, do they, are they willing to respond to the philosophy? Are they willing to integrate the philosophy? Are they willing to think through the philosophy or not? Because I know a lot of people who completely disagree with the philosophy philosophy, right? Here in Hollywood, right? Lots of people here in Hollywood love the fountain. Interesting. All of a stone, who is, I think, a vowed Marxist. Right?

I think he's admitted to being a Marxist. He is. His movies certainly reflect a Marxist theme. Is a huge fan of the fountain head and is actually his dream project. He is set in public. His dream project is to make the fountain. And now he would completely change it as movie directors do and he's actually outlined what his script would look like and it would be a disaster for the ideas of the

fun but he loves the story because they him the story is about autistic integrity. And that's what he catches on and what he hates about the story is an individualism. And I think that his movie ends with how it will join some kind of commune of architects that do it for the love and don't do it for the money. Interesting. So yeah, so you can connect with you without the philosophy. And before we get into the philosophy,

staying on Iron Rand, I'll tell you sort of my own personal experience. And I think it's one that people share. I've experienced this with two people. I ran to Nietzsche. When I brought up I ran when I was in my early 20s. The number of eye roles I got from sort of, you know, like advisors and so on,

that of dismissal, I've seen that later in life about more more specific concept in artificial tellers and technical where people decide that this is this is a set of ideas that are acceptable and these sets of ideas are not and they dismissed Iran without giving me any justification of why they dismissed her, except, oh, that's something you're into when you're 19 or 20. That same thing people say about Nietzsche, well, that's just something you do when you're in college and you take an intro to philosophy course.

So I've never really heard anybody cleanly articulate their opposition to iron rand in my own private little circles and so on. Maybe one question I just wanted to ask is, why is there such a opposition to iron rand and maybe another way to ask the same thing is what's misunderstood about iron rand? So we haven't talked about the philosophy, so it's hot at 8. So, right now, we can return to it if you think that's the right way to go. Well, let me give a broad answer and then we'll do the philosophy and then we'll return to it because I think it's important to know something about our ideas. She, I think, a philosophy challenges everything. It really does.

It shakes up the world. It challenges so many of our preconceptions. It challenges so many of the things that people take for granted as truth. From religion to morality to politics to almost everything, it's never quite being a thinker like her in the sense of really challenging everything and doing it systematically and having a complete philosophy that is a challenge to everything

that has come before her. Now, I'm not saying they're on threads that connect. They are in politics, they might be a thread in immorality, they might be a thread. But on everything, there's just never been like it. And people are afraid of that because it challenges them to the course. She's basically telling you to rethink almost everything. And that is that that people reject. The other thing that it does, and this goes to this point about, oh, yeah, that's when you do when you're 14, 15, right? She points out to them that they've lost something. They've lost their idealism.

They've lost their youthful idealism. What is, what makes youthfulness meaningful? Either that we're in better physical shape, starting to feel because I'm getting older. know, we're in better physical shape, starting to feel because I'm getting older. When we're young, we, you know, sometime in the teen years, right, there's something that happens to human consciousness. We almost awaken a new, right? We suddenly discover that we can think for ourselves.

We suddenly discover that not everything our parents or not teachers tell us is true. We suddenly discover that this tool on minds is suddenly available to us to discover the world and to discover truth. And it is a time of idealism. It's a time of, whoa, I wanna, you know, the better teenagers, I wanna know about the world. I wanna go out there, I don't believe my parents.

I don't believe my teachers. And this is healthy, this is fantastic. And I wanna go out about the world. I want to go out there. I don't believe my parents. I don't believe my teachers. And this is healthy. This is fantastic. And I want to go out there and experiment. And that gets us into trouble, right? We do stupid things when we're teenagers. Why? Because we're experimenting. It's an experiential part of it, right? We want to go and experience life. But we're learning. It's part of the learning process. And we become risk takers because we want to experience. But the risk is something we need to learn because we need to learn where the boundaries are and one of the damages that helicop to parents do is they prevent us from taking those risks. So we don't learn about the world and we

don't learn about where the boundaries are. So the teenage years are these years of wonder. They're depressing when you're in them for a variety of reasons, which I think primarily have to do with the culture, but also with oneself. But they are exciting, the periods of discovery. And people get excited about ideas, and good ideas, bad ideas, all kinds of ideas. And then what happens? We settle. We compromise.

Whether that happens in college, where we're taught that nothing exists and nothing matters and start being, be a, be an ILS, be a cynics, be whatever. Or whether it happens when we get married and get a job and have kids and are too busy and can't think about our ideals and forget and just get into the norm of conventional life or whether it's because a mother pestress pesters us to get married and have kids and do all the things that she wanted us to do. We give up on those ideals. And there's a sense in which I and Rand reminds them that they gave up. That's beautifully, that's so beautifully put and so true.

It's worth pausing on that dismissal. People forget the beauty of that curiosity. That's true in the scientific field too. That youthful joy of like everything is possible and we can understand it with the tools of our mind. Yes. And that's what it's all about. That's what Iron Man's ideas at the end of the day all bow down to. It's that confidence and that passion and that curiosity and that interest. And if you, you know, think about what academia does to so many of us, right, to we go into academia and we're excited about we're going to learn stuff. We're going

to discover things. And then they stick you into sub-subfield and examining some minutiae that's insignificant and unimportant. And to get published, you have to be conventional, you have to do what everybody else does. And then there's the tenure process of seven years where they put you through this torture

to write papers that fit into a certain mold. And by the time you're done, you're in your mid-30s, and you've done nothing, you discovered nothing, you're all in this minutiae in this stuff, and it's destructive. And where's holding on to that passion, holding on to that knowledge and that confidence is hard. And when people do away with it, they become cynical. And they become part of the system and they inflict the same pain on the next guy that they suffered because that's part of how it works. Yeah, this happens in artificial intelligence. This happens when a young person shows up and with fire in their eyes and they say, I want to understand the nature of intelligence. And everybody rolls their eyes.

Well, for these same reasons, because they've spent so many years on the very specific set of questions that, that kind of they compete over and the right papers over and they have conferences about, and it's true. Those, that incremental research is the way you make progress, answering the question of what is intelligence exceptionally difficult. But when you mock it, you actually destroy the realities, when we look like centuries from now, we'll look back at this time for this particular field of artificial intelligence, it will be the people who will be remembered, will be the people who will be remembered, will be the people who have asked the question and made it their life journey of what is intelligence.

And actually had the chance to succeed. Most will fail asking that question, but the ones that had a chance to succeed and had that throughout their whole life. And I suppose the same is true for philosophy. It's in every field. It's it's it's asking the big questions and staying curious and staying passionate and staying excited and accepting failure. Right? Accepting that you're not going to get it first time. You're not going to get the whole thing. But and and sometimes you have to do the minutiae work. And I'm not here to say nobody should specialize and you shouldn't

do the minutiae. You have to do that. But there has to be a way to do that work and keep the passion and keep and keep it all integrated. That's another thing. I mean, we don't live in a culture that integrates, right? We live in a culture that is all that is all about, you know, this minutiae and not and you know, medicine is another field where you specialize in the kidney. I mean, the kidneys connected to other things. You've got to, and we don't have a holistic view of these things. And I'm sure not official intelligence. You're not going to make the big leaps forward without a holistic view

of what it is you're trying to achieve. And maybe that's the question of what is intelligence, but that's the kind of questions you have to ask to make big leaps forward to really move the field in a positive direction. And it's the people who can think that way, who move fields, they move technology, you move anything, anything is everything. But just like you said, it's painful because underlying that kind of questioning is, well, maybe the work I've done for the past 20 years was a dead end. And you have to kind of face that. Even just, it might not be true, but even just facing that

reality is just, it's a painful feeling. Absolutely, but it's, that's part of the reason why it's important to enjoy the work that you do. Right. So that even if it doesn't completely work out, this you enjoy the process, right? It not a waste because you enjoyed the process. And if you learn as any entrepreneur knows this, right? And if you learn from the waste of time, from the errors, from the mistakes, then you can build on them and make things even better. Right. And so the next one years is my massive success. Can we, another impossible task? So you did wonderfully on talking about I and Rand.

The other impossible task of giving a world-wind overview of the philosophy of objectiveism, the philosophy of I and Rand. Yeah, so luckily she did it in an essay, or she talks about doing her philosophy on one foot. But let me integrate it with the literature and with her life a little bit. She wanted to be a writer, but her goal,

she had a particular goal in her writing. She was an idealist, right? She wanted to portray the ideal man. So one of the things you do when you want to do something is what is an ideal man? You have to ask that question. What does that mean? You might have a sense of it. You might have certain glimpses of it in other people's literature. But what is it? So she starts reading philosophy to try to figure out what if philosophers say about the ideal man? And what she finds horrified in terms of the view of most philosophers of man and she's She's attracted certainly when she's young to need she because need she at least has a vision of

Of grandeur for man even though his philosophy is very flawed and has other problems and contradicts him in many ways But at least he has that vision of what is possible to man. And she's attracted to that romantic vision, that idealistic vision. So she discovers in writing, particularly in writing, I would say, but even in the front in it, that she's going to have to develop her own philosophy. She's going to have to discover these ideas for herself because they're not fully articulated anywhere else. They glimpses again of it in Aristotle, in Nietzsche, but they're not fully fleshed out. So to a large extent she develops a philosophy for a very practical purpose, to write, to write a novel about the ideal man and

and and Alaschuk is the manifestation of that. By the way, sorry, into interrupt. As a little aside, she does when you say man, you mean human. And the and because we'll bring this up often, she does, I mean, maybe you can elaborate of how she specifically uses man and he and the work. We live in a time now. Yes. Oh, we gender. So well, she did that in in the in the sense that everybody did it during her specifically uses man and he and the work. We live in a time now, where we gender, so. Well, she did that in the sense

that everybody did it during her period of time, right? It's only in modern times where we do heaps last sheet, right? It is stoically when you said he, human being, a list of particular context implied that it was a, but in Iron Man's case, in this case, in this one sentence, she probably meant man. Not that because she viewed all differences between men and women, but not the same, which comes at a shock to many people.

