Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand and the Philosophy of Objectivism | Lex Fridman Podcast #138
the following is a conversation with euron Brooke one of the best known objectivist philosophers and thinkers in the world objectivism is the philosophical system developed by Ein Rand that she first expressed in her fiction books The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged and later in non-fiction essays and books yaron is the current chairman of the board at the IR Rand Institute host of the Yan Brook show and the co-author of free market Revolution equal is unfair and several other books where he analyzes systems of government human behavior and The Human Condition from the perspective of objectivism quick mention of each sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode blinkist an app I use for reading through summaries of books expressvpn the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet and cash app the app I use to send Mone to friends please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that I first read Atlas Shrugged and the Fountain Head early in college along with many other literary and philosophical works from n haiger Kant lock Fuko wienstein and of course all the great existentialists from kard to kamu I always had an open mind curious to learn learn and explore the ideas of thinkers throughout history no matter how mundane or radical or even dangerous they were considered to be IR Rand was and I think still is a divisive figure some people love her some people dislike or even dismiss her I prefer to look past what some may consider to be the flaws of the person and consider with an open mind the ideas she presents and yaron now describes and applies in his philosophical discussions in general I hope that you will be patient and understanding as I venture out across the space of ideas and the ever widening oron window pulling at the thread of curiosity sometimes saying stupid things but always striving to understand how we can better build a better world together if you enjoy this thing subscribe on YouTube review it with five stars on Apple podcast follow on Spotify support patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman and now here's my conversation with yuron Brook let me ask the biggest possible question first sure what are the principles of a life well lived I think it's to live with uh with thought that is to live a rational life to to think it through I think so many people are in a sense zombies out there there are alive but they're not really alive cuz their mind is not focused their mind is not you know focused on what do I need to do in order to live a great life so too many people just go through the motions of living rather than really Embrace Life so I I I think the secret to living a great life is to take it seriously and what it means to take it seriously is to use the one tool that makes us human the one tool that provides us with all the values that we have on mind a reason and to use it apply it to living right people apply it to their work they apply it to their math problems to science to to programming but imagine if they use that same energy that same Focus that same concentration to actually living life and choosing values uh that they should pursue that would that would change the world and it would change day lives yeah actually you know I wear this silly Suit and Tie it it symbolizes to me always it makes me feel like I'm taking the moment really seriously I think that's really that's right and and each one of us has different ways to kind of uh condition our Consciousness I'm serious now and for you it's it's a student TI it's a it's a conditioning of your Consciousness to now I'm focused now I'm at work now I'm doing my thing yeah right and I think that's that's terrific and I I wish everybody took that look I mean it's a cliche but we only live once every minute of your life you're never going never live again this is really valuable and and when people people don't have that deep respect for their own life for their own time for their own mind and if they did again you know one could only imagine look at how productive people are look at the amazing things they produce and they do in their work yeah and if they applied that to everything wow so you kind of talk about reason where does uh the kind of existentialist idea of experience maybe you know fully experiencing all the moments versus fully thinking through is there uh interesting line to separate the two like why such an emphasis on reason for life well lived versus just enjoy like experience well because I think experience in a sense is the easy part I'm not saying it's it it's it's how we experience the life that we live and yes I'm all with the take time to to to Value what you value but I think I don't think that's the problem of people out there I don't think the problem is they're not taking time to appreciate where they are and what they do I think it's that they don't use their mind in this one respect in planning their life in thinking about how to live so the focus is on reason is because it's our only source of knowledge there's no other source of knowledge we don't know anything with you know that does not come from our senses in our in our mind the integration of the of the evidence of our senses now we know stuff about ourselves and I think it's important to know oneself through introspection and I count consider that part of reasoning is to is to is to introspect but I think reason is undervalued which is funny to say because it's our means of survival it's how human beings survive we cannot see this is why I disagree with so many scientists and and people like Sam hav you mentioned Sam hav before the show um we're not programmed to know how to hunt we're not programmed to do agriculture we're not programmed to build computers and build networks on which we can podcast and do our shows all of that requires effort it requires Focus it requires energy and it requires will it requires somebody to will it it requires somebody to choose it and once you make that choice you have to engage that choice means that you're choosing to engage your reason in Discovery in integration and then in work to change the world in which we live and you know human beings had to discover figure out solve the problem of hunting hunting you know everybody thinks oh that's easy I've seen the movie but human beings had to figure out how to do it right you you you can't run down a bison and bite into it right you're not going to catch it you're not going to you have no fangs to bite into it you have to build weapons you have to build tools you have to create traps you have to have a strategy all of that requires reason so the most important thing that allows human beings to survive and to thrive in every value from the most simp to the most sophisticated from the most material to I believe the most spiritual requires thinking so stopping and appreciating the moment is is something that I think is relatively easy Once you have a plan once you've thought it through once you know what your values are there is a mistake people make they attain their values and they just and they just they don't take a moment to savor that and to appreciate that and to even Pat themselves on the back that they did it right but that's not what's screwing up the world what's screwing up the world is that people have the wrong values and they don't think about them and they don't really focus on them and they don't have a plan for their own life and how to live it if we look at Human Nature you're saying the fundamental big thing that we need to consider is our capacity like capability to reason so to me reason is this massive evolutionary achievement right in quotes right um if you think about any other sophisticated animal everything has to be coded everything has to be written in in the hard way it has to be there yeah and they have to have a solution for every outcome and if there's no solution the animal dies typically or the animal suffers and some way human beings have this capacity to self- program they have this capacity it there's not it's not a A aasa in the sense that there's nothing there obviously we have a nature obviously our minds our brains are structured in a particular way but given that we have the ability to turn it on or turn it off we have the ability to commit suicide to to to reject our nature to work against our interests not to use the tool that Evolution has provided us with which is this mind which is reason so that choice that fundamental choice you know uh uh Hamlet says it right to be or not to be but to be or not to be is to think or not to think to engage or not to engage to focus or not to focus you know in in the morning when you get up you kind of you know you're not you're not really completely there you're kind of out of focus and stuff it requires an act of will to say okay I'm awake I've got stuff to do some people never do that some people live in that Haze and they never engage that mind and and when you when you're sitting and trying to solve a a complex computer prr problem or a math problem you have to turn something on you have to in a sense exert certain energy to focus on the problem to do it and that is not determined in a sense that you have to focus you choose to focus and you could choose not to focus and that choice is more powerful than any other like parts of our brain that we've borrowed from fish and uh from our evolutionary origins like this whatever this crazy little leap in evolution is that allowed us to think is more important than anything else so I think neuroscientists pretend they know a lot more about the brain than they really do yeah um and that we know fired yeah I agree with you and and and we don't know that much yet about how the brain functions and what's a fish you know all this stuff so I think what what exists there is a lot of potentialities but the beauty of the human brain is it's its potentialities that we we have to manifest through our choices it's there it's sitting there and yes there's certain things that going to evoke certain uh senses certain feelings I'm not even saying emotions because I think emotions are too complex to have been programmed into our mind uh but I don't think so you know there's this big issue of evolutionary psychology is huge right now and and it's a big issue you know I find it to a large extent stand as way too early and in storytelling about expost storytelling about about stuff we still don't you know so for example I would like to see evolutionary psychology differentiate between things like inclinations feelings emotions Sensations thoughts Concepts ideas what of those are programmed and what of those are developed and chosen and a product of reason I think anything from emotion to abstract ideas is all chosen is all a product of reason and everything before that we might have been programmed for but the fact is so clearly a sensation is not a product of you know is is is something that we feel because that's how our biology works so until we have these categories and until we can clearly specify what is what and where where did they come from the whole discussion in evolutionary psychology seems to be rambling it doesn't seem to be scientific so we have to Define our terms you know which is the basis of science you have to have some some clear definitions about what we're talking about it when you ask them these questions there's never really a coherent answer about what is it exactly and everybody is afraid of the issue of Free Will and I think I think to some extent I mean Harris has this and I don't want to misrepresent anything Harris has because I you know I'm a fan and I I like a lot of your stuff right but on the one hand he is obviously intellectually active and wants to change our minds so he believes that we have some capacity to choose on the other hand he's undermining that capacity to choose by saying it's just determined you're going to choose what you choose you have no say in and there's actually no you he he he so it's you know so that and that's to me completely unscientific that's completely him you know uh pulling it out of nowhere we all experience the fact that we have an eye that kind of certainty saying that we do not have that fundamental choice that reason provides is uh unfounded currently look there's a sense in which it can never be contradicted because it's a product of your experience it's not a product of your experience you can experience it directly right so no science will ever prove that this table isn't here I can see it it's here right I can I can feel it I I know I have free will cuz I can introspect it in a sense I can see it I can see myself engaging it and that is as valid as the evidence of my senses now I can't point at it so that you can see the same thing I'm seeing but you can do the same thing in your own Consciousness and you can identify the same thing and to deny that in the name of science is to get things upside down you start with that and that's the beginning of science the beginning of science is the identification that I choose and that I can reason and it now I need to figure out the mechanism the the the rules of reasoning the rules of logic the you know how does this work and that's where science come from of course it's possible that science like for my place of AI would be able to if we were able to engineer consciousness or understand I mean it's very difficult to because we're so far away from it now but understand how the actual mechanism of that Consciousness emerges that in fact this table is not real that we can determine that it uh exactly how our mind constructs the reality that we perceive then then you can start to make interesting but our mind our mind doesn't construct the reality that we perceive the reality we perceive is there we perceive a reality that exists yeah now we perceive it in particular ways given the nature of our senses right a bat perceives this table differently but it's still the same table with the same characteristics and the same identity it's just a matter of we use eyes they use a radar system to you know they use sound waves to perceive it but it's still there existence exist whether we exist or not and so you could create I mean I don't know how and I I don't know if it's possible but let's say you could create a Consciousness right and I I suspect that to do that you would have to use biology not just Electronics but you know way outside my expertise um because Consciousness as far as we know is a phenomena of life and you would have to figure out how to create life before you created Consciousness I think but if you did that then that wouldn't change anything all it would say is we have another conscious being cool that's great but it wouldn't change the nature of our Consciousness our Consciousness is what it is respect so that's very interesting I think this is a good way to set the table for discussion of objectivism is let me at least challenge a thought experiment which is uh I don't know if you're familiar with uh Donald Hoffman's work about reality so his idea is that we're just our perception is just an interface to reality so Donald Hoffman is the uh is the guy you see ofine yeah yes I've met Donald and I've seen his video and look Donald has not invented anything new this goes back to ancient philosophy let me just state in in case people aren't familiar I mean it's a fascinating thought experiment to me uh like of out of the boox thinking perhaps literally is that uh you know our there's a different there's a gap between the world as we perceive it and the world as it actually exists and I think that's for the philosophy objectivism is a really important Gap to close so can you maybe at least try to entertain the idea that that there is more to reality than our minds can perceive well I don't understand what more means right of course there's more to reality than what our senses perceive that is uh for example I don't know certain certain elements uh have uh radiation right uranium has rad I can't perceive radiation the beauty of human reason is I can I can through experimentation discover the phenomena of radiation then actually measure radiation and I don't worry about it I can't perceive the world the way a bat perceives the world and I might not be able to see certain things that but I can we've created radar so a we understand how a bat perceives the world and I can mimic it through a radar screen and create and images like the bat its Consciousness somehow perceives it right so the beauty of human reason is our capacity to understand the world beyond what our senses give us directly at the end everything comes in through our senses but we can understand things that our senses don't provide us but but what he's doing is he's doing something very different he is saying what our census provides us might have nothing to do with the reality out there that is just a random arbitrary nonsensical statement and he actually has a whole evolutionary explanation for it run some simulations simulations seem I mean I'm not an expert in this field but they seem silly to me they they don't seem to reflect and look all he's doing is taking Emmanuel Khan's philosophy which articulate exactly the same cause and he's giving it a veneer of of of evolutionary uh ideas I'm not an expert on Evolution and I'm not an expert on epistemology which is what this is so to me as as a semi Layman it doesn't make any sense and uh you know I I'm actually you know I have a I have this shiron book show I don't know if I'm allowed to pitch it but I've got this shiron book show first of all let me pause a huge fan of the BR I listen to it very often as a small aside the cool thing about reason which you practice is you have a systematic way of thinking through basically anything yes and that's so fun to listen to I mean it's rare that I think there's flaws in your logic but even then it's fun cuz I'm like disagreeing with the screen when and it's great when somebody disagrees with me and they give good arguments because that makes it challenging any you know so so one of the shows I want to do in the next few weeks is is one of my philosoph bring one of my philosopher friends to discuss the video that that Hoffman where he presents his St because it surprises me how seductive it is and it's seems to be so first of all completely counterintuitive but but but because you know somehow we managed to cross the road and not get hit by the car and if our our our sensors did not provide us any information about what's actually going on in reality how do we do that that's and not not to mention build computers not to mention fly to the moon and actually land on the moon and if reality is not giving us information about the moon if our senses are not