Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Yaron Brook,
00:00:03 one of the best known objectivist philosophers
00:00:05 and thinkers in the world.
00:00:07 Objectivism is the philosophical system developed by Ayn Rand
00:00:11 that she first expressed in her fiction books,
00:00:14 The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,
00:00:16 and later in nonfiction essays and books.
00:00:19 Yaron is the current chairman of the board
00:00:22 at the Ayn Rand Institute, host of the Yaron Brook Show,
00:00:26 and the coauthor of Free Market Revolution,
00:00:30 Equal is Unfair, and several other books
00:00:33 where he analyzes systems of government, human behavior,
00:00:37 and the human condition from the perspective of objectivism.
00:00:41 Quick mention of each sponsor,
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00:01:07 As a side note, let me say that I first read Atlas Shrugged
00:01:11 and The Fountainhead early in college,
00:01:13 along with many other literary and philosophical works
00:01:16 from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, Locke, Foucault,
00:01:21 Wittgenstein, and of course, all the great existentialists
00:01:25 from Kierkegaard to Camus.
00:01:27 I always had an open mind, curious to learn
00:01:30 and explore the ideas of thinkers throughout history,
00:01:33 no matter how mundane or radical
00:01:36 or even dangerous they were considered to be.
00:01:40 Ayn Rand was, and I think still is, a divisive figure.
00:01:44 Some people love her, some people dislike
00:01:46 or even dismiss her.
00:01:49 I prefer to look past what some may consider
00:01:51 to be the flaws of the person
00:01:53 and consider with an open mind the ideas she presents
00:01:57 and Jaron now describes and applies
00:02:00 in his philosophical discussions.
00:02:02 In general, I hope that you will be patient
00:02:05 and understanding as I venture out across the space of ideas
00:02:09 and the ever widening Overton window,
00:02:12 pulling at the thread of curiosity,
00:02:15 sometimes saying stupid things,
00:02:17 but always striving to understand
00:02:19 how we can better build a better world together.
00:02:23 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
00:02:25 review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
00:02:27 follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon,
00:02:30 or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
00:02:34 And now, here’s my conversation with Jaron Rook.
00:02:39 Let me ask the biggest possible question first.
00:02:42 Sure.
00:02:43 What are the principles of a life well lived?
00:02:47 I think it’s to live with thought,
00:02:51 that is to live a rational life, to think it through.
00:02:55 I think so many people are in a sense zombies out there.
00:02:59 They’re alive, but they’re not really alive
00:03:01 because their mind is not focused,
00:03:03 their mind is not focused on what do I need to do
00:03:07 in order to live a great life?
00:03:10 So too many people just go through the motions
00:03:12 of living rather than really embrace life.
00:03:16 So I think the secret to living a great life
00:03:19 is to take it seriously.
00:03:22 And what it means to take it seriously
00:03:24 is to use the one tool that makes us human,
00:03:26 the one tool that provides us with all the values
00:03:29 that we have, our mind, our reason,
00:03:31 and to use it, apply it to living.
00:03:34 People apply it to their work,
00:03:36 they apply it to their math problems,
00:03:38 to science, to programming.
00:03:41 But imagine if they used that same energy,
00:03:43 that same focus, that same concentration
00:03:45 to actually living life and choosing values
00:03:49 that they should pursue,
00:03:51 that would change the world,
00:03:54 and it would change their lives.
00:03:56 Yeah, actually, I wear this silly suit and tie.
00:04:00 It symbolizes to me always,
00:04:02 it makes me feel like I’m taking the moment really seriously.
00:04:06 I think that’s really, that’s right.
00:04:08 And each one of us has different ways
00:04:10 to kind of condition our consciousness.
00:04:14 I’m serious now, and for you, it’s a suit and tie.
00:04:17 It’s a conditioning of your consciousness
00:04:19 to now I’m focused, now I’m at work,
00:04:21 now I’m doing my thing.
00:04:22 Yeah.
00:04:23 And I think that’s terrific,
00:04:26 and I wish everybody took that.
00:04:28 Look, I mean, it’s a cliche, but we only live once.
00:04:32 Every minute of your life, you’re never gonna live again.
00:04:34 This is really valuable.
00:04:36 And when people don’t have that deep respect
00:04:41 for their own life, for their own time, for their own mind,
00:04:44 and if they did, again, one could only imagine,
00:04:49 look at how productive people are.
00:04:50 Look at the amazing things they produce
00:04:52 and they do in their work.
00:04:54 And if they applied that to everything, wow.
00:04:58 So you kind of talk about reason.
00:05:00 Where does the kind of existentialist idea
00:05:05 of experience maybe, fully experiencing all the moments
00:05:10 versus fully thinking through?
00:05:14 Is there an interesting line to separate the two?
00:05:17 Why such an emphasis on reason for a life well lived
00:05:21 versus just enjoy, like experience the moment?
00:05:26 Well, because I think experience in a sense
00:05:28 is the easy part.
00:05:31 I’m not saying it’s how we experience the life that we live.
00:05:37 And yes, I’m all with the take time to value what you value,
00:05:43 but I don’t think that’s the problem of people out there.
00:05:46 I don’t think the problem is they’re not taking time
00:05:48 to appreciate where they are and what they do.
00:05:51 I think it’s that they don’t use their mind
00:05:53 in this one respect, in planning their life,
00:05:57 in thinking about how to live.
00:06:00 So the focus is on reason is because
00:06:02 it’s our only source of knowledge.
00:06:03 There’s no other source of knowledge.
00:06:05 We don’t know anything that does not come
00:06:10 from our senses and our mind,
00:06:12 the integration of the evidence of our senses.
00:06:15 Now we know stuff about ourselves
00:06:16 and I think it’s important to know oneself
00:06:18 through introspection.
00:06:19 And I consider that part of reasoning is to introspect.
00:06:25 But I think reason is undervalued, which is funny to say,
00:06:29 because it’s our means of survival.
00:06:31 It’s how human beings survive.
00:06:33 We cannot, see, this is why I disagree
00:06:35 with so many scientists and people like Sam Harris.
00:06:38 You mentioned Sam Harris before the show.
00:06:42 We’re not programmed to know how to hunt.
00:06:47 We’re not programmed to do agriculture.
00:06:49 We’re not programmed to build computers
00:06:51 and build networks on which we can podcast
00:06:53 and do our shows.
00:06:55 All of that requires effort.
00:06:58 It requires focus.
00:06:59 It requires energy and it requires will.
00:07:03 It requires somebody to will it.
00:07:05 It requires somebody to choose it.
00:07:08 And once you make that choice,
00:07:11 you have to engage that choice means
00:07:13 that you’re choosing to engage your reason
00:07:15 in discovery, in integration,
00:07:19 and then in work to change the world in which we live.
00:07:23 And human beings have to discover,
00:07:26 figure out, solve the problem of hunting.
00:07:29 Hunting, everybody thinks, oh, that’s easy.
00:07:31 I’ve seen the movie.
00:07:32 But human beings had to figure out how to do it, right?
00:07:36 You can’t run down a bison and bite into it, right?
00:07:40 You’re not gonna catch it.
00:07:41 You’re not gonna, you have no fangs to bite into it.
00:07:44 You have to build weapons.
00:07:45 You have to build tools.
00:07:46 You have to create traps.
00:07:47 You have to have a strategy.
00:07:49 All of that requires reason.
00:07:52 So the most important thing that allows human beings
00:07:56 to survive and to thrive in every value
00:07:58 from the most simple to the most sophisticated,
00:08:01 from the most material to, I believe, the most spiritual,
00:08:04 requires thinking.
00:08:06 So stopping and appreciating the moment
00:08:10 is something that I think is relatively easy
00:08:14 once you have a plan, once you’ve thought it through,
00:08:17 once you know what your values are.
00:08:20 There is a mistake people make.
00:08:21 They attain their values and they don’t take a moment
00:08:25 to savor that and to appreciate that
00:08:27 and to even pat themselves on the back that they did it.
00:08:31 But that’s not what’s screwing up the world.
00:08:33 What’s screwing up the world
00:08:34 is that people have the wrong values
00:08:35 and they don’t think about them
00:08:37 and they don’t really focus on them
00:08:39 and they don’t have a plan for their own life
00:08:41 and how to live it.
00:08:42 If we look at human nature,
00:08:44 you’re saying the fundamental big thing
00:08:46 that we need to consider is our capacity,
00:08:49 like a capability to reason.
00:08:51 So to me, reason is this massive evolutionary achievement
00:08:56 in quotes.
00:08:58 If you think about any other sophisticated animal,
00:09:02 everything has to be coded.
00:09:04 Everything has to be written in the hard way.
00:09:07 It has to be there.
00:09:08 And they have to have a solution for every outcome.
00:09:11 And if there’s no solution, the animal dies typically,
00:09:13 or the animal suffers in some way.
00:09:15 Human beings have this capacity to self program.
00:09:18 They have this capacity.
00:09:20 It’s not a tabula rasa in the sense
00:09:24 that there’s nothing there.
00:09:25 Obviously, we have a nature.
00:09:26 Obviously, our minds, our brains
00:09:29 are structured in a particular way.
00:09:31 But given that, we have the ability
00:09:35 to turn it on or turn it off.
00:09:37 We have the ability to commit suicide,
00:09:39 to reject our nature, to work against our interests,
00:09:43 not to use the tool that evolution has provided us,
00:09:48 which is this mind, which is reason.
00:09:50 So that choice, that fundamental choice,
00:09:54 you know, Hamlet says it, right, to be or not to be.
00:09:58 But to be or not to be is to think or not to think,
00:10:01 to engage or not to engage, to focus or not to focus.
00:10:05 You know, in the morning when you get up,
00:10:07 you kind of, you know, you’re not really completely there.
00:10:10 You’re kind of out of focus and stuff.
00:10:12 It requires an act of will to say,
00:10:14 okay, I’m awake, I’ve got stuff to do.
00:10:17 Some people never do that.
00:10:19 Some people live in that haze,
00:10:21 and they never engage that mind.
00:10:23 And when you’re sitting and try to solve
00:10:26 a complex computer problem or math problem,
00:10:29 you have to turn something on.
00:10:31 You have to, in a sense, exert certain energy
00:10:36 to focus on the problem to do it.
00:10:38 And that is not determined in a sense
00:10:41 that you have to focus.
00:10:43 You choose to focus, and you could choose not to focus.
00:10:46 And that choice is more powerful than any other,
00:10:49 like, parts of our brain that we’ve borrowed from fish
00:10:52 and from our evolutionary origins.
00:10:54 Like this, whatever this crazy little leap in evolution is
00:10:58 that allowed us to think is more powerful than anything else.
00:11:00 So I think neuroscientists pretend they know a lot more
00:11:05 about the brain than they really do.
00:11:07 Yeah.
00:11:09 And that we know. Shots fired.
00:11:11 I agree with you.
00:11:12 And we don’t know that much yet
00:11:14 about how the brain functions and what’s a fish
00:11:16 and what, you know, all this stuff.
00:11:18 So I think what exists there
00:11:21 is a lot of potentialities.
00:11:24 But the beauty of the human brain is it’s potentialities
00:11:28 that we have to manifest through our choices.
00:11:32 It’s there. It’s sitting there.
00:11:34 And, yes, there’s certain things
00:11:36 that are going to evoke certain senses, certain feelings.
00:11:42 I’m not even saying emotions
00:11:43 because I think emotions are too complex
00:11:45 to have been programmed into our mind.
00:11:48 But I don’t think so.
00:11:49 You know, there’s this big issue of evolutionary psychology
00:11:52 is huge right now and it’s a big issue.
00:11:55 You know, I find it to a large extent as way too early
00:12:02 and in storytelling about expo storytelling about stuff.
00:12:08 We still don’t, you know, so for example,
00:12:10 I would like to see if evolutionary psychology
00:12:12 differentiate between things like inclinations,
00:12:17 feelings, emotions, sensations, thoughts, concepts, ideas.
00:12:23 What of those are programmed and what of those are developed
00:12:27 and chosen and a product of reason?
00:12:29 I think anything from emotion to abstract ideas is all chosen,
00:12:33 is all a product of reason.
00:12:36 And everything before that, we might have been programmed for.
00:12:42 But the fact is so clearly a sensation is not a product of,
00:12:45 you know, is something that we feel
00:12:48 because that’s how our biology works.
00:12:50 So until we have these categories
00:12:54 and until we can clearly specify what is what
00:12:58 and where do they come from,
00:13:01 the whole discussion in evolutionary psychology
00:13:03 seems to be rambling.
00:13:04 It doesn’t seem to be scientific.
00:13:06 So we have to define our terms, you know,
00:13:08 which is the basis of science.
00:13:10 You have to have some clear definitions
00:13:12 about what we’re talking about.
00:13:14 When you ask them these questions,
00:13:16 there’s never really a coherent answer
00:13:18 about what is it exactly.
00:13:20 And everybody is afraid of the issue of free will.
00:13:22 And I think to some extent, I mean, Harris has this,
00:13:26 and I don’t want to misrepresent anything Harris has
00:13:28 because, you know, I’m a fan and I like a lot of his stuff.
00:13:33 But on the one hand, he is obviously intellectually active
00:13:37 and wants to change our minds.
00:13:38 So he believes that we have some capacity to choose.
00:13:41 On the other hand, he’s undermining that capacity
00:13:44 to choose by saying it’s just determines
00:13:45 you’re gonna choose what you choose.
00:13:47 You have no say in it, there’s actually no you.
00:13:51 So it’s, you know, and that’s to me completely unscientific.
00:13:55 That’s completely him, you know, pulling it out of nowhere.
00:14:00 We all experienced the fact that we have an eye.
00:14:03 That kind of certainty saying that we do not have
00:14:06 that fundamental choice that reason provides
00:14:09 is unfounded currently.
00:14:12 Look, there’s a sense in which it can never be contradicted
00:14:15 because it’s a product of your experience.
00:14:20 It’s not a product of your experience.
00:14:21 You can experience it directly.
00:14:24 So no science will ever prove that this table isn’t here.
00:14:29 I can see it, it’s here, right?
00:14:31 I can feel it.
00:14:33 I know I have free will because I can introspect it.
00:14:36 In a sense, I can see it.
00:14:37 I can see myself engaging it and that is as valid
00:14:45 as the evidence of my senses.
00:14:47 Now I can’t point at it so that you can see
00:14:49 the same thing I’m seeing,
00:14:51 but you can do the same thing in your own consciousness
00:14:53 and you can identify the same thing.
00:14:55 And to deny that in the name of science
00:14:59 is to get things upside down.
00:15:00 You start with that and that’s the beginning of science.
00:15:04 The beginning of science is the identification
00:15:07 that I choose and that I can reason
00:15:10 and now I need to figure out the mechanism,
00:15:13 the rules of reasoning, the rules of logic.
00:15:16 How does this work?
00:15:17 And that’s where science comes from.
00:15:19 Of course, it’s possible that science,
00:15:21 like from my place of AI would be able to,
00:15:25 if we were able to engineer consciousness or understand,
00:15:30 I mean, it’s very difficult
00:15:32 because we’re so far away from it now,
00:15:33 but understand how the actual mechanism
00:15:36 that consciousness emerges.
00:15:38 And in fact, this table is not real,
00:15:40 that we can determine that it,
00:15:45 exactly how our mind constructs the reality
00:15:47 that we perceive, then you can start to make interesting.
00:15:51 But our mind doesn’t construct the reality that we perceive.
00:15:54 The reality we perceive is there.
00:15:56 We perceive a reality that exists.
00:15:59 Now, we perceive it in particular ways
00:16:02 given the nature of our senses, right?
00:16:05 A bat perceives this table differently,
00:16:07 but it’s still the same table
00:16:08 with the same characteristics and the same identity.
00:16:12 It’s just a matter of, we use eyes,
00:16:16 they use a radar system to,
00:16:18 they use sound waves to perceive it,
00:16:19 but it’s still there.
00:16:20 Existence exists whether we exist or not.
00:16:22 And so you could create, I mean, I don’t know how,
00:16:27 and I don’t know if it’s possible,
00:16:28 but let’s say you could create a consciousness, right?
00:16:31 And I suspect that to do that,
00:16:33 you would have to use biology, not just electronics,
00:16:37 but way outside my expertise.
00:16:40 Because consciousness, as far as we know,
00:16:42 is a phenomenon of life,
00:16:43 and you would have to figure out how to create life
00:16:45 before you created consciousness, I think.
00:16:48 But if you did that, then that wouldn’t change anything.
00:16:51 All it would say is we have another conscious being.
00:16:53 Cool, that’s great.
00:16:54 But it wouldn’t change the nature of our consciousness.
00:16:58 Our consciousness is what it is in respect.
00:17:01 So that’s very interesting, I think this is a good way
00:17:04 to set the table for discussion of objectivism is,
00:17:09 let me at least challenge a thought experiment,
00:17:12 which is, I don’t know if you’re familiar
00:17:14 with Donald Hoffman’s work about reality.
00:17:17 So his idea is that we’re just,
00:17:20 our perception is just an interface to reality.
00:17:23 So Donald Hoffman is the guy you see on Vine?
00:17:26 Yeah.
00:17:27 Yes, I’ve met Donald and I’ve seen his video.
00:17:28 And look, Donald has not invented anything new.
00:17:31 This goes back to ancient philosophy.
00:17:34 Let me just state it in case people aren’t familiar.
00:17:38 I mean, it’s a fascinating thought experiment to me,
00:17:41 like of out of the box thinking, perhaps literally,
00:17:44 is that there’s a gap between the world as we perceive it
00:17:50 and the world as it actually exists.
00:17:52 And I think that’s, for the philosophy,
00:17:55 objectivism is a really important gap to close.
00:17:59 So can you maybe at least try to entertain the idea
00:18:03 that there is more to reality than our minds can perceive?
00:18:09 Well, I don’t understand what more means, right?
00:18:13 Of course there’s more to reality
00:18:14 than what our senses perceive.
00:18:16 That is, for example, I don’t know,
00:18:19 certain elements have radiation, right?
00:18:24 Uranium has radiation.
00:18:25 I can’t perceive radiation.
00:18:27 The beauty of human reason is I can,
00:18:31 through experimentation,
00:18:32 discover the phenomena of radiation,
00:18:34 then actually measure radiation.
00:18:36 And I don’t worry about it.
00:18:37 I can’t perceive the world
00:18:39 the way a bat perceives the world.
00:18:40 And I might not be able to see certain things,
00:18:43 but I can, we’ve created radar,
00:18:44 so A, we understand how a bat perceives the world,
00:18:47 and I can mimic it through a radar screen
00:18:50 and create images like the bat,
00:18:53 its consciousness somehow perceives it, right?
00:18:55 So the beauty of human reason is our capacity
00:19:00 to understand the world beyond
00:19:02 what our senses give us directly.
00:19:05 At the end, everything comes in through our senses,
00:19:07 but we can understand things
00:19:10 that our senses don’t provide us.
00:19:11 But what he’s doing is he’s doing something very different.
00:19:14 He is saying what our senses provides us
00:19:17 might have nothing to do with the reality out there.
00:19:20 That is just a random, arbitrary, nonsensical statement.
00:19:25 And he actually has a whole
00:19:27 evolutionary explanation for it.
00:19:28 He runs some simulations.
00:19:30 The simulations seem, I mean,
00:19:32 I’m not an expert on this field,
00:19:33 but they seem silly to me.
00:19:35 They don’t seem to reflect.
00:19:36 And look, all he’s doing is taking
00:19:38 Immanuel Kant’s philosophy,
00:19:41 which articulate exactly the same cause,
00:19:43 and he’s giving it a veneer of evolutionary ideas.
00:19:48 I’m not an expert on evolution,
00:19:50 and I’m not an expert on epistemology,
00:19:52 which is what this is.
00:19:53 So to me, as a semi layman,
00:19:57 it doesn’t make any sense.
00:19:58 And, you know, I’m actually,
00:20:02 you know, I have this Yaron Book Show.
00:20:04 I don’t know if I’m allowed to pitch it,
00:20:05 but I’ve got this Yaron Book Show on YouTube.
00:20:08 I’m a huge fan of the Yaron Book Show.
00:20:11 I listen to it very often.
00:20:12 As a small aside, the cool thing about reason,
00:20:17 which you practice,
00:20:19 is you have a systematic way of thinking
00:20:21 through basically anything.
00:20:24 Yes.
00:20:25 And that’s so fun to listen to.
00:20:27 I mean, it’s rare that I think there’s flaws in your logic,
00:20:32 but even then it’s fun,
00:20:34 because I’m like disagreeing with the screen.
00:20:37 And it’s great when somebody disagrees with me
00:20:39 and they give good arguments,
00:20:40 because that makes it challenging.
00:20:42 Anyway, sorry.
00:20:43 You know, so one of the shows I want to do
00:20:45 in the next few weeks is one of my philosophy,
00:20:47 bring one of my philosophy friends to discuss the video
00:20:50 that Hoffman, where he presents his theory,
00:20:52 because it surprises me how seductive it is.
00:20:58 And it seems to be so,
00:21:00 first of all, completely counterintuitive,
00:21:01 but because, you know, somehow we managed to cross the road
00:21:05 and not get hit by the car.
00:21:06 And if our senses did not provide us any information
00:21:10 about what’s actually going on in reality,
00:21:12 how do we do that?
00:21:13 And not to mention build computers,
00:21:16 not to mention fly to the moon
00:21:17 and actually land on the moon.
00:21:18 And if reality is not giving us information about the moon,
00:21:21 if our senses are not giving us information about the moon,
00:21:24 how did we get there?
00:21:25 You know, and where did we go?
00:21:27 Maybe we didn’t go anywhere.
00:21:28 It’s just, it’s nonsensical to me.
00:21:30 And it’s a very bad place philosophically,
00:21:37 because it basically says
00:21:38 there is no objective standard for anything.
00:21:40 There is no objective reality.
00:21:42 You can come up with anything.
00:21:43 You could argue anything.
00:21:44 And there’s no methodology, right?
00:21:46 My, I believe that at the end of the day,
00:21:48 what reason allows us to do
00:21:50 is provides us with a methodology for truth.
00:21:52 And at the end of the day, for every claim that I make,
00:21:54 I should be able to boil it down to see,
00:21:59 yeah, look, the evidence of the census is right then.
00:22:02 Once you take that away, knowledge is gone
00:22:05 and truth is gone.