But she was kind of the character. She was working on a particular vision, right? She considered herself a man worshipper and a man, not human being, a male, male. She worshipped manhood, if you will, the hero in man. And she wanted to fully understand what that was. Now, it has massive implications for a deal woman. And I think she does put for

the ideal woman in in in in Atlas shrugged in the character of Dagnie. But her goal is, you know, I think her selfish goal for what she wanted to get out of the novel is that excitement, partially sexual about seeing your ideal manifest in reality of what you perceive as the that which you would be attracted to fully intellectually, physically, sexually, in every aspect of your life. That's what he's trying to bring you to. So there was no ambiguity of gender. So there was a masculinity and a femininity in her word. Very much so. And if you read the novels, you see that. You see that. Now remember, this is in the context of in Atlas Schwab,

she is portraying a woman who runs a railroad, the most masculine of all jobs you can imagine, right? Running a railroad better than any man can run it. Yes. And achieving huge success better than any other man out there. But, but for who? Even Dagnie needs somebody to needs a man in some sense to look up to.

Yeah. And that's the character who's named my will mention because it gives away too much of the plot. But they have to, I like how you do that. You're good. You're not. A lot of practice. Not really, because you convey all the important things

with thou giving away plot lines. That's beautiful. You're a master. So she's very much, she described herself once as a male showrunner. She likes the idea of a man opening a door for. But more metaphysically, she identifies something in the difference between a way a man relates to a woman and a woman relates to a man. It's not the same. And let's not take too far of a tangent, but I just as a side comment

I to me she represented She was a feminist to me and be perhaps there's a perhaps technically philosophical you disagree with that whatever But the you know that to me represented strong like she had the some of the strongest female characters in the history of literature. Again, this is a woman running a railroad in 1957. And not just a woman running a railroad, and this is true of the fountain hit as well. A woman who is sexually, in a sense, assertive, sexually open, this is not a woman who embraces her sexuality. Sex is important in life. This is why it keeps coming up.

It was important to Iron Van. It was important in the novels. It's important in life. And for her, one's attitude towards sex is her reflection. One's attitude towards life. And what attitude towards pleasure, which is an important part of life. And she thought that was an incredibly important thing. And so she has these assertive, powerful sexual women who live their lives on their terms 100% who seek a man to look up to. Yeah.

Now, this is psychologically complex, it's most psychology, the philosophy, it's psychologically complex and not my area of expertise, but this is something, and she would argue, there's something fundamentally different about a male and a woman, about a male and female psychologically in their attitude towards one another. Yeah, but as a side note, I say that I would say that I don't know philosophically if her

ideas about gender are interesting, I think her other philosophical ideas are much more interesting, but reading wise, like the stories that created, the tension that created, that was pretty powerful. I mean, that was, that's, that's pretty powerful stuff. I'll speculate that the reason it's so powerful is because it reflects something in reality. Yeah, that's the issue. There's a thread that at least, and look, it's really important to say, she, I think she was the first feminist in a sense, I think she was the first feminist in a sense.

I think in a sense the feminist, the perverted feminism, into something that it shouldn't be. But in the sense of men and women are capable, she was the first one who really put that into a novel and showed it. To me, as a boy, when I was reading Ella Shrog, I think I read that before Fountainhead, that was one of the early introduction, at least if an American woman had examples of my own life for Russian women, but of a badass lady. I admire, I love engineering.

I love that she could, here's a lady that's running the show. That at least to me was an example of a really strong woman, but objectivism, objectivism. So and so she developed it for a novel. She spent the latter part of her life after the publication of Outlet Shrug, really articulating her philosophy. So that's what she did. She applied it to politics, the life, to gender, to all these issues from 1957 until

she died in 1980. So the objectivism was born out of the later parts of Alice Rugg. Yes, definitely. It was there all the time, but it was fleshed out during the later parts of Alice Rugg, and then articulated for the next 20 years. So what is objectivism? Subjectivism, so there are five branches in philosophy.

And so I'm gonna just go through the branches. She starts with, you start with metaphysics, the nature of reality. An objective is in my argues that reality is what it is. It's kind of, uh, goes Hawkins back to Aristotle, love identity. A is a, you can wish it to be B, but wishes do not make something real. Reality is what it is and it is the primary. And it was, it's, it's not, it not manipulately directed by consciousness. Consciousness

is there to observe, to give us the information about reality. That is the purpose of consciousness. It is the nature of it. So in metaphysics, existence exists. The law of identity, the law of causality, things act based on their nature, not randomly, not arbitrarily, but based on their nature. And then we have the tool to know reality. This is epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Our tool to know reality is reason. It's our senses and our capacity to integrate the information we get from our senses and to integrate it into new knowledge and to conceptualize it.

And that is uniquely human. We don't know the truth from revelation. We don't know truth from emotions. Emotions are interesting. Emotions tell us something about ourselves, but emotions are not tools of cognition. They don't tell us the truth about what's out there, about what's in reality. So reason is a means of knowledge, and therefore reason is a means of survival. Only individuals reason. just in the same way

that only individuals can eat. We don't have a collective stomach. Nobody can eat for me. And therefore, nobody can think for me. We don't have a collective mind. There's no collective consciousness. It's bizarre that people talk about these collectivized aspects of their mind.

They don't talk about collective feet and collective stomachs and collective things. But so we all think for ourselves and it is our fundamental basic responsibility to live our lives, to live, to choose to live, to live our lives to the best of our ability. So in morality, she is an egoist. She believes that the purpose of morality is to provide you with the code of values and virtues to guide your life for the purpose of your own success. You own survival, you own thriving, you own happiness. Happiness is the moral purpose of your life. The purpose of morality is to guide you towards a happy life

Your own happiness your own happiness absolutely your own happiness So she rejects the idea that she should live for the people that you should live for the purpose of other people's happiness Your purpose is not to make them happier to make them anything your purpose is your own happiness But she also rejects the idea that you could argue maybe the Ncchan idea of you should use other people for your own purposes. Right? So every person is an end in himself, every person's moral responsibility is their own happiness, and you shouldn't use other people for your own, you shouldn't exploit

other people for your own happiness, and you shouldn't be allowed yourself to be exploited for other people. Every individual is responsible for themselves. And what is it that allows us to be happy? What is it that facilitates human flourishing, human success, human survival? Well, it's the use of our minds. It goes back to reason. And what is the reason required in order be successful, in order to work effectively? It requires freedom.

So the enemy of reason, the enemy of reason is force, the enemy of reason is coercion, the enemy of reason is authority. The Catholic Church doing what they did to Galileo, right? That restricts Galileo's thinking, right? The Catholic Church doing what they did to Galileo, right? That restricts Galileo's thinking, right? When he's in a house arrest, is he going to come up with a new theory? Is he going to discover new truths? No, it's the punishment is too, you know, it's too dangerous. So force, coercion are enemies of reason, and what reason needs is to be free, to think, to discover, to innovate, to break out of convention. So we need to create an environment in which individuals are free to reason, to free to think. And to do that, we, we, we come up with a concept, historically, we've come up with a concept of individual rights,

individual rights to find the scope of the define the fact that we should be left alone, free to pursue our values, using our reason free of what, free of coercion force or thought. And that the job of government is to make sure that we are free. The whole point of government, the whole point of when we come in a social context, the whole point of establishing a government in that context is to secure that freedom. It's to make sure that I don't use coercion on you. The government is supposed to stop me. It's supposed to intervene before I can do that,

or if I've already done it, to prevent me from doing it again. So the purpose of government is to protect that freedom, to think and to act based on our thoughts. It's to leave individuals free, to pursue their values, to pursue their happiness, individuals free to pursue their values, to pursue their happiness, to pursue their rational thought. And to be left alone to do it. And so she rejects socialism, which basically assumes some kind of collective goal, assumes the sacrifices of the individual to the group, assumes that your moral purpose in life is the war being of other people rather than your own. assumes that your moral purpose in life is the war being of other people rather than you're all. And she rejects all form of status, all form of government that is

overly, that is involved in any aspect other than to protect us, farm force, coercion, authority. And she rejects Anarchy. And we can talk about that. I think you had a question, a list of questions. You sent me about Anarchy. And happy to just talk to Michael Alice about Anarchy. So I don't know if you're familiar with him. Yes, I'm familiar with him. So yeah, so she would completely rejects Anarchy. Anarchy is completely inconsistent with her point of view. And we can talk about why if you want. So there is some perfect place where freedom is maximized. So systems of government that make absolutely. And she thought that the American system of government came close in its idea, obviously founded with original sin, with the sin of slavery.

But in its conception, the Declaration of Independence is about as perfect a political document as one could write, I think the greatest political document in human history, but really articulated almost perfectly and beautifully and that American system government with the checksist balances balances which is with its emphasis on individual rights with its emphasis on freedom with its emphasis on leading leaving individual freedom pursue their happiness and explicit recognition of happiness as a goal, individual happiness, was the model. It wasn't perfect. There were a lot of problems to a large extent because the founders had mixed philosophical premises. So there were alien premises introduced into the founding of the country, slavery obviously being the biggest problem. to the founding of the country, slavery obviously being the biggest problem. But it was close. And we need to build on that to create an ideal political system that will maximize the freedom of individuals to do exactly this. And then of course she had, so that's the manifestation of this individualism in a political realm.

And she had a theory of art. She had a theory of aesthetics, which is the fifth branch of, of, of, she have metaphysics of epistemology, ethics and politics. And the fifth branch is aesthetics. And she viewed art as an essential human need, a fuel for the human spirit. And then just like any human need, it had certain principles that it had to abide by. That is just like there's nutrition, right?

So some food is good for you and some food is bad for you, some food, some stuff is poison. She believed the same as true of odds. That odd had an identity, which is very controversial today, right? If you put a frame around it, it is art, right? You put a funeral in a museum, it becomes art, which she thought was evil and ludicrous and she rejected completely, that art had an identity and that it served a certain function that human beings needed it. And if it didn't have, not only did it have, have the identity, but that function was served well by some art and poorly by other art. And

then there's a whole realm of stuff that's not art, basically, all of, all of what today is considered modern art. She would consider as not being art, you know, splashing paint on a canvas, not art. So, she had very clear ideas. She articulated them not, so I would say not in conventional philosophical form. So, she didn't write philosophical essays using the philosophers' language. It's white, partially white, I think philosophers have never taken seriously. They're actually accessible to us. We can actually read them. And she integrates the philosophy in what I think are amazing ways with psychology, with history, with economics, with politics, with what's going on in the world. And she has dozens and dozens and dozens of essays that she wrote.

Many of them were aggregated into books, I particularly recommend books like The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, and Philosophy who needs it. And, you know, it's a, I think it's a, it's a beautiful philosophy. You know, I know you're big on love. I think it's a philosophy of love. We can talk about that. Essentially, it's about love.