giving us information about the moon how did we get there you know and what did where did we go maybe we didn't go anywhere um it's just it's nonsensical to me and it's it's a it's a very bad place philosophically because it basically says there is no objective standard for anything there is no objective reality you can come up with anything you could argue anything and there's no methodology right my I believe that at the end of the day what reason allows us to do is provides us with a methodology for truth and at the end of the day for every claim that I make I should be able to boil it down to C yeah look you the evidence of the senses is right then once you take that away knowledge is gone and Truth is gone and that opens it up to you know complete disaster so you know to me why it's compelling to at least entertain this idea first of all it shakes up the mind a little bit to force you to go back to First principles and you know ask the question what do I really know and the second part of that that I really enjoy is H it's a reminder that we know very little to be a little bit more humble so if reality doesn't exist at all before you start thinking about it I think it's a really nice wakeup call to think wait wait a minute I don't really know much about this universe that humbleness I think something I'd like to ask you about in terms of reason when you you can become very confident in your ability to understand the world if you practice reason often and I feel like it can lead you astray because you can start to think it's so I love psychology and psychologists have the certainty about understanding The Human Condition which is undeserved you know you run a study with a 50 people and you think you could understand the source of all these psychiatrics The Source all these kinds of things that's similar kind of trouble I feel like you can get uh into with when you when you overreach with reason so I don't think there is such a thing is overreaching with reason but there are bad applications of reason there bad uses of reason or or or the pretense of using reason I think a lot of these psychological studies are pretense of using reason and and uh these psychologists have never really taken a serious stat class or a serious econometrics class so they use statistics in weird ways that just don't make any sense and that's a Mis that's not reason right that's that's just bad thinking right so I I don't think you can do too much good thinking and that's what reason is it's good thinking and now that the fact that you try to use reason does not guarantee you won't make mistakes it doesn't guarantee you won't be wrong it doesn't guarantee you won't go down a rabbit hole and and and completely get it wrong but it does give you the only existing mechanism to fix it right which is going back to reality going back to facts going back to reason and and and and getting out of the rabbit hole and getting up back to reality so I agree with you that it's interesting to think about these what I consider crazy ideas because it oh wait well what is my argument about them if I don't really have a good argument about them then do I know what I know so in that sense it's always nice to be challenged and pushed and and oriented you know the nice thing about objectivism is everybody's doing that to me all the time right because nobody agrees with me on anything so I'm constantly being challenged whether it's in by Hoffman on metaphysics and epistemology right on the very foundations of my knowledge in ethics everybody constantly and in in politics all the time so um I find that it's part of you know I prefer that everybody there's a sense in which I prefer that everybody agreed with me right because I think we live in a better world but there's a sense in which that disagreement makes it at least up to a Point makes it interesting and challenging and forces you to be able to to rethink or to confirm your own thinking and to challenge that thinking can you try to do the impossible task and give a whirlwind introduction to IR Rand the the many sides of ir Rand so IR Rand the human being IR Rand the novelist and irand the philosopher so who was irand should so so her life story is is one that I think is is fascinating and but it also uh lends itself to this integration of all of these things she was born in St Petersburg Russia in 1905 to kind of a middle class uh family Jewish Family they they owned a pharmacy a father owned a pharmacy and uh you know she grew up uh she grew up uh she was a very um she knew what she wanted wanted to do and what she wanted to be from a very young age I think from the age of nine she knew she wanted to be a writer she wanted to write stories that was the thing she wanted to do and uh you know she focused her life after that on this goal of I want to be a novelist I want to write and the philosophy was incidental to that in a sense at least until some point in her life she witnessed the Russian Revolution literally it happened outside they lived in St Petersburg where the first kind of demonstrations and and of the Revolution happened so she witnessed it she lived through it as a teenag um went to school Under the Soviets uh for a while they they they were under kind of the in on the Black Sea where the opposition government was ruling and then they would they would go back and forth between the commies and the whites but but she experienced what communism was like she saw the pharmacy being taken away from her family she saw their apartment being taken away or other other families being brought into the apartment they already lived in um and uh it was very clear given her nature uh given her views even at a very young age that she would not survive the system uh so a lot of effort was put into how do we get how how does she get out and her family was really helpful in this and she had a cousin in cousin in Chicago and uh she had been studying kind of film at the University and uh this is in her 20s this is in her 20s early 20s and uh lenon there was a small window where Lennon was allowing some people to leave under circum certain circumstances and she managed to get out to go do research on film in in the United States everybody knew everybody who knew her knew she would never come back that this was a oneway ticket and and she got out she made it to Chicago spent few weeks in Chicago and then headed to Hollywood she wanted to write scripts that was that was the that was the uh the goal here's this uh you know short woman From Russia with a strong accent uh learning English showing up in in Hollywood and you know I want to be a script writer in English in English writing in English uh and U and this is kind of a one of these fairy tale stories but it's true she shows up uh at the cisa B demill Studios and she she has a let of introdu ction from her cousin in Chicago who owns a movie theater and this is in the 19 uh the late 1920s and she shows up there with this letter and they say you know don't call us we'll call you kind of thing and she steps out and there's this massive um convertible and in the convertible is CB de Mill and he's driving slowly past her right at the entrance of the studio and she stares at him and he stops the con he says you know why are you staring at me and she says you know she tells him a story for Russ and you know I want to want to make it in the movies I want to be a script writer one day and he says well if you want to if you want that you know get in the car you she gets in the car and he takes her to the back lot of his Studio where they're filming the King of Kings the story of Jesus and he says here has a pass for a week yeah if you want to be if you want to write for the movies you better know how movies are made and uh she basically spends a week and then she spends more time there she managed to get an extension she lands up being an extra in the movie so you can see I man there in in one of the masses when Jesus is walking by she meets her future husband on the set of uh of the king of kings she lands up uh getting married getting her American citizenship that way uh and she lands up doing odds and ends jobs in Hollywood living in a tiny little apartment um somehow making a living her husband was an actor he was you know struggling actors were difficult times uh and in the evenings English writing writing writing writing and studying and studying and studying and she she finally makes it by writing a play that that uh is successful in in um in LA and ultimately goes to Broadway um and uh she writes her first novel is a novel called We The Living which is the most autobiographical of all her novels it's about a young woman in the Soviet Union it's a powerful story a very moving story and probably if not the best one of the best portrayals of Life under communism and the book definitely recommend we the living it's her first first novel she wrote in the 30s and it didn't go anywhere because if you think about the intelligencia the the the the people who mattered the people who wrote book reviews this is a time of Durante in who's the New York Times uh guy in Moscow who's praising Stalin to the and the success so the the novel fails uh but but she's got a novel out she writes a small novelet called Anthem a lot of people have read that and it's it's read in high schools it's it's kind of dystopia novel uh and uh it's won't it doesn't get published in the US gets published in the UK UK is very interested in dystopian novels Animal Farm uh and in 1984 84 is published a couple of years after I think after an there's reason to believe he read he read Anthem uh that and uh George read Animal Farm yeah just the small Side Animal Farm is probably top I mean I would it's weird to say but I would say it's my favorite book which have you seen this movie out now called Mr Jones no oh you've got to see Mr Jones what's Mr Jones it's sorry sorry for my ignorance no no it's a movie it hasn't got any publicity which is tragic cuz it's a really good movie It's both brilliantly made it's made by a Polish director but it's in English it's a it's a true story and and gej Well's Animal Farm is featured in it in the sense that during the story JoJo was writing animal farm and and he's the narrator is reading off sections of animal f as the movie is progressing and the movie is a true story about the the first Western journalist to discover and to write about the famine in Ukraine and so he goes to Moscow and then he gets on a train and he finds himself in Ukraine and it's it's it's beautifully and horrifically made so the horror of the famine is brilliantly conveyed and then and it's a true story it's a very moving story very powerful story and and just very well-made movie so it's tragic in my view that not more people are seeing it that's I was actually recently just complaining that there's not enough content on the the famine the 30s of you know of of Stu there's so much on Hitler like I love yeah the reading I'm reading it's so long it's been taking me forever the the rise and Falls the Third Reich yeah I I love it but well I've got the book to complement that that you have to read it's called the ominous parallels it's Lon peof and it's the ominous parallels and it's about it's about the causes of the rise of of of Hitler better philosophical causes so whereas the rise and fall is more of a kind of uh uh the the existential kind of what happened um but really delving into the intellectual uh intellectual uh currence that led to the rise of Hitler and maybe highly recommend that and basically suggesting how it might rise another that's the ominous parallel so the parallel he draws is to the United States and he says those same intellectual forces AR rising in the United States and this is this was published I think in published in 81 ' 82 was published in ' 82 so it's published a long time ago and yet you look around us and it's unbelievably predictive sadly about the state of the world so I haven't finished IR Man story I don't want I don't know if you want me to no no no but on that point I'll have to let's please return to it but let's now for now let's talk let me also say just just because I I don't want to forget about Mr Jones it is true the point you made that tons of movies that are anti-fascist anti-nazi and that's good but there are way too few movies that are anti-communist just almost not yeah and it's very interesting and if you remind me later I'll tell you a story about that but um so she publishes Anthem and and then she starts and she's doing okay in Hollywood and and she's doing okay with with the play and then she starts on her on on the book The Fountain Head and she writes The Fountain Head and it comes out um she finishes it in uh 1945 and she's um she sends it to Publishers and publisher after publisher after publisher turn it down and it takes 12 Publishers before this this editor reads it and says I want to publish this book and he basically tells his bosses if you don't publish this the book I'm leaving right um and they don't really believe in the book so they publish just a few copies they don't do a at L and the book becomes a bestseller from word of mouth and they end up having to publish more and more and more and and it's you know she's basically gone from this immigrant who comes here with very little command of English and and to all kinds of odds and ends jobs in Hollywood to you know writing one of the seminal I think Book American books she is an American Author I mean if you read The Fountain Head it's not Russian the not DKI it feel it feels like a symbol of what America is in the 20th century and I mean probably maybe you can so there's a famous kind of sexual rape scene in there is that is that like a lesson you want to throw in some controversial stuff to make your philosophical books work out I mean is that why why was it so popular uh do you have a sense or was well because I think it Illustrated first of all because I think the characters are uh a fantastic it's got a a real hero and I think it the whole book is basically illustrating this massive conflict that I think went on in America then is going on today and it goes on on a big scale politics all the way down to the scale of the choices you make in your life and and this the the issue is individualism versus collectivism should you live for yourself should you live for your values should you pursue your passions uh should you or should you do do what your mother tells you should you follow your mother's passions and uh that's and it's a it's it's very very much an individ a book about individuals and people relate to that but it obviously has this massive implications to the world outside and at the time of collectivism just having been defeated communis well not Fascism and and uh in and you know the United States representing individualism right is defeated defeated collectivism but where collectivist ideas are still popular in the form of socialism and communism and for the individual there's constant struggle between what people tell me to do what Society tells me to do what my mother tells me to do and what I think I should do I think it's unbelievably appealing particularly to young people who trying to figure out what they want to do in life trying to figure out what's important in life um it it it had this enormous appeal it's romantic it's bigger than life the characters are big heroes it's very American in that sense it's about individualism it's about the Triumph of individualism and uh so I I I think that's what related and it had this big romantic element from the I mean when I use romantic I use it kind of in the in the sense of uh um a movement in art but it also has this romantic element in the sense of a relationship between a man and a woman who's that's very intriguing it's not only that there's a uh I would say almost rape scene right um I would say but it's also that this woman is hard to understand I mean I I've I've read it more than once and I still can't quite figure out Dominique right because she loves him and she wants to destroy him and she marries other people I mean think about that too here she's writing a book in the 1940s it's there's lots of sex there's a woman who marries more than one person has having sex with more than one person very unconventional she having married she's having sex with rck even though she's not married to rock this is 1945 and it's um it's very jarring to people it's very unexpected but it's also a book of its time it's about individuals pursuing their passion pursuing their life and not caring about convention and and what people think but doing what they think is right and U and and so so I think it's it's it's uh I encourage everybody to read it obviously so that was was that the first time she articulated start articulated something that's sounded like a philosophy of individualism I mean the philosophy is there in we the living right because at the end of the day the the woman is the the hero of we the living is this individualist stuck in Soviet Union so she's struggling with these things uh so the theme is there already it's not as fleshed out it's not as articulated philosophically and it's suddenly the anthm which is a dystopia novel where the this dystopia in the future has a has uh there's no I everything is we and it's about one guy who breaks out of that I don't want to give it away but but breaks out of that so these themes are running and and then we have and we and they've been published some of the early irand stories that she was writing in preparation for writing her novel stories she was writing when she first came to America and you can see these same philosophical elements even in the male female relationships and the passion and the you know you in the conflict you see them even in those early pieces and she's just developing them and same philosophically she's developing her philosophy with her literature and of course after the Fountain Head she starts on what turns out to be magnos Opus which is at Shrugged uh which takes her 12 years to publish by the time of course she brings that out every publisher in New York wants to publish it because the fountain headit has been such a huge success um they don't quite understand it they don't know what to do with Atlas Shrugged but they're eager to to get it out there and indeed it's when it's published it becomes an instant bestseller and the thing about the particularly the F head and and Al shrug but true of of even anthem and we the living she is one of the only dead authors that sell more after they've died than when they was your alive now you know that's true maybe in music we listen to more Beethoven when he was alive but it's not true typically of novelists and yet here we are uh you know uh what was it 50 you know 60 years after the 63 years after the publication of at Shrugged and it sells probably