00:22:06 And that opens it up to, you know, complete disaster.
00:22:09 So, you know, to me why it’s compelling
00:22:12 to at least entertain this idea,
00:22:16 first of all, it shakes up the mind a little bit
00:22:18 to force you to go back to first principles
00:22:24 and, you know, ask the question, what do I really know?
00:22:27 And the second part of that that I really enjoy
00:22:31 is it’s a reminder that we know very little
00:22:35 to be a little bit more humble.
00:22:37 So if reality doesn’t exist at all,
00:22:40 before you start thinking about it,
00:22:43 I think it’s a really nice wake up call to think,
00:22:46 wait a minute, I don’t really know much about this universe,
00:22:51 that humbleness.
00:22:52 I think something I’d like to ask you about
00:22:54 in terms of reason, when you,
00:22:58 you can become very confident
00:23:00 in your ability to understand the world
00:23:03 if you practice reason often.
00:23:04 And I feel like it can lead you astray
00:23:07 because you can start to think,
00:23:10 it’s, so I love psychology
00:23:12 and psychologists have the certainty
00:23:15 about understanding the human condition,
00:23:17 which is undeserved.
00:23:19 You know, you run a study with 50 people
00:23:21 and you think you can understand
00:23:23 the source of all these psychiatric disorders,
00:23:25 all these kinds of things.
00:23:27 That’s similar kind of trouble
00:23:28 I feel like you can get into
00:23:31 when you overreach with reason.
00:23:35 So I don’t think there is such a thing
00:23:36 as overreaching with reason,
00:23:38 but there are bad applications of reason.
00:23:40 There are bad uses of reason
00:23:42 or the pretense of using reason.
00:23:44 I think a lot of these psychological studies
00:23:46 are pretense of using reason.
00:23:48 And the psychologists have never really taken
00:23:51 a serious stat class or a serious econometrics class.
00:23:53 So they use statistics in weird ways
00:23:55 that just don’t make any sense.
00:23:57 And that’s a miss, that’s not reason, right?
00:23:59 That’s just bad thinking, right?
00:24:01 So I don’t think you can do too much good thinking.
00:24:05 And that’s what reason is.
00:24:07 It’s good thinking.
00:24:08 Now, the fact that you try to use reason
00:24:14 does not guarantee you won’t make mistakes.
00:24:17 It doesn’t guarantee you won’t be wrong.
00:24:18 It doesn’t guarantee you won’t go down a rabbit hole
00:24:21 and completely get it wrong.
00:24:24 But it does give you the only existing mechanism to fix it.
00:24:29 Which is going back to reality,
00:24:30 going back to facts, going back to reason.
00:24:32 And getting out of the rabbit hole
00:24:34 and getting back to reality.
00:24:37 So I agree with you that it’s interesting
00:24:40 to think about these, what I consider crazy ideas
00:24:44 because it, oh wait, what is my argument about them?
00:24:47 If I don’t really have a good argument about them,
00:24:49 then do I know what I know?
00:24:51 So in that sense, it’s always nice to be challenged
00:24:53 and pushed and oriented.
00:24:55 You know, the nice thing about objectivism is
00:24:58 everybody’s doing that to me all the time, right?
00:25:00 Because nobody agrees with me on anything.
00:25:01 So I’m constantly being challenged,
00:25:04 whether it’s in, by Hoffman on metaphysics
00:25:07 and epistemology, right?
00:25:08 On the very foundations of analogy and ethics,
00:25:10 everybody constantly, and in politics all the time.
00:25:13 So I find that it’s part of, you know,
00:25:18 I prefer that everybody, there’s a sense
00:25:20 in which I prefer that everybody agreed with me, right?
00:25:22 Because I think we’d live in a better world.
00:25:24 But there’s a sense in which that disagreement makes it,
00:25:27 at least up to a point, makes it interesting
00:25:30 and challenging and forces you to be able to rethink
00:25:35 or to confirm your own thinking
00:25:37 and to challenge that thinking.
00:25:39 Can you try to do the impossible task
00:25:42 and give a whirlwind introduction to Ayn Rand,
00:25:46 the many sides of Ayn Rand?
00:25:49 So Ayn Rand the human being, Ayn Rand the novelist,
00:25:53 and Ayn Rand the philosopher.
00:25:56 So who was Ayn Rand?
00:25:57 Sure, so her life story is one that I think is fascinating
00:26:04 but it also lends itself to this integration
00:26:07 of all of these things.
00:26:08 She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905
00:26:12 to kind of a middle class family, Jewish family.
00:26:16 They owned a pharmacy, her father owned a pharmacy.
00:26:20 And, you know, she grew up, she grew up,
00:26:25 she was a very, she knew what she wanted to do
00:26:28 and what she wanted to be from a very young age.
00:26:31 I think from the age of nine,
00:26:32 she knew she wanted to be a writer.
00:26:33 She wanted to write stories.
00:26:34 That was the thing she wanted to do.
00:26:37 And, you know, she focused her life after that
00:26:41 on this goal of I wanna be a novelist, I wanna write.
00:26:46 And the philosophy was incidental to that in a sense,
00:26:50 at least until some point in her life.
00:26:52 She witnessed the Russian Revolution,
00:26:55 literally it happened outside.
00:26:57 They lived in St. Petersburg
00:26:59 where the first kind of demonstrations
00:27:01 and of the revolution happened.
00:27:03 So she witnessed it.
00:27:04 She lived through it as a teenager,
00:27:07 went to school under the Soviets.
00:27:10 For a while, they were under kind of on the Black Sea
00:27:15 where the opposition government was ruling
00:27:18 and then they would go back and forth
00:27:19 between the commies and the whites.
00:27:21 But she experienced what communism was like.
00:27:23 She saw the pharmacy being taken away from a family.
00:27:26 She saw their apartment being taken away
00:27:28 or other families being brought
00:27:30 into the apartment they already lived in.
00:27:33 And it was very clear given her nature,
00:27:38 given her views, even at a very young age
00:27:42 that she would not survive the system.
00:27:44 So a lot of effort was put into how did she get out?
00:27:48 And her family was really helpful in this.
00:27:51 And she had a cousin in Chicago
00:27:54 and she had been studying kind of film at the university and…
00:27:59 This is in her 20s?
00:28:00 This is in her 20s, early 20s.
00:28:03 And Lenin, there was a small window
00:28:06 where Lenin was allowing some people
00:28:09 to leave under certain circumstances.
00:28:12 And she managed to get out to go do research on film
00:28:15 in the United States.
00:28:17 Everybody knew, everybody who knew her
00:28:19 knew she would never come back,
00:28:21 that this was a one way ticket.
00:28:22 And she got out, she made it to Chicago,
00:28:24 spent a few weeks in Chicago, and then headed to Hollywood.
00:28:28 She wanted to write scripts, that was the goal.
00:28:32 Here’s this short woman from Russia with a strong accent,
00:28:38 learning English, showing up in Hollywood
00:28:41 and I wanna be a script writer.
00:28:43 In English.
00:28:44 In English, writing in English.
00:28:46 And this is kind of one of these fairytale stories,
00:28:51 but it’s true, she shows up at the Cecil B. DeMille Studios.
00:28:56 And she has a letter of introduction from her cousin
00:28:59 in Chicago who owns a movie theater.
00:29:02 And this is in the late 1920s.
00:29:05 And she shows up there with this letter and they say,
00:29:08 don’t call us, we’ll call you kind of thing.
00:29:10 And she steps out and there’s this massive convertible.
00:29:15 And in the convertible is Cecil B. DeMille.
00:29:18 And he’s driving slowly past her
00:29:20 right at the entrance of the studio.
00:29:21 And she stares at him and he stops the car and he says,
00:29:23 why are you staring at me?
00:29:25 And she says, she tells him a story from Russia
00:29:28 and I wanna make it in the movies,
00:29:30 I wanna be a script writer one day.
00:29:31 And he says, well, if you want that, get in the car.
00:29:35 She gets in the car and he takes her to the back lot
00:29:38 of his studio where they’re filming The King of Kings,
00:29:40 the story of Jesus.
00:29:41 And he says, here’s a pass for a week.
00:29:45 If you wanna write for the movies,
00:29:47 you better know how movies are made.
00:29:49 And she basically spends a week in there.
00:29:51 She spends more time there.
00:29:53 She managed to get an extension.
00:29:54 She lands up being an extra in the movie.
00:29:56 So you can see Ayn Rand there is one of the masses
00:30:00 when Jesus is walking by.
00:30:03 She meets her future husband on the sets
00:30:05 of The King of Kings.
00:30:07 She lands up getting married,
00:30:09 getting her American citizenship that way.
00:30:12 And she lands up doing odds and ends jobs in Hollywood,
00:30:15 living in a tiny little apartment,
00:30:19 somehow making a living.
00:30:20 Her husband was an actor.
00:30:22 He was struggling actors were difficult times.
00:30:26 And in the evenings, studying English,
00:30:28 writing, writing, writing, writing,
00:30:30 and studying and studying and studying.
00:30:31 And she finally makes it by writing a play
00:30:34 that is successful in LA and ultimately goes to Broadway.
00:30:39 And her first novel is a novel called We The Living,
00:30:44 which is the most autobiographical of all her novels.
00:30:47 It’s about a young woman in the Soviet Union.
00:30:51 It’s a powerful story, a very moving story,
00:30:55 and probably, if not the best,
00:30:58 one of the best portrayals of life under communism.
00:31:02 And how powerful.
00:31:02 So you would recommend the book?
00:31:03 Definitely recommend We The Living.
00:31:05 It’s her first novel.
00:31:06 She wrote it in the spring of 2000.
00:31:08 First novel she wrote in the 30s.
00:31:11 And it didn’t go anywhere.
00:31:13 Because if you think about the intelligentsia,
00:31:16 the people who matter, the people who wrote book reviews,
00:31:20 this is a time of Durante,
00:31:23 who’s the New York Times guy in Moscow,
00:31:25 who’s praising Stalin to the hills and the success.
00:31:29 So the novel fails, but she’s got a novel out.
00:31:34 She writes a small novelette called Anthem.
00:31:36 A lot of people have read that, and it’s read
00:31:38 in high schools.
00:31:39 It’s kind of a dystopian novel,
00:31:42 and it doesn’t get published in the U.S.
00:31:45 It gets published in the U.K.
00:31:47 U.K. is very interested in dystopian novels.
00:31:50 Animal Farm in 1984,
00:31:54 84 is published a couple of years after, I think,
00:31:57 after Anthem.
00:31:58 There’s reason to believe he read Anthem.
00:32:01 And George Orwell read Animal Farm.
00:32:07 Just a small aside, Animal Farm is probably top.
00:32:11 I mean, it’s weird to say,
00:32:12 but I would say it’s my favorite book.
00:32:14 Have you seen this movie out now called Mr. Jones?
00:32:17 No.
00:32:18 Oh, you’ve got to see Mr. Jones.
00:32:19 What’s Mr. Jones?
00:32:21 It’s a…
00:32:22 Sorry for my ignorance.
00:32:22 No, no, it’s a movie, and it hasn’t got any publicity,
00:32:25 which is tragic, because it’s a really good movie.
00:32:28 It’s both brilliantly made.
00:32:29 It’s made by a Polish director.
00:32:31 But it’s in English.
00:32:32 It’s a true story,
00:32:34 and George Orwell’s Animal Farm is featured in it
00:32:37 in the sense that during the story,
00:32:40 George Orwell is writing Animal Farm,
00:32:42 and the narrator is reading off sections of Animal Farm
00:32:47 as the movie is progressing.
00:32:49 And the movie is a true story
00:32:50 about the first Western journalist to discover
00:32:55 and to write about the famine in Ukraine.
00:32:58 And so he goes to Moscow, and then he gets on a train,
00:33:01 and he finds himself in Ukraine,
00:33:02 and it’s beautifully and horrifically made.
00:33:05 So the horror of the famine is brilliantly conveyed.
00:33:10 And it’s a true story, so it’s a very moving story,
00:33:13 very powerful story, and just very well made movie.
00:33:16 So it’s tragic, in my view,
00:33:18 that not more people are seeing it.
00:33:20 I was actually recently just complaining
00:33:23 that there’s not enough content
00:33:25 on the famine in the 30s of stuff.
00:33:29 There’s so much on Hitler.
00:33:30 I love the reading.
00:33:32 I’m reading, it’s so long, it’s been taking me forever,
00:33:35 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
00:33:37 Yeah, I love it, but.
00:33:39 Well, I’ve got the book to compliment that,
00:33:40 that you have to read.
00:33:42 It’s called The Ominous Parallels.
00:33:44 It’s Lennon Peacock, and it’s The Ominous Parallels,
00:33:47 and it’s about the causes of the rise of Hitler,
00:33:52 but a philosophical causes.
00:33:54 So whereas The Rise and Fall is more of a kind of,
00:33:58 the existential kind of what happened,
00:34:02 but really delving into the intellectual currents
00:34:07 that led to the rise of Hitler, highly recommend that.
00:34:11 Basically suggesting how it might rise another.
00:34:15 That’s The Ominous Parallels,
00:34:17 so the parallel he draws is to the United States,
00:34:20 and he says those same intellectual forces
00:34:22 are rising in the United States,
00:34:23 and this was published, I think, in, published in 82.
00:34:28 It was published in 82.
00:34:30 So it was published a long time ago,
00:34:31 and yet you look around us,
00:34:34 and it’s unbelievably predictive, sadly,
00:34:37 about the state of the world.
00:34:38 So I haven’t finished Iron Man’s story.
00:34:40 I don’t know if you want me to finish it.
00:34:41 No, no, no, but on that point, I’ll have to,
00:34:44 let’s please return to it, but let’s now,
00:34:46 for now, let’s talk.
00:34:47 Let me also say, just because,
00:34:49 I don’t want to forget about Mr. Jones,
00:34:51 it is true, the point you made,
00:34:54 there are tons of movies that are anti fascist,
00:34:57 anti Nazi, and that’s good,
00:35:00 but there are way too few movies that are anti communist,
00:35:03 just almost not, and it’s very interesting,
00:35:06 and if you remind me later, I’ll tell you a story about that.
00:35:09 But so she publishes Anthem, and then she starts,
00:35:13 and she’s doing okay in Hollywood,
00:35:15 and she’s doing okay with the play,
00:35:18 and then she starts on the book The Fountainhead,
00:35:21 and she writes The Fountainhead, and it comes out,
00:35:25 she finishes it in 1945,
00:35:28 and she sends it to publishers,
00:35:33 and publisher after publisher after publisher turn it down,
00:35:37 and it takes 12 publishers before this editor reads it,
00:35:41 and says, I want to publish this book,
00:35:44 and he basically tells his bosses,
00:35:47 if you don’t publish this book, I’m leaving, right?
00:35:52 And they don’t really believe in the book,
00:35:54 so they publish just a few copies,
00:35:56 they don’t do a mat lot,
00:35:58 and the book becomes a bestseller from word of mouth,
00:36:00 and they land up having to publish more and more and more,
00:36:02 and she’s basically gone from this immigrant
00:36:07 who comes here with very little command of English,
00:36:10 and to all kinds of odds and ends jobs in Hollywood,
00:36:14 to writing one of the seminal, I think, American books.
00:36:21 She is an American author.
00:36:24 I mean, if you read The Fountainhead, it’s not Russian.
00:36:27 This is not Dostoevsky.
00:36:29 It feels like a symbol of what America is
00:36:32 in the 20th century, and I mean, probably, maybe you can,
00:36:38 so there’s a famous kind of sexual rape scene in there.
00:36:42 Is that like a lesson you wanna throw in
00:36:44 some controversial stuff
00:36:46 to make your philosophical books work out?
00:36:49 I mean, why was it so popular?
00:36:51 Do you have a sense?
00:36:53 Or is it just?
00:36:54 Well, because I think it illustrated,
00:36:55 first of all, because I think the characters are fantastic.
00:36:58 It’s got a real hero, and I think the whole book
00:37:02 is basically illustrating this massive conflict
00:37:05 that I think went on in America then, is going on today,
00:37:09 and it goes on on a big scale, politics,
00:37:12 all the way down to the scale
00:37:13 of the choices you make in your life.
00:37:16 And the issue is individualism versus collectivism.
00:37:21 Should you live for yourself?
00:37:22 Should you live for your values?
00:37:23 Should you pursue your passions?
00:37:26 Or should you do what your mother tells you?
00:37:29 Should you follow your mother’s passions?
00:37:31 And it’s very, very much a book about individuals,
00:37:40 and people relate to that.
00:37:42 But it obviously has this massive implications
00:37:45 to the world outside,
00:37:47 and at the time of collectivism just having been defeated,
00:37:50 communism, well, fascism,
00:37:53 and the United States representing individualism
00:37:58 as defeated collectivism.
00:38:01 But where collectivist ideas are still popular
00:38:03 in the form of socialism and communism.
00:38:06 And for the individual, there’s constant struggle
00:38:09 between what people tell me to do,
00:38:10 what society tells me to do,
00:38:12 what my mother tells me to do,
00:38:13 and what I think I should do.
00:38:15 I think it’s unbelievably appealing,
00:38:17 particularly to young people
00:38:18 who’s trying to figure out what they wanna do in life,
00:38:21 trying to figure out what’s important in life.
00:38:24 It had this enormous appeal, it’s romantic,
00:38:27 it’s bigger than life, the characters are big heroes.
00:38:29 It’s very American in that sense.
00:38:31 It’s about individualism,
00:38:32 it’s about the triumph of individualism.
00:38:35 And so I think that’s what related,
00:38:38 and it had this big romantic element from the,
00:38:42 I mean, when I use romantic,
00:38:44 I use it kind of in the sense of a movement in art.
00:38:49 But it also has this romantic element
00:38:51 in the sense of a relationship between a man and woman
00:38:54 who’s, that’s very intriguing.
00:38:55 It’s not only that there’s a,
00:38:58 I would say almost rape scene, right?
00:39:01 I would say, but it’s also that this woman
00:39:03 is hard to understand.
00:39:04 I mean, I’ve read it more than once,
00:39:06 and I still can’t quite figure out Dominique, right?
00:39:09 Because she loves him and she wants to destroy him
00:39:11 and she marries other people.
00:39:13 I mean, think about that too.
00:39:14 Here she’s writing a book in the 1940s.
00:39:18 There’s lots of sex.
00:39:20 There’s a woman who marries more than one person,
00:39:23 has having sex with more than one person,
00:39:25 very unconventional.
00:39:27 She’s having married, she’s having sex with work
00:39:29 even though she’s not married to work.
00:39:31 This is 1945.
00:39:33 And it’s very jarring to people.
00:39:36 It’s very unexpected, but it’s also a book of its time.
00:39:39 It’s about individuals pursuing their passion,
00:39:42 pursuing their life and not caring about convention
00:39:45 and what people think, but doing what they think is right.
00:39:50 And so I think it’s,
00:39:54 I encourage everybody to read this, obviously.
00:39:56 So that was, was that the first time
00:39:58 she articulated something that sounded like a philosophy
00:40:03 of individualism?
00:40:04 I mean, the philosophy’s there in We The Living, right?
00:40:08 Because at the end of the day, the woman is,
00:40:12 the hero of We The Living is this individualist
00:40:16 stuck in Soviet Union.
00:40:17 So she’s struggling with these things.
00:40:20 So the theme is there already.
00:40:22 It’s not as fleshed out.
00:40:23 It’s not as articulated philosophically.
00:40:26 And it’s certainly then Anthem, which is a dystopian novel
00:40:29 where this dystopia in the future has a,
00:40:33 there’s no I, everything is we.
00:40:37 And it’s about one guy who breaks out of that.
00:40:40 I don’t want to give it away, but breaks out of that.
00:40:43 So these themes are running and then we have,
00:40:48 and they’ve been published,
00:40:48 some of the early Ayn Rand stories that she was writing
00:40:53 in preparation for writing her novel,
00:40:54 stories she was writing when she first came to America.
00:40:57 And you can see these same philosophical elements,
00:41:01 even in the male, female relationships and the passion
00:41:04 and the, you know, in the conflict,
00:41:07 you see them even in those early pieces.
00:41:10 And she’s just developing them.
00:41:12 It’s same philosophically,
00:41:13 she’s developing her philosophy with her literature.
00:41:17 And of course, after The Fountainhead,
00:41:20 she starts on what turns out to be her Magnus Opus,
00:41:22 which is Atlas Shrugged,
00:41:24 which takes her 12 years to publish.
00:41:26 By the time, of course, she brings that out,
00:41:28 every publisher in New York wants to publish it
00:41:31 because The Fountainhead has been such a huge success.
00:41:34 They don’t quite understand it.
00:41:35 They don’t know what to do with Atlas Shrugged,
00:41:37 but they’re eager to get it out there.
00:41:39 And indeed it, when it’s published,
00:41:41 it becomes an instant bestseller.
00:41:43 And the thing about the,
00:41:44 particularly The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,
00:41:46 but true of even Anthem and We the Living,
00:41:49 she is one of the only dead authors
00:41:53 that sell more after they’ve died
00:41:55 than when they were still alive.
00:41:56 Now, that’s true maybe in music,
00:41:58 we listen to more Beethoven than when he was alive,
00:42:00 but it’s not true typically of novelists.
00:42:02 And yet here we are,
00:42:06 was it 50, 60 years after,
00:42:09 63 years after the publication of Atlas Shrugged,
00:42:13 and it sells probably more today than it sold
00:42:15 when it was a bestseller when it first came out.
00:42:17 Is it true that it’s like one of the most sold books
00:42:21 in history?
00:42:22 No.
00:42:23 Okay.
00:42:24 I’ve heard this kind of statement.
00:42:24 Any Tom Clancy book comes out,
00:42:27 sells more than Atlas Shrugged.
00:42:28 But I’ve read, I’ve heard statements like this.
00:42:30 So there was a very,
00:42:32 and I shouldn’t say this, but it’s the truth,
00:42:34 so I’ll say it,
00:42:35 a very unscientific study done by the Smithsonian Institute,
00:42:40 probably in the early 90s,
00:42:42 that basically surveyed CEOs and asked them,
00:42:47 what was the most influential book on you?
00:42:50 And Atlas Shrugged came out as number two,
00:42:53 the second most influential book on CEOs in the country.
00:42:57 But there’s so many flaws in the study.
00:42:58 One was, you want to guess what the number one book?
00:43:01 Bible.
00:43:02 The Bible.