That's what the philosophy is all about and when it applies in terms of it's applying to self. And, you know, I think it's sad. That so few people read it and so few intellectuals take it seriously in a willing to engage with it. Let me ask, that was incredible, but after that beautiful world-wind overview,

let me ask the most shallow of questions, which is the name ofjectivism. How should people think about the name being rooted? Why not individualism? What are the options? If we were like, had a branding meeting right now. Sure. So she actually had a branding meeting.

So she did this. She went through the exercise. Objectivism, I do not think. I don't know all the details, but I don't think objectivism was the first name she came with. The problem was that the other names were taken. And they were not positive implications So for example rationalism could have been a good word

Because she's an advocate of rational thought or reasonism but reason is in sounds weird, right? The ism because of too many s's I guess rationalism But it was already a philosophy and it was a philosophy inconsistent with her because it was it was a it was already a philosophy, and it was a philosophy inconsistent with her, because it was what she considered a false view of reason, of rationality. Realityism doesn't work. So she came in objectiveism, and I think actually, it's a great word, it's a great name, because it has two aspects to it, and this is a unique view of what

objectivity actually means. Inobjectivism, inobjectivity is the idea of an independent reality. There is truth. There's actually something out there that we, and then there's the wall of consciousness. There's the wall of consciousness, right? There is the wall of figuring out the truth. The truth doesn't just hit you. The truth is not in the thing. You have to discover it. It's that consciousness applied to, that's what objectivity is, right?

It's you discovering the truth in reality. It's your consciousness. So, the... Interacting. And thereby posing the individual in that sense. And only the individual could do it. Now, the problem with individualism is it would have made the philosophy too political. And she always said, so she said, she said, I'm an advocate of capitalism because I'm really an advocate for rational egoism.

But I'm a rational, I'm an advocate for rational egoism really because I'm an advocate for reason. So she viewed the essential of her philosophy as being this reason and her, her, who, particularly of you of reason, and she has a whole book, she has a book called Introduction to Objective as the Pistomology, which I encourage any scientist mathematician, anybody interested in science to read because it is a tour de force on, on, on, in a sense, the, the, the, the, what it means to hold concepts and what it means to discover new discoveries and to use to use concepts and how we use concepts and she has a theory of concepts that is completely new that is completely revolutionary and I think is essential for the philosophy of science and therefore ultimately for the more abstract we get with scientific discoveries The easy it is to detach them from reality and to detach them from truth The easy it is to be inside our heads

instead of about what's real and They're probably examples from metaphysics that fit that and And they're probably examples from metaphysics that fit that. And I think what she teaches in the book is how to ground your concepts and how to bring them into grounding in reality. So introduction to objective, to psychology, and note that it's only an introduction because one of the things she realized, one of the things that I think a lot of her critics don't give enough credit for, is the philosophy is there's no end, right? It's always growing. There's always new discoveries. There's always it's like science. There's always new things. And

there's a ton of work to do in philosophy. And particularly in epistemology and the theory of knowledge that she was actually giving you an interest in mathematics, she actually saw a lot of parallels between math and concept formation. And she was actually, you know, in the years before she died, she was taking private lessons in mathematics in algebra and calculus, because she believed that there was real insight in understanding algebra in calculus to philosophy into epistemology. And she also was very interested in neuroscience because she believed that that had a lot to tell us about epistemology, but also about music, therefore about aesthetics. So I mean, she recognized the importance of all these different fields and how, and the beauty of philosophy is it should be integrating all of them.

And one of the sad things about the world in which we live is, again, we view these things as silos. We don't view them as integrating. We don't have teams of people from different arena, you know, different fields, you know, discovering things. We, we, we become like ants, specialized. So if she was definitely like that and she was constantly curious, constantly interested in the, in new discoveries, in new ideas and how this could expand the scope of her philosophy and application of her philosophy.

There's like a million topics I can talk to you, but since you mentioned math, I'm almost curious. We only got three hours. You math, I'm almost curious. We only got three hours. You know, I'm almost curious. Yeah. I don't know if you're familiar with gales, like incompleteness theorem. I'm not, unfortunately.

Okay. It was a powerful proof that any ex-chaomatic systems, when you start from a bunch of axioms, that there will, in that system, probably must be an inconsistency. So that was this painful stab in the idea of mathematics that, no, if we start with a set of assumptions,

kind of like Anman started with Objectivism, there will have to be at least one contradiction. I intuitively am going to say that's false philosophically, but in math, it's just true. It's a question about how you define, again, definitions matter and you have to be careful on how you define axioms. And you have to be careful about what you define as an inconsistency and what that means to say there's an inconsistency and what that means to say there's an inconsistency. And I don't know, I'm not going to say more than that because I don't know.

But I'm suspicious that there is some, and this is the power philosophy. And this is why I said before, concept formation is so important and understanding cause of formation and so on. But for particularly getting mathematics because it's such an abstract field. And it's so easy to lose grounding in reality that if you properly define axioms and you properly define what you're doing in math, whether that is true.

And I don't think it is. This is, yeah, we'll leave it as an open mystery because actually this audience, there's literally over 100,000 people that have PhDs. And so they know Gato's a complete serum. I have this intuition that there is something different to mathematics and philosophy that I'd love to hear from people.

Like what exactly is that difference? Because there's a precision to mathematics that philosophy doesn't have, but that precision gets you in trouble. It somehow actually takes you away from truth. Like the very constraints of the language used in mathematics actually puts a constraint on the capture of truth that it's able to do. I'm going to argue that that is a total product of the way you're conceptualizing the terms within mathematics. It's not in reality. Yeah, so you would argue it's in the fact that mathematics in as much as it's detached from reality that you can do these kinds of things. Yes. And you've, and that mathematicians have come up with concepts that they haven't

grounded in reality properly that allows them to go off on places that don't lead to truth. That's right. That don't lead to truth. But I encourage you then, I encourage you to do one of these podcasts with one of our philosophers who know more about this stuff. And if you move to Austin, I've got somebody I'd recommend to you. And you know, or no? Yeah, I mean, I would talk to Greg, so Mary. When we say hour, can you say what you mean by hour?

I'd say people who are affiliated with the Ion Ministers, a philosophy is who are affiliated with objectiveism. Right, and Greg is one of our one of our brightest and he's an Austin, he's just got a position at UT, so at the University of Texas, and he would want to, on Cargata, would be another one who actually works at the Institute and a chief philosophy officer at the University of Texas, and he would want to go out there, would be another one who actually works at the Institute and a chief philosophy officer at the Institute. That's awesome. And there are others who specialize in philosophy of science, who I think Greg could probably give you a lead, but these unbelievably smart people who know this part of the philosophy

much better than I do. What can you just briefly perhaps say say what is the Iron Man Institute? Yeah, so the Iron Man Institute was an organization founded three years after Iman died. She died in 1982 and it was founded in 1985 to promote her ideas, to make sure that her ideas and her novels continued in the culture and were relevant. Well, they're relevant, but the people saw the relevance. So our mission is to get people to read her books, to engage in the ideas. We teach, we have an objective academic center where we teach the philosophy

primarily to graduate students and others who take their ideas seriously and who really want a deep understanding of the philosophy. And we apply the ideas. So we take the ideas and apply them to ethics, to philosophy, to issues of the day, which is more my strength and more what I tend to do. I've never formally studied philosophy. So all my education philosophy is informal and I'm an engineer and a finance guy. That's my background. So I'm a nervous guy. Well, let me, I feel pretty under educated, have a pretty open mind, which sometimes can be painful on the internet because people

mock me or, you know, if I say something new on us about communism, people immediately kind of put you in a bin or something like that, it hurts to be open-minded to say, I don't know, to ask the question, why is communism or Marxism so problematic, why is capitalism problematic and so on? But let me nevertheless go into that direction with you. Maybe let's talk about capitalism a little bit. How does objectivism compare relate to the idea of capitalism? Well, first we have to find what capitalism is because again,

people use capitalism in all kinds of ways. And I know you had read Dalio on your show once. I haven't, I need to listen to that episode. The episode, but we has no clue what capitalism is. And that's, that's, that's his big problem. So when he, when he says there are real problems today in capitalism, he's not talking about capitalism. He's talking about problems in the world today, and I agree with many of the problems, but they have nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism is a social

political economic system in which all property is privately owned, in which the only role of government is the protection of individual rights. I think it's the ideal system. I think it's the right system for the reasons we talked about earlier. It's a system that leaves you as an individual to pursue your values, your life, your happiness, free of coercion of course. And if you get to decide what happens to you, and I get to decide if to help you or not, right, if you let's say you fall flat on your face people always say well what about the poor well if you if you care about the poor help them right just don't you know what do you need a government for you know I always ask audiences okay if there's a if there's a put kid who can't afford to go to school and all the schools are private because capitalism has been instituted and he can't go to school would you be willing to participate in a fund

that pays for his education? Every hand in the room goes up. So what do you need government for? Just let's get all the money together and pay for his schooling. So the point is that what capitalism does is leave individuals fee to make their own decisions. And as long as they're not violating other people's rights,

in other words, as long as they're not using coercion force on other people then leave them alone and and people are going to make mistakes and people are going to screw up their lives and people are going to commit suicide people are going to do terrible things to themselves that is fundamentally their problem and if you want to help you want to capitalism a free to help It's just the only thing that doesn't happen on the capitalist is you don't get to impose your will and other people. Now, how's that a bad thing?

So the question then is how does the implementation of capitalism deviate from its ideal in practice? I mean, this is the question with a lot of systems, is how does it start to then fail? So one thing maybe you can correct me or inform me, it seems like information is very important. Like being able to make decisions, to be free, you have to have access, full access of all the information you need to make rational decisions.

No, I can't listen. Because it can't be right. Because none of us has full access to all the information we need. I mean, what does that even mean? And how big, how much have to scope do you want to do? Let's just start there. Yeah, so you need to have access to information. So one of the big criticisms of capitalism

is this asymmetrical information. The drug maker has more information about the drug than the drug buyer, pharmaceutical drugs. True, it's a problem. Well, I wonder if one can think about an entrepreneur, can think about how to solve that problem. See, I view any one of these challenges to capitalism as an opportunity for entrepreneur to make money.

And they have the freedom to do it. Yeah, so imagine an entrepreneur steps in and says, I will test all the drugs that drug companies make. And I will provide you for fee with the answer. And how do I know he's not going to be corrupted? Well, there'll be other ones and they'll compete. And who am I to tell which one of these is the right one? Well, it won't be you really getting the information from them.