more today than it sold when it was a bestseller when it first came out is it true that it's like one of the most sold books in history no okay I've heard this kind of statement any Tom Clancy book comes out sells more than atly Shrugged but or read I've heard so there was a very and I shouldn't say this but it's the truth so I'll say it a very unscientific study done by the Smithsonian Institute yeah probably in the early 90s that basically surveyed uh CEOs and asked them what was the most influential book on you and at came out as number two the second most influential book and CEOs in in the country but but there's so many flaws in the study one well you want to guess what the number one book Bible the Bible yeah but the Bible was like you know so maybe they serveed 100 people I don't know what the exact numbers were but let's say it's 100 people and 60 said the Bible and 10 said Atlas Shrug and there were a bunch of books over there so you know I don't that's again the psychology discussion what we're having ex well and it's it's one thing I've learned and maybe Co has taught me and and uh nobody you know there are very few people who know how to do statistics and almost nobody knows how to think probabilistically that is think in terms of probabilities that it is a skill it's a hard skill and everybody thinks they know it so I see doctors thinking their statisticians and giving whole analyses of the data on covid and they don't have a clue what they're talking about not because they're not good doctors because they're not good statisticians it's not e you know people think that they have one skill and therefore it translates immediately into another skill and and it's just not true um so I've been astounded at how how bad people are at that for people who haven't read any of the books that we were just discussing what would you recommend what book would you recommend they read and maybe also just elaborate what mindset should they enter the reading of that book with so I would recommend everybody read Fountain Head and Aly shrug and in what order so it would depend on on where you are in life right so it it depends on who you are and what you are so found head is a more personal story for many people it's their favorite and for many people it was their first book and and they wouldn't replace that right um if Al shrug is a it's about the world right it's about what impacts the world how the world functions how it's a biger book in the sense of the scope if you're that if you're interested in politics and you're interested in the world read Atlas Shrug first if you're mainly focused on your life your career what you want to do with yourself start with fad I still think you should read both because I think they are I mean to me they were life altering and to many many people they're life altering and you should go into reading them with an open mind I'd say and with a put aside everything you've heard about irand put aside any even if it's true just put it aside even what I just said about IR man put it aside just read the book as a book and let it move you and let let let your thoughts let it shape how you think um and and it'll have you know it either have a you'll either have a response to it or you won't uh but I think most people have a very strong response to it and then the question is do they are they willing to respond to the philosop are they willing to integrate the philosophy are they willing to Think Through the philosophy or not because I know a lot of people who completely disagree with the philosop philosop philosophy right here in Hollywood right lots of people here in Hollywood love the Fountain Head interesting Oliver Stone who is I think a a vowed Marxist right I think he's he I think he's admitted to being a Marxist he is his movie certainly reflect a Marxist theme um is a huge fan of the fountain head and is actually his dream project he has said in public his dream project is to make the Fountain Head now he would completely change it as movie directors do and he's actually outlined what his script would look like and it would be a disaster for the ideas of the but he loves the story because to him the story is about Artistic integrity ah yeah and that's what he catches on and what he hates about the story is individualism right and I think that his movie ends with Howard walk joining some kind of commune of Architects that do it for the love and don't do it for the money interesting but so yeah so you can connect with you without the philosop and before we get into the philosophy staying on iron Rand I I'll tell you sort of my own personal experience and I think it's one that people share I've experienced this with two people IR Rand and N when I brought up IR Rand when I was in my early 20s the number of ey rolls I got from sort of you know like advisers and so on that of dismissal I've seen that later in life about more more specific Concept in artificial intelligence and Technical where people decide that this is this is a set of ideas that are acceptable and these sets of ideas are not and they dismissed irand without giving me any justification of why they dismissed her except oh well that's something you're into when you're 19 or 20 that's same thing people say about nature well that's just something you do when you're in college and you take an intro to philosophy course so and I've never really heard anybody cleanly articulate their opposition to IR Rand in in my own private little circles and so on maybe one question I just want to ask is why is there such opposition to iron Rand and maybe another way to ask the same thing is what's misunderstood about iron Rand so we haven't talked about the philosophy so it's harder to answer right now we can return to it if you think that's the right way to go well let me let me give a broad answer and then and then and then we'll do the philosophy and then we'll return to it because I think it's important to know something about her ideas she I think her philosophy challenges everything it it really does it shakes up the world it challenges so many of our preconceptions it challenges so many of the things that people take for granted as Truth uh from religion to morality to to politics to almost everything there never quite been a thinker like her in the sense of really challenging everything and doing it systematically and having a complete philosophy that is a challenge to everything that has come before her now I'm not saying they AR thread that connect they are right in in politics they might be a threat and in immorality they might be a threat but on everything there's just never been like it and people are afraid of that because it challenges them to the course she's basically telling you to rethink almost everything um and that is that that people reject the other thing that it does and this goes to this point about oh yeah that's when you do when you're 14 15 right yeah she points out to them that they've lost something they've lost their idealism they've lost their youthful idealism yeah what is what makes youthfulness meaningful other than you know we're in better physical shape yeah starting to feel because I'm getting older yeah when we're young we you know sometime in the teen years right there's something that happens to human consciousness we almost awaken a new right M we we suddenly discover that we can think for ourselves we suddenly discover that not everything our parents and our teachers tell us is true we suddenly discover that this tool our minds is suddenly available to us to discover the world and to discover truth and it is a time of idealism it's a time of whoa I want to you know the better teenagers I want to know about the world I want to go out there I don't believe my parents I don't believe my teachers and this is healthy this is fantastic and I want to go out there and experiment and and that gets us into trouble right we do stupid things when we're teenagers why because we're experimenting it's the experiential part of it right we want to go and experience life but we're learning it's part of the learning process and and and we become Risk Takers because we want experience but the risk is something we need to learn because we need to learn where the boundaries are and and one of the damages that helicopter parents do is they prevent us from taking those risks so we don't learn about the world and we don't learn about where the boundaries are so the teenage years of these years of Wonder they're depressing when you're in them for a variety of reasons which I think primly have to do with the culture but also with oneself but there are exciting the periods of Discovery and people get excited about ideas and good ideas bad ideas all kinds of ideas and then what happens we settle we compromise whether that happens in college where we're taught that nothing exists and nothing matters and start being be a be annihilist be a cynic be whatever or whether it happens when we get married and get a job and have kids and are too busy and can't think about our ideals and forget and get just get into the norm of conventional life or whether it's because a mother pester us pesters us to get married and have kids and do all the things that she wanted us to do we give up on those ideals and there's a sense in which irand reminds them that they gave up that's beautifully that's so beautifully put and it's so true it's it's worth pausing on that uh this dismissal people forget the the beauty of that Curiosity that's true in the scientific feel too is Uh I that that youthful Joy of like everything is possible and we can understand it with the tools of our mind yes and that's what it's all about that's what Iron Man's ideas at the end of the day all boow down to is that confidence and that passion and that Curiosity and that interest and if you you know think about what Academia does to so many of us right we go into Academia and and we're excited about we're going to learn stuff we're we're going to discover things and then they stick you into sub subfield and examining some minutia that's insignificant and unimportant and and to get published you have to be conventional you have to do what every body else does and then there's the tenure process of seven years where they put you through this torture to write papers that fit into a certain mold and by the time you're done you're in your mid-30s and you've done nothing you discovered nothing you you you're all in this minutia in this stuff and it's destructive and where holding on to that passion holding on to that knowledge and that confidence is hard and when people do away with it they become cynical yeah and they become part of the system and they inflict the same pain on the next guy that they suffered because that's part of how it works yeah there's uh this happens in artificial intelligence this happens when like a young person shows up and with like fire in their eyes and they say I want to understand the nature of intelligence and everybody rolls their eyes be well for these same reasons because they've spent so many years on the very specific set of questions that um that kind of they compete over and they write papers over and they have conferences about and it's true those that incremental research is the way you make progress answering the question of what is intelligence exceptionally difficult but when you mock it you actually destroy the the reality when when we look like centuries from now look back at this time for this particular field of artificial intelligence it will be the people who will be remembered will be the people who asked the question and made it their life journey of what is intelligence and actually had the chance to succeed most will fail asking that question but the ones that like had a chance of succeeding and had that throughout their whole life uh and I suppose the same is true for philosophy it's in every field it's it's it's asking the big questions and staying curious and staying passionate and staying excited and accepting failure right accept accepting that you're not going to get it first time you're not going to get the whole thing but and and sometimes you have to do the minua work and I'm not here to say nobody should specialize or you shouldn't do the Manos you have to do that but there has to be a way to do that work and keep the passion and keep and keep it all integrated that's another thing I mean we don't live in a culture that integrates right we live in a culture that is all that is all about you know this minutia and not and and you know medicine is another field where you you specialize in the kidney I mean the kidney is connected other things you've got to and we don't have a holistic view of these things and I'm sure in artificial intelligence you're not going to make the big leaps forward without a holistic view of what it is you're trying to achieve and maybe that's the question what is intelligence but that's the kind of questions you have to ask to make big leaps forward to really move the field in in a in a positive direction and it's the people who can think that way who move fields and move technology who move ev anything anything is is is everything is like which just like you said is painful because underlying that kind of questioning is well maybe the work I've done for the past 20 years was um was a dead end and you have to kind of face that even just it might not be true but even just facing that reality yes is is just it's a it's a painful feeling absolutely but but it's that's part of the reason why it's important to enjoy the work that you do right so that even if it doesn't completely worked out at least you enjoy the process right it was not a waste because you enjoyed the process and if you learn as as any entrepreneur knows this right and if you learn from the waste of time from the errors from the mistakes then you can build on them and make things even better right and so the next 20 years are are a a massive success can we uh another impossible task so you did wonderfully on talking about Iran the other impossible task of giving a whirlwind overview of the philosophy of objectivism the philosophy of Vine Rand yeah so luckily she did it in an essay you she she talks about doing a philosophy on one foot um but let me integrate it with the literature and with her life a little bit she wanted to be a writer but her goal she had a particular goal in her writing uh she was an idealist right she wanted to portray the ideal man so one of things you do when you want to do is what is an ideal man you have to ask that question what does that mean you might have a sense of it you might have certain glimpses it glimpses of it in other people's literature but what is it so she starts reading philosophy to try to figure out what a Philosophers say about the ideal man and what she finds horrifies her in terms of the view of most philosophers of man and and she's she's attracted certainly when she's young to n because n at least has a vision of of of grandeur for man even though his philosophy is very flawed and has other problems and contradicts man in many ways but at least he has that vision of what is possible to man and she's attracted to that romantic Vision that idealistic Vision so she discovers in writing and particularly in writing out shrug but even in the fountain that she's going to have to develop her own philosophy she's going to have to discover these ideas for herself because they're not fully articulated anywhere else they glimpses again of it in Aristotle in in in N but they're not fully fleshed out so to a large extent she develops a philosophy for a very practical purpose to write to write a novel about the ideal man and and and Al shrug is the manifestation of that by the way sorry to interrupt uh as a little aside she does when you say man you mean human and the and because we'll bring this up often I she does I mean maybe you can elaborate of how she specifically uses man and he in the work we live in a time now of gender so well she did that in in the in the sense that everybody did it during her period of time right it's only in modern times where we do he/ she right it historically when you said he you meant a human being unless the particular context implied that it was a but in Ein man's case in this case in this one sentence she she probably me man not that because she a she viewed that there are differences between men and women were not the same which I know comes at a shock to many people but um she she's working on a character she was working on a particular Vision right yeah she considered herself a man worshipper and a man not not human being a man male she worshiped manhood if you will the the the the the hero in man and she wanted to fully understand what that was now it has massive implications for ideal woman and I think she does put for the ideal woman in in in in Atlas Shrug in the character of dagy but her goal is you know I think her selfish goal for what she wanted to get out of the novel is that excitement partially sexual about seeing your ideal manifest in reality of what you perceive as the that which you would be attracted to yeah fully intellectually physically sexually in every aspect of your life that's what she's trying to bring into so there was no ambiguity of gender so there was a masculinity and a femininity in her work very much so and if you read the novels you you see that you see that now remember this is in the context of in Atlas Shrug she is portraying a woman who runs a railroad the most masculine of all jobs you could imagine right running a railroad better than any man can run it yes and achieving huge success better than any other man out there but but for her even dagney needs somebody to needs a man in some sense to look up to yeah and that's the character who name I won't mention because it gives away too much of the plot but there has to I like how you do that you're good you're not a lot of practice a lot of practice not brilliant cuz you convey all the important things without giving away plot lines that's beautiful you're master so she's so she's very much she she described once as a male chauvinist okay she very she likes the idea of a man opening a DOA but more metaphysically she identifies something in the difference between a way a man relates to a woman and a woman relates to a man it's not the same and let's not take too far of a tangent but I just as a side comment I to me she represented she was a feminist to me perhaps there's a perhaps technically philosophically you disagree with that whatever but the you know that to me represented strong like she had the some of the strongest female characters in the history of literature again this is this is a woman running a railroad in 1957 yeah and not just a woman running a railroad and this is true the fountain hit as well a woman who is sexually