00:43:03 But the Bible was like,
00:43:05 so maybe they surveyed 100 people.
00:43:07 I don’t know what the exact numbers were,
00:43:07 but let’s say it’s 100 people,
00:43:09 and 60 said the Bible and 10 said Atlas Shrugged,
00:43:12 and there were a bunch of books over there.
00:43:15 So, I don’t…
00:43:16 That’s, again, the psychology discussion
00:43:18 what we’re having right now.
00:43:18 Exactly, well, and it’s one thing I’ve learned,
00:43:21 and maybe COVID has taught me,
00:43:23 and there are very few people
00:43:27 who know how to do statistics,
00:43:29 and almost nobody knows how to think probabilistically,
00:43:33 that is, think in terms of probabilities,
00:43:35 that it is a skill, it’s a hard skill,
00:43:38 and everybody thinks they know it.
00:43:39 So I see doctors thinking they’re statisticians
00:43:42 and giving whole analyses of the data on COVID,
00:43:45 and they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about,
00:43:46 not because they’re not good doctors,
00:43:48 but because they’re not good statisticians.
00:43:49 It’s not…
00:43:52 People think that they have one skill,
00:43:53 and therefore it translates immediately into another skill,
00:43:55 and it’s just not true.
00:43:58 So I’ve been astounded at how bad people are at that.
00:44:03 For people who haven’t read any of the books
00:44:05 that we were just discussing,
00:44:09 what would you recommend,
00:44:11 what book would you recommend they read,
00:44:14 and maybe also just elaborate
00:44:17 what mindset should they enter
00:44:20 the reading of that book with?
00:44:22 So I would recommend everybody
00:44:24 read Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
00:44:26 And in one…
00:44:27 In that order?
00:44:28 So it would depend on where you are in life, right?
00:44:31 So it depends on who you are and what you are.
00:44:35 So Fountainhead is a more personal story.
00:44:38 For many people, it’s their favorite,
00:44:39 and for many people, it was their first book,
00:44:41 and they wouldn’t replace that, right?
00:44:46 Atlas Shrugged is a…
00:44:49 It’s about the world.
00:44:50 Right.
00:44:51 It’s about what impacts the world,
00:44:54 how the world functions,
00:44:55 how it’s a bigger book in the sense of the scope.
00:44:59 If you’re interested in politics
00:45:01 and you’re interested in the world,
00:45:03 read Atlas Shrugged first.
00:45:05 If you’re mainly focused on your life, your career,
00:45:08 what you wanna do with yourself, start with Fountainhead.
00:45:10 I still think you should read both
00:45:12 because I think they are…
00:45:13 I mean, to me, they were life altering,
00:45:16 and to many, many people, they’re life altering,
00:45:18 and you should go into reading them with an open mind,
00:45:21 I’d say, and with a…
00:45:24 Put aside everything you’ve heard about Ayn Rand.
00:45:27 Put aside any…
00:45:28 Even if it’s true, just put it aside.
00:45:30 Even what I just said about Ayn Rand, put it aside.
00:45:33 Just read the book as a book,
00:45:35 and let it move you and let your thoughts,
00:45:39 let it shape how you think,
00:45:43 and you’ll either have a response to it or you won’t,
00:45:48 but I think most people have a very strong response to it,
00:45:52 and then the question is,
00:45:55 are they willing to respond to the philosophy?
00:45:57 Are they willing to integrate the philosophy?
00:45:58 Are they willing to think through the philosophy or not?
00:46:01 Because I know a lot of people
00:46:02 who completely disagree with the philosophy, right?
00:46:06 Here in Hollywood, right?
00:46:07 Lots of people here in Hollywood,
00:46:09 love The Fountainhead.
00:46:11 Interesting.
00:46:12 Oliver Stone, who is, I think, a avowed Marxist, right?
00:46:16 I think he’s admitted to being a Marxist, he is.
00:46:19 His movies certainly reflect a Marxist theme,
00:46:24 is a huge fan of The Fountainhead,
00:46:27 and is actually his dream project, he has said in public,
00:46:30 his dream project is to make The Fountainhead.
00:46:33 Now, he would completely change it, as movie directors do,
00:46:37 and he’s actually outlined what his script would look like,
00:46:40 and it would be a disaster for the ideas of The Fountainhead,
00:46:43 but he loves the story,
00:46:44 because to him, the story is about artistic integrity.
00:46:47 Ah, yeah.
00:46:48 And that’s what he catches on.
00:46:50 And what he hates about the story is the individualism.
00:46:53 And I think that his movie ends
00:46:56 with Howard Rourke joining some kind of commune
00:46:58 of architects that do it for the love
00:47:00 and don’t do it for the money.
00:47:02 Interesting.
00:47:02 But so, yeah, so he can connect with you
00:47:04 without the philosophy,
00:47:05 and before we get into the philosophy,
00:47:07 staying on Ayn Rand,
00:47:10 I’ll tell you sort of my own personal experience,
00:47:12 and I think it’s one that people share.
00:47:15 I’ve experienced this with two people, Ayn Rand and Nietzsche.
00:47:19 When I brought up Ayn Rand when I was in my early 20s,
00:47:24 the number of eye rolls I got from sort of, you know,
00:47:28 like advisors and so on, that of dismissal,
00:47:33 I’ve seen that later in life about more specific concepts
00:47:37 in artificial intelligence and technical,
00:47:38 where people decide that this is a set of ideas
00:47:42 that are acceptable and these sets of ideas are not.
00:47:45 And they dismissed Ayn Rand
00:47:49 without giving me any justification
00:47:52 of why they dismissed her,
00:47:54 except, oh, that’s something you’re into
00:47:57 when you’re 19 or 20.
00:48:00 That’s the same thing people say about Nietzsche.
00:48:02 Well, that’s just something you do when you’re in college
00:48:05 and you take an intro to philosophy course.
00:48:08 So, and I’ve never really heard anybody cleanly articulate
00:48:15 their opposition to Ayn Rand,
00:48:17 in my own private little circles and so on.
00:48:20 Maybe one question I just wanna ask is,
00:48:24 why is there such a opposition to Ayn Rand?
00:48:27 And maybe another way to ask the same thing is,
00:48:30 what’s misunderstood about Ayn Rand?
00:48:35 So, we haven’t talked about the philosophy,
00:48:37 so it’s harder to answer right now.
00:48:38 We can return to it if you think
00:48:40 that’s the right way to go.
00:48:41 Well, let me give a broad answer
00:48:43 and then we’ll do the philosophy
00:48:45 and then we’ll return to it,
00:48:45 because I think it’s important to know
00:48:47 something about her ideas.
00:48:49 She, I think her philosophy challenges everything.
00:48:55 It really does, it shakes up the world.
00:48:58 It challenges so many of our preconceptions.
00:49:01 It challenges so many of the things
00:49:03 that people take for granted as truth.
00:49:07 From religion to morality to politics
00:49:10 to almost everything,
00:49:11 there’s never quite been a thinker like her
00:49:13 in the sense of really challenging everything
00:49:17 and doing it systematically
00:49:18 and having a complete philosophy
00:49:21 that is a challenge to everything that has come before her.
00:49:23 Now, I’m not saying they’re on threads that connect,
00:49:27 they are, right?
00:49:28 In politics, there might be a thread
00:49:30 and in morality, there might be a thread,
00:49:31 but on everything, there’s just never been like it.
00:49:34 And people are afraid of that
00:49:37 because it challenges them to the core.
00:49:39 She’s basically telling you to rethink almost everything.
00:49:44 And that is that people reject.
00:49:47 The other thing that it does,
00:49:49 and this goes to this point about,
00:49:51 oh yeah, that’s what you do when you’re 14, 15, right?
00:49:54 Yeah.
00:49:55 She points out to them that they’ve lost something.
00:50:00 They’ve lost their idealism.
00:50:02 They’ve lost the youthful idealism.
00:50:05 What makes youthfulness meaningful
00:50:09 other than we’re in better physical shape,
00:50:13 starting to feel, because I’m getting older.
00:50:16 When we’re young,
00:50:19 sometime in the teen years, right?
00:50:21 There’s something that happens to human consciousness.
00:50:24 We almost awakened and knew, right?
00:50:27 We suddenly discovered that we can think for ourselves.
00:50:30 We suddenly discovered that not everything our parents
00:50:33 and our teachers tell us is true.
00:50:36 We suddenly discovered that this tool, our minds,
00:50:39 is suddenly available to us to discover the world
00:50:42 and to discover truth.
00:50:44 And it is a time of idealism.
00:50:46 It’s a time of, whoa, I want to, you know,
00:50:49 the better teenagers, I want to know about the world.
00:50:52 I want to go out there.
00:50:53 I don’t believe my parents.
00:50:54 I don’t believe my teachers.
00:50:55 And this is healthy.
00:50:56 This is fantastic.
00:50:57 And I want to go out there and experiment.
00:50:59 And that gets us into trouble, right?
00:51:01 We do stupid things when we’re teenagers.
00:51:03 Why?
00:51:04 Because we’re experimenting.
00:51:05 It’s the experiential part of it, right?
00:51:06 We want to go and experience life.
00:51:08 But we’re learning.
00:51:09 It’s part of the learning process.
00:51:11 And we become risk takers because we want to experience.
00:51:15 But the risk is something we need to learn
00:51:16 because we need to learn where the boundaries are.
00:51:19 And one of the damages that helicopter parents do
00:51:21 is they prevent us from taking those risks
00:51:23 so we don’t learn about the world
00:51:24 and we don’t learn about where the boundaries are.
00:51:26 So the teenage years are these years of wonder.
00:51:30 They’re depressing when you’re in them
00:51:32 for a variety of reasons,
00:51:33 which I think primarily have to do with the culture,
00:51:35 but also with oneself.
00:51:38 But they are exciting, the periods of discovery.
00:51:41 And people get excited about ideas
00:51:45 and good ideas, bad ideas, all kinds of ideas.
00:51:48 And then what happens?
00:51:50 We settle.
00:51:51 We compromise.
00:51:53 Whether that happens in college
00:51:55 where we’re taught that nothing exists and nothing matters
00:51:57 and stop being an idealist, be a cynic, be whatever.
00:52:01 Or whether it happens when we get married and get a job
00:52:03 and have kids and are too busy
00:52:05 and can’t think about our ideals and forget
00:52:06 and just get into the norm of conventional life
00:52:09 or whether it’s because a mother pesters us
00:52:13 to get married and have kids
00:52:14 and do all the things that she wanted us to do.
00:52:17 We give up on those ideals.
00:52:19 And there’s a sense in which Ayn Rand reminds them
00:52:24 that they gave up.
00:52:25 That’s beautifully, that’s so beautifully put and so true.
00:52:29 It’s, it’s worth pausing on,
00:52:34 that this dismissal,
00:52:38 people forget the beauty of that curiosity.
00:52:41 That’s true in the scientific field too,
00:52:44 is that youthful joy of like everything is possible
00:52:51 and we can understand it with the tools of our mind.
00:52:56 Yes.
00:52:57 And that’s what it’s all about.
00:52:57 That’s what Ayn Rand’s ideas
00:52:58 at the end of the day all boil down to,
00:53:00 is that confidence and that passion
00:53:02 and that curiosity and that interest.
00:53:05 And if you think about what academia does
00:53:08 to so many of us, right?
00:53:10 We go into academia and we’re excited about,
00:53:12 we’re gonna learn stuff.
00:53:14 We’re gonna discover things.
00:53:16 And then they stick you into sub sub field
00:53:18 and examining some minutia
00:53:20 that’s insignificant and unimportant.
00:53:22 And to get published, you have to be conventional.
00:53:25 You have to do what everybody else does.
00:53:27 And then there’s the tenure process of seven years
00:53:29 where they put you through this torture to write papers
00:53:32 that fit into a certain mold.
00:53:34 And by the time you’re done,
00:53:36 you’re in your mid thirties and you’ve done nothing.
00:53:38 You discovered nothing.
00:53:39 You’re all in this minutia in this stuff
00:53:43 and it’s destructive.
00:53:44 And where’s holding onto that passion,
00:53:48 holding onto that knowledge and that confidence is hard.
00:53:52 And when people do away with it, they become cynical
00:53:55 and they become part of the system
00:53:57 and they inflict the same pain on the next guy
00:54:00 that they suffered because that’s part of how it works.
00:54:03 Yeah, this happens in artificial intelligence.
00:54:06 This happens when like a young person shows up
00:54:08 and with like fire in their eyes and they say,
00:54:11 I want to understand the nature of intelligence.
00:54:14 And everybody rolls their eyes.
00:54:18 Well, for these same reasons,
00:54:20 because they’ve spent so many years
00:54:21 on the very specific set of questions
00:54:25 that kind of they compete over and they write papers over
00:54:30 and they have conferences about.
00:54:31 And it’s true that incremental research
00:54:34 is the way you make progress answering the question
00:54:36 of what is intelligence exceptionally difficult.
00:54:38 But when you mock it, you actually destroy the realities.
00:54:45 When we look like centuries from now,
00:54:47 we’ll look back at this time
00:54:49 for this particular field of artificial intelligence,
00:54:52 it will be the people who will be remembered,
00:54:55 will be the people who’ve asked the question
00:54:58 and made it their life journey of what is intelligence
00:55:01 and actually had the chance to succeed.
00:55:04 Most will fail asking that question,
00:55:06 but the ones that like had a chance of succeeding
00:55:09 and had that throughout their whole life.
00:55:12 And I suppose the same is true for philosophy.
00:55:15 It’s in every field.
00:55:16 It’s asking the big questions and staying curious
00:55:20 and staying passionate and staying excited
00:55:22 and accepting failure, right?
00:55:26 Accepting that you’re not going to get it first time.
00:55:27 You’re not going to get the whole thing.
00:55:29 But, and sometimes you have to do the minutia work
00:55:31 and I’m not here to say nobody should specialize
00:55:34 and you shouldn’t do the minutia, you have to do that.
00:55:36 But there has to be a way to do that work
00:55:38 and keep the passion and keep it all integrated.
00:55:41 That’s another thing.
00:55:42 I mean, we don’t live in a culture that integrates, right?
00:55:46 We live in a culture that is all about this minutia
00:55:51 and not, and medicine is another field
00:55:53 where you specialize in the kidney.
00:55:55 I mean, the kidney’s connected to other things.
00:55:57 You’ve got to, and we don’t have a holistic view
00:55:59 of these things and I’m sure in artificial intelligence,
00:56:02 you’re not going to make the big leaps forward
00:56:04 without a holistic view of what it is
00:56:07 you’re trying to achieve.
00:56:08 And maybe that’s the question of what is intelligence?
00:56:10 But that’s the kind of questions you have to ask
00:56:14 to make big leaps forward, to really move the field
00:56:17 in a positive direction.
00:56:19 And it’s the people who can think that way,
00:56:21 who move fields and move technology,
00:56:24 who move anything, anything is, everything is like.
00:56:27 But just like you said, it’s painful
00:56:28 because underlying that kind of questioning is,
00:56:32 well, maybe the work I’ve done for the past 20 years
00:56:35 was a dead end and you have to kind of face that.
00:56:40 Even just, it might not be true,
00:56:42 but even just facing that reality is just,
00:56:45 it’s a painful feeling.
00:56:47 Absolutely, but it’s, that’s part of the reason
00:56:50 why it’s important to enjoy the work that you do.
00:56:52 Right.
00:56:53 So that even if it doesn’t completely work out,
00:56:54 at least you enjoy the process, right?
00:56:56 It was not a waste because you enjoyed the process.
00:56:59 And if you learn, as any entrepreneur knows this, right,
00:57:02 and if you learn from the waste of time,
00:57:05 from the errors, from the mistakes,
00:57:07 then you can build on them and make things even better.
00:57:10 Right, and so the next 20 years are a massive success.
00:57:16 Can we, another impossible task,
00:57:18 so you did wonderfully on talking about Ayn Rand,
00:57:22 the other impossible task of giving a whirlwind overview
00:57:25 of the philosophy of objectivism,
00:57:28 the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
00:57:30 Yeah, so luckily she did it in an essay.
00:57:33 She talks about doing a philosophy on one foot.
00:57:37 But let me integrate it with the literature
00:57:39 and with her life a little bit.
00:57:41 She wanted to be a writer, but her goal,
00:57:45 she had a particular goal in her writing.
00:57:48 She was an idealist, right?
00:57:50 She wanted to portray the ideal man.
00:57:52 So one of the things you do when you want to do something
00:57:55 is what is an ideal man?
00:57:56 You have to ask that question.
00:57:57 What does that mean?
00:57:58 You might have a sense of it.
00:58:00 You might have some glimpses of it
00:58:03 in other people’s literature, but what is it?
00:58:07 So she starts reading philosophy to try to figure out
00:58:09 what do philosophers say about the ideal man?
00:58:12 And what she finds horrifies her
00:58:14 in terms of the view of most philosophers of man.
00:58:16 And she’s attracted, certainly when she’s young,
00:58:20 to Nietzsche, because Nietzsche at least has a vision
00:58:24 of grandeur for man, even though his philosophy
00:58:28 is very flawed and has other problems
00:58:30 and contradicts man in many ways.
00:58:32 But at least he has that vision of what is possible to man.
00:58:36 And she’s attracted to that romantic vision,
00:58:38 that idealistic vision.
00:58:40 So she discovers in writing,
00:58:41 and particularly in writing Atlas Shrugged,
00:58:43 but even in the Fountainhead,
00:58:44 that she’s gonna have to develop her own philosophy.
00:58:47 She’s gonna have to discover what she can do
00:58:50 and she’s gonna have to discover these ideas for herself,
00:58:52 because they’re not fully articulated anywhere else.
00:58:55 The glimpses again of it in Aristotle, in Nietzsche,
00:59:00 but they’re not fully fleshed out.
00:59:02 So to a large extent, she develops a philosophy
00:59:05 for a very practical purpose, to write,
00:59:08 to write a novel about the ideal man.
00:59:11 And Atlas Shrugged is the manifestation of that.
00:59:14 By the way, sorry to interrupt, as a little aside,
00:59:18 she does, when you say man, you mean human.
00:59:22 And because we’ll bring this up often,
00:59:26 she does, maybe you can elaborate
00:59:28 of how she specifically uses man and he in the work.
00:59:33 We live in a time now of gender and so on.
00:59:36 Well, she did that in the sense that everybody did it
00:59:40 during her period of time, right?
00:59:41 It’s only in modern times where we do he slash she, right?
00:59:45 Historically, when you said he, you meant a human being,
00:59:48 unless the particular context implied that it was a…
00:59:51 But in Ayn Rand’s case, in this case, in this one sentence,
00:59:55 she probably meant man.
00:59:58 Not that, because she viewed that there are differences
01:00:02 between men and women, we’re not the same,
01:00:03 which I know comes at a shock to many people.
01:00:06 But she…
01:00:11 She’s working on a character.
01:00:12 She was working on a particular vision, right?
01:00:15 She considered herself a man worshiper.
01:00:18 And a man, not human being, a male.
01:00:23 She worshiped manhood, if you will, the hero in man.
01:00:28 And she wanted to fully understand what that was.
01:00:31 Now, it has massive implications for ideal woman.
01:00:35 And I think she does portray the ideal woman
01:00:36 in Atlas Shrugged, in the character of Dagny.
01:00:40 But her goal is, I think her selfish goal
01:00:46 for what she wanted to get out of the novel
01:00:49 is that excitement, partially sexual,
01:00:52 about seeing your ideal manifest in reality
01:00:56 of what you perceive as that which you would be attracted to
01:01:02 fully, intellectually, physically, sexually,
01:01:05 in every aspect of your life.
01:01:06 That’s what she’s trying to bring into it.
01:01:08 So there was no ambiguity of gender, so there was a masculinity
01:01:11 and a femininity in her work.
01:01:12 Very much so.
01:01:14 And if you read the novels, you see that.
01:01:16 You see that.
01:01:17 Now, remember, this is in the context of, in Atlas Shrugged,
01:01:21 she is portraying a woman who runs a railroad,
01:01:25 the most masculine of all jobs you can imagine, right?
01:01:28 Running a railroad, better than any man can run it.
01:01:31 And achieving huge success,
01:01:33 better than any other man out there.
01:01:35 But, but for her, even Dagny needs somebody to,
01:01:42 needs a man, in some sense, to look up to.
01:01:47 Yeah.
01:01:48 And that’s the character whose name I won’t mention
01:01:51 because it gives away too much of the plot.
01:01:53 But there has to be that.
01:01:54 I like how you do that.
01:01:55 You’re good.
01:01:57 You’re not, a lot of practice, a lot of practice.
01:01:59 Nothing, brilliant.
01:02:01 Because you convey all the important things
01:02:02 without giving away plot lines.
01:02:04 That’s beautiful.
01:02:05 You’re a master.
01:02:06 So she’s, so she’s very much,
01:02:09 she, she described herself once as a male chauvinist.
01:02:15 Okay.
01:02:16 She very, she likes the idea of a man opening a door for her.
01:02:20 But more metaphysically, she identifies something
01:02:25 in the difference between the way a man relates to a woman
01:02:28 and a woman relates to a man.
01:02:30 It’s not the same.
01:02:32 And let’s not take too far of a tangent,
01:02:35 but I just, as a side comment, I, to me, she represented,
01:02:41 she was a feminist to me.
01:02:43 Perhaps there’s a, perhaps technically,
01:02:45 philosophy, you disagree with that, whatever.
01:02:47 But the, you know, that to me represented strong,
01:02:52 like she had some of the strongest female characters
01:02:55 in the history of literature.
01:02:56 Again, this is, this is a woman running a railroad in 1957.
01:03:00 Yeah.
01:03:01 And not just a woman running a railroad,
01:03:02 and this is true of the Fountainhead as well.
01:03:05 A woman who is sexually, in a sense, assertive,
01:03:09 sexually open.
01:03:13 This is, this is not a woman who, you know,
01:03:15 this is a woman who, who, who embraces her sexuality.
01:03:20 And, you know, sex is important in life.
01:03:22 This is why it keeps coming up, right?
01:03:24 It’s, it was important to Ayn Rand.
01:03:25 It was, it’s important in the novels.
01:03:27 It’s important in life.
01:03:28 And for her, one’s attitude towards sex
01:03:32 is a reflection of one’s attitude towards life.
01:03:34 And it, you know, and what attitude towards pleasure,
01:03:36 which is an important part of life.