It'll be a doctor. The doctor doesn't need that information. So the doctor who has some expertise in medicine will be evaluating which rating agency to you stay value eight the drugs and which ones then to recommend to you. So do we need an FDA? Do we need a government that siphons all the information to one source that does all the research all the thing and has a clear incentive by the way not to approve drugs. There's only because they don't make any money from it. They, nobody pays them for the information.

Nobody pays them to be accurate. They're bureaucrats at the end of the day. And what is a bureaucrat? What's the main focus of a bureaucrat? Even if they go in with the best of intentions, which I'm sure all the scientists that the FDA have the best of intention, what's their incentive? The system builds in this incentive? Not to screw up. Because one drug gets value and does damage. You lose your job. But if a hundred drugs that could cure cancer tomorrow, don't ever get to market. Nobody's going

to, nobody's going to come after you. Yeah. And you're saying that's not, that's not a mechanism that's Conduces the most places competition. So if you won't approve the drug if I still think it's possible I will and it's not zero one you see the other thing that happens with the FDA is zero one see the proved it's not approved Oh, it's approved for this but it's not approved for that But what if what if a drug came out came out and you said, you told the doctors, this drug in 10% of the cases can cause patients an increase risk of heart disease. You and your patients should, we're not forcing you, but you should.

It's your medical responsibility to evaluate that and decide if the drug is appropriate or not. Why not? I get to make that choice if I want to take on the 10% risk of heart disease. So there was a drug, and right now I forget the name, but it was a drug against pain, particularly for a thridic pain. And it worked. It reduced pain dramatically, right? And some people tried everything and this was the only drug that reduced their pain. And it turned out that in 10% of the cases, it caused their elevated risk. Didn't kill people necessarily, but it caused elevated risk of heart disease. Okay, what did they have to do? It banned the drug. Some people, I know a lot of people who said, living with pain is much worse than taking on a 10% risk. Again, probabilities, right? People don't think in those numbers. 10% risk of maybe getting heart

disease. Why don't I get to make that choice? Why does some bureaucrat make that choice for me? That's capitalism. Capitalism gives you the choice. Not you as an agreement person, you with your doctor and a whole marketplace, which is not created to provide you with information. And think about, think about a world where we didn't have all these regulations and controls, the amount of opportunities that would exist to create, to provide information, to educate you about that information, would mushroom dramatically. Bloomberg, the billionaire, Bloomberg, how did he make his money? He made his money by providing financial information, by creating this service called Bloomberg

that you buy a terminal and you get all this amazing information. And he was before computers, desktop computers. He was very early on in that whole computing revolution. But his focus was providing financial information to professionals. And you hire a professional to manage your money. That's the way it's supposed to be. You know, you have to have. So you as an individual cannot have all the knowledge you need in medicine,

all the knowledge you need in finance, all the knowledge you need in every aspect of your life. You can do that. You have to delegate. And you hire a doctor. Now you should be able to figure out if the doctor is good or not. You should be able to ask doctors for reasons for why you have to make the decision at the end. But that's why you have a doctor. You have a financial advisor. That's why you have different people who you're delegating certain in aspects of your life too, but you want choices and What the marketplace provides is those choices. So let's let me then This is this is what I do. I'll make a dumb case for things and then you shut me down and then the internet says how dumb Lexus This is good. This is how it works. It's shutting down and

and they're foolish in blaming you for the question because you're here to ask me questions. Let's make a case for socialism. So it's going to be bad because it's going to be case to his association. That's reality. So perhaps it's not a case of socialism, but just a certain notion that inequality, the wealth inequality, that the bigger the gap between the poorest or the average and the richest,

the more painful it is to be average, psychologically speaking, if you know that there is the experience of our life, that even though everybody's life has gotten better over the past decades and centuries, it may feel actually worse, because you know that life could be so, so much better in life than the CEOs, that the CEOs that, yeah, that gap is fundamentally a thing that is undesirable in a society. Everything about that is wrong. I like the start of like that. So, yeah, I mean, so my wife likes to remind me that as well as we've done in life, we are actually from a wealth perspective closer to a homeless person than we ought to build gates. Just a math, right?

Just a math, right? And yeah. To go check. When I look at Bill Gates, I get a smile on my face. I love Bill Gates. I've never met Bill Gates. I love Bill Gates. I love what he stands for.

I love that he has $100 billion. I love that he is built a trampoline room in his house where his kids can jump up and down and trampoline in a safe environment. Can we take another billionaire? Because I'm not sure if you're paying attention, but there's all kinds of conspiracy theories about Bill Gates.

Well, but that's part of the story, right? They have to pull him down because people resent him. And that's strange. That's strange. But yes, we can take Jeff Bezos. We can take my favorite stalker, just because I like a lot about him with Steve Jobs. I mean, I love these people.

And I can't, they're very few billionaires. I don't love. In a sense that I appreciate everything they've done for me, for people I cherish and love, they've made the world a better place. Why would it ever cross my mind that they make me look bad because they're richer than me or that I don't have what they have. They've made me so much richer that they've made inventions that used to cost millions and millions and millions of dollars accessible to me. I mean, this is a super computer in my pocket.

to me, I mean, this is a super computer in my pocket. Now, but think about it, right? What is the difference between, and I'll get to the essence of your point in a minute. But think about what the difference is between me and Bill Gates in terms of, because it's true that in terms of wealth, I'm closer to the homeless person. But in terms of my day to day life, I'm close to the bill gauge. You know, we both live in a nice house. Here's this nicer, but we live in a nice house. Here's this bigger, but I might as plenty big. We both drive cars. Here's this nicer, but we both drive cars cars. How many years ago? What cars? We both can fly. Get on a plane in Los Angeles and fly to New York and get there in about the same time. We're both flying private. The only difference is my private plane I share with 300 other people. And his, but it's accessible.

It's relatively comfortable again in the perspective of 50 years ago, 100 years ago. It's unimaginable that I could fly like that for such a low fee. We live very similar lives in that sense. So I don't resent him. So first of all, I'm an exception to the supposed wall that people resent. I don't think anybody, I don't think people do resent unless they're taught to resent. And this is the key. People are taught. And I've seen this in America. And this is, to me, the most horrible shocking thing that has happened in America over the last 40 years.

I came to America, so I'm an immigrant. I came to America from Israel in 1987. And I came here because I thought this was the place where I could, where it had the most opportunities. And it is, the most opportunities. And I came here because I believed there was a certain American spirit of individualism and exactly the opposite of what you just described. A sense of, I live my life, it's my happiness.

I'm not looking at my neighbor. I'm not competing with the Jones. The American dream is my dream, my two kids, my dog, my station wagon, not because other people have it because I wanted. And that sense, and when I came here in the 80s, you had that. You had, you still had it. It was less than I think it had been in the past. But you had that spirit. There was no envy. There was no resentment. There were rich people and, and they were celebrated. There was still this admiration for entrepreneurs and admiration for success.

Not by everybody, certainly not by the intellectuals, but by the average person. I have witnessed particularly over the last 10 years a complete transformation in America's become like Europe. I know you Russian. Yeah. It's you Russian. Yeah, yeah, it's become Russian. In a sense where, you know, they've always done these studies, you know, I'll give you a hundred dollars in your neighbor, a hundred dollars, or give you, or give you a thousand dollars, but your neighbor gets ten thousand

dollars. And a Russian will always choose $100, right? He wants equality about being better for himself. Americans would always choose that gap. And that's changing. And that's changing. And it's changing because we've been told it should change. And morally you're saying that doesn't make any sense. So there's no sense in

which let me put another spin, I forget the book, but the sense of if you're working for Steve Jobs and you your hands, you're the engineer behind the iPhone, and there's a sense in which his salary is stealing from your efforts. Because I forget the book, right? That's literally the terminology is used. Well, this is straight out of Karl Marx. Well, sure, yeah. It's also straight, but out of Karl Marx. But like, there's no sense morally speaking

that you see that as the best. The other way around. That engineer's stealing off of, and it's not stealing, right? It's not. But the engineer's getting more from Steve Jobs, by a lot, not by a little bit, than Steve Jobs is getting from the engineer. The engineer, even if they're a great engineer,

they're probably other great engineers that could replace him. Would he even have a job without Steve Jobs? Would the industry exist without Steve Jobs? Without the giants that carry these things forward? And let me ask you this, I mean, you're a scientist. Yes. Do you resent Einstein for being smarter than you? I mean, you and VM, do you, are you angry with him? Would you, would you, would you feel negative towards him if he was in the room right now? Or would you, if he came into the room, you'd say, oh my God, I mean, you and you interview people who I think some of them are probably smarter than you

and me. Yeah, for sure. And your attitude towards them is one of reverence. Well, one interesting little side question there is what is the natural state of being for us humans. You kind of implied education has polluted our minds, but like if I, because you're referring to jealousy, the Einstein question, the Steve Jobs question, I wonder which way, if we're left without education, we would naturally go. So there is no such thing as the natural state in that sense, right?

This is the myth of who so is a noble savage and of John Walls is Behind the veil of ignorance. Well, if you're ignorant you're ignorant There's you can't make any decisions you just ignorant You're there is no Human nature that determines how you will relate to other people You will relate to other people based on the conclusions you come to about how to relate to other people.