in a sense assertive sexually open uh this is this is not a woman who you know this is a woman who who who Embraces her sexuality and uh you know sex is important in life this is why it keeps coming up right it's it was important to i it was it's important in the novels it's important in life and for her one's attitude towards sex is a reflection one's attitude towards life and you know what attitude towards pleasure which is an important part of life and she thought that was an incredibly important thing and so she has these assertive powerful U sexual women who live their lives on their terms 100% who seek a man to look up to yeah now this is psychologically complex it's more psychology than philosophy right it's psychologically complex and you know not my area of expertise but this is there's something in She would argue there's something fundamentally different about a male and a woman about a male and female psychologically in their attitude towards one another yeah but but as a side note I say that uh I would say that I don't know philosophically if her ideas about gender are interesting I think her other philosophical ideas are the much more interesting but reading wise like the stories it created the tension it created um that was pretty powerful I mean that was that's that's pretty powerful stuff I'll speculate that the reason it's so powerful is because it reflects something in reality yeah that's that's true there's a thread that at least and and look she it's it's really important to say she I think she was the first feminist in a sense uh I think in a sense the feminist have proved feminism into something that it shouldn't be but in the sense of men and women are capable she was the first one who really put that into a novel and showed it to me as a as a as a as a boy when I was reading Al shrug I think I read that before F in the head that was one of the early introduction at least of an American woman I had examples in my own life for Russian women but of like aad badass lady like I admire like I love engineering I love that that she could you know here's a lady that's running the show so that at least to me was an example of really strong woman but objectivism objectivism so and and so she developed it for novel she spent the latter part of her life after the publication of atas shrug really articulating her philosophy so that's what she did she applied it to politics to life to gender to all these issues from 1957 until she died in 1982 so the objectivism was born born out of the later parts of atas shrug yes definitely it was there all the time but it it was fleshed out during the later parts of alas shrug and then articulated for the next 20 years so what is objectivism so objectivism so there are five branches in philosophy and it it and so I'm going to just go through the branches she starts with you start with metaphysics the nature of reality and objectivism argues that reality is what it is it's kind of uh goes Hawkins back to Aristotle law of identity a is a you can wish to be be but wishes do not make something real reality is what it is and it is the primary and it was it's it's not it's not manipulated directed by Consciousness Consciousness is there to uh you know to observe to to give us information about reality that is the purpose of Consciousness that is the nature of it so in metaphysics existence exists a it the law of identity the law of causality things are you know the the things act based on their nature not randomly not arbitrarily but based on their nature and then we have the tool to know reality this is epistemology the the theory of knowledge our tool to know reality is reason it's our senses and our capacity to integrate the information we get from our senses and to integrate it into new knowledge and to conceptualize it and uh and and that is uniquely human um uh we don't we don't know the truth from revelation we don't know truth from our emotions our emotions are interesting our emotions tell us something about ourselves but our emotions are not tools of cognition they don't tell us the truth about what's out there about what's in reality so reason is a means of knowledge and therefore me reason is our means of survival only individuals reason just in the same way that only individuals can eat we don't have a collective stomach nobody can eat for me and therefore nobody can think for me I we don't have a collective mind there's no Collective Consciousness none it's it's bizarre that people talk about these collectivized aspects of the mind they don't talk about Collective Feats and Collective stomachs and Collective things but so we all think for ourselves and it is our fundamental basic responsibility to live our lives to live to choose to once we choose to live to live our lives to the best of our ability so in Morality she is an egoist she believes that the purpose of morality is to provide you with a code of values and virtues to guide your life for the purpose of your own success your own Survival your own thriving your own happiness happiness is the moral purpose of your life the purpose of morality is to to guide you towards a happy life your own happiness your own happiness absolutely your own happiness so she rejects the idea that she should live for other people that you should live for the purpose of other people's happiness your purpose is not to make them happy or to make them anything your purpose is your own happiness but she also rejects the idea that you could argue maybe the N idea of you should use other people for your own purposes right so every person is an end in himself every person's responsibility is their own happiness and you shouldn't use other people for your own shouldn't exploit other people for your own happiness and you shouldn't be allow yourself to be exploited for other people every individual is responsible for themselves and what is it that allows us to be happy what is it that facilitates um human flourishing human success human survival well it's the use of our minds right go goes back to reason and what does reason require in order to to be successful in order to to work effectively it requires Freedom so the enemy of reason the enemy of reason is force the enemy of reason is corrosion the enemy of reason is Authority right the Catholic Church doing what they did to Galileo right that restricts Galileo's thinking right when he's in house arrest is he going to come up with a new theory is he going to discover new truths no it it it it's the punishment is too you know it's too dangerous so Force coercion um are enemies of of reason and what reason needs is to be free to to think to to discover to innovate to break out of convention um so we need to create an environment in which individuals are free to reason free to think and to do that we we we come up with a con conceptt historically we've come up with the concept of individual rights individual rights define the scope of Define the fact that we should be left alone free to pursue our values using our reason free of what free of corion Force Authority and that the job of government is to make sure that we are free the whole point of government the whole point of when we come in a social context the whole point of establish a govern in that context is to secure that freedom it's to make sure that I don't use cion on you the governor is supposed to stop me supposed to intervene before I can do that or or if I've already done it to prevent me from doing it again so the purpose of government is to protect our freedom to think and to act based on our thoughts it's to leave individuals free to pursue their values to pursue their happiness to pursue their rational thought and to be left alone to do it and so she rejects socialism which which basically assumes some kind of collective goal assumes the sacrifice of the individual to the group assumes that your moral purpose in life is the well-being of other people rather than your own uh and and she rejects all form of statism all form of government uh that is you know overly uh that that is involved in any aspect other than to protect us from Force coion Authority uh and she rejects Anarchy and we can talk about that I I I I think you had a question in the list of questions you sent me about Anarchy to Michael malice about Anarchy so I don't know if you're familiar with him yes I'm familiar with him so so yeah so she would completely rejects Anarchy anak is completely inconsistent with their point of view and we can talk about why if you want so there's some perfect place where freedom is maximized so systems of government that absolutely and and she thought that the American system of government came close in its idea obviously founded with original sin with the sin of slavery but in its conception the Declaration of Independence is about as perfect a political document as one could write I think the greatest political document in human history but really articulated almost perfectly um and and beautifully and that American system government with the check's Balan balances with which is with its emphasis on individual rights with its emphasis on freedom with its emphasis on lead leaving individual free to pursue their happiness an explicit recognition of Happiness as the goal individual happiness was the model it it wasn't perfect there a lot of problems to a large extent because the founders had mixed philosophical premises so so they were there were alien um uh premises introduced into the founding of the country slavery obviously being the biggest problem uh but it was close and we need to build on that to create an ideal political system that will yes op maximize the freedom of individuals to do exactly this um and then of course she had so that's kind of uh that's the manifestation of this individualism in a political realm and she had a theory of art she had a theory of Aesthetics which is the fifth branch of of of she have metaphysics epistemology ethics and politics and the fifth branch is Aesthetics and she viewed art as an essential human need a fuel for the human spirit and that just like any human need it had certain principles that it had to abide by that is just like there's nutrition right so some food is good for you and some food is bad for you some food some stuff is poison she believed the same is true of Arts that art had an identity which is very controversial today right if you you know today it's if you put a frame around it it is Art right if you put a unal in urinal in a in a museum it becomes art which he thought was was evil and and and ludicrous and she rejected completely uh that art had an identity and that it served a certain function that human beings needed it and if it didn't have not only did it have have the identity but that function was served well by some art and poorly by other art um and then there's a whole realm of stuff that's not art B basically all of all of what today is considered Modern Art she would consider not being art you know splashing paint on a canvas not art um so she had very clear ideas uh she articulated them not so I would say not in conventional philosophical form so she didn't write philosophical essays using the Philosopher's language it's why partially why I think philos phers have never taken us seriously they're actually accessible to us we can actually read them and she integrates the philosophy in what I think amazing ways with psychology with history with economics with politics with what's going on in the world uh and she has dozens and dozens and dozens of essays that she she wrote uh many of them were aggregated into books uh I particularly recommend books like uh uh the virtue of selfishness capitalism the unknown ideal uh and and uh philosophy who needs it and you know it's it's a I think it's a it's a it's a beautiful philosophy uh you know I know you're big on love I think it's a philosophy of love we can talk about that essentially it's about love that's what the philosophy is all about and when it apply in terms of it applying to self um and uh you know I I think it's sad that so few so few people read it and so few intellectuals take it seriously and are willing to engage with it let me ask that was incredible but after that beautiful Whirlwind overview let me ask the most shallow of questions which is the name objectivism of where like how should people think about the name being rooted why not individualism what what are the options if we like had a branding meeting right now sure so she actually had a branding meeting so she she did this she went through the exercise objectivism I do not think I don't know the all the details but I don't think objectivism was the first yeah name she came with the problem was that the other names were taken and they were not positive implications that it so for example rationalism could have been a good word because she's an advocate of rational thought or Reason ISM but reason ISM sounds weird right the ism because of too many s's I guess rationalism but was already a philosophy and it was a philosophy inconsistent with her because it was it was a it was a what she considered a false view of of reason of rationality um realism you know just doesn't work so she came in objectivism and I think actually it's a great word it it's a great name because it it's it has two aspects to it and this is a unique view of what objectivity actually means in objectivism in objectivity is the idea of an independent reality there is truth mhm there's actually something out there that we and then there's the role of Consciousness right there is the role of figuring out the truth the truth doesn't just hit you the truth is not in the thing you have to discover it it's that it's that a Consciousness applied to that's what objectivity is right it's you discovering the truth in reality it's your Consciousness interacting and thereby pulls in the individual in that sense and only the individual could do it now the problem with individualism is it would have made the philosophy too political right and she always said so she said she said I'm an advocate of capitalism because I'm really an advocate for rational egoism but I'm a rational for I'm an advocate for rational egoism really because I'm an advocate for reason so she viewed the essential of her philosophy as being this uh reason and her her particular view of reason and she has a whole book she has a book called uh introduction to objectivist epistemology which I encourage any scientist mathematician anybody interested in science to read because it is a tur of force on on on in a sense this the the the what it means to hold Concepts and what it means to discover new discoveries and to use to use Concepts and how we use Concepts and she has a theory of Concepts that is completely new that is completely revolutionary and I think is essential for the philosophy of science and therefore ultimately for the more abstract we get with scientific discoveries the easy it is to detach them from reality and to detach them from truth the easier it is to be inside our heads instead of about what's real and they're probably examples from monop physics that fit that and I think what she teaches in the book is how to ground your Concepts and how to bring them into grounding in reality so introduction to objectivist epistemology and note that it's only an introduction because one of the things she realized one of the things that I think a lot of her critics don't give enough credit for is that philosophy is there's no no end right it's always growing there always new discoveries there's always it's you know it's like science there's always new things and and there's a ton of work to do in in philosophy uh and particularly in epistemology and Theology and she was actually giving you interest in mathematics she was she actually saw a lot of parallels between math and concept formation and she was actually you know in the years before she died she was taking private lessons in mathematics in algebra and calculus because she believed that there was real insight in understanding algebra in calculus to um philosophy into epistemology and and she also was very interested in Neuroscience because she believed that that had a lot to tell us about epistemology but also about music therefore about Aesthetics so I mean she recognized the importance of all these different fields and how and and the beauty of philosophy is it should be integrating all of them and one of the sad things about the world in which we live is again we view these things as silos we don't view them as integrating we don't have teams of people from different Arena you know different fields you know discovering things we we we become like ants specialized so she was definitely uh like that and she was constantly curious constantly interested in in the in discoveries and new ideas and and how this could expand the scope of her philosophy and the application of her philosophy there's like a million topics I can talk to you but since you mentioned math I'm almost only got three hours only I'm almost curious uh I don't know if you're familiar with Gay's incompleteness theorem I'm not unfortunately okay it was a a powerful proof that any axiomatic systems when you start from a bunch of axioms that there will in that system provably must be an inconsistency so that was this painful like stab in the idea of mathematics that no if we start with a set of assumptions kind of like an started with objectivism Y there will have to be at least one contradiction see I I intuitively I'm going to say that's false philosophically but in math it's just true and it's it's a question about how you define again the definitions matter and you have to be careful on how you define axioms and you have to be careful about what you define as an inconsistency and what that means to say there's an inconsistency and I don't know I'm not going to say more than that because I don't know but I'm suspicious that there is some uh and this is the power philosophy and this is why I said before concept formation is so important and understanding concept formation is so important from for particularly again mathematics because it's such an abstract field and it's so easy to lose grounding in in reality that that if you properly Define axioms and you properly Define what you're doing in math whether that is true and I I don't think it is this is uh yeah we'll leave it as an open mystery cuz actually this audience you know there's literally over 100,000 people that have PG and so they they know G's the complet theorem I I I have this intuition that there's something different to mathematics and philosophy that I'd love to hear from people like what what exactly is that difference because um there's a Precision to mathematics that philosophy doesn't have but that Precision gets you in trouble it somehow it actually takes you away from