01:03:38 And she thought that was an incredibly important thing.
01:03:41 And so she has these assertive, powerful, sexual women
01:03:48 who live their lives on their terms 100%,
01:03:54 who seek a man to look up to.
01:03:56 Yeah.
01:03:57 It’s not, it is psychologically complex.
01:04:00 It’s more psychology than philosophy, right?
01:04:02 It’s psychologically complex and, you know,
01:04:05 not my area of expertise, but this is,
01:04:07 there’s something in, she would argue,
01:04:10 there’s something fundamentally different
01:04:12 about a male and a woman, about a male and female,
01:04:16 psychologically in their attitude towards one another.
01:04:18 Yeah, but as a side note, I say that,
01:04:21 I would say that, I don’t know philosophically
01:04:25 if her ideas about gender are interesting.
01:04:28 I think her other philosophical ideas
01:04:30 are much more interesting.
01:04:32 But reading wise, like the stories it created,
01:04:36 the tension it created, that was pretty powerful.
01:04:39 I mean, that was, that’s pretty powerful stuff.
01:04:43 I’ll speculate that the reason it’s so powerful
01:04:45 is because it reflects something in reality.
01:04:47 Yeah, that’s true.
01:04:48 There’s a thread that at least.
01:04:50 And look, it’s really important to say,
01:04:53 I think she was the first feminist in a sense.
01:04:56 I think in a sense, the feminists have
01:04:57 promoted feminism into something that it shouldn’t be.
01:05:00 But in the sense of men and women are capable,
01:05:05 she was the first one who really put that
01:05:08 into a novel and showed it.
01:05:10 To me, as a boy, when I was reading Alice Shrugged,
01:05:15 I think I read that before Fountainhead,
01:05:18 that was one of the early introductions,
01:05:20 at least of an American woman,
01:05:21 I had examples of my own life of Russian women,
01:05:24 but of like a badass lady.
01:05:26 Like I admire, like I love engineering.
01:05:30 I had loved that she could, you know,
01:05:32 here’s a lady that’s running the show.
01:05:34 So that at least to me was an example
01:05:36 of a really strong woman, but objectivism.
01:05:38 Objectivism.
01:05:39 So, and so she developed it for a novel.
01:05:42 She spent the latter part of her life
01:05:43 after the publication of Alice Shrugged
01:05:45 really articulating her philosophy.
01:05:46 So that’s what she did.
01:05:47 She applied it to politics, to life, to gender,
01:05:50 to all these issues from 1957 until she died in 1982.
01:05:54 So the objectivism was born
01:05:56 out of the later parts of Alice Shrugged.
01:05:57 Yes, definitely.
01:05:59 It was there all the time,
01:06:00 but it was fleshed out during the latter parts
01:06:02 of Alice Shrugged and then articulated
01:06:04 for the next 20 years.
01:06:05 So what is objectivism?
01:06:06 So objectivism, so there are five branches in philosophy.
01:06:09 And so I’m gonna just go through the branches.
01:06:13 She starts with, you start with metaphysics,
01:06:15 the nature of reality.
01:06:16 And objectivism argues that reality is what it is.
01:06:20 It’s kind of goes Hawkins back to Aristotle,
01:06:22 law of identity, A is A.
01:06:24 You can wish it to be B,
01:06:27 but wishes do not make something real.
01:06:29 Reality is what it is and it is the primary.
01:06:32 And it’s not manipulated, directed by consciousness.
01:06:37 Consciousness is there to observe,
01:06:42 to give us information about reality.
01:06:45 That is the purpose of consciousness.
01:06:48 That is the nature of it.
01:06:50 So in metaphysics, existence exists.
01:06:54 The law of identity, the law of causality,
01:06:57 things act based on their nature,
01:07:01 not randomly, not arbitrarily, but based on their nature.
01:07:05 And then we have the tool to know reality.
01:07:08 This is epistemology, the theory of knowledge.
01:07:11 A tool to know reality is reason.
01:07:14 It’s our senses and our capacity
01:07:16 to integrate the information we get from our senses
01:07:19 and to integrate it into new knowledge
01:07:20 and to conceptualize it.
01:07:22 And that is uniquely human.
01:07:26 We don’t know the truth from revelation.
01:07:32 We don’t know truth from our emotions.
01:07:35 Our emotions are interesting.
01:07:36 Our emotions tell us something about ourselves,
01:07:39 but our emotions are not tools of cognition.
01:07:42 They don’t tell us the truth about what’s out there,
01:07:45 about what’s in reality.
01:07:47 So reason is our means of knowledge
01:07:50 and therefore reason is our means of survival.
01:07:54 Only individuals reason,
01:07:56 just in the same way that only individuals can eat.
01:07:59 We don’t have a collective stomach.
01:08:00 Nobody can eat for me and therefore nobody can think for me.
01:08:05 We don’t have a collective mind.
01:08:07 There’s no collective consciousness.
01:08:09 It’s bizarre that people talk about
01:08:11 these collectivized aspects of the mind.
01:08:14 They don’t talk about collective feet
01:08:16 and collective stomachs and collective things.
01:08:18 But so we all think for ourselves
01:08:21 and it is our fundamental basic responsibility
01:08:25 to live our lives, to live, to choose.
01:08:29 Once we choose to live, to live our lives
01:08:32 to the best of our ability.
01:08:35 So in morality, she is an egoist.
01:08:38 She believes that the purpose of morality
01:08:40 is to provide you with a code of values and virtues
01:08:43 to guide your life for the purpose of your own success,
01:08:47 your own survival, your own thriving, your own happiness.
01:08:51 Happiness is the moral purpose of your life.
01:08:54 The purpose of morality is to guide you towards a happy life.
01:08:57 Your own happiness.
01:08:58 Your own happiness, absolutely.
01:09:00 Your own happiness.
01:09:01 So she rejects the idea
01:09:03 that you should live other people.
01:09:04 That you should live for the purpose
01:09:06 of other people’s happiness.
01:09:07 Your purpose is not to make them happier,
01:09:09 to make them anything.
01:09:10 Your purpose is your own happiness.
01:09:12 But she also rejects the idea
01:09:14 that you could argue maybe the Nietzschean idea
01:09:18 of you should use other people for your own purposes, right?
01:09:22 So every person is an end in himself.
01:09:24 Every person’s moral responsibility is their own happiness.
01:09:28 And you shouldn’t use other people for your own,
01:09:30 shouldn’t exploit other people for your own happiness,
01:09:32 and you shouldn’t allow yourself
01:09:33 to be exploited for other people.
01:09:34 Every individual is responsible for themselves.
01:09:38 And what is it that allows us to be happy?
01:09:40 What is it that facilitates human flourishing,
01:09:44 human success, human survival?
01:09:46 Well, it’s the use of our minds, right?
01:09:49 It goes back to reason.
01:09:51 And what does reason require in order to be successful,
01:09:56 in order to work effectively?
01:10:00 It requires freedom.
01:10:02 So the enemy of reason, the enemy of reason is force.
01:10:07 The enemy of reason is coercion.
01:10:09 The enemy of reason is authority, right?
01:10:12 The Catholic church doing what they did to Galileo, right?
01:10:16 That restricts Galileo’s thinking, right?
01:10:19 When he’s in house arrest,
01:10:20 is he gonna come up with a new theory?
01:10:21 Is he gonna discover new truths?
01:10:23 No, the punishment is too, you know, it’s too dangerous.
01:10:29 So force, coercion are enemies of reason.
01:10:34 And what reason needs is to be free,
01:10:39 to think, to discover, to innovate,
01:10:42 to break out of convention.
01:10:46 So we need to create an environment
01:10:48 in which individuals are free to reason, free to think.
01:10:52 And to do that, we come up with a concept,
01:10:55 historically we’ve come up with a concept
01:10:57 of individual rights.
01:10:58 Individual rights define the scope of,
01:11:01 define the fact that we should be left alone,
01:11:05 free to pursue our values, using our reason,
01:11:09 free of what?
01:11:10 Free of coercion, force, authority.
01:11:12 And that the job of government
01:11:14 is to make sure that we are free.
01:11:17 The whole point of government,
01:11:18 the whole point of when we come in a social context,
01:11:22 the whole point of establish a government in that context
01:11:25 is to secure that freedom.
01:11:30 It’s to make sure that I don’t use coercion on you.
01:11:34 The government is supposed to stop me,
01:11:36 supposed to intervene before I can do that,
01:11:38 or if I’ve already done it,
01:11:40 to prevent me from doing it again.
01:11:43 So the purpose of government is to protect our freedom
01:11:47 to think and to act based on our thoughts.
01:11:49 It’s to leave individuals free to pursue their values,
01:11:53 to pursue their happiness, to pursue their rational thought,
01:11:59 and to be left alone to do it.
01:12:01 And so she rejects socialism, which basically assumes
01:12:06 some kind of collective goal,
01:12:07 assumes the sacrifice of the individual to the group,
01:12:11 assumes that your moral purpose in life
01:12:13 is the well being of other people rather than your own.
01:12:17 And she rejects all form of statism,
01:12:20 all form of government that is overly,
01:12:26 that is involved in any aspect
01:12:28 other than to protect us from forced coercion authority.
01:12:33 And she rejects anarchy, and we can talk about that.
01:12:36 I think you had a question in the list of questions
01:12:39 you sent me about anarchy.
01:12:41 And I’m happy to discuss that.
01:12:41 I just talked to Michael Malice about anarchy,
01:12:43 so I don’t know if you’re familiar with him.
01:12:45 Yes, I’m familiar with him.
01:12:46 So yeah, so she would completely reject anarchy.
01:12:49 Anarchy is completely inconsistent with her point of view,
01:12:52 and we can talk about why if you want.
01:12:54 So there is some perfect place where freedom is maximized,
01:12:57 so systems of government and that.
01:12:58 Absolutely.
01:12:59 And she thought that the American system of government
01:13:01 came close in its idea,
01:13:04 obviously founded with original sin, with the sin of slavery,
01:13:08 but in its conception, the Declaration of Independence
01:13:11 is about as perfect a political document as one could write.
01:13:14 I think the greatest political document in human history,
01:13:17 but really articulated almost perfectly and beautifully.
01:13:21 And that the American system of government
01:13:23 with the checks as balances,
01:13:25 which is with its emphasis on individual rights,
01:13:27 with its emphasis on freedom,
01:13:29 with its emphasis on leaving individual freedom
01:13:32 to pursue their happiness,
01:13:33 an explicit recognition of happiness as a goal,
01:13:36 individual happiness, was the model.
01:13:39 It wasn’t perfect.
01:13:40 There are a lot of problems to a large extent
01:13:42 because the founders had mixed philosophical premises.
01:13:45 So there were alien premises introduced
01:13:50 into the founding of the country,
01:13:52 slavery obviously being the biggest problem.
01:13:55 But it was close.
01:13:56 And we need to build on that
01:13:59 to create an ideal political system
01:14:01 that will, yes, maximize the freedom of individuals
01:14:06 to do exactly this.
01:14:09 And then of course she had,
01:14:10 so that’s kind of,
01:14:12 that’s the manifestation of this individualism
01:14:15 in a political realm.
01:14:16 And she had a theory of art.
01:14:18 She had a theory of aesthetics,
01:14:19 which is the fifth branch of,
01:14:21 she have metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics.
01:14:25 And the fifth branch is aesthetics.
01:14:26 And she viewed art as an essential human need,
01:14:31 a fuel for the human spirit.
01:14:34 And that just like any human need,
01:14:36 it had certain principles that it had to abide by.
01:14:40 That is just like there’s nutrition, right?
01:14:42 So some food is good for you
01:14:43 and some food is bad for you.
01:14:45 Some food, some stuff is poison.
01:14:47 She believed the same is true of art,
01:14:49 that art had an identity,
01:14:51 which is very controversial today, right?
01:14:53 If you put a frame around it, it is art, right?
01:14:57 If you put a urinal in a museum, it becomes art,
01:15:01 which she thought was evil and ludicrous,
01:15:05 and she rejected completely.
01:15:07 That art had an identity
01:15:09 and that it served a certain function
01:15:11 that human beings needed it.
01:15:13 And if it didn’t have,
01:15:15 not only did it have the identity,
01:15:17 but that function was served well by some art
01:15:20 and poorly by other art.
01:15:22 And then there’s a whole realm of stuff that’s not art.
01:15:24 Basically, all of what today is considered modern art,
01:15:28 she would consider as not being art.
01:15:31 Splashing paint on a canvas, not art.
01:15:35 So she had very clear ideas.
01:15:40 She articulated them not,
01:15:42 so I would say not in conventional philosophical form.
01:15:46 So she didn’t write philosophical essays
01:15:49 using the philosopher’s language.
01:15:51 It’s why, partially why I think philosophers
01:15:54 have never taken it seriously.
01:15:56 They’re actually accessible to us.
01:15:58 We can actually read them.
01:16:00 And she integrates the philosophy
01:16:02 in what I think are amazing ways with psychology,
01:16:07 with history, with economics, with politics,
01:16:09 with what’s going on in the world.
01:16:11 And she has dozens and dozens and dozens of essays
01:16:14 that she wrote.
01:16:16 Many of them were aggregated into books.
01:16:19 I particularly recommend books like
01:16:22 The Virtue of Selfishness,
01:16:25 Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal,
01:16:28 and Philosophy Who Needs It.
01:16:32 And I think it’s a beautiful philosophy.
01:16:38 I know you’re big on love.
01:16:38 I think it’s the philosophy of love.
01:16:41 We can talk about that.
01:16:42 Essentially, it’s about love.
01:16:44 That’s what the philosophy is all about
01:16:45 in terms of it applying to self.
01:16:49 And I think it’s sad that so few people read it
01:16:54 and so few intellectuals take it seriously
01:16:57 and are willing to engage with it.
01:16:58 Let me ask, that was incredible.
01:17:01 But after that beautiful whirlwind overview,
01:17:04 let me ask the most shallow of questions,
01:17:06 which is the name Objectivism.
01:17:12 How should people think about the name being rooted?
01:17:16 Why not individualism?
01:17:18 What are the options?
01:17:19 If we had a branding meeting right now.
01:17:21 Sure.
01:17:22 So she actually had a branding meeting.
01:17:23 So she did this.
01:17:24 She went through the exercise.
01:17:25 Objectivism, I do not think,
01:17:27 I don’t know all the details,
01:17:28 but I don’t think Objectivism was the first name
01:17:32 she came with.
01:17:32 The problem was that the other names were taken
01:17:35 and they were not positive implications.
01:17:38 So for example, rationalism could have been a good word
01:17:41 because she’s an advocate of rational thought or reasonism,
01:17:45 but reasonism sounds weird, right?
01:17:47 The ism because of too many Ss, I guess.
01:17:50 Rationalism, but it was already a philosophy
01:17:52 and it was a philosophy inconsistent with hers
01:17:55 because it was what she considered a false view
01:17:59 of reason, of rationality.
01:18:01 Reality ism, you know, just doesn’t work.
01:18:04 So she came on Objectivism.
01:18:06 And I think actually, it’s a great word.
01:18:10 It’s a great name because it has two aspects to it.
01:18:15 And this is a unique view
01:18:16 of what objectivity actually means.
01:18:19 In Objectivism, in objectivity is the idea
01:18:22 of an independent reality.
01:18:24 There is truth.
01:18:26 There’s actually something out there that we,
01:18:28 and then there’s the role of consciousness, right?
01:18:32 There is the role of figuring out the truth.
01:18:36 The truth doesn’t just hit you.
01:18:40 The truth is not in the thing.
01:18:42 You have to discover it.
01:18:44 It’s that a consciousness applied to,
01:18:49 that’s what objectivity is, right?
01:18:51 It’s you discovering the truth in reality.
01:18:55 It’s your consciousness.
01:18:57 It’s your consciousness interacting.
01:19:00 And thereby posing the individual in that sense.
01:19:02 And only the individual could do it.
01:19:03 Now, the problem with individualism
01:19:06 is it would have made the philosophy too political.
01:19:09 Right.
01:19:10 And she always said, so she said,
01:19:13 she said, I’m an advocate of capitalism
01:19:16 because I’m really an advocate for rational egoism.
01:19:20 But I’m a advocate for rational egoism
01:19:23 really because I’m an advocate for reason.
01:19:26 So she viewed the essential of her philosophy
01:19:28 as being this reason and her particular view of reason.
01:19:34 And she has a whole book.
01:19:35 She has a book called
01:19:36 Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,
01:19:39 which I encourage any scientist, mathematician,
01:19:42 anybody interested in science to read
01:19:43 because it is a tour de force on,
01:19:48 in a sense, what it means to hold concepts
01:19:52 and what it means to discover new discoveries
01:19:56 and to use concepts and how we use concepts.
01:20:03 And she has a theory of concepts that is completely new,
01:20:09 that is completely revolutionary.
01:20:11 And I think is essential for the philosophy of science.
01:20:14 And therefore, ultimately,
01:20:16 the more abstract we get with scientific discoveries,
01:20:18 the easier it is to detach them from reality
01:20:22 and to detach them from truth,
01:20:24 the easier it is to be inside our heads
01:20:26 instead of about what’s real.
01:20:30 And there are probably examples
01:20:31 from modern physics that fit that.
01:20:33 And I think what she teaches in the book
01:20:36 is how to ground your concepts
01:20:38 and how to bring them into grounding in reality.
01:20:41 So Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,
01:20:43 note that it’s only an introduction
01:20:45 because one of the things she realized,
01:20:46 one of the things that I think a lot of her critics
01:20:49 don’t give enough credit for,
01:20:51 is that philosophy is, there’s no end, right?
01:20:55 It’s always growing, there are always new discoveries.
01:20:57 There’s always, it’s like science,
01:20:59 there’s always new things.
01:21:00 And there’s a ton of work to do in philosophy,
01:21:06 and particularly in epistemology and the theory of knowledge.
01:21:08 And she was actually,
01:21:10 given your interest in mathematics,
01:21:11 she actually saw a lot of parallels
01:21:14 between math and concept formation.
01:21:18 And she was actually, in the years before she died,
01:21:22 she was taking private lessons in mathematics,
01:21:24 in algebra and calculus,
01:21:27 because she believed that there was real insight
01:21:30 in understanding algebra in calculus
01:21:32 to philosophy and to epistemology.
01:21:38 And she also was very interested in neuroscience
01:21:41 because she believed that that had a lot to tell us
01:21:44 about epistemology, but also about music,
01:21:48 therefore about aesthetics.
01:21:50 So, I mean, she recognized the importance
01:21:54 of all these different fields
01:21:56 and the beauty of philosophy
01:21:58 is it should be integrating all of them.
01:21:59 And one of the sad things about the world in which we live
01:22:02 is again, we view these things as silos.
01:22:04 We don’t view them as integrating.
01:22:06 We don’t have teams of people from different arena,
01:22:10 you know, different fields, you know, discovering things.
01:22:13 We become like ants, specialized.
01:22:16 So she was definitely like that.
01:22:19 And she was constantly curious,
01:22:21 constantly interested in new discoveries and new ideas
01:22:25 and how this could expand the scope of her philosophy
01:22:30 and the application of her philosophy.
01:22:31 There’s like a million topics I could talk to you,
01:22:33 but since you mentioned math, I’m almost curious.
01:22:35 We only got three hours.
01:22:36 Oh, okay.
01:22:37 I’m almost curious.
01:22:40 I don’t know if you’re familiar
01:22:41 with Gayle’s incompleteness theorem.
01:22:44 I’m not, unfortunately.
01:22:45 Okay.
01:22:45 It was a powerful proof that any axiomatic systems,
01:22:51 when you start from a bunch of axioms,
01:22:53 that there will, in that system,
01:22:57 provably must be an inconsistency.
01:23:00 So that was this painful like stab
01:23:04 in the idea of mathematics that, no,
01:23:07 if we start with a set of assumptions,
01:23:09 kind of like Ayn Rand started with objectivism,
01:23:12 there will have to be at least one contradiction.
01:23:17 See, I intuitively am gonna say that’s false.
01:23:21 Philosophically, but in math, it’s just true.
01:23:25 And that’s…
01:23:26 It’s a question about how you define,
01:23:28 again, definitions matter,
01:23:30 and you have to be careful on how you define axioms.
01:23:32 And you have to be careful about what you define
01:23:34 as an inconsistency and what that means
01:23:36 to say there’s an inconsistency.
01:23:38 And I don’t know.
01:23:39 I’m not gonna say more than that,
01:23:40 because I don’t know.
01:23:41 But I’m suspicious that there is some…
01:23:46 And this is the power of philosophy.
01:23:47 And this is why I said before,
01:23:49 concept formation is so important.
01:23:50 And understanding concept formation is so important,
01:23:52 for particularly, again, mathematics,
01:23:54 because it’s such an abstract field.
01:23:55 And it’s so easy to lose grounding in reality
01:24:00 that if you properly define axioms,
01:24:03 and you properly define what you’re doing in math,
01:24:05 whether that is true.
01:24:06 And I don’t think it is.
01:24:08 This is a…
01:24:09 Yeah, we’ll leave it as an open mystery,
01:24:11 because actually, this audience,
01:24:14 there’s literally over 100,000 people that have PhDs.
01:24:19 So they know Gaydo’s The Compliance Theorem.
01:24:21 I have this intuition that there’s something different
01:24:25 to mathematics and philosophy
01:24:27 that I’d love to hear from people.
01:24:28 Like, what exactly is that difference?
01:24:31 Because there’s a precision to mathematics
01:24:36 that philosophy doesn’t have,
01:24:39 but that precision gets you in trouble.
01:24:42 It somehow, it actually takes you away from truth.
01:24:46 Like, the very constraints of the language used
01:24:49 in mathematics actually puts a constraint
01:24:53 on the capture of truth that it’s able to do.
01:24:56 I’m gonna argue that that is a total product
01:25:00 of the way you’re conceptualizing
01:25:02 the terms within mathematics.
01:25:05 It’s not in reality.
01:25:07 Yeah, so you would argue it’s in the fact
01:25:10 that mathematics, in as much as it’s detached from reality,
01:25:13 that you can do these kinds of things.
01:25:15 Yes, and that mathematicians have come up with concepts
01:25:20 that they haven’t grounded in reality properly
01:25:25 that allows them to go off in places
01:25:28 that don’t lead to truth.
01:25:29 That’s right, that don’t lead to truth.
01:25:31 But I encourage you then, I encourage you
01:25:34 to do one of these podcasts with one of our philosophers
01:25:38 who know more about this stuff.