You can relate to other people as values to use your terminology from the perspective of love. This other human being is a value to me and I want to trade with them and trade the beauty of trade is it win-win. I want to benefit and they are going to benefit. I don't want to screw them. I don't want them to screw me. I want them to be win-win. Or you can deal with other people as threats, as enemies, much of human history we have done that. And therefore, as a zero-some world, what they have, I want, I will take it. I will use force to take it. I will use political force to take it. I will use the force of my arm to take it. I will just

take it. So those are two options, right? And they will determine whether we live in civilization or not. And they are determined by conclusions. People come to about the world and the nature of reality and the nature of morality and the nature of politics and all these things. They are determined by philosophy. And this is why philosophy is so important because philosophy shapes, its evolution doesn't do this. It doesn't just happen. Ideas shape how we relate to other people and you say well little children do it Well, little children don't have a frontal cortex. Why it's not relevant, right? What happens when as you develop a frontal cortex as you develop the brain? you learn ideas and

Those ideas will shape how you relate to other people. And if you learn good ideas, you relate to other people in a healthy, productive, win-win. And if you develop bad ideas, you will resent other people and you will want this stuff. And the thing is that human progress depends on the win-win relationship. It depends on civilization, it depends on peace, it depends on allowing people, going back to what we talked about earlier, allowing people to feed them to think for themselves. And anytime you try to interrupt that, you're causing damage. So this change in America is not some reversion to a natural state. It's a shift in ideas. We still live the better part of American society and the world still lives on the remnants

of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment ideas, the ideas that brought about this scientific revolution, the ideas that brought about the creation of this country. And it's the same basic ideas that led to both of those. And as those ideas get more distant, as those ideas are not defended, as though these ideas disappear, as enlightenment goes away,

we will become more violent, more resentful, more tribal, more obnoxious, more unpleasant, more primitive. A very specific example of this that bothers me and be curious to get your comment on. So Elon Musk is a billionaire. And one of the things that really, maybe it's almost a pet peeve, it really bothers me when the press and the general public will say, well, all those rockets they're sending up there. Those are just like the toys, the games that billionaires play. That, to me, the billionaires become a dirty word to use,

like as if money can buy or has anything to do with genius. Like, I'm trying to articulate a specific line of question here because it just bothers me. I guess the question is like, why do we get here and how do we get out of that? Because Elon Musk is doing some of the most incredible things that a human being has ever participated in. And mostly not, he doesn't build the rockets himself.

He's getting a bunch of other geniuses together that have that takes genius. That takes genius. But why, where did we go and how do we get back to where Elon Musk is in the inspiring figure as opposed to a billionaire playing with some toys? So this is the role of philosophy. It goes back to the same place. It goes back to all understanding of the world and our role in it. And if you understand that the only way to become a billionaire, for example, is to create value, value for whom, value for people who are going to consume it. The only way to become a billionaire,

the only way Elon Musk became a billionaire is to PayPal. Now, PayPal is something we'll all use. PayPal is an enormous value to all of us. It's why it's worth several billions of dollars, which Elon Musk could then, you know, earn. But you cannot become a billionaire in a free society by exploiting people. You cannot, because you'll be left, nobody will deal with you, nobody will have any interactions with you. The only way to become a billionaire is to do billions of win-win transactions. So the only way to become a billionaire in a free society is to change the world to make it a better place. Billionaires are the great humanitarians of our time, not because they give charity, but because they make their billions. And it's

true that money and genius are not necessarily correlated. But you cannot become a billionaire without being super smart. You cannot become a billionaire by figuring something out that nobody else has figured out in whatever realm it happens to be. And that thing that you figure out has to be something that provides immense value to other people. Where do we go wrong? We go wrong. Our culture goes wrong because it views billionaires as selfish as selfish. And there's a sense in which, and not a sense, it's absolutely true. The billionaire doesn't ask for my opinion on what product to launch. Elon Musk doesn't ask

others what they think you should spend his money on. What the greatest social well-being will be. Ella, I mean, the sense in which the rocket's eyes toys. There's a sense in which he chose that he would have, he would be inspired the most. He would have the most fun by going to Mars and building rockets. And he probably dreamt of rockets from when he was a kid and probably always played with rockets. And now he has the funds of rockets from when he was a kid and probably always played

with rockets. And now he has the funds, the capital, to be able to deploy it. So he's being selfish. Obviously, he's being self-interested. This is what Elon Musk is about. I mean, the same with Jeff Bezos, there's no committee to decide whether to invent,

you know, to invest in cloud computing or not. Bezos decided that. And at the end of the day, the bosses, the pursuers, the values they believe are good. They create the wealth. It's their decisions, it's their mind. And the fact is we live in a world where for 2,000 plus years, years Self-interest even though we all do it the more extent of the less We deem it as morally apart. It's bad. It's wrong

I mean your mother probably taught you the same thing my mother taught me think of others first think of yourself last The good stuff is kept for the guests. You never get to use the good stuff You know, it's others. That's what the focus of morality is now no mother even no Jewish mother actually believes that right because They don't really want you to be last. They want you to be first and they push you to be first But Mawali they taught them entire lives and they believe that the right thing to say and to some extent do is to argue for sacrifice for other people. So most people, 99% of people are torn. They know they should be selfless, sacrifice, live for the people. They don't really want to.

So they act selfishly in their day-to-day life and they feel guilty and they can be happy. They can't be happy. And Jewish mothers and Catholic mothers are excellent at using that guilt to manipulate you. But the guilt is inevitable because you've got these two conflicting things, the way you want to live and the way you've been taught to live. And what objectiveism does is at the end of the day, provide you with the way to unite morality, a proper morality, with what you want, and to think about what you really

want, to conceptualize what you really want properly. So what you want and to think about what you really want to conceptualize what you really want properly. So what you want is really good for you and what you want will really lead to your happiness. So, you know, we reject the idea of sacrifice. We reject the idea of living for other people. But that's, but you see, if you believe, if you believe that the purpose of morality is to sacrifice for other people, and you look at Jeff Bezos, who almost the last time he sacrificed anything, right? He's living pretty well. He's got billions that he could give it all away, and yet he doesn't.

How day, you know, in my talks, I often position, and I'm going to use vocase. Sorry guys. Yeah. Drop the conspiracy theory. They're all BS, complete and out of nonsense. There's not a shred of truth. You know, I disagree with vocates on everything political. I think he politically is a complete ignoramus. But the guy is a genius when it comes to technology and he's just thoughtful even in this philanthropy.

He just uses his mind and I respect that even though politically he's terrible. Anyway, think about this. Who had a bigger impact on the lives of poor people in the world? Bill Gates or Mother Teresa? Bill Gates, it's not even close. And Mother Teresa lived this altruistic life to the core. She lived it consistently. And yet she was miserable, pathetic, horrible. She hated her life. She was miserable. And most of the people she helped didn't do very well because she just helped them not

die. Right? And then Bill Gates changed all. And he helped a lot of by providing technology. We even found out that being gets to them, the food gets to much fancier more efficient. Yet who is the moral saint? Saintshood is not determined based on what you do

to other people. Saintshood is based on how much pain you suffer. I like to ask people to go to a museum and look at all the paintings of saints. How many of them are smiling and are happy? They've used to go arrows a museum and look at all the paintings of saints. How many of them are smiling and are happy? They've usually got arrows through them and holes in their body, and they're just suffering a horrible death. The whole point of the morality we are taught is that happiness is immorality, that happy

people cannot be good people, and that good people suffer, and that suffering is necessary for morality. Morality is about self-sacrifice and suffering. And at the end of the day, almost all the problems in the world boil down to that false view. So can we try to talk about, part of it is the problem of the word selfishness but let's talk about the virtue of selfishness. So let's start at the fact that for me I really enjoy doing stuff for other people. I enjoy being cheering on the success of others. Why? I don't know. It's deep in that.

What's the thing about it? Why? Because I think you do know. If I were to really think, I don't want to resort to like evolution to arguments or like this. Somehow I'm doing evolution. So I think, I can tell you why I enjoy helping others. Maybe you can go there, like one thing,

cause we'll should talk about love a little bit. I'll tell you, there's a part of me that's a little bit not rational. Like there's a gut that I follow that not everything I do is perfectly rational. Like for example, my dad criticizes me. He says, like, you should always have a plan. Like, it should make sense.

You have the strategy. And I say that, you know, I left, I stepped down from my full cell A position at MIT. I, there's so many things I did without like a plan. It's the gut. It's like, I want to start a company. Well, you know how many companies fail? I don't know. I, it, to start a company. Well, you know how many companies fail? I don't know.

I, it, it's a gut. And the same thing with being kind to others is a gut. I watch the way that karma works in this world, that the people like us, the one guy I look up to is Joe Rogan, that he does stuff for others. And that, the joy he experiences, the way he sees the world, like just the glimmer

in his eyes because he does stuff for others that creates a joyful experience. And that somehow seems to be an instructive way to that to me is inspiring of a life well lived. But you probably know a lot of people who have done stuff others who are not happy. True. So I don't think it's the doing stuff others that is being happy. It's why you do stuff others and what else you're doing in your life and what is the proportion. But it's why at the end of the day, which is, which is in, and it's the same. Look, you can maybe through a gut feeling, say I want to start a company, but you better start doing thinking about how and what

and all of that. And to some extent, the why? Because if you really want to be happy doing this, you may better make sure you're doing it for the right reason. So I'm not, you know, there's something called fast thinking. They're calling it the, the, the, the, the, the, the, Daniel Conorman. Yeah.

Daniel Conorman talks about, and, and there is, it's, all the integrations you've made so far in your life, cause you to have specialized knowledge and certain things and you can think very fast. And you'll tell you what the right answer is. But it's not. Your mind is constantly evaluating and constantly working. You want to make it as rational as you can, not in the sense that I have to think through every

time I make a decision, but that they've so programmed my mind in a sense that the answers of the right answers when I get them. So I like, I view other people as a value. Other people contribute enormously to my life, whether it's romantic love relationship, or whether it's a friendship relationship, or whether it's just Jeff Bezos creating Amazon and delivering goodies to my home when I get them. And people do all that, right?

It's not just Jeff Bezos. He gets the most credit, but everybody in that chain of command, everybody in Amazon, is working for me. I love that. I love the idea of a human being. I love the idea that there are people capable of being in Einstein, of being, you know, and creating and building and making stuff that makes my life so good. I, you know, most of us like, this is not a good room for an example. Most of us like plants, right? We like pets. I don't

particularly, but people like pets. Why? We like to see life. Human beings are life on steroids right that life with a brain. It's amazing right what they can do. I love people Now that doesn't mean I love everybody because there's some really bad people of it Well, I hate right and I do hate and there are people out there that are just, I have no opinion about, but generally, the idea of a human being, to me, is a phenomenal idea. When I see a baby, I light up, because to me, there's a potential, you know, there's this magnificent potential that is embodied in that.

And when I see people struggling in need help, I think they're human beings. They embody that potential, they embody that goodness. They might turn out to be bad, but why would I ever give the presumption of that? I give them the presumption of the positive, and I cheer them on, and I enjoy watching people succeed.

I enjoy watching people get to the top of the mountain and produce something. Even if I don't get anything directly from it, I enjoy that because it's part of my enjoyment of life. So the word, see, to you, the morality of selfishness, this kind of love of other human beings, the love of life fits into a morality of selfishness. Can't not. Because there's no context in which you can truly love yourself without loving life and loving what it means to be human. So, you know, the love of yourself is gonna manifest itself differently in different people, but it's cool.