truth like the the very constraint of the language used in mathematics actually puts a constraint on the on the capture of truth that it's able to do so I'm going to argue that that is a comp a total product of the way you're conceptualizing the the terms within mathematics it's not in reality yes so it's you would argue it's in the fact that mathematics in in as much as is detached from reality that you can do these kinds of things yes and and you and you've and that mathematicians have uh come up with Concepts that they haven't grounded in reality properly that allows them to go off on on in places that have that don't lead to truth that's right that don't lead to truth but I encourage you then I encourage you to to to to do one of these uh podcast with one of our philosophers who know more about uh about this stuff um and if you if you move to Austin I've got somebody I'd recommend to you and can you throw a name out or no yeah I mean I would I would I would talk to GRE sary you say hour can you say what you mean by hour I'd say people who are affiliated with the adman Institute of philosophers were affiliated with objectivism right and Greg is one of our one of our brightest and and he's in Austin he's just got a position at at UT uh at the University of Texas uh and he and he one on Kate would be another one who actually works at the Institute and a chief philosophy officer at The Institute that's awesome and uh and there are others who specialize in Phil of science who who I think Greg could probably uh give you a lead but but these are unbelievably smart people who know this part of the philosophy much better than I do what uh can you just briefly perhaps say what is the irand Institute yeah so the irand Institute was a organization founded um three years after Iran died she died in 1982 and it was founded in 1985 to promote her ideas to make sure that her ideas and her novels are uh continued in the culture and were relevant well they they're relevant but what the people saw the relevance so our mission is to get people to read her books to engage in the ideas we teach we have a the objective is the academic center where we teach the philosophy uh primarily to graduate students and others who take the ideas seriously and who really want a a a deep understanding of the the philosophy and uh we apply the ideas so we take the ideas and apply them to ethics to philosophy to issues of the day um which is more my strength and more what what I tend to do I've you know I've never I've never formally studied philosophy so uh um all my education in philosophy is informal and um you know I'm an engineer and a finance guy that's that's my background so I'm I'm a numbers guy well let me uh I feel pretty under educated I have a pretty open mind which sometimes can be painful on the internet because people mock me or you know you know if I say something nuanced about communism people people immediately kind of put you in a bin or something like that it's it hurts to be open-minded to say I don't know to ask the question why is uh communism or Marxism so problematic why is capitalism problematic and so on but let me nevertheless go into that Direction with you uh maybe uh let's talk about capitalism a little bit how does objectivism compare relate to the idea of capitalism well first we have to Define what capitalism is because again people use capitalism in all kinds of ways and I know you had Ray Dalo on on your show Once I haven't I need to listen to that episode but Ray has no clue what capitalism is and that's that's that's that's his big problem um so when he when he says the real problems today in capitalism he's not talking about capitalism he's talking about problems in the world today and I agree with many of the problems but they have nothing to do with capitalism um capitalism is this is is a social political economic system in which uh all property is privately owned and in which the only role of government is the protection of individual rights I think it's the ideal system I think it's the right system for the reasons we talked about earlier it's a system that leaves you as an individual to pursue your values your life your happiness free of corosion of force and if and and you get to decide what happens to you and I get to decide if to help you or not right if you let's say you fall flat on your face people always say well what about the poor well if you if you care about the poor help them right just don't you know what do you need a government for you know I always ask audiences um okay if if there's a if there's a poor kid who can't afford to go to school and all the schools are private because capitalism is being instituted um and he can't go to school would you be willing to participate in a fund that that pays for his education every hand in the room goes up so what do you need government for just let's let's let's get all the money together and pay for schooling so the point is that what capitalism does is leave individuals free to make their own decisions and as long as they're not violating other people's rights in other words as long as they're not using cision force on other people then leave them alone and and people are going to make mistakes and people are going to screw up their lives and people are going to commit suicide people are going to do terrible things to themselves that is fundamentally their problem and if you want to help you under capitalism are free to help it's just the only thing that doesn't happen under capitalist is you don't get to impose your will on other people now how's that a bad thing so the the question then is how does uh the implementation of capitalism uh deviate from its ideal mhm in practice I mean this is what is the question with a lot of systems is how does it start to then fail so one thing maybe you can correct me or inform me it seems like information is very important like being able to uh make decisions to be free you have to have access full access of all the information you need to make rational decisions no that can be because it can be right because none of us has full access to all the information we need I mean what does that even mean and how how big how how much of the scope do you want to do right let's just start there yeah don't so you need you need to have access to information so one of the big criticisms of capitalism is there's asymmetrical information the drug maker has more information about the drug than the drug buyer right pharmaceutical drugs um true it's a problem well I wonder if one can think about an entrepreneur can think about how to solve that problem see I view any one of these challenges to capitalism as an opportunity for entrepreneur to make money and and they have the freedom to do it yeah so imagine an entrepreneur steps in and says I will test all the drugs that drug companies make and I will provide you for a fee with with the answer and how do I know he's not he's not going to be corrupted well there'll be other ones and they'll compete and who am I to tell which one of these is the right one well it won't be you really getting the information from them it'll be your doctor the doctors need that information so the doctor who has some expertise in medicine will be evaluating which rating agency to use to evaluate the drugs and which ones then to recommend to you so do we need an FDA do we need a government that siphons all the information to One Source that does all the research all the thing and has a clear incentive by the way not to approve drugs there's only because they don't make any money from it they nobody pays them for the information nobody pays them to be accurate they're bureaucrats at the end of the day and what is a bureaucrat what's the main focus of a bureaucrat even if they go in with the best of intentions which I'm sure all the scientists that the FDA have the best of intentions what's their incentive the the system builds in this incentive not to screw up because one drug gets P you and does damage you lose your job but if a 100 drugs that could cure cancer tomorrow don't ever get to Market nobody's going to nobody's going to come after you yeah and you're saying that's not that's not a mechanism that's um the marketplace is competition so if you won't approve the drug if I still think it's possible I will and it's not 01 you see the other thing that happens with the FDA is 01 it's either approved or it's not approved mhm oh it's approved for this but it's not approved for that but what if what if what if a drug came out and and and you said right you told the doctors this drug in 10% of the cases can cause patients an increased risk of heart disease you and your patients should we're not we're not forcing you but you should right it's your medical responsibility to evaluate that and decide if the drug is appropriate or not why don't I get to make that choice if I want to take on the 10% risk of heart disease so there was a drug and right now I forget the name but it was a drug uh against pain particularly arthritic pain and it worked it reduced pain dramatically right and some people tried everything and this was the only drug that reduced their pain and it turned out that in 10% of the cases it it caused the elevated risk didn't kill people necessarily but it caused elevated risk of heart disease okay what did the FDA do it banned the drug some people I know a lot of people who said living with pain is much worse than taking on a 10% risk again probabilities right people don't think in those numbers 10% risk of maybe getting heart disease why don't I get to make that choice why does some bureaucrat make that choice for me that's capitalism capitalism gives you the choice not you as an ignorant person you with your doctor and and a whole Marketplace which is not created to provide you with information and think about think about a world where we didn't have all these regulations and controls the the the the the amount of opportunities that would exist to create to provide information to educate you about that information would mushroom dramatically you know Bloomberg you know the billionaire Bloomberg you know how did he make his money he made his money by providing financial information by creating this service called Bloomberg that you buy a terminal and you get all this amazing information and he was before computers desktop computers I mean he was very early on in that whole Computing Revolution but his Focus was providing financial information to professionals and you hire a professional to manage your money that's the way it's supposed to be you know you have to have so you as an individual cannot have all the knowledge you need in medicine all the knowledge you need in finance all the knowledge you need in every aspect of your life you can't do that you have to delegate and you you hire a doctor now you should be able to figure out if the doctor's good or not you should be able to ask doctors for reasons for why and you have to make the decision at the end but that's why you have a doctor that's why you have a financial advisor that's why you have different people who you're delegating certain aspects of your life to but you want choices and what the marketplace provides is those choices so let's let me then this is this is what I do I'll make a dumb case for things and then you shut me down and then the internet says how dumb Lex is this is good this is how it works good at shutting down and and they're foolish in uh blaming you for the question because you're here to ask me questions let's let's make let me make a case for socialism so it's going to be bad because that's the only case there is for socialism that's reality so then perhaps it's not a case for socialism but just a certain notion that inequality the wealth and inequality that uh the bigger the gap between the poorest or the average and the richest the the more painful it is to be average psychologically speaking if you know that there is the CEOs of companies make 300 a th000 1 million times more than you do that makes life for a large part of the population less fulfilling that there's a relative notion to the experience of our life that even though everybody's life has gotten better over the past decades and centuries it may feel actually worse because you know that life could be so so much better in the life of these CEOs that uh yeah that Gap is fundamentally uh a thing that is undesirable in a society everything about that is wrong [Music] okay I like to start off like that yeah which so yeah I mean so my wife likes to remind me that as well as we've done in life we are actually from a wealth perspective closer to a homeless person than we are to Bill Gates just the math right just the math right it's a good go check when I look at Bill Gates I get a smile on my face I love Bill Gat I've never met Bill Gates I love Bill Gates yeah I I love what he stands for I love that he has hundred billion dollar I love that he has built a trampoline room in his house where his kids can jump up and down in a trampoline in a safe environment can we take another billionaire because I'm not if you're sure if you're paying attention but there's all kinds of conspiracy theories about Bill Gates so let well but that's part of the story right they have to pull him down because people resent him for other reason that's strange but yes we can take Jeff Bezos we can sa you know my favorite stoically just because I I like I like a lot about him was was Steve Jobs um I mean I love these people and I can't there are very few billionaires I don't love in a sense that I appreciate everything they've done for me for people I cherish and love they've made the world a better place why would it ever cross my mind that they make me look bad because they're richer than me or that I don't have what they have they've made me so much richer that they've made inventions that used to cost millions and millions and millions of dollars accessible to me I mean this is a supercomputer in my pocket now but think about it right what is the difference between and and I'll get to the essence of your point in a minute but think about what the difference is between me and Bill Gates in terms of because it's true that in terms of wealth I'm closer to the homeless person but in ter in in terms of my day-to-day life I'm closer to Bill Gates you know we both live in a nice house his is nicer but we live in a nice house his is bigger but mine is plenty big we both drive cars his is nicer but we both drive cars cars 100 years ago what cause we both fly can fly get on a plane in Los Angeles and fly to New York and get there about the same time we're both flying private the only difference is my private plane I share with 300 other people and here's but it's accessible it's relatively comfortable again in the perspective of 50 years ago 100 years ago it's unimaginable that I could fly like that for for such a low feet we live very similar lives in that sense um so I don't resent him so first of all I'm an exception to the supposed rule that people resent I don't think anybody I don't think people do resent unless they're taught to resent and this is the key people are taught and I've seen this in America and this is to me the most horrible shocking thing that has happened in America over the last 40 years I came to America so I'm an immigrant I came to America from Israel in 1987 and I came here because I thought this was the place where I could where it had the most opportunities and it is most opportunities and I came here cuz I believ there was some a certain American Spirit of individualism and exactly the opposite of what you just described a a a sense of I live my life it's my happiness I'm not looking at my neighbor I'm not competing with the Joneses the American dream is my dream my two kids my dog my station wagon not because other people have it because I want it and that sense and when I came here in the 80s you had that you had you still had it it it it was less than I think it had been in the past but you had that Spirit there was no Envy there was no resentment there were rich people and and they were celebrated there was still this admiration for entrepreneurs and admiration for Success not by everybody certainly not by the intellectuals but by the average person I have witnessed particularly over the last 10 years a complete transformation and America's become like Europe I know are you Russian yeah yeah it's become Russian in a sense where you know they've always done these studies um you know I'll give you $100 and your neighbor $100 or I'll give you or is it or give you uh ,000 but your neighbor gets $10,000 and a Russian will always choose the $100 right he he he wants equality above being better himself yeah Americans would always choose that Gap sense is not anymore and it's changing because we've been told it should change and morally you're saying that doesn't make any sense so there's no sense in which let me put another spin I forget the book but the sense of if you're working for Steve Jobs and you your hands you're the engineer behind the iPhone and there's a sense in which his salary is stealing from your efforts because I forget the book right that's literally the terminology is used this this is straight out of K MOX well sure it's it's also straight but out of car MOX but like there's no sense morally speaking that you see that the other way around that engineer stealing off of and and it's not stealing right it's not but the engineer getting more from from Steve Jobs by a lot not by a little bit than Steve Jobs is getting from the engineer the engineer even if they're a great engineer they're probably other great Engineers that could replace him would he even have a job without Steve Jobs would the industry exist without Steve Jobs without the Giants that carry these things forward and let me ask you this I mean you're a scientist yes do you resent Einstein for being smarter than you I mean you NVM do you are you angry with him would you would you would you feel negative towards him if he was in the room right now or would you if you came into the room you'd say oh my God I mean you interview people who I think some of them are probably smarter than you and me yeah for sure and your attitude towards them is one of reverence well one interesting little side question there is what is the natural state of being for us humans you kind of implied education has uh polluted our minds but like if I because you're referring to jealousy the Einstein question the Steve Jobs question I wonder which way if we're left without education would we naturally go so there is no such thing as the Natural State in that sense right this is this is the myth of of Russo's uh uh noble savage and of John Walls is behind the veil of ignorance well if you're ignorant you're ignorant there you can't make any decisions you're