01:25:42 And if you move to Austin,
01:25:43 I’ve got somebody I’d recommend to you.
01:25:45 And I’d love to hear from you.
01:25:47 I’ve got somebody I’d recommend to you.
01:25:50 Can you throw a name out, or no?
01:25:51 Yeah, I mean, I would talk to Greg Saumieri.
01:25:54 When you say our, can you say what you mean by our?
01:25:58 I’d say people who are affiliated
01:26:00 with the Ironman Institute are philosophers
01:26:02 who are affiliated with objectivism.
01:26:05 And Greg is one of our brightest, and he’s in Austin.
01:26:08 He’s just got a position at UT,
01:26:11 so at the University of Texas.
01:26:13 And he would want, Ankar Gatte would be another one
01:26:16 who works at the Institute and a chief philosophy officer
01:26:19 at the Institute.
01:26:20 That’s awesome.
01:26:20 And there are others who specialize in philosophy
01:26:24 of science who I think Greg could probably give you a lead.
01:26:28 But these are unbelievably smart people
01:26:31 who know this part of the philosophy much better than I do.
01:26:34 What, can you just briefly perhaps say
01:26:36 what is the Ironman Institute?
01:26:38 Yeah, so the Ironman Institute was an organization founded
01:26:42 three years after Ironman died.
01:26:44 She died in 1982.
01:26:47 And it was founded in 1985 to promote her ideas,
01:26:51 to make sure that her ideas and her novels
01:26:55 continued in the culture and were relevant.
01:26:58 Well, they’re relevant, but the people saw the relevance.
01:27:01 So our mission is to get people to read her books,
01:27:04 to engage in the ideas.
01:27:06 We teach, we have the Objectivist Academic Center
01:27:10 where we teach the philosophy,
01:27:12 primarily to graduate students and others
01:27:14 who take their ideas seriously
01:27:15 and who really want a deep understanding of the philosophy.
01:27:20 And we apply the ideas.
01:27:22 So we take the ideas and apply them to ethics,
01:27:25 to philosophy, to issues of the day,
01:27:28 which is more my strength and more what I tend to do.
01:27:31 I’ve never formally studied philosophy.
01:27:34 So all my education philosophy is informal.
01:27:39 And I’m an engineer and a finance guy.
01:27:43 That’s my background.
01:27:44 So I’m a numbers guy.
01:27:45 Well, let me, I feel pretty undereducated.
01:27:52 I have a pretty open mind,
01:27:54 which sometimes can be painful on the internet
01:27:57 because people mock me or,
01:28:02 if I say something nuanced about communism,
01:28:06 people immediately kind of put you in a bin
01:28:09 or something like that.
01:28:10 It hurts to be open minded to say,
01:28:12 I don’t know, to ask the question,
01:28:15 why is communism or Marxism so problematic?
01:28:19 Why is capitalism problematic and so on?
01:28:21 But let me nevertheless go into that direction with you.
01:28:26 Maybe let’s talk about capitalism a little bit.
01:28:29 How does Objectivism compare,
01:28:32 relate to the idea of capitalism?
01:28:36 Well, first we have to define what capitalism is.
01:28:37 Cause again, people use capitalism in all kinds of ways.
01:28:40 And I know you had Ray Dalio on your show once.
01:28:44 I need to listen to that episode.
01:28:46 But Ray has no clue what capitalism is.
01:28:48 And that’s his big problem.
01:28:52 So when he says there are real problems today in capitalism,
01:28:56 he’s not talking about capitalism.
01:28:58 He’s talking about problems in the world today.
01:28:59 And I agree with many of the problems,
01:29:01 but they have nothing to do with capitalism.
01:29:03 Capitalism is a social, political, economic system
01:29:08 in which all property is privately owned
01:29:13 and in which the only role of government
01:29:15 is the protection of individual rights.
01:29:18 I think it’s the ideal system.
01:29:19 I think it’s the right system
01:29:21 for the reasons we talked about earlier.
01:29:22 It’s a system that leaves you as an individual
01:29:24 to pursue your values, your life, your happiness,
01:29:27 free of coercion and force.
01:29:28 And you get to decide what happens to you.
01:29:32 And I get to decide if to help you or not, right?
01:29:34 Let’s say you fall flat on your face.
01:29:35 People always say, well, what about the poor?
01:29:37 Well, if you care about the poor, help them.
01:29:39 Right.
01:29:41 Just don’t, you know, what do you need a government for?
01:29:43 You know, I always ask audiences, okay,
01:29:46 if there’s a poor kid who can’t afford to go to school
01:29:49 and all the schools are private
01:29:50 because capitalism is being instituted
01:29:54 and he can’t go to school,
01:29:55 would you be willing to participate in a fund
01:29:57 that pays for his education?
01:29:58 Every hand in the room goes up.
01:30:00 So what do you need government for?
01:30:02 Just let’s get all the money together and pay for schooling.
01:30:05 So the point is that what capitalism does
01:30:08 is leave individuals free to make their own decisions.
01:30:11 And as long as they’re not violating other people’s rights,
01:30:14 in other words, as long as they’re not using coercion force
01:30:17 on other people, then leave them alone.
01:30:20 And people are going to make mistakes
01:30:21 and people are gonna screw up their lives
01:30:23 and people are gonna commit suicide.
01:30:24 People are gonna do terrible things to themselves.
01:30:27 That is fundamentally their problem.
01:30:29 And if you want to help,
01:30:30 you under capitalism are free to help.
01:30:33 It’s just the only thing that doesn’t happen
01:30:35 under capitalism is you don’t get to impose your will
01:30:38 on other people.
01:30:40 Now, how’s that a bad thing?
01:30:41 So the question then is how does the implementation
01:30:47 of capitalism deviate from its ideal in practice?
01:30:54 I mean, this is what is the question with a lot of systems
01:30:57 is how does it start to then fail?
01:31:00 So one thing maybe you can correct me or inform me,
01:31:06 it seems like information is very important.
01:31:10 Like being able to make decisions, to be free,
01:31:15 you have to have access, full access
01:31:19 of all the information you need to make rational decisions.
01:31:23 No, that can’t be.
01:31:25 Because it can be right, because none of us has full access
01:31:28 to all the information we need.
01:31:31 I mean, what does that even mean?
01:31:32 And how big, how much of the scope do you wanna do?
01:31:35 Let’s just start there.
01:31:36 Yeah, we don’t.
01:31:37 So you need to have access to information.
01:31:39 So one of the big criticisms of capitalism
01:31:41 is this asymmetrical information.
01:31:44 The drug maker has more information about the drug
01:31:46 than the drug buyer, pharmaceutical drugs.
01:31:50 True, it’s a problem.
01:31:53 Well, I wonder if one can think about,
01:31:55 an entrepreneur can think about how to solve that problem.
01:31:58 See, I view any one of these challenges to capitalism
01:32:01 as an opportunity for entrepreneur to make money.
01:32:03 And they have the freedom to do it.
01:32:04 Yeah, so imagine an entrepreneur steps in and says,
01:32:07 I will test all the drugs that drug companies make,
01:32:11 and I will provide you for a fee with the answer.
01:32:15 And how do I know he’s not gonna be corrupted?
01:32:18 Well, there’ll be other ones and they’ll compete.
01:32:21 And who am I to tell which one of these is the right one?
01:32:25 Well, it won’t be you really getting
01:32:26 the information from them.
01:32:28 It’ll be your doctor.
01:32:30 The doctors need that information.
01:32:33 So the doctor who has some expertise in medicine
01:32:35 will be evaluating which rating agency to use
01:32:39 to evaluate the drugs and which ones then
01:32:41 to recommend to you.
01:32:43 So do we need an FDA?
01:32:45 Do we need a government that siphons all the information
01:32:48 to one source that does all the research, all the thing,
01:32:51 and has a clear incentive, by the way,
01:32:52 not to approve drugs.
01:32:55 Because they don’t make any money from it.
01:32:57 Nobody pays them for the information.
01:32:59 Nobody pays them to be accurate.
01:33:00 They’re bureaucrats at the end of the day.
01:33:02 And what is a bureaucrat?
01:33:04 What’s the main focus of a bureaucrat?
01:33:06 Even if they go in with the best of intentions,
01:33:08 which I’m sure all the scientists at the FDA
01:33:10 have the best of intentions, what’s their incentive?
01:33:13 The system builds in this incentive not to screw up.
01:33:17 Because one drug gets value and does damage,
01:33:21 you lose your job.
01:33:23 But if a hundred drugs that could cure cancer tomorrow
01:33:26 don’t ever get to market,
01:33:29 nobody’s gonna come after you.
01:33:31 Yeah.
01:33:32 And you’re saying that’s not a mechanism,
01:33:35 and that’s conducive to like…
01:33:38 You see, the marketplace is competition.
01:33:39 So if you won’t approve the drug,
01:33:41 if I still think it’s possible, I will.
01:33:43 And it’s not zero one.
01:33:45 You see the other thing that happens with the FDA
01:33:47 is it’s zero one.
01:33:48 It’s either approved or it’s not approved.
01:33:50 Oh, it’s approved for this, but it’s not approved for that.
01:33:52 But what if a drug came out and you said, right?
01:33:56 You told the doctors,
01:33:59 this drug in 10% of the cases can cause patients
01:34:05 an increased risk of heart disease.
01:34:07 You and your patients should,
01:34:09 we’re not forcing you, but you should, right?
01:34:12 It’s your medical responsibility to evaluate that
01:34:15 and decide if the drug is appropriate or not.
01:34:17 Why don’t I get to make that choice
01:34:19 if I wanna take on the 10% risk of heart disease?
01:34:21 So there was a drug, and right now I forget the name,
01:34:24 but it was a drug against pain,
01:34:26 particularly for arthritic pain, and it worked.
01:34:29 It reduced pain dramatically, right?
01:34:31 And some people tried everything,
01:34:33 and this was the only drug that reduced their pain.
01:34:35 And it turned out that in 10% of the cases,
01:34:39 it caused the elevated risk.
01:34:42 It didn’t kill people necessarily,
01:34:43 but it caused elevated risk of heart disease.
01:34:47 Okay, what did the FDA do?
01:34:49 It banned the drug.
01:34:50 Some people, I know a lot of people who said
01:34:53 living with pain is much worse than taking on a 10% risk.
01:34:58 Again, probabilities, right?
01:34:59 People don’t think in those numbers.
01:35:01 10% risk of maybe getting heart disease.
01:35:03 Why don’t I get to make that choice?
01:35:04 Why does some bureaucrat make that choice for me?
01:35:07 That’s capitalism.
01:35:08 Capitalism gives you the choice,
01:35:11 not you as an ignorant person.
01:35:13 You with your doctor and a whole marketplace,
01:35:17 which is not created to provide you with information.
01:35:20 And think about a world where we didn’t have
01:35:23 all these regulations and controls.
01:35:28 The amount of opportunities that would exist
01:35:31 to create, to provide information,
01:35:35 to educate you about that information,
01:35:36 would mushroom dramatically.
01:35:39 Bloomberg, you know, the billionaire,
01:35:40 Bloomberg, you know, how did he make his money?
01:35:42 He made his money by providing financial information,
01:35:45 by creating this service called Bloomberg
01:35:47 that you buy a terminal and you get
01:35:49 all this amazing information.
01:35:50 And he was before computers, desktop computers.
01:35:53 I mean, he was very early on
01:35:55 in that whole computing revolution,
01:35:57 but his focus was providing financial information
01:35:59 to professionals.
01:36:02 And you hire a professional to manage your money.
01:36:04 That’s the way it’s supposed to be.
01:36:05 You know, you have to have,
01:36:08 so you as an individual cannot have
01:36:11 all the knowledge you need in medicine,
01:36:12 all the knowledge you need in finance,
01:36:14 all the knowledge you need in every aspect of your life.
01:36:16 You can’t do that.
01:36:17 You have to delegate and you hire a doctor.
01:36:21 Now you should be able to figure out
01:36:23 if the doctor’s good or not.
01:36:24 You should be able to ask doctors for reasons
01:36:26 for why you have to make the decision at the end.
01:36:28 But that’s why you have a doctor.
01:36:29 That’s why you have a financial advisor.
01:36:31 That’s why you have different people
01:36:32 who you’re delegating certain aspects of your life to,
01:36:36 but you want choices.
01:36:38 And what the marketplace provides is those choices.
01:36:41 So let me then,
01:36:44 this is what I do.
01:36:45 I’ll make a dumb case for things
01:36:47 and then you shut me down
01:36:48 and then the internet says how dumb Lex is.
01:36:51 This is good.
01:36:51 This is how it works.
01:36:52 I’m good at shutting down and they’re foolish
01:36:57 in blaming you for the question
01:36:59 because you’re here to ask me questions.
01:37:02 Let me make a case for socialism.
01:37:06 So.
01:37:09 It’s gonna be bad because that’s the only case
01:37:11 there is for socialism.
01:37:12 That’s reality.
01:37:13 So perhaps it’s not a case for socialism,
01:37:16 but just a certain notion that inequality,
01:37:22 the wealth inequality,
01:37:24 that the bigger the gap between the poorest
01:37:28 or the average and the richest,
01:37:30 the more painful it is to be average.
01:37:34 Psychologically speaking,
01:37:36 if you know that there is the CEOs of companies
01:37:41 make 300, 1000, 1 million times more than you do,
01:37:45 that makes life for a large part of the population
01:37:50 less fulfilling.
01:37:51 That there’s a relative notion to the experience of our life
01:37:55 that even though everybody’s life has gotten better
01:37:58 over the past decades and centuries,
01:38:02 it may feel actually worse
01:38:05 because you know that life could be so,
01:38:08 so much better in the life of the CEOs
01:38:11 that yeah, that gap is fundamentally a thing
01:38:17 that is undesirable in a society.
01:38:21 Everything about that is wrong.
01:38:22 Okay.
01:38:25 I like to start off like that.
01:38:27 Which, so I mean,
01:38:30 so my wife likes to remind me
01:38:33 that as well as we’ve done in life,
01:38:36 we are actually from a wealth perspective
01:38:38 closer to a homeless person than we are to Bill Gates.
01:38:41 Just a math, right?
01:38:42 Just a math, right?
01:38:44 It’s a good ego check.
01:38:46 When I look at Bill Gates,
01:38:47 I get a smile on my face.
01:38:49 I love Bill Gates.
01:38:50 I’ve never met Bill Gates.
01:38:51 I love Bill Gates.
01:38:53 I love what he stands for.
01:38:54 I love that he has $100 billion.
01:38:57 I love that he has built a trampoline room in his house
01:39:01 where his kids can jump up and down in a trampoline
01:39:03 in a safe environment.
01:39:04 Can we take another billionaire?
01:39:06 Because I’m not sure if you’re paying attention,
01:39:09 but there’s all kinds of conspiracy theories
01:39:12 about Bill Gates.
01:39:13 Well, but that’s part of the story, right?
01:39:15 They have to pull him down
01:39:16 because people resent him for other reasons.
01:39:19 That’s strange.
01:39:19 But yes, we can take Jeff Bezos.
01:39:21 We can say my favorite, historically,
01:39:24 just because I like a lot about him, was Steve Jobs.
01:39:30 I mean, I love these people.
01:39:32 And I can’t, there are very few billionaires I don’t love.
01:39:37 In the sense that I appreciate everything they’ve done
01:39:40 for me, for people I cherish and love,
01:39:46 they’ve made the world a better place.
01:39:48 Why?
01:39:49 Would it ever cross my mind that they make me look bad
01:39:54 because they’re richer than me
01:39:55 or that I don’t have what they have?
01:39:58 They’ve made me so much richer
01:40:03 that they’ve made inventions that used to cost millions
01:40:08 and millions and millions of dollars accessible to me.
01:40:12 I mean, this is a supercomputer in my pocket.
01:40:16 Now, but think about it, right?
01:40:18 What is the difference between,
01:40:20 and I’ll get to the essence of your point in a minute,
01:40:22 but think about what the difference is
01:40:24 between me and Bill Gates in terms of,
01:40:27 because it’s true that in terms of wealth,
01:40:29 I’m closer to the homeless person,
01:40:30 but in terms of my day to day life,
01:40:32 I’m closer to Bill Gates.
01:40:34 You know, we both live in a nice house.
01:40:36 His is nicer, but we live in a nice house.
01:40:39 His is bigger, but mine is plenty big.
01:40:42 We both drive cars.
01:40:43 His is nicer, but we both drive cars.
01:40:45 We both drive cars, cars, 100 years ago, what cars?
01:40:50 We both can fly, get on a plane in Los Angeles
01:40:54 and fly to New York and get there in about the same time.
01:40:57 We’re both flying private.
01:40:59 The only difference is my private plane
01:41:01 I share with 300 other people and his,
01:41:04 but it’s accessible.
01:41:07 It’s relatively comfortable.
01:41:08 Again, in the perspective of 50 years ago, 100 years ago,
01:41:11 it’s unimaginable that I could fly like that
01:41:14 for such a low fee.
01:41:15 We live very similar lives in that sense.
01:41:18 So I don’t resent him.
01:41:20 So first of all, I’m an exception to the supposed rule
01:41:23 that people resent.
01:41:24 I don’t think anybody, I don’t think people do resent
01:41:26 unless they’re taught to resent.
01:41:28 And this is the key.
01:41:29 People are taught and I’ve seen this in America.
01:41:33 And this is to me the most horrible shocking thing
01:41:37 that has happened in America over the last 40 years.
01:41:40 I came to America, so I’m an immigrant.
01:41:42 I came to America from Israel in 1987.
01:41:45 And I came here because I thought this was the place
01:41:48 where I could, where I’d had the most opportunities
01:41:50 and it is, most opportunities.
01:41:52 And I came here because I believed
01:41:54 there was a certain American spirit of individualism
01:41:58 and exactly the opposite of what you just described.
01:42:01 A sense of I live my life, it’s my happiness.
01:42:06 I’m not looking at my neighbor.
01:42:07 I’m not competing with the Joneses.
01:42:09 The American dream is my dream.
01:42:11 My two kids, my dog, my station wagon.
01:42:14 Not because other people have it, it’s because I want it.
01:42:17 In that sense, and when I came here in the 80s,
01:42:21 you had that.
01:42:22 You had, you still had it.
01:42:25 It was less than I think it had been in the past.
01:42:28 But you had that spirit.
01:42:29 There was no envy.
01:42:30 There was no resentment.
01:42:31 There were rich people and they were celebrated.
01:42:34 There was still this admiration for entrepreneurs
01:42:37 and admiration for success.
01:42:39 Not by everybody, certainly not by the intellectuals,
01:42:42 but by the average person.
01:42:45 I have witnessed particularly over the last 10 years
01:42:47 a complete transformation
01:42:50 and America’s become like Europe.
01:42:52 I know, are you Russian?
01:42:54 Yeah. Yeah.
01:42:55 It’s become Russian in a sense where,
01:42:59 you know, they’ve always done these studies.
01:43:02 You know, I’ll give you a hundred dollars
01:43:05 and your neighbor a hundred dollars
01:43:06 or I’ll give you, what was it, I’ll give you a thousand
01:43:11 dollars but your neighbor gets $10,000
01:43:14 and a Russian will always choose the hundred dollars, right?
01:43:16 He wants equality above being better himself.
01:43:20 Americans would always choose that gap.
01:43:24 And that’s changing.
01:43:25 My sense is not anymore.
01:43:26 And it’s changing because we’ve been told it should change.
01:43:32 And morally you’re saying that doesn’t make any sense.
01:43:34 So there’s no sense in which, let me put another spin.
01:43:38 I forget the book, but the sense of,
01:43:41 if you’re working for Steve Jobs and your hands,
01:43:45 you’re the engineer behind the iPhone
01:43:48 and there’s a sense in which his salary
01:43:51 is stealing from your efforts.
01:43:53 Because I forget the book, right?
01:43:57 That’s literally the terminology is used, right?
01:43:59 This is straight out of Karl Marx.
01:44:02 Sure, it’s also straight out of Karl Marx.
01:44:05 But there’s no sense morally speaking
01:44:08 that you see that as the theft.
01:44:09 The other way around.
01:44:11 That engineer is stealing off of,
01:44:12 and it’s not stealing, right?
01:44:14 It’s not.
01:44:15 But the engineer is getting more from Steve Jobs
01:44:18 by a lot, not by a little bit,
01:44:20 than Steve Jobs is getting from the engineer.
01:44:23 The engineer, even if they’re a great engineer,
01:44:26 there are probably other great engineers
01:44:27 that could replace him.
01:44:29 Would he even have a job without Steve Jobs?
01:44:32 Would the industry exist without Steve Jobs?
01:44:34 Without the giants that carry these things forward?
01:44:38 Let me ask you this.
01:44:39 I mean, you’re a scientist.
01:44:41 Do you resent Einstein for being smarter than you?
01:44:45 I mean, and VM, are you angry with him?
01:44:48 Would you feel negative towards him
01:44:51 if he was in the room right now?
01:44:52 Or would you, if he came into the room,
01:44:53 you’d say, oh my God.
01:44:55 I mean, you interview people who I think some of them
01:44:58 are probably smarter than you and me.
01:45:00 And your attitude towards them is one of reverence.
01:45:03 Well, one interesting little side question there
01:45:06 is what is the natural state of being for us humans?
01:45:10 You kind of implied education has polluted our minds,
01:45:15 but like if I, because you’re referring to jealousy,
01:45:19 the Einstein question, the Steve Jobs question,
01:45:22 I wonder which way, if we’re left without education,
01:45:25 we would naturally go.
01:45:27 So there is no such thing as the natural state
01:45:30 in that sense, right?
01:45:31 This is the myth of who so is a noble savage
01:45:37 and of John Walls is behind the veil of ignorance.
01:45:42 Well, if you’re ignorant, you’re ignorant.
01:45:45 You can’t make any decisions.
01:45:47 You’re just ignorant.
01:45:50 There is no human nature that determines
01:45:54 how you will relate to other people.
01:45:56 You will relate to other people based on the conclusions
01:45:58 you come to about how to relate to other people.
01:46:01 You can relate to other people as values
01:46:06 to use your terminology from the perspective of love.
01:46:10 This other human being is a value to me
01:46:13 and I want to trade with them and trade,
01:46:16 the beauty of trade is it’s win, win.
01:46:19 I want to benefit and they are going to benefit.