What do you love about yourself? First of all, I love, I love that I'm alive. I love that I, you know, I not love this world and the opportunities it provides me and the fun and the excitement of discovering something new and meaning a new person and having a conversation. You know, all of this is, is, is, is immensely enjoyable, but behind all of that is, is a particular human capability're not only I have, other people have. And the fact that they have it makes my life so much more fun, because so it's,

you cannot view, you know, it's all integrated and you cannot view yourself in isolation. Now that doesn't, that doesn't place a moral commandment on me. Help everybody who's poor that you happen to meet in the street. It doesn't place a burden on me in a sense that now I have this moral duty to help everybody. It leaves me free to make decisions about who I help and who I don't. There's some people who I will not help. There's some people who I do not wish positive things upon.

Bad people should have bad outcomes. Bad people should suffer. So you have the freedom to choose who is good, who is bad within your heart. Your decision based on your values. Now I think there's an objectivity to it. There's a standard by which you should evaluate good versus bad. And that standard should be to what extent that they contribute a whole human life. The standard is human life.

And so when I say, look at the Jeff Bezos, I say, he's contributing to human life. Good guy. I might disagree with him on stuff. We might disagree about politics. We might disagree about women. I don't know what we, but overall, big picture. He is pro-life. I look at somebody like, you know, to take like 99.9% of our politicians. And they are pro-death. They are pro-destruction. They are pro-cutting corners and ways to destroy

human life and human potential and human ability. So I literally hate almost every politician out there. And I wish ill on them, right? I don't want them to be successful or happy. I want them all to go away, right? Leave me alone. So I believe in justice. I believe good things should happen. A good people and bad things should happen to bad people. So I make those generalizations based on this one, you know, on the other hand, if you

know, I shouldn't say all politicians, right? So if I, you know, I love Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, right? I love Abraham Lincoln. I love people who fought for freedom and who believed in freedom, who had his ideas and who lived up to at least in parts of their lives to those principles. Now, do I think Thomas Jefferson was flawed because he held slaves? Absolutely. But the virtues weigh out way that in my view. And I understand people who

don't accept that. You don't have to also love and hate the entirety of the person, this part of that person that you're trying to understand. The major part is pro life and therefore I'm pro that person. And I think, and I said earlier that the rejectiveism's philosophy of love and I believe that because rejectiveism is about your life, about loving your life, about embracing your life, about engaging with the world, about loving the world in which you live, about win-win relationships with other people, which means to Allah, He's the God, the good and other people and the best and other people, and encouraging that and supporting that and promoting that.

So I know selfishness is a harsh word because the culture's given at that harshness. Selfishness is a harsh word because the people who don't like selfishness want you to believe it's a harsh word. But it's not. What does it mean? It means focus on self.

It means take care of self. It means make yourself your highest priority, not your only priority, because in taking care of self, what would I be without my wife? What would I be without the people who support me, who help me, who I have these love relationships with? So other people are crucial. What would my life be without, you know, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, right? A lot of things you mentioned here are just beautiful. So one is win-win. So one key

thing about this selfishness and the idea of objectiveism is the philosophy of love is that you don't want parasitism. So that goes, that is unethical. So you actually, first of all, you say win win a lot, and I just like that terminology, because it's a good way to see life. It's tried to maximize the number of win win interactions. That's a good way to see business, actually. Well, life generally, I think every aspect of life, you want to have a win-win relationship with your wife. Imagine if it was win lose.

Either way, if you win, and she loses, how long is that going to sustain? If you want to have a win-win relationship with your wife, imagine if it was win-lose. Either way, if you win and she loses, how long is that going to sustain? So win-lose relationships are not in equilibrium. What they turn into is lose-lose. Like win-lose turns into lose-lose. And so the alternative, the only alternative to lose-lose is win-win. And you win and the person you love wins. What's better than that?

That's the way to maximize. So like the selfishness is you're trying to maximize the win, but the way to maximize the win is to maximize the win. Yes. And it turns out, and Adam Smith understood this a long time ago, that if you focus on your own winning, while respecting other people as human beings, then everybody wins. And the beauty of capitalism, if we go back to capitalism for a second,

the beauty of capitalism is you cannot be successful in capitalism without producing values that other people appreciate and therefore willing to buy from you. And they buy them and this goes back to that question about the engineering and Steve Jobs. Why is the engineer working there? Because he's getting paid more than his time is worth to him. I know people don't like to think in those terms, but that's the reality. If his time is worth more to him than what he's getting paid, he would leave. So he's winning. And his apple winning, yes, because they're getting more productivity from him, they're getting more from him than what he's actually producing. It's tough because there's human psychology and imperfect information.

It just makes it a little messier than the clarity of thinking you have about this. It's just, you know, because for sure, but not everything in life is an economic transaction. It ultimately is close. But even if it's not an economic transaction, even if it's a relationship transaction, when you get to a point with a friend, where you're not gaining from the relationship, friendships going to be over, not immediately because it takes time for these things to manifest itself and to really absorb into it. But we change friendships, we change our loves, right?

We fall in and out of love. We fall out of love because we're not love. So let's go back to love. Love is the most selfish of all emotions. Love is about what you do to me, right? So I love my wife because she makes me feel better about myself. So you know, the idea of selfless love is bizarre. So I'm used to say before you say, I love you, you have to say that I. And you have to know who you are and you have to appreciate yourself. If you hate

yourself, what does it mean to love somebody else? So I love my wife because she makes me feel great about the world. Yeah. And she lives for the same reason. And so I'm used to use this example. Imagine you go up to you to be spoused the night before the wedding. And you say, you know, I get nothing out of this relationship. I'm doing this purely as an act of noble self-sacrifice. She would slap you. And she should, right? So, now, we know this intuitively that love is selfish, but we are afraid to admit it to ourselves and why, because the other side is convinced, that selfishness is associated with exploiting other people. Selfishness means lying, cheating, stealing, walking, and corpses, backstabbing people.

But is that ever in your self interest truly, right? You know, I'll offer the front of an audience to say, okay, how many people here have lied? I'm kidding, right? How many of you think that that if you did that consistently, that would make your life better? Nobody thinks that, right? Because everybody's experienced how shitty lying, not because of how it makes you feel out of a sense of guilty. Existentially, just a bad strategy, right? You get caught, you have to create other lives to cover up the previous lie.

It screws up with your own psychology and your own cognition. You know, the mind, to some extent, like a computer, right? Is an integrating machine. And a computer science, I understand, there's a term called garbage in garbage out of. Lying is garbage in. Yeah. So it's not good strategy, cheating, understand there's a term called garbage in garbage out of lying is garbage in yeah so

It's not good strategy cheating School your customers in a business not paying your suppliers as a businessman not good business practices not good practices for being a life So when win is both Mauro And practical in the beauty of Ironman's philosophy and I think this is really important Is that the Mauro is the practical in the practical and the beauty of Iron Man's philosophy. And I think this is really important, is that the Molo is the practical and the practical is the Molo. And therefore, if you are Molo, you will be happy. Yeah, that's the, that's why the application of the philosophy of objectivism is so easy to practice. So like they order to discuss or possible to discuss. That's why you talk about all clear cut. Yeah, I'm not ambiguous about my view. And that's fundamentally practical.

I mean, that's the best of philosophies is practical. Yes. It's in a sense teaching you how to live a good life. And it's teaching you how to live a good life, not just as you, but as a human being. And then for the principles that apply to you, probably apply to me as well. And if we both share the same principles of how to live a good life, we're not going to be enemies. We brought up anarchy earlier. It's an interesting question because you've kind of said, politicians, I mean, part of it is a little bit joking, but politicians are, you know, not good people. So, but we should have some.

So you have an opposition to anarchism. So the first of all, they won't always not bad people. That is, I gave examples of people who engage in political life, or I think we're good people basically. And, but they think they get worse over time. If the system is corrupt, and I think the system, unfortunately, even the American system was good as it was, was founded on quick sand and have corruption built in.

They didn't quite get it. And, and they needed, I invent to get it, so I'm not blaming them. I don't think they hold, they show any blame. You needed a philosophy in order to completely fulfill the promise that is America, the promise that is the founding of the. So the place where corruption sneaked in is the lack in some way of the philosophy underlying the nation. Absolutely.

So it's Christianity. It's it's it's you know, not to hit on another controversial topic. It's religion, which undercut their morality. So the founders were explicitly Christian and altruistic in their morality, implicitly, in terms of their actions, they were completely secular and they were very secular anyway, but in their morality, even, they were secular.

So there's nothing in Christianity that says that you have an innumerable right to pursue happiness. That's unbelievably self-interested and based on kind of a moral philosophy of egoistic moral philosophy. But they didn't know that and they didn't know how to ground it. They implicitly, they had that fast thinking that got, they told them that this was right and the whole enlightenment, that period from John Locke on to really to to to hum that period is about pursuit of happiness using reason in pursuit of the good life

right, but they can't ground it. They don't really understand what reason is and they don't really understand what happiness requires and they can't Detach them from Christianity Then I allowed to politically and they can I think conceptually. He just can't make that big break Rand is an enlightenment thinker in that sense. She is what should have followed right after Right, she should have come then grounded them in the secular and in the egoistic and there was the Tillion view of morality as as a as a Code of values to basically to guide your life to guide your life towards happiness. That's Aristotle's view.

So they didn't have that so You know, so I think that government is necessary. It's not necessarily evil, it's a necessary good because it does something good. And the good that it does is it eliminates coercion from society, it eliminates violence from society, it eliminates the use of force

between individuals from society. And that, if I see the argument like Michael Malin said, make a commitment chance here, is why can't you apply the same kind of reasoning that you've effectively used for the rest of mutually agreed upon institutions that are driven by capitalism, that we can't also hire a forces to protect us from the violence, to ensure the stability of society that protects us from the violence. Why value? Why draw the line at this particular place, right?

Well, because there is no other place to draw a line and there is a line. And by the way, we draw lines other places, right? and there is a line. And by the way, we draw lines other places, right? We don't vote. We don't have, we don't determine truth and science based in competition. Right, so that's a line.

But first of all, some people might say, I mean, there's competition in a sense that you have alternate theories, but at the end of the day, whether you decide that this he's right or he's right, is not based on the market. It's based on facts, on reality, on objective reality. You have to, and some people will never accept that this person is right because they don't see the string. So first of all, what they reject, what most anarchists reject, even if they don't admit it or recognize it, is they reject, they reject objective reality. In what sense? So like, okay, right. right? So there's a whole, so the whole realm of law is a scientific realm to define, for example,

the boundaries of private property. It's not an issue of competition. It's not an issue of of I have one system and you have another system. It's a new show of objective reality. And now it's more difficult than science in a sense because it's more difficult to prove that my conception of property is correct and you're correct. But there is a correct one. In reality, there's a correct vision.