just ignorant you're there is no human nature that determines how you will relate to other people you will relate to other people based on the conclusions you come to about how to relate to other people you can relate to other people as values to use your terminology from the perspective of love this other human being is a value to me and I want to trade with them and trade the beauty of trade is its win-win I want to benefit and they are going to benefit I don't want to screw them I don't want them to screw me I want this to be win-win or you can deal with other people as threats as enemies much of human history we have done that and therefore as a zero sum world what they have I want uh I I will take it I will use Force to take it I will use political force to take it I will use the force of my arm to take it I will just take it so um those are two options right and and they will determine whether we live in ization or not and they are determined by conclusions people come to about the world and the nature of reality and the nature of morality and the nature of politics and all these things they're determined by philosophy and this is why philosophy is so important because so philosophy shapes it's Evolution doesn't do this it doesn't just happen ideas shape how we relate to other people and you say well little children do it well little children don't have a fontal cortext why it's not relevant right what happens with as you develop a fontal cortex as you develop the brain you learn ideas and those ideas will shape how you relate to other people and if you learn good ideas you relate to other people in a healthy productive win-win and if you develop bad ideas you will resent other people and you will want their stuff and the thing is that human progress depends on the win-win relationship it depends depends on civilization depends on peace it depends on allowing people going back to what we talked about earlier allowing people the freedom to think for themselves and anytime you try to interrupt that you're causing damage so this change in America is not some reversion to a natural state it's a shift in ideas we we still live the better part of American society and the world still lives on the remnants of the Enlightenment the Enlightenment ideas uh the ideas that brought about this scientific revolution ideas that brought about the creation of this country and it's the same basic ideas that led to both of those and as those ideas get more distant as those ideas are not defended as those ideas disappear as Enlightenment goes away we will become more violent more resentful more tribal more obnoxious more unpleasant more primitive a very specific example of this though that bothers me i' be curious to get your comment on so Elon Musk is a billionaire yeah and one of the things that really maybe it's almost a pet peeve it it really bothers me when the press and the general public will say well all those rocket they're sending up there those are just like the toys the games that billionaires play that to me billionaire has become a dirty word to use like as if money can buy or has anything to do with Genius Like I I'm trying to articulate a specific um line of uh question here because it's just it just bothers me I guess the question is like why how do we get here and how do we get out of that because Elon Musk is doing some of the most incredible things that a human being has ever participated in mostly not he doesn't build the Rockets himself he's getting a bunch of other Geniuses together that have that takes genius that takes genius but why where did we go and how do we get back to where Elon Musk is an inspiring figure as opposed to a billionaire playing with some toys so this is the role of philosophy it goes back to the same place it goes back to our understanding of the world and our role in it and if you understand that the only way to become a billionaire for example is to create value value for whom value for people who are going to consume it the only way to to become a billionaire the only way Elon Musk became a billionaire is through PayPal now PayPal is something we all use PayPal is an enormous value to all of us it's why it's worth several billions of dollars which Alon musk could then you know earn but you cannot become a billionaire in a free Society by exploiting people you cannot because you'll be you'll be laughed nobody will deal with you nobody will have any interactions with you the only way to become a billionaire is to do billions of win-win transactions so the only way to become a billionaire in a fee Society is to change the world to make it a better place billionaires are the the great humanitarians of our time not because they give charity but because they make them billions and it's true that money and genius are not necessarily correlated but you cannot become a billionaire without being super smart you cannot become a billionaire by figuring something out that nobody else has figured out in whatever realm it happens to be and that thing that you figure out has to be something that provides immense value to other people where do we go wrong we go wrong our culture goes wrong because it views billionaires as self-interested as selfish and there's a sense in which and not a sense it's absolutely true the billionaire doesn't ask for my opinion on what product to launch Elon Musk doesn't ask others what they think he should spend his money on what the greatest social well-being will be Ellen I mean there a sense in which the Rockets areest toys there's a sense in which he chose that he would have he would be inspired the most yes he would have the most fun by going to Ms and building rockets and he he's probably dreamt of rockets from when he was a kid and probably always played with rockets and now he has the funds the capital to be able to deploy it so he's being selfish obviously he's being self-interested this is what Elon Musk is about I mean uh the same with with uh Jeff beus there's no committee to decide with whether to invent you know to to invest in cloud computing or not BOS decided that and at the end of the day they are the bosses they pursue the values they believe are good they pursue they create the wealth it's their decisions it's their mind and the fact is we live in a world where for 2,000 plus years self-interest even though we all do it to small extent or the less we deem it as abhorent it's bad it's wrong I mean your mother probably taught you the same thing my mother taught me think of others first think of yourself last the good stuff is kept for the guests you never get to use the good stuff you know it's others that's what the focus of morality is now no mother even no Jewish mother actually believes that right because they don't really want you to be last they want you to be first and they push you to be be first but morally they've been taught their entire lives and they believe that the right thing to say and to some extent do is to argue for sacrifice for other people right so most people 99% of people are torn yeah they they know they should be selfless sacrifice live for other people they don't really want to so they act selfishly in their day-to-day life and they feel guilty and they can't be happy they can't be happy and Jewish Mothers and Catholic mothers are excellent at using that guilt to manipulate you but the guilt is inevitable because you you've got these two conflicting things the way you want to live and the way you've been taught to live and what objectivism does is it at the end of the day provides you with the way to unite morality a proper morality with what you want and to think about what you really want to to conceptualize what you really want properly so what you want is really good for you and what you want will really lead to your happiness so you know we reject the idea of sacrifice we reject the idea of living for other people but that's but you see if if if you believe if you believe that the purpose of morality is to sacrifice for other people and you look at Jeff Bezos when was the last time he sacrificed anything right he's living pretty well he's got billions he could give it all away and yet he doesn't how dare he you know in my in my talks I often position and I'm going to use Bill Gates sorry guys dro the conspiracy theory they're all Bs complete and utter nonsense there's not a shred of Truth he you know I disagree with Bill Gates on everything political I think he politically is a complete ignoramus but the guy's a genius when it comes to technology and and when he's just thoughtful even in his philanthropy he just uses his mind and I respect that even though politically he terrible anyway think about this who who had a bigger impact on the lives of poor people in the world Bill Gates or Mother Teresa Bill Gates it's not even close and Mother Teresa lived this altruistic life to the core she lived it consistently and yet she was miserable pathetic horrible she hated her life she she she she was miserable and most of people she helped didn't do very well because she just helped them not die right yeah and then Bill Gates changed all and he helped a lot of by providing technology even philanthropy gets to them the food gets them much F more efficient yet who is them all Saint sainthood is not determined based on what you do for other people Saint it is based on how much how much pain you suffer I like to ask people to go to a museum and look at all the paintings of saints how many of them are smiling and are happy they've used to got arrows through them and holes in their body and they're just suffering a horrible death the whole point of the morality we are taught is that happiness is immorality that ha happy people cannot be good people and that good people suffer and that suffering is necessary for Morality morality is about sacrifice self-sacrifice and and suffering and at the end of the day almost all the problems in the world boil down to that false view so can we try to talk about part of it the problem of the word selfishness but let's talk about the virtue of selfishness so let's start at the fact that for me I really enjoy doing stuff for other people I enjoy being uh cheering on the success of others why I don't know it's deep think about it why cuz I think you do know if I were to really think I I don't I don't want to resort to like evolutionary arguments are like this is so I I think so I can tell you why I enjoy helping others maybe you can go there like one thing cuz we'll should talk about love a little bit I'll tell you there there's a part of me that's a little bit not rational like there's a gut that I follow that uh not everything I do is perfectly rational like for example my dad uh criticizes me he says like you should always have a plan like it it should make sense you have a strategy and and and I say that you know I left I stepped down for my full cell position on MIT I there's so many things I did without like a plan it's the gut it's like I want to start a company well you know how many companies fail I don't know I % I it's a gut and the same thing of being kind to others is is a gut like I watch the way that Karma Works in this world that the people like us one guy look up to his Joe Rogan that he does stuff for others and that the joy he experiences the way he sees the world like just the the the glimmer in his eyes because he does stuff for others that creates a joyful experience and that somehow is seems to be an instructive way to that to me is inspiring of a of a life well lived but you probably know a lot of people who have done stuff others were not happy true so I don't think it's the doing stuff for others that just brings the happiness it's why you do stuff for others and what else you're doing in your life and and what what is the what is the proportion but it's why at the end of the day which is which is and it's the same look you can you can maybe through a gut feeling say I want to start a company but you better start doing thinking about how and what and all of that and to some extent the why because if you really want to be happy doing this you may better make sure you're doing it for the right reason so I'm not you know there's something called Fast thinking colan the the the the the the Daniel Conan no Daniel colan talks about and and there is it's it's it's you know all the Integrations you've made so far in your life cause you to have specialized knowledge in certain things and you can think very fast and and and your gut tells you what that what the right answer is it's but it's not it's it's your mind is constantly evaluating and constantly working um you want to make it as rational as you can not in the sense that I have to think through every time I make a decision but that they've so programmed my mind in a sense that the answers are the right answers you know in in in uh when I get them so you know I like I view other people as a value other people contribute enormously to my life uh whether it's a romantic love relationship or whether it's a friendship relationship or whether it's just you know Jeff Bezos creating Amazon and and delivering goodies to my home when I get them and and and people do all that right it's not just Jeff Bezos he gets the most credit but everybody in that chain of command everybody at Amazon is working for me I love that I love the idea of a human being I love the idea that there are people capable of of being an Einstein of being you know and and creating and building and making stuff that makes my life so good I you know most of us like this is not a good room for an example most of us like plants right we like pets I don't particular but people like pets why we like to see life yeah human beings are life on steroids right they're life with a brain it's amazing right what they can do I love people now that doesn't mean I love everybody because there's some they really bad people out there who I hate right and I do hate and there are people out there that are just I have no opinion about but generally the idea of a human being to me is a phenomenal idea when I see a baby I light up because to me there's a potential you know uh there's a there's this magnificent potential that is embodied in that and when I see people struggling and need help I think they're human beings they you know they embody that potential they embody that goodness they might turn out to be bad but why would I ever give the presumption of that I give them the presumption of the positive and I cheer them on and and I and I and I enjoy watching people succeed seed I enjoy watching people get to the top of the mountain and and produce something even if I don't get anything directly from it I enjoy that because it's part of my enjoyment of life so the word so to you the morality of selfishness this kind of love of other human beings the love of Life fits into a morality of selfishness can't not because it it's it you there's no context in which you can truly love yourself without loving life and loving what it means to be human so you know the love of yourself is going to manifest yourself differently in different people but it's core what do you love about yourself you you first of all I love I love that I'm alive I love that I you know I not love this world and the opportunities it provides me and the the the fun and the excitement of discovering something new and meeting a new person and and having a conversation uh you know all of this is is is is immen enjoyable but behind all of that is is a particular human capability that not only I have other people have and the fact that they have it makes my life so much more fun because so it's it's you cannot view you know it's all integrated and you cannot view yourself in isolation now that doesn't that doesn't place a moral commandment on me uh help everybody who's poor that you happen to meet in the street it doesn't place a burden on me in a sense that now I have this moral duty to help everybody it leaves me free to make decisions about who I help and who I don't there's some people who I will not help there's some people who I do not wish positive things upon bad people should have bad outcomes bad people should suffer so and you have the freedom to choose who's good who's bad within your your decision based on your values now I think there's an objectivity to it there's a there's a standard by which you should valuate good versus bad and that standard should be to what extent that they contribute or hurt human life the standard is human life and so when I say look at the Jeff beos I say he's contributing to HBA life good guy I might disagree with him on stuff we might disagree about politics we might disagree about women women dis I don't know what we agree but overall big picture he is pro-life right I look at somebody like you know to take like 99.9% of our politicians and they are pro death they're Pro destruction they're Pro cutting Corners in ways that destroy human life and human potential and human ability so I literally hate almost every politician out there and I wish ill on them right I don't want them to be successful or happy I want them all to go away right leave me alone so I Believe In Justice I believe good things should happen to good people and bad things should happen to bad people so I can I make those generalizations based on this one you know on the other hand if you know I shouldn't say all politicians right so if I you know I love Thomas Jefferson and and and George Washington right I love Abraham Lincoln I love people who fought for freedom and who believed in Freedom who had this ideas and who lived up to at least in parts of their lives to those principles now do I think Tom jeffson was flawed because he held slaves absolutely but the virtues way outweigh that in my view and I understand people who don't accept that you don't have to also love and hate the entirety of the person there parts that person that you that you're attracted the major part is pro-life and therefore I'm Pro that person and and I think and I said earlier that objectivism is philosophy of love and I I I believe that because objectivism is about your life about loving your life about embracing your life about engaging with the world about loving the world in which you live about win-win relationships with other people which means to a large extent loving the good in other people and the and the best in other people and encouraging that and supporting that and promoting that so I know selfishness is a harsh word because the culture is given it that harshness selfishness is a harsh word because the people who don't like selfishness want you to believe it's a harsh word but it's not what does it mean it means focus on self it means take care of self it means make yourself your highest priority not your only priority because in taking care self what would me what what would I be