01:46:21 I don’t want to screw them.
01:46:22 I don’t want them to screw me.
01:46:24 I want us to be win, win.
01:46:25 Or you can deal with other people as threats, as enemies.
01:46:31 Much of human history, we have done that.
01:46:34 And therefore, as a zero sum world,
01:46:37 what they have, I want, I will take it.
01:46:41 I will use force to take it.
01:46:43 I will use political force to take it.
01:46:44 I will use the force of my arm to take it.
01:46:46 I will just take it.
01:46:47 So those are two options, right?
01:46:51 And they will determine whether we live
01:46:52 in civilization or not.
01:46:54 And they are determined by conclusions people come to
01:46:57 about the world and the nature of reality
01:46:59 and the nature of morality and the nature of politics
01:47:01 and all these things.
01:47:02 They’re determined by philosophy.
01:47:05 And this is why philosophy is so important
01:47:07 because the philosophy shapes,
01:47:10 evolution doesn’t do this.
01:47:12 It doesn’t just happen.
01:47:14 Ideas shape how we relate to other people.
01:47:18 And you say, well, little children do it.
01:47:19 Well, little children don’t have a frontal cortex.
01:47:22 It’s not relevant, right?
01:47:24 What happens as you develop a frontal cortex,
01:47:26 as you develop the brain, you learn ideas.
01:47:32 And those ideas will shape how you relate to other people.
01:47:35 And if you learn good ideas,
01:47:36 you relate to other people in a healthy, productive win, win.
01:47:41 And if you develop bad ideas,
01:47:43 you will resent other people and you will want their stuff.
01:47:47 And the thing is that human progress depends
01:47:50 on the win, win relationship.
01:47:52 It depends on civilization, depends on peace.
01:47:55 It depends on allowing people,
01:47:57 going back to what we talked about earlier,
01:47:59 allowing people the freedom to think for themselves.
01:48:02 And anytime you try to interrupt that,
01:48:05 you’re causing damage.
01:48:06 So this change in America is not some reversion
01:48:09 to a natural state.
01:48:11 It’s a shift in ideas.
01:48:15 We still live, the better part of American society
01:48:19 and the world, still lives on the remnants
01:48:23 of the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment ideas,
01:48:27 the ideas that brought about this scientific revolution,
01:48:30 the ideas that brought about the creation of this country.
01:48:33 And it’s the same basic ideas that led to both of those.
01:48:36 And as those ideas get more distant,
01:48:41 as those ideas are not defended,
01:48:43 as those ideas disappear, as Enlightenment goes away,
01:48:47 we will become more violent, more resentful,
01:48:52 more tribal, more obnoxious, more unpleasant,
01:48:56 more primitive.
01:48:58 A very specific example of this that bothers me,
01:49:02 I’d be curious to get your comment on.
01:49:04 So Elon Musk is a billionaire.
01:49:10 And one of the things that really,
01:49:14 maybe it’s almost a pet peeve,
01:49:16 it really bothers me when the press
01:49:18 and the general public will say,
01:49:21 well, all those rockets they’re sending up there,
01:49:24 those are just like the toys,
01:49:26 the games that billionaires play.
01:49:29 That to me, billionaire has become a dirty word to use,
01:49:36 like as if money can buy or has anything to do with genius.
01:49:41 I’m trying to articulate a specific line of question here
01:49:52 because it just bothers me.
01:49:53 I guess the question is how do we get here
01:49:57 and how do we get out of that?
01:49:58 Because Elon Musk is doing some of the most incredible things
01:50:02 that a human being has ever participated in.
01:50:05 Mostly, he doesn’t build the rockets himself,
01:50:07 he’s getting a bunch of other geniuses together that have.
01:50:10 That takes genius.
01:50:11 That takes genius.
01:50:12 But where do we go and how do we get back
01:50:16 to where Elon Musk is an inspiring figure
01:50:19 as opposed to a billionaire playing with some toys?
01:50:23 So this is the role of philosophy.
01:50:25 It goes back to the same place.
01:50:26 It goes back to our understanding of the world
01:50:28 and our role in it.
01:50:30 And if you understand that the only way
01:50:32 to become a billionaire, for example,
01:50:34 is to create value.
01:50:36 Value for whom?
01:50:37 Value for people who are gonna consume it.
01:50:39 The only way to become a billionaire,
01:50:41 the only way Elon Musk became a billionaire is through PayPal.
01:50:45 Now, PayPal is something we all use.
01:50:47 PayPal is an enormous value to all of us.
01:50:50 It’s why it’s worth several billions of dollars
01:50:52 which Elon Musk could then earn.
01:50:57 But you cannot become a billionaire in a free society
01:51:01 by exploiting people.
01:51:02 You cannot because you’ll be laughed.
01:51:05 Nobody will deal with you.
01:51:06 Nobody will have any interactions with you.
01:51:09 The only way to become a billionaire
01:51:10 is to do billions of win, win transactions.
01:51:15 So the only way to become a billionaire in a free society
01:51:18 is to change the world to make it a better place.
01:51:21 Billionaires are the great humanitarians of our time,
01:51:24 not because they give charity,
01:51:26 but because they make them billions.
01:51:29 And it’s true that money and genius
01:51:32 are not necessarily correlated,
01:51:35 but you cannot become a billionaire
01:51:37 without being super smart.
01:51:38 You cannot become a billionaire by figuring something out
01:51:42 that nobody else has figured out
01:51:44 in whatever realm it happens to be.
01:51:46 And that thing that you figure out
01:51:48 has to be something that provides immense value
01:51:50 to other people.
01:51:52 Where do we go wrong?
01:51:54 We go wrong, our culture goes wrong
01:51:56 because it views billionaires as selfish.
01:52:02 And there’s a sense in which,
01:52:04 not a sense, it’s absolutely true.
01:52:06 The billionaire doesn’t ask for my opinion
01:52:08 on what product to launch.
01:52:11 Elon Musk doesn’t ask others
01:52:13 what they think he should spend his money on,
01:52:15 what the greatest social wellbeing will be.
01:52:18 I mean, there’s a sense in which the rockets are his toys.
01:52:21 There’s a sense in which he chose
01:52:24 that he would be inspired the most.
01:52:28 He would have the most fun
01:52:30 by going to Mars and building rockets.
01:52:32 And he’s probably dreamt of rockets
01:52:34 from when he was a kid
01:52:35 and probably always played with rockets.
01:52:37 And now he has the funds, the capital
01:52:39 to be able to deploy it.
01:52:40 So he’s being selfish.
01:52:43 Obviously, he’s being self interested.
01:52:45 This is what Elon Musk is about.
01:52:47 I mean, the same with Jeff Bezos.
01:52:50 There’s no committee to decide whether to invest
01:52:54 in cloud computing or not.
01:52:57 Bezos decided that.
01:52:58 And at the end of the day,
01:53:00 they are the bosses,
01:53:01 they pursue the values they believe are good.
01:53:03 They create the wealth.
01:53:06 It’s their decisions, it’s their mind.
01:53:08 And the fact is we live in a world
01:53:10 where for 2000 plus years,
01:53:14 self interest, even though we all do it,
01:53:18 just more extent to the less,
01:53:20 we deem it as morally apparent.
01:53:23 It’s bad.
01:53:24 It’s wrong.
01:53:26 I mean, your mother probably taught you the same thing
01:53:28 my mother taught me.
01:53:29 Think of others first.
01:53:30 Think of yourself last.
01:53:32 The good stuff is kept for the guests.
01:53:35 You never get to use the good stuff.
01:53:38 It’s others.
01:53:39 That’s what the focus of morality is.
01:53:41 Now, no mother, even no Jewish mother
01:53:44 actually believes that, right?
01:53:46 Because they don’t really want you to be last.
01:53:50 They want you to be first and they push you to be first.
01:53:53 But morally, they’ve been taught their entire lives
01:53:56 and they believe that the right thing to say
01:53:59 and to some extent do
01:54:01 is to argue for sacrifice for other people, right?
01:54:06 So most people, 99% of people are torn.
01:54:12 They know they should be selfless,
01:54:17 sacrifice, live for other people.
01:54:20 They don’t really want to.
01:54:21 So they act selfishly in their day to day life
01:54:25 and they feel guilty and they can’t be happy.
01:54:28 They can’t be happy.
01:54:29 And Jewish mothers and Catholic mothers are excellent
01:54:31 at using that guilt to manipulate you.
01:54:33 But the guilt is inevitable
01:54:35 because you’ve got these two conflicting things,
01:54:38 the way you want to live
01:54:39 and the way you’ve been taught to live.
01:54:42 And what objectivism does is that at the end of the day
01:54:45 provides you with a way to unite morality,
01:54:49 a proper morality with what you want
01:54:52 and to think about what you really want,
01:54:55 to conceptualize what you really want properly.
01:54:58 So what you want is really good for you
01:55:00 and what you want will really lead to your happiness.
01:55:03 So, you know, we reject the idea of sacrifice.
01:55:06 We reject the idea of living for other people,
01:55:08 but you see, if you believe that the purpose of morality
01:55:14 is to sacrifice for other people
01:55:17 and you look at Jeff Bezos,
01:55:19 when was the last time he sacrificed anything, right?
01:55:22 He was living pretty well.
01:55:23 He’s got billions that he could give it all away
01:55:26 and yet he doesn’t.
01:55:27 How dare he?
01:55:28 You know, in my talks, I often position,
01:55:34 and I’m gonna use Bill Gates,
01:55:35 sorry guys, drop the conspiracy theory.
01:55:37 They’re all BS, complete and utter nonsense.
01:55:41 There’s not a shred of truth.
01:55:42 You know, I disagree with Bill Gates
01:55:45 on everything political.
01:55:47 I think he politically is a complete ignoramus,
01:55:50 but the guy’s a genius when it comes to technology
01:55:54 and he’s just thoughtful even in this philanthropy.
01:55:57 He just uses his mind and I respect that
01:56:00 even though politically he’s terrible.
01:56:01 Anyway, think about this.
01:56:04 Who had a bigger impact on the lives
01:56:06 of poor people in the world?
01:56:08 Bill Gates or Mother Teresa?
01:56:11 Bill Gates.
01:56:12 It’s not even close.
01:56:14 And Mother Teresa lived this altruistic life to the core.
01:56:17 She lived it consistently.
01:56:19 And yet she was miserable, pathetic, horrible.
01:56:21 She hated her life.
01:56:22 She was miserable.
01:56:25 And most of the people she helped didn’t do very well
01:56:27 because she just helped them not die, right?
01:56:30 And then Bill Gates changed the world
01:56:32 and he helped a lot by providing technology.
01:56:35 We even, philanthropy gets to them.
01:56:37 The food gets them, much fancier, more efficient.
01:56:39 Yet who is the moral saint?
01:56:42 Sainthood is not determined based on
01:56:44 what you do for other people.
01:56:46 Sainthood is based on how much pain you suffer.
01:56:50 I like to ask people to go to a museum
01:56:52 and look at all the paintings of saints.
01:56:54 How many of them are smiling and are happy?
01:56:57 They’ve usually got arrows through them
01:56:59 and holes in their body
01:57:00 and they’re just suffering a horrible death.
01:57:02 The whole point of the morality we are taught
01:57:06 is that happiness is immorality,
01:57:11 that happy people cannot be good people,
01:57:15 and that good people suffer
01:57:17 and that suffering is necessary for morality.
01:57:20 Morality is about self sacrifice and suffering.
01:57:26 And at the end of the day,
01:57:28 almost all the problems in the world
01:57:30 boil down to that false view.
01:57:34 So can we try to talk about,
01:57:37 part of it is the problem of the word selfishness,
01:57:39 but let’s talk about the virtue of selfishness.
01:57:42 So let’s start at the fact that for me,
01:57:45 I really enjoy doing stuff for other people.
01:57:48 I enjoy cheering on the success of others.
01:57:54 Why?
01:57:55 I don’t know.
01:57:56 It’s deep in that.
01:57:57 Well, think about it.
01:57:58 Why?
01:57:59 Because I think you do know.
01:58:01 If I were to really think,
01:58:05 I don’t want to resort to like evolutionary arguments
01:58:08 or like this is somehow different.
01:58:10 So I think.
01:58:14 So I can tell you why I enjoy helping others.
01:58:16 Maybe you can go there.
01:58:18 Like one thing,
01:58:19 cause we should talk about love a little bit.
01:58:21 I’ll tell you there’s a part of me
01:58:23 that’s a little bit not rational.
01:58:26 Like there’s a gut that I follow
01:58:29 that not everything I do is perfectly rational.
01:58:32 For example, my dad criticizes me.
01:58:36 He says like, you should always have a plan.
01:58:38 Like it should make sense.
01:58:40 You have a strategy.
01:58:41 And I say that,
01:58:44 I left, I stepped down from my full salary position
01:58:46 at MIT.
01:58:47 There’s so many things I did without like a plan.
01:58:50 It’s a gut.
01:58:51 It’s like, I want to start a company.
01:58:53 Well, you know how many companies fail?
01:58:55 I don’t know.
01:58:56 It’s a gut.
01:58:58 And the same thing with being kind to others is a gut.
01:59:02 I watched the way that karma works in this world
01:59:06 that the people like us,
01:59:07 one guy I look up to is Joe Rogan,
01:59:09 that he does stuff for others.
01:59:12 And that the joy he experiences,
01:59:15 the way he sees the world,
01:59:16 like just the glimmer in his eyes
01:59:20 because he does stuff for others
01:59:22 that creates a joyful experience.
01:59:24 And that somehow seems to be an instructive way to,
01:59:27 that to me is inspiring of a life well lived.
01:59:31 But you probably know a lot of people
01:59:32 who have done stuff for others who are not happy.
01:59:36 True.
01:59:37 So I don’t think it’s the doing stuff for others
01:59:39 that just brings the happiness.
01:59:41 It’s why you do stuff for others
01:59:42 and what else you’re doing in your life
01:59:44 and what is the proportion.
01:59:48 But it’s why at the end of the day, which is,
01:59:51 and it’s the same.
01:59:52 Look, you can maybe through a gut feeling say,
01:59:55 I wanna start a company,
01:59:56 but you better start doing thinking
01:59:57 about how and what and all of that.
02:00:00 And to some extent the why,
02:00:01 because if you really wanna be happy doing this,
02:00:03 you better make sure you’re doing it for the right reason.
02:00:06 So I’m not, you know,
02:00:08 there’s something called fast thinking,
02:00:10 Carlman, the Daniel Kahneman.
02:00:14 Daniel Kahneman talks about,
02:00:15 and there is, it’s, you know,
02:00:19 all the integrations you’ve made so far in your life
02:00:21 cause you to have specialized knowledge and certain things
02:00:25 and you can think very fast
02:00:27 and your gut tells you what the right answer is.
02:00:31 But it’s not, it’s your mind is constantly evaluating
02:00:34 and constantly working.
02:00:37 You wanna make it as rational as you can,
02:00:39 not in the sense that I have to think through
02:00:41 every time I make a decision,
02:00:42 but that they’ve so programmed my mind in a sense
02:00:45 that the answers are the right answers,
02:00:48 you know, when I get them.
02:00:53 So, you know, I like, I view other people as a value.
02:01:00 Other people contribute enormously to my life,
02:01:04 whether it’s a romantic love relationship
02:01:07 or whether it’s a friendship relationship
02:01:09 or whether it’s just, you know,
02:01:12 Jeff Bezos creating Amazon
02:01:14 and delivering goodies to my home when I get them.
02:01:18 And people do all that, right?
02:01:20 It’s not just Jeff Bezos.
02:01:22 He gets the most credit,
02:01:23 but everybody in that chain of command,
02:01:24 everybody at Amazon is working for me.
02:01:27 I love that.
02:01:28 I love the idea of a human being.
02:01:31 I love the idea that there are people capable
02:01:34 of being an Einstein, of being, you know,
02:01:37 and creating and building and making stuff
02:01:40 that makes my life so good.
02:01:42 You know, most of us like,
02:01:45 this is not a good room for an example.
02:01:47 Most of us like plants, right?
02:01:50 We like pets.
02:01:51 I don’t particularly, but people like pets.
02:01:53 Why?
02:01:54 We like to see life.
02:01:57 Human beings are life on steroids, right?
02:01:59 They’re life with a brain.
02:02:01 It’s amazing, right, what they can do.
02:02:03 I love people.
02:02:05 Now that doesn’t mean I love everybody
02:02:07 because there’s some,
02:02:08 there are really bad people out there who I hate, right?
02:02:10 And I do hate.
02:02:11 And there are people out there that are just,
02:02:14 I have no opinion about.
02:02:15 But generally the idea of a human being
02:02:18 to me is a phenomenal idea.
02:02:20 When I see a baby, I light up
02:02:22 because to me there’s a potential, you know,
02:02:26 there’s this magnificent potential
02:02:29 that is embodied in that.
02:02:31 And when I see people struggling and need help,
02:02:34 I think they’re human beings.
02:02:36 You know, they embody that potential.
02:02:38 They embody that goodness.
02:02:40 They might turn out to be bad,
02:02:43 but why would I ever give the presumption of that?
02:02:45 I give them the presumption of the positive
02:02:46 and I cheer them on.
02:02:48 And I enjoy watching people succeed.
02:02:52 I enjoy watching people get to the top of the mountain
02:02:54 and produce something.
02:02:56 Even if I don’t get anything directly from it,
02:02:59 I enjoy that because it’s part of my enjoyment of life.
02:03:03 So the word, to you, the morality of selfishness,
02:03:08 this kind of love of other human beings,
02:03:10 the love of life fits into a morality of selfishness.
02:03:13 Cannot, because there’s no context
02:03:18 in which you can truly love yourself
02:03:21 without loving life and loving what it means to be human.
02:03:24 So, you know, the love of yourself is gonna manifest itself
02:03:28 definitely in different people, but it’s core.
02:03:31 What do you love about yourself?
02:03:33 First of all, I love that I’m alive.
02:03:35 I love this world and the opportunities it provides me
02:03:39 and the fun and the excitement of discovering something new
02:03:43 and meeting a new person and having a conversation.
02:03:46 You know, all of this is immensely enjoyable,
02:03:51 but behind all of that is a particular human character.
02:03:54 There’s a particular human capability
02:03:55 that not only I have, other people have.
02:03:57 And the fact that they have it makes my life
02:03:59 so much more fun because, so it’s,
02:04:03 you cannot view, you know, it’s all integrated
02:04:07 and you cannot view yourself in isolation.
02:04:09 Now that doesn’t place a moral commandment on me,
02:04:14 help everybody who’s poor
02:04:16 that you happen to meet in the street.
02:04:18 It doesn’t place a burden on me in a sense
02:04:21 that now I have this moral duty to help everybody.
02:04:25 It leaves me free to make decisions
02:04:27 about who I help and who I don’t.
02:04:28 There’s some people who I will not help.
02:04:31 There’s some people who I do not wish positive things upon.
02:04:36 Bad people should have bad outcomes.
02:04:39 Bad people should suffer.
02:04:41 So.
02:04:42 And then you have the freedom to choose who’s good,
02:04:44 who’s bad within your.
02:04:45 It’s your decision based on your values.
02:04:47 Now, I think there’s an objectivity to it.
02:04:49 There’s a standard by which you should evaluate
02:04:52 good versus bad.
02:04:53 And that standard should be to what extent
02:04:55 do they contribute or hurt human life?
02:04:57 The standard is human life.
02:04:59 And so when I say, look at Jeff Bezos,
02:05:01 I say, he’s contributed to human life, good guy.
02:05:04 I might disagree with him on stuff.
02:05:05 We might disagree about politics.
02:05:07 We might disagree about women.
02:05:08 I don’t know what we agree.
02:05:10 But overall, big picture, he is pro life, right?
02:05:15 I look at somebody like, you know, to take like 99.9%
02:05:19 of our politicians and they are pro death.
02:05:23 They’re pro destruction.
02:05:25 They’re pro cutting corners in ways that destroy human life
02:05:29 and human potential and human ability.
02:05:31 So I literally hate almost every politician out there.
02:05:35 And I wish ill on them, right?
02:05:38 I don’t want them to be successful or happy.
02:05:40 I want them all to go away, right?
02:05:42 Leave me alone.
02:05:43 So I believe in justice.
02:05:45 I believe good things should happen to good people
02:05:46 and bad things should happen to bad people.
02:05:47 So I make those generalizations based on this one,
02:05:52 you know, on the other hand, if, you know,
02:05:54 I shouldn’t say all politicians, right?
02:05:55 So if I, you know, I love Thomas Jefferson
02:05:57 and George Washington, right?
02:05:59 I love Abraham Lincoln.
02:06:00 I love people who fought for freedom
02:06:02 and who believed in freedom, who had these ideas
02:06:04 and lived up to, at least in parts of their lives,
02:06:07 to those principles.
02:06:08 Now, do I think Thomas Jefferson was flawed
02:06:10 because he held slaves?
02:06:11 Absolutely.
02:06:12 But the virtues way outweigh that in my view.
02:06:15 And I understand people who don’t accept that.
02:06:17 You don’t have to also love
02:06:19 and hate the entirety of the person.
02:06:21 There’s parts of that person that you’re attracted to.
02:06:23 The major part is pro life and therefore I’m pro that person.
02:06:26 And I think, and I said earlier
02:06:28 that objectivism is a philosophy of love.
02:06:30 And I believe that because objectivism is about your life,
02:06:35 about loving your life, about embracing your life,
02:06:38 about engaging with the world,
02:06:39 about loving the world in which you live,
02:06:42 about win win relationships with other people,
02:06:44 which means to a large extent loving the good
02:06:48 in other people and the best in other people
02:06:50 and encouraging that and supporting that
02:06:52 and promoting that.
02:06:53 So I know selfishness is a harsh word
02:06:56 because the culture has given it that harshness.
02:06:58 Selfishness is a harsh word
02:07:00 because the people who don’t like selfishness
02:07:01 want you to believe it’s a harsh word.
02:07:04 But it’s not.
02:07:05 What does it mean?
02:07:06 It means focus on self.
02:07:09 It means take care of self.
02:07:10 It means make yourself your highest priority,
02:07:13 not your only priority,
02:07:14 because in taking care of self,
02:07:16 what would I be without my wife?
02:07:20 What would I be without the people who support me,
02:07:24 who help me, who I have these love relationships with?
02:07:30 So other people are crucial.
02:07:31 What would my life be without Steve Jobs, right?