It's more abstract. But look, somebody has to decide what property is. So I have defined my property is defined by certain boundaries. And I have a police force, and I have a judiciary system that backs my vision. And you have a claim against my property. You have a claim against my property. And you have a police force and your judicial system that backs your claim. Who's right? So the our definitions of property are different.

Yeah, so our definitions of property. Oh, our claim on the property is different. So what, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, So she just agree on the definition of property. Right. But why should we agree, right? Your judicial system is one definition of property. My judicial system is not. You think that there's no such thing as intellectual property rights. And your whole system believes that. And my whole system believes there is such thing.

So you are duplicating my books and handing them out to all your friends and not paying me a royalty. And I think that's wrong. My judicial system and my police force think that's wrong. And we're both living in the same geographic area. So we have overlapping jurisdictions. Now the anarchist would say, well, what do we go to? Why should we negotiate? My system

is actually right. There is such a thing as intellectual property rights. There's no negotiation here. You're wrong. And you should either pay a fine or go to jail. Yeah, but why can't because it's a community is multiple, there's multiple parties and it's like a majority vote. They'll they'll hire different forces that says, yeah, Yoran is, is on to something here with the definition of property and we'll go with that. So anarchist pro-democracy in the, in the majority rule sense? Well, I think so. I think, I think, you know, so promotes like emergent democracy, right? No, it doesn't. It, it, it, it, I'll tell you what, it, it promotes, it promotes emergent strife and civil war and violence, constant uninterrupted violence,

because the only way to settle the dispute between us, since we both think that we are right. And we have guns behind us to protect that. And we have a legal system. We have a whole theory of ideas is, is, you're stealing my stuff. How do I get it back? I invade you, right? I take over, you know, and who's gonna win that battle? The smartest guy?

Oh, the guy with the biggest guns. See, but the anarchists would say that they're using implied, like the state uses implied force. They're already doing violence. Because they take the status as is today today and they refuse to engage in the conversation about what a state should and could look like and how we can create mechanisms to protect us from the state using those those. But look, this is my view of anarchy is very simple. It's a ridiculous position. It's infantile. I mean, I really mean this, right? And I'm sorry to Michael, but and all the other very very smart, very, very smart anarchists because anarchists

is never, you won't find a dumb anarchist, right? Because dumb people know it wouldn't work. You have to have, it's absolutely true. You have to have a certain IQ to be an anarchist. That's true. They're all really intelligent. All intelligence and the reason is that you have to create such a mythology in your head. You have to create so many rationalizations. Any Joe in the street knows it doesn't work because they can understand what happens where two people who are armed are in the street and have a dispute and there's no mechanism to resolve that dispute. Yeah That's objective that's and this is where it gets objective. That's objective

The whole point of government is That it is the objective authority for determining the truth in one regard, in regard to force. Because the only alternative to determining it when it comes to force is through force. The only way to resolve disputes is through force or through this negotiation, which is unjust because if one parties write and one parties won't, why negotiate? And this is the point, I'm not against competition of governance.

I'm all for competition of governance. We do that all the time, it's called countries. The United States has a certain governance structure, the Soviet Union had a governance structure, Mexico has a governance structure, and the competing. And we can observe the competition. And in my world, you could move freely from one governance to another if you didn't like your governance, you would move to a better governance system.

But they have to have autonomy within a geographic area. Otherwise what you get is complete and out of civil war. The law needs to be objective and they need to be one law over piece of ground. And if you disagree with that law, you can move somewhere else where they mean, this is why federalism is such a beautiful system. Even within the United States, we have states. And on certain issues, we're allowed to disagree between states, like the death penalty, some states do, some states don't.

Fine. And now I can move from one state if I don't like it. But there are certain issues you cannot have disagreement. Slavery, for example, this is why we had a civil war. But let me one other argument against the Anarchy. Markets exist with forces being eliminated. So I can say it again. Markets exist with a rule of force has been eliminated. The rule of force.

Yes. So, a market will exist if we know that you can't pull a gun on me and just take my stuff. I am willing to engage in transaction with you. If we have an implicit understanding, we're not going to use force against each other. So the force has something special to it. Yes. It's a special. It force has something special to it. Yes.

It's a special, it overrides. Because we are still agreeing we can manipulate each other. Yes. But force, we can't. Force, kind of. So what is something fundamental about violence? Force is a fundamental force. It's the anti-reason.

It's the anti-life. It's the anti-reason. It's the anti-life. It's the anti-force against another person. And what it does is shuts down the mind. Right. So, in order to have a market, you have to extract force. How can you have a market in force? When I, there's an Instagram channel called Nature's Metal where it has all these videos of animals basically having a market of force. Yes. But that shuts down the ability to

reason animals don't need to because they can't exactly. So the innovation that is human beings is a capacity to reason. And therefore, the relegation of force to the animals, we don't do force. Civilization is where we don't have force. And so what you have is you cannot have a market in that, which a market requires the elimination of it. And I, you know, I, I don't debate formally these guys, but I interact with them all the time, right? And you get these absurd arguments where, you know, David Friedman will say, that's Milton Friedman's son, he will say something like, well, in Somalia, in the northern part of Somalia where they have no government, you have all these wonderful, you have these

tribal, uh, tribunals of these tribes, and they was all disputes. Yeah. But, barically, they, they show real law. They have no respect for individual rights, no respect for property. And the only reason they have any authority is because they have guns and they have power and they have force. And they do it barbarically. There's nothing civilizing about the courts of Somalian.

And they write about pirates, and because they view force, they don't view forces something unique that must be extracted from human life. And that's why Anarchy has to devolve into violence, because it treats forces just what's a big deal, even negotiating over guns. So we call it a lot of high-level philosophy,

but I'd like to touch on the troubles, the chaos of the day, a couple of things, and I really would try to find a hopeful path way out. So one is the current coronavirus pandemic, or in particular not the virus, but our handling of it. Is there something philosophically, politically, that you would like to see, that you would like to recommend, that you would like to maybe give a hopeful message if we take that kind of trajectory, who might be able to get out? Because I'm kind of worried about the economic pain

that people are feeling that there's this quiet suffering. I mean, I agree with you completely. There is a quiet suffering, it's horrible. I mean, I know people, I go to a lot of restaurants, so one of the things we love to do is eat out. My wife doesn't like cooking anymore. We don't have kids in the house anymore so she doesn't have to. So we got a lot. We go to restaurants and because we have our favorites,

so we go to them a lot, we get to know the owners of the restaurant, the chef, and it's just hard-prakey. You know, these people put a life, you know, the blood sweat and tears. I mean, real blood sweat and tears into these projects. Restaurants are super difficult to manage. Most of them go bankrupt anyway. And the restaurants, we go to a good restaurant, so they've done a good job, and they've got a unique value. And they shut them down. And many of them will never open.

Something like they estimate 50%, 60% of restaurants in some places won't open. These are people's lives, these are people's capital, these are people's effort, these are people's love, talk about love, they love what they do, particularly if they're the chef as well. And it's gone. And it's disappeared.

And what are they gonna do with their lives now? They're gonna live off the government the way our politicians would like them, be going biggest, stimulus plans. So we can hand checks to people to get them used to living off of us rather than, it's disgusting and it's offensive and it's unbelievably sad. And this is where it comes to this,

I care about other people. I mean, this idea that objectives don't care. I mean, I love these people who provide me with pleasure of eating wonderful food in a great environment. And there's something inspiring about them too. Like when I say a great restaurant, I want to do better with my own stuff. Yeah, exactly. It's a different spying.

Anybody who does it is excellent. I love sports because it's the one realm in which you'd still value and celebrate excellence. But I try to celebrate excellence everything in my life. So I try to be nice to these people, and with COVID, we went more to restaurants, if you believe it or not. We did more takeout stuff.

We made an effort, particularly the restaurants. We really loved it, to keep them going, to encourage them to support them. The problem is, the problem is philosophy drives the world. The response to COVID has been worse than pathetic. And it's driven by philosophy. It's driven by disrespect to science, ignorance and disrespect to statistics,

a disrespect to individual human decision-making, government has to decide everything for us. And just throughout the process, and a disrespect of markets, because we didn't let markets work to facilitate what we needed in order to deal with this virus. If you look at the play, it's interesting that the only place on the planet that's done well with this, a part of Asia, Taiwan did phenomenally with this. And the vice president of Taiwan is an epidemiologist, so he knew what he was doing.

And they got it right from the beginning. South Korea did amazing. Even Hong Kong and Singapore, you know, Hong Kong is just very few deaths. And the economy wasn't shut down in any of those places. There were no lockdowns in any of those places. There were no lockdowns in any of those places. The CDC had plans before this happened and how to deal good plans. Indeed, if you ask people around the world before the pandemic, which country is best prepared for a pandemic that would have said the United States because of the CDC's plans

and how all of our emergency reserves and all that and the wealth. And yet all of that went out the window because people panicked, people didn't think, go back to reason, people were arrogant, refused to use the tools that they had that they disp of to deal with this so you deal with pandemics It's very simple how you deal with pandemics And this is how South Korea and Taiwan and you you deal with them by not by testing Tracing and isolated. It's it And you do it well and you do it vigorously and you do it on scale if you have to and you scale up to do it

We have the wealth to do that. So one question I have, it's a difficult one. So I talk about love a lot, and you've just talked about down Trump, I guarantee you, this particular segment will be full of division from the internet. But I believe that should be and can be fixed. What I'm referring to in particular is the division because we've talked about the value of reason. And what I've noticed on the internet is the division shuts down reason. So when people hear you say Trump, actually the first sentence you said about Trump, they'll hear Trump and they're, their ears will perk up,

and they'll immediately start in that first sentence, they'll say, is he a Trump supporter or a Trump? They're not interested in anything else after that. And then after that, that's it. And so my question is, you as one of the beacons of intellectualism, maybe quite honest, I mean, sounds silly to say, but you are a beacon of reason.

How do we bring people together long enough to where we can reason? I mean, there's no easy way out of this because the fact that people have become tribal and they have very tribal. And the tribe, in the tribe reason doesn't matter. It's all about emotion. It's all about belonging and not belonging. And you don't want to stand out. You don't want to have a different opinion. You want to belong. And it's all about belonging. It took us decades to get back to tribalism where we were hundreds of years ago.