without my wife what would I be with without the people who are who who who support me who help me who who who I have these love relationships with it it so other people are crucial what would my life be without you know Steve J Steve Jobs right a lot of uh things you mentioned here are just be beautiful so one is win-win so one key thing about this uh selfishness and the idea of objectivism is a philosophy of Love is that you don't want parasitism so that goes that is unethical so you actually first of all you say it win-win a lot and I I just like that terminology because it's a good way to see life it's try to maximize the number of win-win interactions absolutely that's a good way to see business actually right well life generally I think every aspect of life you you want to have a win-win relationship with your wife imagine if it was win lose either way if you win and she loses how long is that going to sustain so win lose relationships are not in equilibrium what they turn into is lose lose like win lose turns into lose lose and the so the alternative the only alternative to lose lose is win- win and you win and the person you love wins what's better than that right that's the way to maximize so like the selfishness is you're trying to maximize the win but the way to maximize the win is to to maximize the win win yes and and it turns out and Adam Smith understood this a long time time ago that if you focus on your own winning while respecting other people as human beings then everybody wins and the beauty of capitalism if we go back to capitalism for a second the beauty of capitalism is you cannot be successful in capitalism without producing values that other people appreciate and therefore willing to buy from you and they buy them at and and this goes back to that question about the engineer and Steve Jobs why is the engineer working there because he's getting paid more than his time is worth to him I know people don't like to think in those terms but that's the reality if his time is worth more to him than what he's getting paid he would leave so he's winning and is Apple winning yes because they're getting more productivity from him they're getting more from him than what he's actually producing it's it's tough it's tough because there's uh human psychology and imperfect information it just makes it a little messier than the the clarity of thinking you have about this it just you know because I for sure but not everything in life is an economic transaction It ultimately is close but even if it's not an economic transaction even if it's a if it's a if it's a relationship transaction when you get to a point with a friend where you're not gaining from the relationship friendship's going to be over not immediately because it takes time for these things to manifest itself and to really absorb and to but we change friendships we change our loves right we fall in and out of love love we fall out of love because we're not love so let's let's go back to love right love is the most selfish of all emotions love is about what you do to me right so I love my wife because she makes me feel better about myself yeah so you know the idea of Selfless Love is bizarre so Ein Rand used to say before you say I love you you have to say the I and you you have to know who you are and you have to appreciate yourself if you hate yourself what does it mean to love somebody else so my I love my wife CU she makes me feel great about the world yeah and she lives me for the same reason and so I Randy used to use this example imagine you go up to your um to be spouse the night before the wedding and you say you know I get nothing out of this relationship I'm doing this purely as an act of noble self-sacrifice she would slap you yeah as she should right so it no we know this intuitively that love is selfish but we afraid to admit it to ourselves and why because the other side has convinced us that selfishness is associated with exploiting other people yeah selfishness means lying cheating stealing walking on corpses backstabbing people but is that ever in your self-interest truly right I you know I I I'll offer be in front of an audience to say okay how many people here have lied you know kidding right how many of you think that that if you did that consistently that would make your life better nobody thinks that right because everybody's experienced how shitty lying not because of how it makes you feel out of a sense of guilt existentially just a bad strategy yeah right you get caught you have to create other lies to cover up the previous lie it screws up with your own psychology and your own cognition you know the mind to some extent like a computer right is an integrating machine and in computer science I understand there's a term called garbage in garbage out lying is garbage in yeah so it's not good strategy cheating uh screwing your customers in a business not paying your suppliers as a businessman not good business practices not good practices for being alive so win-win is both model and practical in the beauty of ir man's philosophy and I think this is really important is that the model is the Practical and the Practical is the m and therefore if you are marrow you will be happy yeah that that's the the con that's why the application of the philosophy of objectivism is so easy to practice so like or to discuss or possible to discuss that's why you talk about clearcut I'm not ambiguous about my view and it's fundamentally practical I mean that's the best of philosophies is is practical yes it's in a sense teaching you how to live a good life and it's teaching you how to live a good life not just as you but as a human being and therefore the principles that apply to you probably apply to me as well and if we both share the same principles of how to live a good life we're not going to be enemies when you brought up Anarchy earlier uh it's an interesting question because you've kind of said politicians I mean part of it just is a little bit joking but politicians are you know not good people yeah so but we should have some so so you you have an opposition to anarchism so they first of all they want always not bad people that is I gave examples of people who engage in political life who I think were good people basically um and and but they think they get worse over time if the system is corrupt and I think the system fortunately even the American system as good as it was was founded on quicksand and have corruption built in uh they didn't quite get it and and they needed Iran to get it I'm not blaming them I don't think they they show any blame you needed a philosophy in order to completely fulfill the promise that is America the promise that is the founding of America so the the place where corruption sneaked in is a lack in some way of the philosophy underlying the nation absolutely so so the it's it's Christianity it's it's it's you know not they hit on another controversial topic it's religion uh which un which undercut their morality so the founders were explicitly Christian and and altruistic in their morality implicitly in terms of their actions they were completely secular and they were they were very secular anyway but in their morality even they were secularist so there's nothing in Christianity that says that the that the you have an inable right to pursue happiness that's unbelievably self-interested and a and a based on on kind of a m philosophy of ego of egoistic moral philosophy but they didn't know that and they didn't know how to ground it they implicitly they had that fast thinking that gut that told them that this was right and the whole Enlightenment that period from John lock on to really to to um to Hume that period is about Pursuit of Happiness using reason in pursuit of the good life right but they can ground it they don't really understand what reason is and they don't really understand what happiness requires and they can't detach and F from Christianity they're not allowed to politically and they I think conceptually you just can't make that big break Rand is an Enlightenment thinker in that sense she is what should have followed right after right she should have come there and grounded them in the secular and in the egoistic and the oratian view of morality as as as a a as a as a code of values to basically to guide your life to guide your life towards happiness that's Aristotle view right um so they didn't have that so you you know so I think that government is necessary it's not a necessary evil it's a necessary good because it does something good and the good that it does is eliminates corosion from society it eliminates violence from society it eliminates the use of force between individuals from society and that but but see the argument like Michael M make give me a chance here yeah is uh why can't you apply the same kind of uh reasoning that you've effectively used for the rest of uh mutually agreed upon institutions that are driven by capitalism that we can't also hire forces to protect us from the violence to ensure the stability of society that protects us from the violence why violent why draw the line at this particular place right well because there is no other place to draw a line and they and there is a line and by the way we draw lines other places right um we uh we don't vote we don't um we don't have we don't determine truth and science based in competition right so that's a that's a line but first of all some people might say I mean there's competition in a sense that you have alternate theories but at the end of the day whether you decide that this he's right or he's right is not based on the market it's based on facts on reality an objective reality you have to you and and some people will never accept that this person is right because they don't see the Stream So first of all what they reject what most anarchists reject even if they don't admit it or recognize it is they object they they reject objective reality and in which sense so like right so there's a whole so the the whole realm of law is a scientific realm to Define for example the boundaries of private property it's not an issue of competition it's not an issue of of of um of I have one system and you have another system it's an issue of objective reality and now it's more difficult than science in a sense because it's more difficult to prove that my conception of property is correct and you're correct but there has there is a correct one in reality there's a correct vision it's more abstract but look somebody has to decide what property is so I have I have Define my property is defined mhm by certain boundaries and I have a police force and I have a Judiciary System that backs my vision and you have a claim against my property you have a claim against my property and you have a police force and a judicial system that backs your claim who's right so the our definitions of property are different yes our definitions of property or our claim on the property is different so why why we just agree on the definition of property and but why should we agree right your judicial system as one definition of property my judicious system is now you you think that there's no such thing as intellectual property rights and your whole system believes that yeah and my whole system believes there is such thing so you are duplicating my books and handing them out to all your friends and not paying me a royalty yeah and I I think that's wrong my judicial system and my police force think that's wrong and we're both living in the same geographic area right so I we have overlapping jurisdictions yeah now the anarchist would say well we'll negotiate why should we negotiate my system is actually right there is such a thing as intellectual property rights there's no negotiation here you're wrong and you should either pay a fine or go to jail yeah but why can't because it's a community there multiple there's multiple parties and it's like a majority vote they'll they'll hire different forces that says yeah youran is is is on to something here with the definition of property and we'll go with that so Anarchist Pro democracy in in the in the majority rule sense I think so I I think Anarchy you know promotes like emergent democracy right like no it doesn't it it it I'll tell you what it it promotes it promotes emergent uh strife and civil war and violence constant uninterrupted violence cu the only way to settle the dispute between us since we both think that we are right and we have guns behind us to protect that and we have a legal system we have a whole theory of ideas is is you're stealing my stuff how do I get it back I invade you right I take over you know and and who's G to who's going to win that battle the smartest guy no the guy with the biggest guns see but the anarchist would say that they're using implied like the state uses imp Force they're already doing violence because they they they take the state as it is today and they refuse to engage in the conversation about what a state should and could look like and how we can create mechanisms to protect us from the state using those those D but look this is my view of Anarchy is very simple it's a ridiculous position it's infantile I mean I really mean this right and and I'm sorry to Michael but and and all the other very very smart very very smart an because Anarchist is never you won't find a dumb Anarchist right because dumb people know it wouldn't work you have to have it's absolutely true you have to have a certain IQ to be an anarchist that's true they're all really intelligence all intelligence and the reason is that you have to create such a mythology in your head you have to create so many rationalizations any Jo the street knows it doesn't work because they can understand what happens when two people who are armed are in the street and have a dispute and there's no mechanism to resolve that dispute yeah that's objective that's SE and this is where it gets the objective that's objective the whole point of government is that it is the objective Authority for determining the truth in one Regard in regard to force because the only alternative to determining it when it comes to force is through Force the only way to resolve disputes is through force or through this negotiation which is unjust because if one part's right and one part's wrong why negotiate and and this is the point I'm not against competition of governance I'm all for competition of governance we do that all the time it's called countries the United States has a certain governance structure the Soviet Union had a governance structure Mexico has a government structure CH and they're competing yeah and we can observe the competition we and in a in my world you could move freely from one governance to another if you didn't like your governance you would move to a better governance system but they have to have autonomy within a geographic area otherwise what you get is complete and utter Civil War the law needs to be objective and there needs to be one law over a piece of ground and if you disagree with that law you can move somewhere else where they me this is why Federalism is such a beautiful system even within the United States we have States and on certain issues we're allowed to disagree between states like the death penalty some states do some states don't fine and now I can move from one state if I don't like it but there's certain issues you cannot have disagreement slavery for example this is why we had a civil war but let me one other argument against Anarchy markets exist with forces has being eliminated sorry can you say that again Marcus markets exist where the rule of force has been eliminated the rule of force yes elate so a market will exist if we know that you can't pull a gun on me and just take my stuff I am willing to engage in transaction with you if we have an implicit understanding that we're not going to use Force against each other so the force has a something special to it yes it's a special it overrides cuz we are still agreeing we can manipulate each other yes but Force we can force kind of there's something fundamental about violence force is a is a fundamental Force it's the anti-reason it's the anti-life it's the anti- force against another person and it what it does it shuts down the mind right so in order to have a market you have to extract Force that's F how can you have a Market in force yeah when I there's an Instagram Channel called nature is metal where it has all these videos of animals basically having a market of force yes but that shuts down the ability to reason an animals don't need to because they can't exactly so the Innovation that is human beings is our capacity to reason and therefore the relegation of force to the animals we don't do Force civilization is where we don't have force and so what you have is you cannot have a market in that which a market requires the elimination of it and I you know I I don't debate formally these guys but I interact with them all the time right and and you get these absurd arguments where you know David Freedman will say that's Milton freedman's son he will say something like well in Somalia in the northern part of Somalia where they have no government you have all these wonderful you have these tribal uh uh tribunals of these tribes and they resolve disputes yeah barbarically they Sharia law they have no respect for individual rights no respect for property and the only reason they have any Authority is because they have guns and they have power and they have force and they do it barbarically there's nothing civilizing about the courts of Somalian and and they write about Pirates and because they view Force they don't view Force as something unique that must be extracted from human life and that's why Anarchy has to devolve into violence because it treats Force as just what's a big deal we negotiating you know over guns so we we covered a lot of high level philosophy but I'd like to touch on the troubles the chaos of the day yeah a couple of things and I really trying to find a hopeful path way out so one is the current Corona virus pandemic or in particular not the virus but our handling of it is there something philosophically politically that you would like to see that you would like to recommend that you would like to maybe give a hopeful message if we take that kind of trajectory we might be able to get out because I'm kind of worried about the economic pain that people are feeling that there's this quiet suffering I mean I agree with you completely there is a quiet suffering it's horrible I mean I know people you know I I go to a lot of restaurants what one of the things we love to do is is eat out my wife doesn't like cooking anymore we don't have kids we don't have kids in the house anymore so she doesn't have to so we go out a lot we go to restaurants and because we have our favorites and we go to