02:07:36 A lot of things you mentioned here are just beautiful.
02:07:41 So one is win win.
02:07:42 So one key thing about this selfishness
02:07:45 and the idea of objectivism is the philosophy of love
02:07:48 is that you don’t want parasitism.
02:07:52 So that is unethical.
02:07:54 So you actually, first of all, you say win win a lot.
02:07:58 And I just like that terminology
02:08:00 because it’s a good way to see life.
02:08:02 It’s tried to maximize the number of win win interactions.
02:08:06 That’s a good way to see business actually.
02:08:08 Well, life generally, I think every aspect of life,
02:08:10 you wanna have a win win relationship with your wife.
02:08:13 Imagine if it was win lose.
02:08:16 Either way, if you win and she loses,
02:08:18 how long is that gonna sustain?
02:08:20 So win lose relationships are not in equilibrium.
02:08:25 What they turn into is lose lose.
02:08:27 Like win lose turns into lose lose.
02:08:29 And so the only alternative to lose lose is win win.
02:08:34 And you win and the person you love wins.
02:08:36 What’s better than that, right?
02:08:38 That’s the way to maximize, so like the selfishness
02:08:42 is you’re trying to maximize the win,
02:08:44 but the way to maximize the win is to maximize the win win.
02:08:48 Yes, and it turns out,
02:08:49 and Adam Smith understood this a long time ago,
02:08:51 that if you focus on your own winning
02:08:55 while respecting other people as human beings,
02:08:57 then everybody wins.
02:08:59 And the beauty of capitalism,
02:09:00 if we go back to capitalism for a second,
02:09:02 the beauty of capitalism is you cannot be successful
02:09:05 in capitalism without producing values
02:09:08 that other people appreciate
02:09:10 and therefore willing to buy from you.
02:09:12 And they buy them, and this goes back to that question
02:09:14 about the engineer and Steve Jobs.
02:09:16 Why is the engineer working there?
02:09:18 Because he’s getting paid more than his time is worth to him.
02:09:22 I know people don’t like to think in those terms,
02:09:24 but that’s the reality.
02:09:25 If his time is worth more to him than what he’s getting paid,
02:09:27 he would leave.
02:09:29 So he’s winning.
02:09:32 And is Apple winning?
02:09:33 Yes, because they’re getting more productivity from him.
02:09:35 They’re getting more from him
02:09:36 than what he’s actually producing.
02:09:40 It’s tough because there’s the human psychology
02:09:44 and imperfect information.
02:09:45 It just makes it a little messier
02:09:47 than the clarity of thinking you have about this.
02:09:50 It’s just, you know, because for sure,
02:09:54 but not everything in life is an economic transaction.
02:09:56 It ultimately is close, but it…
02:10:00 Even if it’s not an economic transaction,
02:10:02 even if it’s a relationship transaction,
02:10:05 when you get to a point with a friend
02:10:08 where you’re not gaining from the relationship,
02:10:11 friendship’s gonna be over.
02:10:12 Not immediately, because it takes time for these things
02:10:14 to manifest itself and to really absorb and to…
02:10:17 But we change friendships, we change our loves, right?
02:10:20 We fall in and out of love.
02:10:22 We fall out of love because we’re not…
02:10:23 Love, so let’s go back to love, right?
02:10:27 Love is the most selfish of all emotions.
02:10:29 Love is about what you do to me, right?
02:10:31 So I love my wife because she makes me feel better
02:10:34 about myself.
02:10:36 So, you know, the idea of selfless love is bizarre.
02:10:41 So Ayn Rand used to say, before you say, I love you,
02:10:44 you have to say the I.
02:10:48 And you have to know who you are
02:10:50 and you have to appreciate yourself.
02:10:52 If you hate yourself,
02:10:53 what does it mean to love somebody else?
02:10:55 So I love my wife because she makes me feel great
02:10:58 about the world.
02:11:00 And she loves me for the same reason.
02:11:02 And so Ayn Rand used to use this example.
02:11:05 Imagine you go up to be spoused the night before the wedding
02:11:10 and you say, you know, I get nothing out of this relationship.
02:11:14 I’m doing this purely as an act of noble self sacrifice.
02:11:18 She would slap you, as she should, right?
02:11:23 So, you know, we know this intuitively that love is selfish,
02:11:27 but we are afraid to admit it to ourselves.
02:11:29 And why?
02:11:30 Because the other side has convinced us
02:11:33 that selfishness is associated with exploiting other people.
02:11:36 Selfishness means lying, cheating, stealing,
02:11:39 walking on corpses, backstabbing people.
02:11:43 But is that ever in your self interest truly, right?
02:11:47 You know, I’ll often be in front of an audience to say,
02:11:50 okay, how many people have you ever been in a relationship
02:11:52 and say, okay, how many people here have lied?
02:11:54 I’m kidding, right?
02:11:57 How many of you think that if you did that consistently,
02:12:00 that would make your life better?
02:12:03 Nobody thinks that, right?
02:12:04 Because everybody’s experienced how shitty lying,
02:12:09 not because of how it makes you feel
02:12:11 out of a sense of guilt.
02:12:12 Existentially, it’s just a bad strategy, right?
02:12:15 You get caught, you have to create other lies
02:12:18 to cover up the previous lie.
02:12:19 It screws up with your own psychology and your own cognition.
02:12:23 You know, the mind, to some extent, like a computer, right,
02:12:27 is an integrating machine.
02:12:29 And in computer science, I understand
02:12:31 there’s a term called garbage in, garbage out.
02:12:33 Lying is garbage in.
02:12:35 Yeah.
02:12:36 So it’s not good strategy.
02:12:38 Cheating, screwing your customers in a business,
02:12:42 not paying your suppliers as a businessman,
02:12:45 not good business practices,
02:12:47 not good practices for being alive.
02:12:49 So win, win is both model and practical.
02:12:52 And the beauty of Heinemann’s philosophy,
02:12:55 and I think this is really important,
02:12:57 is that the model is the practical
02:12:58 and the practical is the model.
02:13:00 And therefore, if you are a model, you will be happy.
02:13:04 Yeah, that’s why the application
02:13:08 of the philosophy of objectivism is so easy to practice.
02:13:11 So like, or to discuss, or possible to discuss.
02:13:15 That’s why you talk about all.
02:13:16 I’m so clear cut.
02:13:17 Yeah.
02:13:18 I’m so vigorous about my view.
02:13:19 And that’s fundamentally practical.
02:13:20 I mean, that’s the best of philosophies is practical.
02:13:24 It’s in a sense, teaching you how to live a good life.
02:13:27 And it’s teaching you how to live a good life,
02:13:30 not just as you, but as a human being.
02:13:33 And therefore, the principles that apply to you
02:13:35 probably apply to me as well.
02:13:37 And if we both share the same principles
02:13:40 of how to live a good life, we’re not gonna be enemies.
02:13:44 You brought up anarchy earlier.
02:13:46 It’s an interesting question
02:13:49 because you’ve kind of said politicians.
02:13:52 I mean, part of it is a little bit joking,
02:13:54 but politicians are not good people.
02:13:57 Yep.
02:13:58 So, but we should have some.
02:14:02 So you have an opposition to anarchism.
02:14:05 So they, first of all, they weren’t always not bad people.
02:14:08 That is, I gave examples of people
02:14:10 who engage in political life
02:14:11 who I think were good people basically.
02:14:14 And, but they think they get worse over time
02:14:17 if the system is corrupt.
02:14:19 And I think the system, unfortunately,
02:14:21 even the American system, as good as it was,
02:14:24 was founded on quicksand and have corruption built in.
02:14:28 They didn’t quite get it.
02:14:30 And they needed Ayn Rand to get it.
02:14:31 So I’m not blaming them.
02:14:32 I don’t think they share any blame.
02:14:34 You needed a philosophy in order to completely fulfill
02:14:39 the promise that is America,
02:14:40 or the promise that is the founding of America.
02:14:42 So the place where corruption sneaked in
02:14:45 is the lack in some way of the philosophy
02:14:48 underlying the nation?
02:14:49 Absolutely.
02:14:50 So it’s Christianity.
02:14:53 It’s, you know, not to hit on another controversial topic.
02:14:57 It’s religion, which undercut their morality.
02:15:01 So the founders were explicitly Christian
02:15:05 and altruistic in their morality.
02:15:09 Implicitly, in terms of their actions,
02:15:11 they were completely secular,
02:15:12 and they were very secular anyway.
02:15:15 But in their morality, even, they were secular.
02:15:17 So there’s nothing in Christianity that says
02:15:20 that you have an inalienable right to pursue happiness.
02:15:23 That’s unbelievably self interested
02:15:25 and based on kind of a moral philosophy of ego,
02:15:28 of an egoistic moral philosophy.
02:15:30 But they didn’t know that.
02:15:31 And they didn’t know how to ground it.
02:15:33 They implicitly, they had that fast thinking, that gut.
02:15:36 They told them that this was right.
02:15:37 And the whole enlightenment, that period,
02:15:39 from John Locke on to really to Hume,
02:15:44 that period is about pursuit of happiness,
02:15:47 using reason in pursuit of the good life, right?
02:15:50 But they can’t ground it.
02:15:51 They don’t really understand what reason is,
02:15:53 and they don’t really understand what happiness requires.
02:15:56 And they can’t detach themselves from Christianity.
02:16:00 They’re not allowed to politically.
02:16:01 And I think conceptually,
02:16:02 you just can’t make that big break.
02:16:05 Rand is an enlightenment thinker in that sense.
02:16:07 She is what should have followed right after, right?
02:16:10 She should have come there and grounded them
02:16:13 in the secular and in the egoistic
02:16:18 and the Aristotelian view of morality
02:16:19 as a code of values to basically to guide your life,
02:16:25 to guide your life towards happiness.
02:16:27 That’s Aristotle’s view, right?
02:16:31 So they didn’t have that.
02:16:34 So I think that government is necessary.
02:16:38 It’s not a necessary evil.
02:16:39 It’s a necessary good, because it does something good.
02:16:43 And the good that it does
02:16:45 is it eliminates coercion from society.
02:16:48 It eliminates violence from society.
02:16:50 It eliminates the use of force
02:16:52 between individuals from society.
02:16:55 And that…
02:16:56 But see, the argument like Michael Malice would make,
02:16:59 give me a chance here,
02:17:02 is why can’t you apply the same kind of reasoning
02:17:05 that you’ve effectively used for the rest
02:17:08 of mutually agreed upon institutions
02:17:12 that are driven by capitalism,
02:17:14 that we can’t also hire forces
02:17:17 to protect us from the violence,
02:17:19 to ensure the stability of society
02:17:21 that protects us from the violence.
02:17:24 Why draw the line at this particular place, right?
02:17:28 Well, because there is no other place to draw a line,
02:17:30 and there is a line.
02:17:32 And by the way, we draw lines at other places, right?
02:17:36 We don’t vote.
02:17:45 We don’t determine truth and science based on competition.
02:17:49 Right, so that’s a line.
02:17:51 But first of all, some people might say…
02:17:53 I mean, there’s competition in a sense
02:17:55 that you have alternate theories,
02:17:57 but at the end of the day,
02:17:59 whether you decide that he’s right or he’s right
02:18:01 is not based on the market.
02:18:04 It’s based on facts, on reality, on objective reality.
02:18:09 You have to…
02:18:11 And some people will never accept that this person is right
02:18:14 because they don’t see the string.
02:18:17 So first of all, what they reject,
02:18:19 what most anarchists reject,
02:18:20 even if they don’t admit it or recognize it,
02:18:23 is they reject objective reality.
02:18:26 In which sense?
02:18:27 So like, okay, I get it, right.
02:18:29 So there’s a whole…
02:18:30 So the whole realm of law
02:18:36 is a scientific realm
02:18:39 to define, for example, the boundaries of private property.
02:18:45 It’s not an issue of competition.
02:18:47 It’s not an issue of,
02:18:50 I have one system and you have another system.
02:18:53 It’s an issue of a big competition.
02:18:55 It’s an issue of objective reality.
02:18:57 And now it’s more difficult than science in a sense
02:19:00 because it’s more difficult to prove
02:19:03 that my conception of property is correct
02:19:05 and you’re correct.
02:19:07 But there is a correct one.
02:19:10 In reality, there’s a correct vision.
02:19:12 It’s more abstract.
02:19:14 But look,
02:19:16 somebody has to decide what property is.
02:19:19 So my property is defined by certain boundaries.
02:19:24 And I have a police force
02:19:27 and I have a judiciary system that backs my vision.
02:19:31 And you have a claim against my property.
02:19:33 You have a claim against my property.
02:19:35 And you have a police force and a judicial system
02:19:38 that backs your claim.
02:19:40 Who’s right?
02:19:41 So our definitions of property are different?
02:19:45 Yes, our definitions of property
02:19:46 or our claim on the property is different.
02:19:48 So what if we just agree on the definition of property and…
02:19:54 But why should we agree, right?
02:19:55 Your judicial system is one definition of property.
02:19:58 My judicial system is not.
02:20:00 You think that there’s no such thing
02:20:02 as intellectual property rights.
02:20:05 And your whole system believes that.
02:20:07 And my whole system believes there is such thing.
02:20:09 So you are duplicating my books
02:20:12 and handing them out to all your friends
02:20:14 and not paying me a royalty.
02:20:16 Yeah.
02:20:16 And I think that’s wrong.
02:20:19 My judicial system and my police force think that’s wrong.
02:20:23 And we’re both living in the same geographic area, right?
02:20:27 So we have overlapping jurisdictions.
02:20:31 Now, the anarchist would say, well, we’ll negotiate.
02:20:34 Why should we negotiate?
02:20:35 My system is actually right.
02:20:37 There is such a thing as intellectual property rights.
02:20:39 There’s no negotiation here.
02:20:40 You’re wrong.
02:20:41 And you should either pay a fine or go to jail.
02:20:44 Yeah, but why can’t…
02:20:45 Because it’s a community, there’s multiple parties
02:20:48 and it’s like a majority vote.
02:20:49 They’ll hire different forces that says,
02:20:52 yeah, Yaron is onto something here
02:20:54 with the definition of property and we’ll go with that.
02:20:57 So are anarchists pro democracy in the majority rule sense?
02:21:01 Well, I think so.
02:21:02 I think anarchy promotes like emergent democracy, right?
02:21:07 Like the…
02:21:08 No, it doesn’t.
02:21:09 I’ll tell you what it promotes.
02:21:11 It promotes emergent strife and civil war and violence,
02:21:15 constant uninterrupted violence.
02:21:18 Because the only way to settle the dispute between us,
02:21:20 since we both think that we are right
02:21:23 and we have guns behind us to protect that
02:21:26 and we have a legal system,
02:21:28 we have a whole theory of ideas,
02:21:30 is you’re stealing my stuff.
02:21:33 How do I get it back?
02:21:35 I invade you, right?
02:21:37 I take over, and who’s gonna win that battle?
02:21:41 The smartest guy?
02:21:43 Oh, the guy with the biggest guns.
02:21:44 See, but the anarchists would say
02:21:46 that they’re using implied,
02:21:48 like the state uses implied force.
02:21:51 They’re already doing violence.
02:21:53 Because they take the state as it is today
02:21:56 and they refuse to engage in the conversation
02:21:58 about what a state should and could look like
02:22:01 and how we can create mechanisms
02:22:04 to protect us from the state using those.
02:22:07 But look, my view of anarchy is very simple.
02:22:10 It’s a ridiculous position.
02:22:12 It’s infantile.
02:22:13 I mean, I really mean this, right?
02:22:14 And sorry to Michael,
02:22:16 but and all the other very, very smart,
02:22:19 very, very smart anarchists.
02:22:20 Because anarchists is never,
02:22:23 you won’t find a dumb anarchist.
02:22:25 Right.
02:22:26 Because dumb people know it wouldn’t work.
02:22:28 You have to have, it’s absolutely true.
02:22:31 You have to have a certain IQ to be an anarchist.
02:22:35 That’s true, they’re all really intelligent.
02:22:37 All intelligence.
02:22:38 And the reason is that you have to create
02:22:42 such a mythology in your head.
02:22:45 You have to create so many rationalizations.
02:22:49 Any Joe in the street knows it doesn’t work
02:22:52 because they can understand what happens
02:22:55 when two people who are armed are in the street
02:22:59 and have a dispute and there’s no mechanism
02:23:01 to resolve that dispute.
02:23:03 Yeah.
02:23:04 That’s objective.
02:23:06 And this is where it gets subjective.
02:23:07 That’s objective.
02:23:09 The whole point of government is
02:23:12 that it is the objective authority
02:23:14 for determining the truth in one regard,
02:23:18 in regard to force.
02:23:21 Because the only alternative to determining it
02:23:25 when it comes to force is through force.
02:23:27 The only way to resolve disputes is through force
02:23:31 or through this negotiation, which is unjust
02:23:33 because if one party is right and one party is wrong,
02:23:34 why negotiate?
02:23:35 And this is the point.
02:23:38 I’m not against competition of governance.
02:23:41 I’m all for competition of governance.
02:23:43 We do that all the time.
02:23:44 It’s called countries.
02:23:46 The United States has a certain governance structure.
02:23:49 The Soviet Union had a governance structure.
02:23:50 Mexico has a governance structure.
02:23:52 And they’re competing.
02:23:54 And we can observe the competition.
02:23:55 And in my world, you could move freely
02:23:58 from one governance to another.
02:24:00 If you didn’t like your governance,
02:24:01 you would move to a better governance system.
02:24:03 But they have to have autonomy within a geographic area.
02:24:07 Otherwise what you get is complete and utter civil war.
02:24:10 The law needs to be objective.
02:24:13 And there needs to be one law over a piece of ground.
02:24:15 And if you disagree with that law,
02:24:16 you can move somewhere else where they may.
02:24:18 This is why federalism is such a beautiful system.
02:24:21 Even within the United States, we have states.
02:24:23 And on certain issues, we’re allowed
02:24:25 to disagree between states, like the death penalty.
02:24:27 Some states do, some states don’t.
02:24:30 Fine.
02:24:30 And now I can move from one state if I don’t like it.
02:24:33 But there’s certain issues you cannot have disagreement.
02:24:36 Slavery, for example, this is why we had a civil war.
02:24:39 But let me, one other argument against anarchy.
02:24:43 Markets exist where force has been eliminated.
02:24:49 Sorry, can you say that again?
02:24:50 Markets exist where the rule of force has been eliminated.
02:24:55 The rule of force?
02:24:57 Yes.
02:24:58 So a market will exist if we know
02:25:02 that you can’t pull a gun on me and just take my stuff.
02:25:05 I am willing to engage in transaction with you
02:25:08 if we have an implicit understanding
02:25:10 that we’re not gonna use force against each other.
02:25:13 So force has something special to it.
02:25:15 Yes.
02:25:16 It’s a special, it overrides,
02:25:18 because we are still agreeing we can manipulate each other.
02:25:21 Yes.
02:25:22 But force we can’t.
02:25:23 Force kind of,
02:25:25 so there’s something fundamental about violence.
02:25:28 Force is a fundamental force.
02:25:30 It’s the anti reason.
02:25:32 It’s the anti life.
02:25:34 It’s the anti force against another person.
02:25:38 And it’s what it does is shuts down the mind.
02:25:41 Right.
02:25:43 So in order to have a market,
02:25:45 you have to extract force.
02:25:49 That’s fascinating.
02:25:50 How can you have a market in force?
02:25:53 When I, there’s an Instagram channel called nature’s metal
02:25:56 where it has all these videos of animals,
02:26:00 basically having a market of force.
02:26:03 Yes.
02:26:04 But that shuts down the ability to reason
02:26:06 and animals don’t need to because they can’t.
02:26:08 Exactly.
02:26:08 So the innovation that is human beings
02:26:10 is our capacity to reason.
02:26:12 And therefore the relegation of force to the animals.
02:26:16 We don’t do force.
02:26:17 Civilization is what we don’t have force.
02:26:20 And so what you have is you cannot have a market in that,
02:26:25 which a market requires the elimination of it.
02:26:28 And I don’t debate formally these guys,
02:26:32 but I interact with them all the time, right?
02:26:34 And you get these absurd arguments where,
02:26:37 David Friedman will say, that’s Milton Friedman’s son.
02:26:39 He will say something like, well, in Somalia,
02:26:42 in the Northern part of Somalia
02:26:43 where they have no government,
02:26:45 you have all these wonderful,
02:26:46 you have these tribal tribunals of these tribes
02:26:51 and they resolve disputes.
02:26:52 Yeah.
02:26:54 Barbarically, they use Sharia law.
02:26:57 They have no respect for individual rights,
02:26:58 no respect for property.
02:27:00 And the only reason they have any authority
02:27:02 is because they have guns and they have power
02:27:04 and they have force and they do it barbarically.
02:27:08 There’s nothing civilizing about the courts of Somalian
02:27:14 and they write about pirates because they view force.
02:27:18 They don’t view force as something unique
02:27:20 that must be extracted from human life.
02:27:23 And that’s why anarchy has to devolve into violence
02:27:26 because it treats forces just,
02:27:27 what’s the big deal with negotiating over guns?
02:27:32 So we covered a lot of high level philosophy,
02:27:34 but I’d like to touch on the troubles, the chaos of the day.
02:27:41 Yeah.
02:27:42 A couple of things.
02:27:43 And I really trying to find a hopeful path way out.
02:27:51 So one is the current coronavirus pandemic,
02:27:55 or in particular, not the virus,
02:27:57 but our handling of it.
02:28:00 Is there something philosophically, politically
02:28:04 that you would like to see,
02:28:06 that you would like to recommend,
02:28:08 that you would like to maybe give a hopeful message
02:28:11 if we take that kind of trajectory
02:28:12 we might be able to get out?
02:28:14 Because I’m kind of worried about the economic pain
02:28:18 that people are feeling that there’s this quiet suffering.
02:28:22 I mean, I agree with you completely.
02:28:23 There is a quiet suffering.
02:28:24 It’s horrible.
02:28:26 I mean, I know people.
02:28:27 I go to a lot of restaurants.
02:28:29 One of the things we love to do is eat out.
02:28:31 My wife doesn’t like cooking anymore.
02:28:33 We don’t have kids in the house anymore,
02:28:35 so she doesn’t have to.
02:28:36 So we go out a lot.
02:28:37 We go to restaurants.
02:28:38 And because we have our favorites and we go to them a lot,
02:28:40 we get to know the owners of the restaurant, the chef.