It took millennium to get out of tribalism. It took the Enlightenment to get us to the point of individualism where we think in respect for reason. Before that, we were all tribal. So it took the Enlightenment to get us out of it. We've been in the Enlightenment for about 250 years influenced by by the enlightenment and it's fading. The impact is fading. So what would we need to get out of it? We need self-esteem. People join a tribe because they don't trust their own mind. People join a tribe because they're afraid to stand on their own two feet. They're afraid to think for themselves. They're afraid to be different. They're afraid to stand on their own two feet, they're afraid to think for themselves, they're afraid to be different, they're afraid to be unique,

they're afraid to be an individual. People need self-esteem. To gain self-esteem, they have to have respect for rationality, they have to think, and they have to achieve, and they have to recognize that achievement. To do that, they have to be,

they have to have respect for thinking, they have to have to have respect for reason. And we have to, and think about the schools, we have to have schools that teach people to think, teach people to value their mind. We have schools that teach people to feel and value their feelings. We have groups of six year old sitting around a circle discussing politics. What? They don't know anything. They're ignorant. So you don't

know anything when you're ignorant. Yes, you can feel, but your feelings are useless as decision-making tools. But we emphasize emotion. It's all about socialization and emotion. This is why they talk about this generation of snowflakes. They can't hear anything that they're opposed to because they've not learned how to use their mind, how to think. So it boils down to teaching people how to think, to think,

how to think and how to care about themselves. So it's thinking a self-esteem and they're connected because when you think you achieve which gains you gains yourself a steam when you help a self-esteem, it's easier to think for yourself. And I don't know how you do that quickly. I mean, I think leadership matters. So you know, part of what I try to do is try to encourage people to do those things, but I am a small voice. You asked me when, really, you said we should talk about why I'm not more famous. I'm not famous.

You know, my following is not big. It's very small in the scope of things. But yours and objectivism, and that question, could you linger on it for a moment? Why isn't objectivism more? And I think because it's so challenging. It's it's it's not challenging to me, right? When I first encountered objectiveism, it's like after the first shock and after the first kind of none of this can be true, this was all BS. And fighting it, once I got it, it was easy. It was easy.

It was quite years of studying, but it was easy in the sense of, yes, this makes sense. But it's challenging because it abends everything. It really says, what my mother taught me is wrong. It won my politicians say left and right is wrong. All of them, there's not a single politician on which I agree with on almost anything, right? Because on the fundamentals we disagree. And what my teachers are telling me is wrong and what Jesus said is wrong. And it's hard. But the thing is, so you talk about politics and all that kind of stuff, but you know, most people don't care. The more powerful thing about objectivism is the practical of my life, of how I revolutionize

my life. And that feels to be like a very important and appealing, you know, get your shit together. Yeah, but this is why it's like Jordan Peterson is so much more successful than we are, right? Why is that? Make your bed or whatever that's that? Make your bed or whatever that says. Yeah, because his puts no responsibility, shallow. It's make your bed stand up straight. It's what my mother told me when I was growing up. There's nothing new about Jordan Peterson. He says, embrace Christianity. Christianity is fine, right? Religion is okay. Just do these few things and you'll be finding by the way he says Happiness, you know, you either have it or you don't you know, it's random

You don't actually you can't bring about you when happiness. So he's given people an easy out people want easy out people buy Self-help books that give them five principles for living it, you know, shallow, I'm telling them, think standing your own two feet, be independent, don't listen to your mother, do your own thing, but thoughtfully, not based on emotions. So you're responsible not just for a set of particular habits and so on, you're responsible for everything. Yes, and you're a spot, here's the big one, right? You're responsible for shaping your own soul, your consciousness, you get to decide

what it's gonna be like. And the only tool you have is your mind. Your own reason. Your mind, well, your emotions play a tool you have is your mind. Your own reason is your mind. Well, your emotions play a tool when they're properly cultivated. They play a role in that. And the tools you have is thinking, experiencing, living, coming to the right conclusions, you know, listening to great music and watching good movies and and and and art is very important in shaping your own soul and helping you do this.

It's got a it's got a crucial role in that. But it's work. And it's lonely work because this work you do with yourself. Now, if you find somebody who you love who shares these values and you can do with them, that's great. But it's mostly sleep lonely work. it's hard, it's challenging, it ends your world. The reward is unbelievable. But even at the, think about the enlightenment, right? So I've been telling the enlightenment, where was truth? Truth came from our book. And there were a few people who understood the book, most of us couldn't read, and they conveyed it to us. And they just told us what to do. And in that sense, life's easy.

It sucks and we die young and we have nothing and we don't enjoy it, but it's easy. And then the Enlightenment comes around and says, we've got this tool. It's called Reason. And it allows us to discover truth about the world. It's not in a book. It's actually your reason allows you to discover

stuff about the world. And I a book. It's actually your reason allows you to discover stuff about the world. And I consider the first, really the first figure of the Enlightenment is Newton, not Locke, right? It's a scientist because he teaches us the laws of mechanics, like how does stuff work? And people go, oh, wow, this is cool. I can use my mind. I can discover truth isn't that amazing.

And everything opens up when she do that. Hey, if I can discover, if I understand the laws of motion, if I can understand truth in the world, how can I decide who I marry? I mean, everything was fixed in those days. How can I can't decide what profession I should be in, right? Everybody will belong to a guilt. How can I decide who my political leader should be? That's, so it's all reason.

It's all, once you understand the efficacy of your own mind to understand truth, to understand reality, to discover truth, not to understand truth, discover it. Everything opens up. Now you can take responsibility for your own life, because now you have the tools to do it. But we are living in an era where post-moderism tells us there is no truth, there is no reality and our mind is useless anyway.

Critical race theory tells us that you're determined by your race and your race shapes everything and your free will is meaningless and your reason doesn't matter because reason is just shaped by your genes and shaped by your color of your skin. It's the most racist theory of all. And you've got, you've got our friend at UC Irvine telling them, oh, your senses don't tell you anything about reality. Anyway, reality is what it is. And you know, what's the purpose of reason? It's the invent stuff.

It's to make stuff up. And then what uses that? It's complete fantasy. You've basically got every philosophical intellectual voice in the culture, telling them their reason is impotent. There's like a Stephen Pinker who tries and I love Pinker and he's really good and I love his books. But you know, he needs to be stronger about this. And there's a few people on kind of there's a few people partially in the intellectual dark web. And otherwise who are big on reason, but not consistent

enough and not full understanding of what it means or what it implies. And then there's little old me. And it's me against the world in a sense because I'm not only willing to accept to articulate the case for reason, but then what that implies, it implies freedom, it implies capitalism, it implies taking post responsibility over your own life, and though other intellectual dark web people get to reason and they're, oh, politics, you can be whatever. No, you can't, you can't be a socialist and for reason. Right. It doesn't actually, those are incompatible. And you can't be a determinist. And for reason reason and determinism don't go together. The whole point of reason is

that it's an achievement and requires effort and requires engagement and requires choice. So it is it does feel like a little bit because that's that's it. I the allies I have allies. I have allies among the some libertarians over economics. I have some allies in these intellectual dark web maybe overweasant, but none of them are allies in the full sense. My allies are the other objectives, but we're just they're not a lot of us. For people listening to this, for the few folks kind of listening to this and thinking about the trajectory of their own life, I guess the takeaway is a reason, is a difficult project, but a project that's worthy of taking on. Yeah, and difficult is, I don't know if difficulties do right work, because difficult sounds like

it's, you know, I have to push this bold there up a hill. It's not difficult in that sense. It's difficult in a sense that it requires energy and focus. It requires effort. But it's immediately rewarding. It's fun to do. And it's rewards are immediate, pretty quick, right? It takes a while to undo all the garbage that you have. But we all have that I had that took

me years and years and years to get rid of certain concepts and certain emotions that I had that didn't make any sense, but it takes a long time to fully integrate that. So I don't want it to sound like it's a burden, like it's hard in that sense. It does require focus and energy. And I don't want to sound like a doctor's spark. I don't want to to and I don't think I do because I'm pretty passionate guy. But I don't want it to appear like, oh, just forget about emotions. Emotions are how you experience the world. You want to have strong emotions. You want to live. You want to experience life strongly and passionately. You want to experience life strongly and passionately. You just need to know that emotions are not cognition. It's another realm. It's like, don't mix the realms.

Think about outcomes and then experience them. And sometimes your emotions won't coincide with what you think should be. And that means there's no more integration to be done. You're on, as I told you offline, I've been a fan of yours for a long time. It's been, it was a little star-struck early on getting a little more comfortable now. That's gone. I highly recommend that people that have heard your work, listen to it for the year-on-brook show. You know, the times I've disagreed with something I've here you say is usually a first step on

a journey of learning a lot more about that thing, about that viewpoint. That's been so fulfilling, it's been a gift, the passion. You talk about it a lot, but the passion radiates in a way that's just contagious and on-spiring. So thank you for everything you've done for this world. It's truly an honor and a pleasure to talk to you. Well, thank you. And it's my what is that if I've had an impact on you and people like you, wow. I mean, that's that's amazing to me. When you wrote to me an email saying, you being a fan, I was blown away because I had no idea and completely unexpected.

And I, you know, every few months, I'd discover, hey, I had an impact on this book. And people that I would have never thought. So, you know, the only way to change the world is to change a one mind at the time. And when you have an impact on a good mind, and a mind that cares about the world, and a mind that goes out and does something about it, then you get the exponential growth. So through you I've impacted other people,

and that's how you get, that's how you ultimately change everything. And so I'm in spite of everything. I'm optimistic in a sense that I think that the progress we've made today is so universally accepted, the scientific progress, the technological progress. It can just vanish like it did under when Rome collapsed. And whether it's in the United States or somewhere, progress will continue, the human project for human progress will continue. And I think these ideas, ideas of reason and individualism will always be at the heart of it. And, you

know, what we are doing is continuing the project of the Enlightenment. And it's the project that will save this, save the human race and allow it to, to, to, for Elon Musk and for Jeff Bezos to reach the stars. Thank you for masterfully ending on a hopeful note. You're on a pleasure and an honor. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this conversation with you're on Brook and thank you to our sponsors. Blinkist and app I use for reading through summaries of books, express VPN, the VPN I've used

for many years to protect my privacy on the internet, and cash app. The app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoyed this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5,000 Apple podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Iron Rand. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be one. It exists. It is real. It is possible. It is yours. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. you