them a lot we get to know the owners of the restaurant the chef the and it's just heartbreaking you know these people put their life you know they Blood Sweat and Tears I mean real Blood Sweat and Tears into these projects restaurants are super difficult to to manage most of them go bankrupt anyway and and the restaurants we go to a good restaurant so they've done a good job and they've they've they they offer unique value and they shut them down and you know many of them will never open you know something like they estimate 50 60% of restaurants in some places won't open these are people's lives these are people's Capital these are people effort these are people's Love talk about love they love what they do particularly if they're the chef as well and it's gone and it's disappear and what are they going to do with their lives now they're going to live off the government the way our politicians would like them bigger and bigger stimulus plans so we can hand checks to people to get them used to living off of us rather than it's disgusting and it's offensive and it's unbelievably sad and this is where it comes to this I care about other people I mean this idea that objectivist don't care I mean I love these people who who provide me with pleasure of eating wonderful food in in a great environment is there something inspiring about them too like when I see a great restaurant I want to do better with my my own stuff yeah exactly it's it's it's they're inspiring anybody who does it is excellent I love sports because it's the one realm in which you still value and celebrate Excellence I but I try to celebrate Excellence everything in my life so I I you know I try to be nice to these people and you know with Co we we went more to restaurant if Believe it or and we did more takeout stuff we made an effort particularly the restaurants we really love to to keep them going to encourage them to support them the problem is the problem is philosophy drives the world the response the covid has been worse than pathetic um and it's driven by philosophy it's driven by disrespect to science uh ignorance and disrespect of Statistics uh a disrespect of individual human decision-making government has to decide everything for us a and and just throughout the process in a disrespect of markets because we didn't let markets work to to to facilitate what we needed in order to deal with this virus if you look at at the pl it's interesting that the only place on the planet that's done well with this are parts of Asia right Taiwan did phenomenally with this and the vice president of Taiwan is a epidemiologist so he knew what he was doing and they got it right from the beginning South Korea did did amazing even Hong Kong and Singapore it's you know Hong Kong is just very few deaths and economy wasn't shut down in any of those places there were no lockdowns in any of those places the CDC had plans before this happened and how to deal with good plans indeed if you ask people around the world before the pandemic which country is best prepared for a pandemic they would have said the United States because of the cdc's plans and all of our emergency reserves and all that and the wealth and yet all of that went out the window because people panicked people didn't think go back to reason people were arrogant uh refused to to to to use the tools that they had at their disposal to deal with this so you deal with pandemics it's very simple how you deal with pandemics and this is how South Korea and Taiwan and you deal with them by not by uh testing tracing and isolating that's it yeah and you do it well and you do it vigorously and you do it on scale if you have to and you scale up to do it we have the wealth to do that so one uh question I have it's a difficult one um so I talk about love a lot and you've just talked about Donald Trump I guarantee you they'll this particular segment will be full of division from the internet yes but I believe that should be and can be fixed what I'm referring to in particular is the division because we've talked about the value of reason and what I've noticed on the Internet is the division shuts down reason so when people will hear you say Trump actually the first sentence you said about Trump they'll hear Trump and their ears will per up and they'll immediately start in that first sentence they'll say is he a trump supporter or a they're not interested in anything else after that and then after that that's it and what how do so my question is you as one of the beacons of intellectualism quite honestly I mean it sounds silly to say but yeah you are a beacon of Reason how do we bring people together long enough to where we can reason I mean there's no easy way out of this because the fact that people have become tribal and they have very tribal uh and and the tribe uh in the tribe reason doesn't matter in the it's all about emotion it's all about belonging or not belonging and you don't want to stand out you don't want to have a different opinion you want to belong and it's all about belonging it took us decades to get back to tribalism where we were hundreds of years ago it took Millennium to get out of tribalism it took the enlightenment to get us to the point of individualism where we think for in reason respect for reason before that we were all tribal so it took the enlightenment to get us out of it we've been in the enlightenment for about 250 years influenced by the Enlightenment and we're and it's fading the impact is fading so what would we need to get out of it we need self-esteem people join a tribe because they don't trust their own mind people join a tribe because they're afraid to stand on their own two feet they're afraid to think for themselves they're afraid to be different they're afraid to be unique they're afraid to be an individual people need self-esteem to gain self-esteem they have to they have to have respect for rationality they have to think and they have to achieve and they have to recognize that achievement um to do that they have to be they have to have respect for thinking they have to have to respect for reason uh and we have to and and think about the schools we have to have schools that teach people to think teach people to to Value their mind we have schools that teach people to feel and value their feelings we have groups of six-year-olds sitting around a circle discussing politics what they don't know anything they're ignorant see you don't know anything when you're ignorant yes you can feel but your feelings are useless as as as decision-making tools but but but we emphasize emotion it's all about socialization and emotion this is why they talk about this generation of snowflakes they can't hear anything that that they're opposed to because they've not learned how to use their mind how to think um so it boils down to teaching people how to think two things how to think and how to care about themselves so it's it's thinking of self-esteem and they're connect it because when you think you achieve which gains you gains your self-esteem when you have self-esteem it's easier to think for yourself and I don't know how you do that quickly I mean I think leadership matters so you know part of what I try to do is try to encourage people to do those things but I am a small voice you you asked me when early on you said we should talk about why I'm not more famous I'm not famous you know my following is not big it's very small in in a in in the in the in the scope of things well yours in objectivism and that question could you Linger on it for a moment why isn't objectivism more famous I think because it's so challenging it it's it's not challenging to me right when I first encountered objectivism it's like after the first shock and after the first uh kind of none of this can be true this is all Bs and fighting it once I got it it was EAS it was easy it required years of studying but it was easy in the sense of yes this makes sense but it's challenging because it upends everything it really says what my mother taught me is wrong and what my politicians say left and right is wrong all of them there's not a single politician on which I agree with on almost anything right because on the fundamentals we disagree and what might teachers are telling me is wrong and what Jesus said is wrong and it's hard but the thing is so you you talk about politics and all that kind of stuff but you know most people don't care the the the more powerful thing about objectivism is the Practical of my life of how I revolutionize my life and it that feels to be like a very important and appealing you know get your together kind of yeah but this is why this is why Jordan Peterson is so much more successful than we are right why is it make your bed or whatever make bed yeah because his personal responsibility is shallow it's make your bed stand up straight it's what my mother told me when I was growing up there's nothing new about Jordan Peterson he says Embrace Christianity Christianity is fine right religion is okay just do these few things and you'll be fine and by the way he says happiness you know you either have it or you don't you know it's random you don't actually you can't bring about your own happiness so he's given people an easy out people want easy outs people buy self-help books that give them five principles for living a you know shallow I'm telling them think stand on your own two feet be independent don't listen to your mother do your own thing but thoughtfully not based on emotions so you're responsible not just for a set of particular habits and so on you're responsible for everything yes and you respon here's here's the big one right you're responsible for shaping your own soul your Consciousness you get to decide what it's going to be like and the only tool you have is your mind your only tool is is is your mind well your emotions play a tool when they're properly cultivated they play a role in that and the tools you have is thinking experiencing living coming to the right conclusions you know listening to great music and and watch watching good movies and and and and art is very important in shaping your own soul and helping you do this it's got a it's got a crucial role in that but it's work and it's lonely work because it's work you do with yourself now if you find somebody who you love who shares these values and you can do with them that's great but it's monly lonely work it's hard it's challenging it's ends your world the reward is unbelievable but but even at the think about think about the enlightenment right so up until the enlightenment where was truth truth came from a book and there were a few people who understood the book most of us couldn't read and they conveyed it to us and they just told us what to do and in that sense life's easy it sucks and we die young and we have nothing and we don't enjoy it but it's easy and then Enlightenment comes around and says we've got this tool it's called reason and allows us to discover truth about the world it's not in a book it's actually your reason allows you to discover stuff about the world and I consider the first really the first figure of the enlightment is Newton not Lo right it's a scientist because he teaches us the laws of mechanics like how does stuff work and people go oh wow this is cool I can use my mind I can discover truth isn't that amazing and everything opens up once you do that hey if I can discover if I understand the laws of motion if I can understand truth in the world how come I can't decide who I marry I mean everything was fixed in those days how come I can't decide what profession I should be in right everybody belong to a guild how come I can't decide who my political leader should be that's so it's all reason it's all once you understand the efficacy of your own mind to understand truth to understand reality discover truth not understand truth Discover it everything opens up now you can take responsibility for your own life cuzz now you have the tool to do it but we are living in an era where postmodernism tells us there is no truth there is no reality and our mind is useless anyway critical race Theory tells us that you're determined by your race and your race shapes everything and your free will is meaningless and your reason doesn't matter because reason is just shaped by your genes and shaped by your color of your skin the it's the most racist theory of all and you've got you've got our friended you see Irvine telling them oh your senses don't tell you anything about reality anyway reality is what it is so you know what's the purpose of reason it's to invent stuff it's to make stuff up then what use is that it's complete fantasy you've basically got every philosophical intellectual voice in the culture telling them their reason is impotent there's like a Steven Pinker who tries and I love Pinker and he's he's really good and I love his books but you know he needs to be stronger about this and there's a few people on kind of there's a few people partially in the intellectual dark web and otherwise who are big on reason but not consistent enough and not full understanding of what it means or what it implies and then there's little old me and and it's me against the world in a sense because I'm not only willing to accept to to to articulate the case for reason but then what that implies it implies Freedom it implies capitalism it implies taking personal responsibility over your own life and there other intellectual dark web people get to reason and oh politics you you can be whatever no you can't you can't be a socialist and for reason right it doesn't actually th those are incompatible and you can't be a determinist and for reason reason and determinism don't go together the whole point of reason is that it's an achievement and it requires effort and it requires engagement it requires choice so it is it does feel like little old me because that's that's it I the Allies I have are allies I have allies among the some Libertarians over economics I have some allies in the intellectual dark web maybe over reason but none of them are allies in the full sense my allies are the other objectivist but we're just they're not a lot of us for people listening to this for the few folks kind of listening to this and and thinking about the trajectory of their own life I guess the takeaway is a reason is a difficult project but a project that's worthy of taking on yeah and difficult is I don't know if difficult is the right word because difficult sounds like it's you know I have to push this boulder up a hill it's not difficult in that sense it's difficult in the sense that it requires energy and focus it requires effort but it's immediately rewarding it's fun to do and it's rewards uh immediate pretty quick right it takes a while to undo all the garbage that you have but we all have that I had that took me years and years and years to get rid of certain Concepts and certain emotions that I had that didn't make any sense but it it takes a long time to fully integrate that so I I don't want it to sound like it's a burden like it's hard in that sense it does require focus and energy and I don't want to sound like a Dr Spock I don't want to and I don't think I do because I'm pretty passionate guy but I don't want it to appear like oh just forget about emotions emotions are how you experience the world you want to have strong emotions you want to live you want to experience life strongly and passionately you just need to know that emotions are not cognition it's another realm it's like don't mix the Realms think about outcomes and then experience them and sometimes your emotions won't coincide with what you think should be and that means there's still more integration to be done y on as I told you offline I've been a fan of yours for a long time it's been I was a little star struck early on getting a little more comfortable now gone the I I highly recommend that people uh that haven't heard your work listen to it to the Yon Brook show you know the times I've disagreed with something I've hear you say is usually a first step on a journey of learning a lot more about that thing about that Viewpoint and that's been so F feeling it's been a gift the passion you know you talk about reason a lot but the passion radiates in in a way that's just uh contagious and on inspiring so thank you for everything you've done for this world it's it's truly an honor and a pleasure to talk to you well thank you and and it's it's my reward is that that if I've had an impact on you and people like you wow I mean that's that's amazing when you wrote to me an email saying you being a fan I was blown away cuz I had no idea and completely unexpected and and I you know every every few months I discover hey I had an impact on this Pro and people that I would have never thought and they so you know the only way to change the world is to change your one mind at a time and uh and and when you when you have an impact on a good mind and a mind that cares about the world and a mind that goes out and does something about it then you get the exponential growth so through you I've impacted other people and that's how you get that's how you ultimately change everything and and so I'm in spite of everything I'm I'm optimistic in a sense that I think that the progress we've made today is so universally accepted the scientific progress the technological problem it can just vanish like it did under when Rome collapsed and and whether it's in the United States of some way progress will continue the the the the human project for human progress will continue and I think these ideas ideas of reason and individualism will always be at the heart of it and uh you know what we are doing is continuing the project of the Enlightenment and and it's the project that will will save this save the human race and and allow it to to for ellon musk and for um Jeff bezus to reach the Stars thank you for masterfully ending on a hopeful note youran a pleasure and an honor thanks thanks for listening to this conversation with euron Brook and thank you to our sponsors blinkist an app I use for reading through summaries of books expressvpn the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet and cash app the app I use to send money to friends please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast if you enjoy this thing subscribe on YouTube review it with five stars and apple podcast follow on Spotify support on patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman and now let me leave you with some words from Iron Rand do not let your fire go out Spark by Irreplaceable spark in the Hopeless swamps of the not quite the not yet and the not at all do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach the world you desire can be one it exists it is real it is possible it is yours thank you for listening and hope to see you next time