02:28:44 And it’s just heartbreaking.
02:28:46 These people put their life, their blood, sweat, and tears.
02:28:51 I mean, real blood, sweat, and tears into these projects.
02:28:53 Restaurants are super difficult to manage.
02:28:56 Most of them go bankrupt anyway.
02:28:59 And the restaurants, we go to a good restaurant.
02:29:01 So they’ve done a good job
02:29:03 and they offer unique value.
02:29:08 And they shut them down.
02:29:10 And many of them will never open.
02:29:13 Something like the estimate 50, 60% of restaurants
02:29:16 in some places won’t open.
02:29:17 These are people’s lives.
02:29:18 These are people’s capital.
02:29:19 These are people’s effort.
02:29:20 These are people’s love.
02:29:22 Talk about love.
02:29:22 Love what they do.
02:29:24 Particularly if they’re the chef as well.
02:29:26 And it’s gone.
02:29:27 And it’s disappeared.
02:29:28 And what are they gonna do with their lives now?
02:29:29 They’re gonna live off the government
02:29:30 the way our politicians would like them.
02:29:32 Bigger and bigger stimulus plans
02:29:34 so we can hand checks to people
02:29:35 to get them used to living off of us rather than.
02:29:38 It’s disgusting and it’s offensive
02:29:40 and it’s unbelievably sad.
02:29:42 And this is where it comes to this.
02:29:44 I care about other people.
02:29:45 I mean, this idea that objectivists don’t care.
02:29:46 I mean, I love these people who provide me with pleasure
02:29:50 of eating wonderful food in a great environment.
02:29:54 And there’s something inspiring about them too.
02:29:56 Like when I see a great restaurant owner,
02:29:58 I wanna do better with my own stuff.
02:30:00 Yeah, exactly.
02:30:02 They’re inspiring.
02:30:02 Anybody who does it is excellent.
02:30:04 I love sports because it’s the one realm
02:30:07 in which you’d still value and celebrate excellence.
02:30:10 But I try to celebrate excellence everything in my life.
02:30:13 So I try to be nice to these people.
02:30:16 And with COVID, we went more to restaurants,
02:30:20 we did more takeout stuff.
02:30:23 We made an effort, particularly the restaurants,
02:30:25 we really love to keep them going,
02:30:27 to encourage them, to support them.
02:30:30 The problem is philosophy drives the world.
02:30:35 The response to COVID has been worse than pathetic.
02:30:40 And it’s driven by philosophy.
02:30:43 It’s driven by disrespect to science,
02:30:46 ignorance and disrespect of statistics,
02:30:48 a disrespect of individual human decision making.
02:30:52 Government has to decide everything for us.
02:30:55 And just throughout the process and a disrespect of markets
02:30:59 because we didn’t let markets work to facilitate
02:31:02 what we needed in order to deal with this virus.
02:31:05 If you look at the place, it’s interesting
02:31:07 that the only place on the planet
02:31:08 that’s done well with this are parts of Asia, right?
02:31:11 Taiwan did phenomenally with this.
02:31:14 And the vice president of Taiwan is an epidemiologist.
02:31:18 So he knew what he was doing.
02:31:20 And they got it right from the beginning.
02:31:22 South Korea did amazing, even Hong Kong and Singapore.
02:31:27 Hong Kong is just very few deaths.
02:31:31 And the economy wasn’t shut down in any of those places.
02:31:34 There were no lockdowns in any of those places.
02:31:38 The CDC had plans before this happened
02:31:43 on how to deal with good plans.
02:31:45 Indeed, if you ask people around the world before the pandemic
02:31:48 which country is best prepared for a pandemic,
02:31:51 they would have said the United States
02:31:53 because of the CDC’s plans
02:31:54 and all of our emergency reserves and all that
02:31:56 and the wealth.
02:31:59 And yet all of that went out the window
02:32:02 because people panicked, people didn’t think,
02:32:06 go back to reason, people were arrogant,
02:32:10 refused to use the tools that they had at their disposal
02:32:14 to deal with this.
02:32:15 So you deal with pandemics, it’s very simple
02:32:17 how you deal with pandemics.
02:32:18 And this is how South Korea and Taiwan and everywhere,
02:32:20 you deal with them by testing, tracing and isolating.
02:32:26 That’s it.
02:32:28 And you do it well and you do it vigorously
02:32:30 and you do it on scale if you have to.
02:32:32 And you scale up to do it and we have the wealth to do that.
02:32:35 So one question I have, it’s a difficult one.
02:32:40 So I talk about love a lot
02:32:43 and you’ve just talked about Donald Trump,
02:32:45 I guarantee you though this particular segment
02:32:47 will be full of division from the internet.
02:32:51 But I believe that should be and can be fixed.
02:32:57 What I’m referring to in particular is the division
02:33:00 because we’ve talked about the value of reason.
02:33:04 And what I’ve noticed on the internet
02:33:06 is the division shuts down reason.
02:33:10 So when people hear you say Trump,
02:33:12 actually the first sentence you said about Trump,
02:33:14 they’ll hear Trump and their ears will perk up
02:33:17 and they’ll immediately start in that first sentence,
02:33:19 they’ll say, is he a Trump supporter or a Trump?
02:33:22 They’re not interested in anything else after that.
02:33:24 And then after that, that’s it.
02:33:26 And what, how do, so my question is,
02:33:30 you as one of the beacons of intellectualism,
02:33:34 quite honestly, I mean, it sounds silly to say,
02:33:37 but you are a beacon of reason.
02:33:40 How do we bring people together long enough
02:33:44 to where we can reason?
02:33:48 I mean, there’s no easy way out of this
02:33:51 because the fact that people have become tribal
02:33:54 and they have, very tribal.
02:33:57 And the tribe, in the tribe reason doesn’t matter.
02:34:03 It’s all about emotion.
02:34:04 It’s all about belonging or not belonging.
02:34:06 And you don’t wanna stand out.
02:34:08 You don’t wanna have a different opinion.
02:34:10 You wanna belong.
02:34:11 And it’s all about belonging.
02:34:13 It took us decades to get back to tribalism
02:34:18 where we were hundreds of years ago.
02:34:20 It took millennium to get out of tribalism.
02:34:23 It took the enlightenment
02:34:24 to get us to the point of individualism,
02:34:26 where we think in reason, respect for reason.
02:34:28 Before that, we were all tribal.
02:34:30 So it took the enlightenment to get us out of it.
02:34:31 We’ve been in the enlightenment for about 250 years,
02:34:34 influenced by the enlightenment and it’s fading.
02:34:38 The impact is fading.
02:34:39 So what would we need to get out of it?
02:34:42 We need self esteem.
02:34:45 People join a tribe
02:34:46 because they don’t trust their own mind.
02:34:50 People join a tribe
02:34:51 because they’re afraid to stand on their own two feet.
02:34:54 They’re afraid to think for themselves.
02:34:55 They’re afraid to be different.
02:34:57 They’re afraid to be unique.
02:34:58 They’re afraid to be an individual.
02:35:00 People need self esteem.
02:35:02 To gain self esteem,
02:35:04 they have to have respect for rationality.
02:35:08 They have to think and they have to achieve
02:35:10 and they have to recognize that achievement.
02:35:14 To do that, they have to have respect for thinking.
02:35:19 They have to have to respect for reason.
02:35:22 And we have to, and think about the schools.
02:35:24 We have to have schools that teach people to think,
02:35:27 teach people to value their mind.
02:35:29 We have schools that teach people to feel
02:35:32 and value their feelings.
02:35:33 We have groups of six year olds sitting around a circle
02:35:36 discussing politics.
02:35:37 What?
02:35:38 They don’t know anything.
02:35:39 They’re ignorant.
02:35:41 See, you don’t know anything when you’re ignorant.
02:35:43 Yes, you can feel,
02:35:44 but your feelings are useless as decision making tools.
02:35:49 But we emphasize emotion.
02:35:51 It’s all about socialization and emotion.
02:35:53 This is why they talk about this generation of snowflakes.
02:35:57 They can’t hear anything that they’re opposed to
02:36:00 because they’ve not learned how to use their mind,
02:36:03 how to think.
02:36:04 So it boils down to teaching people how to think two things,
02:36:08 how to think and how to care about themselves.
02:36:11 So it’s thinking of self esteem and the connected,
02:36:14 because when you think, you achieve,
02:36:16 which gains you self esteem.
02:36:19 When you have self esteem,
02:36:20 it’s easier to think for yourself.
02:36:23 And I don’t know how you do that quickly.
02:36:26 I mean, I think leadership matters.
02:36:29 So, you know, part of what I try to do
02:36:32 is try to encourage people to do those things.
02:36:35 But I am a small voice.
02:36:37 You asked me when,
02:36:38 early on you said we should talk about
02:36:39 why I’m not more famous.
02:36:41 I’m not famous.
02:36:42 You know, my following is not big.
02:36:43 It’s very small in the scope of things.
02:36:47 Well, yours and objectivism and that question,
02:36:49 could you linger on it for a moment?
02:36:51 Why isn’t objectivism more famous?
02:36:56 I think because it’s so challenging.
02:36:59 It’s not challenging.
02:37:01 It’s not challenging to me, right?
02:37:03 When I first encountered objectivism,
02:37:06 it’s like after the first shock
02:37:08 and after the first kind of,
02:37:10 none of this can be true.
02:37:11 This is all BS.
02:37:12 And fighting it, once I got it,
02:37:16 it was easy.
02:37:17 It required years of studying,
02:37:19 but it was easy in the sense of,
02:37:20 yes, this makes sense.
02:37:22 But it’s challenging because it upends everything.
02:37:25 It really says what my mother taught me is wrong.
02:37:28 And what my politicians say left and right is wrong.
02:37:32 All of them.
02:37:33 There’s not a single politician
02:37:35 on which I agree with on almost anything, right?
02:37:39 Because on the fundamentals we disagree.
02:37:42 And what my teachers are telling me is wrong.
02:37:45 And what Jesus said is wrong.
02:37:48 And it’s hard.
02:37:50 But the thing is,
02:37:52 so you talk about politics and all that kind of stuff,
02:37:54 but you know, most people don’t care.
02:37:56 The more powerful thing about objectivism
02:37:58 is the practical of my life,
02:38:02 of how I revolutionized my life.
02:38:04 And that feels to be like a very important and appealing,
02:38:10 you know, get your shit together.
02:38:12 Yeah, but this is why Jordan Peterson
02:38:14 is so much more successful than we are, right?
02:38:16 Why is that?
02:38:17 Make your bed or whatever.
02:38:18 What’s that?
02:38:19 Make your bed.
02:38:20 Yeah, because his personal responsibility is shallow.
02:38:24 It’s make your bed, stand up straight.
02:38:25 That’s what my mother told me when I was growing up.
02:38:27 There’s nothing new about Jordan Peterson.
02:38:29 He says, embrace Christianity.
02:38:32 Christianity is fine, right?
02:38:34 Religion is okay.
02:38:36 Just do these few things and you’ll be fine.
02:38:38 And by the way, he says, happiness, you know,
02:38:42 you either have it or you don’t.
02:38:43 You know, it’s random.
02:38:44 You don’t actually,
02:38:45 you can’t bring about your own happiness.
02:38:47 So he’s given people an easy out.
02:38:49 People want easy outs.
02:38:50 People buy self help books
02:38:52 that give them five principles
02:38:53 or living in, you know, shallow.
02:38:56 I’m telling them, think,
02:38:58 stand on your own two feet, be independent.
02:39:02 Don’t listen to your mother.
02:39:04 Do your own thing, but thoughtfully,
02:39:07 not based on emotions.
02:39:09 So you’re responsible not just
02:39:10 for a set of particular habits and so on.
02:39:14 You’re responsible for everything.
02:39:17 Yes, and you’re responsible.
02:39:18 Here’s the big one, right?
02:39:20 You’re responsible for shaping your own soul.
02:39:26 Your consciousness,
02:39:27 you get to decide what it’s going to be like.
02:39:30 And the only tool you have is your mind.
02:39:33 Your only tool is your mind.
02:39:35 Well, your emotions play a tool
02:39:37 when they’re properly cultivated.
02:39:38 They play a role in that.
02:39:40 And the tools you have is thinking, experiencing,
02:39:43 living, coming to the right conclusions,
02:39:46 you know, listening to great music
02:39:47 and watching good movies and art is very important
02:39:51 in shaping your own soul and helping you do this.
02:39:55 It’s got a crucial role in that.
02:39:58 But it’s work.
02:40:00 And it’s lonely work
02:40:03 because it’s work you do with yourself.
02:40:04 Now, if you find somebody who you love
02:40:06 who shares these values and you can do with them,
02:40:09 that’s great, but it’s mostly lonely work.
02:40:11 It’s hard, it’s challenging, it ends your world.
02:40:15 The reward is unbelievable.
02:40:17 But even at that, think about the enlightenment, right?
02:40:23 So up until the enlightenment, where was truth?
02:40:25 Truth came from a book.
02:40:27 And there were a few people who understood the book.
02:40:29 Most of us couldn’t read and they conveyed it to us.
02:40:32 And they just told us what to do.
02:40:33 And in that sense, life’s easy.
02:40:35 It sucks and we die young and we have nothing
02:40:38 and we don’t enjoy it, but it’s easy.
02:40:41 And the enlightenment comes around and says,
02:40:44 we’ve got this tool, it’s called reason.
02:40:49 And it allows us to discover truth about the world.
02:40:51 It’s not in a book.
02:40:52 It’s actually your reason allows you
02:40:54 to discover stuff about the world.
02:40:56 And I consider the first,
02:40:57 really the first figure of the enlightenment is Newton,
02:41:01 not Locke, right?
02:41:02 It’s a scientist.
02:41:03 Because he teaches us the laws of mechanics,
02:41:07 like how does stuff work?
02:41:10 And people go, oh, wow, this is cool.
02:41:13 I can use my mind.
02:41:14 I can discover truth.
02:41:16 Isn’t that amazing?
02:41:18 And everything opens up once you do that.
02:41:19 Hey, if I can discover,
02:41:21 if I understand the laws of motion,
02:41:23 if I can understand truth in the world,
02:41:25 how come I can’t decide who I marry?
02:41:28 I mean, everything was fixed in those days.
02:41:29 How come I can’t decide what profession I should be in?
02:41:33 Right, everybody would belong to a guild.
02:41:35 How come I can’t decide who my political leader should be?
02:41:38 That’s, so it’s all reason.
02:41:40 It’s all, once you understand the efficacy of your own mind
02:41:43 to understand truth, to understand reality,
02:41:45 discover truth, not understand truth, discover it.
02:41:48 Everything opens up.
02:41:49 Now you can take responsibility for your own life
02:41:51 because now you have the tool to do it.
02:41:53 But we are living in an era where postmodernism tells us
02:41:57 there is no truth, there is no reality,
02:41:59 and our mind is useless anyway.
02:42:01 Critical race theory tells us
02:42:03 that you’re determined by your race
02:42:05 and your race shapes everything
02:42:06 and your free will is meaningless
02:42:08 and your reason doesn’t matter
02:42:10 because reason is just shaped by your genes
02:42:12 and shaped by the color of your skin.
02:42:15 It’s the most racist theory of all.
02:42:17 And you’ve got our friend at UC Irvine telling them,
02:42:21 oh, your senses don’t tell you anything about reality.
02:42:24 Anyway, reality is what it is.
02:42:25 So, you know, what’s the purpose of reason?
02:42:28 It’s to invent stuff, it’s to make stuff up.
02:42:30 And then what use is that?
02:42:31 It’s complete fantasy.
02:42:32 You’ve basically got every philosophical,
02:42:35 intellectual voice in the culture
02:42:37 telling them their reason is impotent.
02:42:40 There’s like a Steven Pinker who tries,
02:42:43 and I love Pinker and he’s really good
02:42:46 and I love his books,
02:42:48 but, you know, he needs to be stronger about this.
02:42:52 And there’s a few people on kind of,
02:42:54 there’s a few people partially in the intellectual dark web
02:42:56 and otherwise who are big on reason
02:42:58 but not consistent enough and not full understanding
02:43:01 of what it means or what it implies.
02:43:04 And then there’s little old me.
02:43:05 There’s a little old me and it’s me against the world
02:43:10 in a sense, because I’m not only willing to accept,
02:43:13 to articulate the case for reason,
02:43:16 but then what that implies.
02:43:18 It implies freedom, it implies capitalism,
02:43:20 it implies taking personal responsibility over your own life.
02:43:23 And there are other intellectual dark web people
02:43:25 get to reason and then, oh, politics, you can be whatever.
02:43:28 No, you can’t, you can’t be a socialist and for reason.
02:43:32 It doesn’t actually, those are incompatible.
02:43:35 And you can’t be a determinist and for reason.
02:43:38 Reason and determinism don’t go together.
02:43:40 The whole point of reason is that it’s an achievement
02:43:43 and it requires effort and it requires engagement,
02:43:45 it requires choice.
02:43:47 So it is, it does feel like a little old me
02:43:49 because that’s it.
02:43:51 The allies I have are allies.
02:43:53 I have allies among some libertarians over economics.
02:43:56 I have some allies in the intellectual dark web
02:43:58 maybe over reason,
02:44:00 but none of them are allies in the full sense.
02:44:02 So my allies are the other objectivists,
02:44:04 but they’re not a lot of us.
02:44:07 For people listening to this,
02:44:10 for the few folks kind of listening to this
02:44:12 and thinking about the trajectory of their own life,
02:44:17 I guess the takeaway is reason is a difficult project,
02:44:23 but a project that’s worthy of taking on.
02:44:27 Yeah, difficulties, I don’t know
02:44:30 if difficulty is the right word
02:44:31 because difficult sounds like it’s,
02:44:33 I have to push this boulder up a hill.
02:44:35 It’s not difficult in that sense.
02:44:37 It’s difficult in the sense that it requires energy
02:44:39 and focus, it requires effort,
02:44:41 but it’s immediately rewarding.
02:44:43 It’s fun to do.
02:44:45 And it rewards immediate, pretty quick, right?
02:44:51 It takes a while to undo all the garbage that you have,
02:44:53 but we all have that I had that took me years
02:44:56 and years and years to get rid of certain concepts
02:44:58 and certain emotions that I had that didn’t make any sense,
02:45:01 but it takes a long time to fully integrate that.
02:45:04 So I don’t want it to sound like it’s a burden,
02:45:09 like it’s hard in that sense.
02:45:11 It does require focus and energy.
02:45:13 And I don’t want it to sound like a Dr. Spock.
02:45:16 I don’t want to say, and I don’t think I do
02:45:18 because I’m a pretty passionate guy,
02:45:20 but I don’t want it to appeal like,
02:45:22 oh, just forget about emotions.
02:45:24 Emotions are how you experience the world.
02:45:26 You want to have strong emotions.
02:45:29 You want to live, you want to experience life strongly
02:45:33 and passionately.
02:45:35 You just need to know that emotions are not cognition.
02:45:39 It’s another realm.
02:45:40 It’s like, don’t mix the realms.
02:45:42 Think about outcomes and then experience them.
02:45:45 And sometimes your emotions won’t coincide
02:45:47 with what you think should be.
02:45:49 And that means there’s still more integration to be done.
02:45:53 Yaron, as I told you offline,
02:45:55 I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time.
02:45:58 It’s been, I was a little starstruck early on,
02:46:01 getting a little more comfortable now.
02:46:02 I believe that’s gone.
02:46:05 I highly recommend that people
02:46:09 that haven’t heard your work,
02:46:11 listen to it through the Yaron Brook Show.
02:46:15 The times I’ve disagreed with something I’ve heard you say
02:46:18 is usually a first step on a journey
02:46:21 of learning a lot more about that thing,
02:46:24 about that viewpoint.
02:46:25 And that’s been so fulfilling.
02:46:27 It’s been a gift.
02:46:28 The passion, you talk about reason a lot,
02:46:32 but the passion radiates in a way
02:46:35 that’s just contagious and uninspiring.
02:46:38 So thank you for everything you’ve done for this world.
02:46:40 It’s truly an honor and a pleasure to talk to you.
02:46:43 Well, thank you.
02:46:44 And my reward is that if I’ve had an impact
02:46:48 on you and people like you, wow.
02:46:49 I mean, that’s amazing.
02:46:51 When you wrote to me an email saying you’ve been a fan,
02:46:54 I was blown away because I had no idea
02:46:56 and completely unexpected.
02:46:58 And every few months I discover,
02:47:02 hey, I had an impact on this world
02:47:03 and people that I would have never thought.
02:47:06 So the only way to change the world
02:47:10 is to change your one mind at a time.
02:47:13 And when you have an impact on a good mind
02:47:18 and a mind that cares about the world
02:47:20 and a mind that goes out and does something about it,
02:47:22 then you get the exponential growth.
02:47:24 So through you, I’ve impacted other people
02:47:27 and that’s how you ultimately change everything.
02:47:31 And so in spite of everything,
02:47:34 I’m optimistic in a sense that I think
02:47:37 that the progress we’ve made today
02:47:39 is so universally accepted,
02:47:41 the scientific progress, the technological progress,
02:47:44 it can just vanish like it did when Rome collapsed.
02:47:48 And whether it’s in the United States or somewhere,
02:47:51 progress will continue, the human project
02:47:55 for human progress will continue.
02:47:57 And I think these ideas,
02:47:58 the ideas of reason and individualism
02:48:00 will always be at the heart of it.
02:48:02 And what we are doing is continuing
02:48:05 the project of the Enlightenment.
02:48:06 And it’s the project that will save the human race
02:48:11 and allow it to, for Elon Musk
02:48:14 and for Jeff Bezos to reach the stars.
02:48:19 Thank you for masterfully ending on a hopeful note.
02:48:22 Yaron, a pleasure and an honor.
02:48:24 Thanks.
02:48:25 Thanks for listening to this conversation
02:48:27 with Yaron Brook and thank you to our sponsors,
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02:48:49 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
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02:48:56 or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
02:49:00 And now let me leave you with some words from Ayn Rand.
02:49:03 Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark
02:49:09 in the hopeless swamps of the not quite,
02:49:13 the not yet, and the not at all.
02:49:15 Do not let the hero in your soul perish
02:49:19 in lonely frustration for the life you deserved
02:49:22 and have never been able to reach.
02:49:24 The world you desire can be one.
02:49:27 It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
02:49:32 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.