Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy
Guests: Michael Malice and Yaron Brook
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents37 chapters
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The following is a conversation with Michael Malice
and Yaron Brook, Michael's third time on this podcast
and Yaron's second, but together for the first time.
Michael is an anarchist, political thinker,
host of a podcast called "You're Welcome"
and author of "Dear Reader, The New Right"
and two upcoming books,
"Anarchist Handbook" and "The White Pill".
Yaron is an objectivist philosopher,
chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute,
host of the Yaron Brook Show
and co-author of "The Free Market Revolution"
and "Equal is Unfair".
Quick mention of our sponsors,
Ground News, Public Goods, Athletic Greens,
Brave and Four Sigmatic.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that this conversation
is a kind of experiment.
Both Michael and Yaron are thoughtful and passionate,
united in part by an interest in the history
and philosophy of Ayn Rand,
but they are also very different in style.
Good conversation, like good food,
is often made delicious by pairing of contrasting elements.
For example, someone suggested I try a peanut butter,
bacon and banana sandwich, which apparently is very good.
Among the three of us, I don't know who's the peanut butter,
who's the bacon and who's the banana.
I'm guessing it's probably me, I'm the banana.
But I hope the final result, the final dish, if you will,
is equally delicious.
We talked through, I think, a lot of interesting ideas,
sometimes disagreeing, sometimes even in rare cases,
saying something humorous, including dark humor,
especially in Michael's case.
All three of us are sensitive to the suffering
in the world today and throughout human history.
We think about it, we talk about it,
and we deal with it in different ways.
Be patient with us.
Whether you agree, disagree, enjoy or dislike the result,
I hope if you listen, you're a wiser person
on the other end of it.
I know I was.
Mostly, I really enjoyed this conversation
because no matter what Michael and Yaron believe,
underneath it all, they're genuine, kind human beings
that I'm lucky to be able to hang out with and learn from.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,
and here's my conversation
with Michael Malice and Yaron Brooke.
- I've been a huge fan of the two of you
for the longest time.
- Are we recording now?
Is it starting?
Or are you just talking?
- I'm not recording at all.
- He's not gonna compliment us if it's not part of the show.
- Yes, he does, all the time.
He speaks very highly of me.
You, I don't know.
Maybe he's being charitable.
- He only does this to me on the show.
- Objectivists don't like charity, so don't compliment him.
He won't think it's sincere.
- There you go.
- So it's an incredible honor
that the both of you would show up here.
If we, let me just ask this sort of
profound philosophical question.
How well do you think we would get along
if we were stuck in a desert island together?
What would life be like?
- I thought the original question you had,
that you sent us this question,
was how long would it take for us to murder one another,
or something like that.
There was murder in the question, if I remember.
- I, listen, he sent us homework, right,
all these questions.
- I ignored it.
- I didn't spend four years at Patrick Henry University
to do homework.
To answer your question,
I think it would be very easy
for us to live together in a desert island
in terms of interpersonal.
I know, and I say this because I know a lot of people
who have been the show's survivor.
So they, and I know a little bit about the dynamics.
So when you have people who are intelligent,
who are gonna have the same goals,
I mean, and there's space to go away if I'm annoyed at you,
I don't think it would be that hard at all.
- What's our goals on a desert island?
- Food, shelter.
- Survival.
- Survival, yeah.
- Survival, basically.
- And getting out of there, right?
You don't wanna stay on the desert island.
So yeah, I don't think,
I think that's true of any three,
you know, semi-rational people who, you know,
who basically share the goal that they wanna survive,
they wanna thrive, they wanna get off of the island.
Why would there be conflict?
- Yeah.
- Well, I mean, there would be conflict,
but, and there can be conflict,
but they'd find ways to deal with it.
I don't have this negative view of human beings,
particularly not as individuals.
It's when they get into mobs and groups and collectives
that ideology can really motivate them
to do horrible things.
- One of the things that really drives me crazy
is how sinister an impact the book "Lord of the Flies"
has had on our culture.
I read it in high school.
It's a superb book, that's not even a question,
but it's not accurate.
We see in many situations where people are trapped together
under difficult circumstances,
obviously that book's about children,
that very quickly, it is not about conflict.
It very quickly becomes about cooperation.
Let's work together.
We all have the same goal.
This is not a time to worry about other things.
It really, the human beings,
the animal instinct that kicks in is the social animal,
and I'm gonna shut up and go over there
and have a, like, stomp my feet
instead of arguing with your own
because we're really trapped in the situation
and we need to make it work.
- Well, and to the extent that they're bad people,
bad people are dealt with, right?
So this is true of all of, you know,
how did we survive as a species, right?
How have we survived as a species?
We've been on a desert island, in a sense,
as a species forever.
Tribes survive.
They survive by cooperation.
They survive by dealing with bad people.
Civilization is created by people cooperating
and working together and allowing individuals
to thrive within the group,
and when bad people arise, they deal with them, right?
They now, sometimes these groups get captured by bad people,
right, and bad ideas,
and probably from day one that was going on, right,
the whole tribe is probably a bad idea to begin with,
but underneath it all,
the fact is that to survive as a species,
we need to think, we need to be rational,
and if we don't have any respect for reason,
then we would all die.
We would die off.
- So that's a hopeful message,
but where does that go wrong?
So with three people, we might get along.
We would focus on the basics of life.
We have similar goals.
- Once women are introduced,
they're incessant irrationalism.
- No, no.
- And less of their hormones, or SOL.
- Look, three of us on a desert island would be nice,
but without women, it wouldn't be fun.
- I'm gonna edit out half the things Michael said
through this broadcast.
- As you know, I used to run the Ayn Rand Institute.
She was a woman last time I looked.
- Oh, wait a minute.
You know exactly what I'm gonna say.
When Ludwig von Mises, or Hazlitt,
I forget who it was, Mises, was praising Ayn Rand,
and I think it was Hazlitt who said it to her.
He said, "Ludwig von Mises said,
"you're the smartest man I've ever met."
And Ayn Rand said, "Did he say man?"
Right?
- No, she viewed it as a compliment.
- Right, but she wanted to be clear that he said man.
She was excited, yes.
- Absolutely.
- She was excited, but she was.
- I took it as her perceiving him
as seeing her as a full equal.
- Oh, I think that's right.
I think that's right.
Plus, I think the perception out there,
the perception and the culture of men as being rational
was a compliment to her.
- And this is also--
- Because that was affirming that he viewed her as a rational.
§02Transcript · 07:22–15:09
- Yeah, 'cause Mises is old school.
He's an older Eastern European guy,
so he would definitely have these rigid views.
Like his wife, I read her autobiography,
Marguerite von Mises,
and basically he made her his secretary
to the point where if he's typing something,
or he had something handwritten, she had to type it out,
and if she made a typo, he would tear up the page.
She had to start from the beginning,
but it's like this is the role of the man,
this is the role of the woman.
So for him to regard her,
this was kind of a breaking through moment,
not that she was secretly misogynist.
- So I think we go wrong when people try to understand
the world around them and come up with wrong ideas.
And it's natural that they would come up with wrong ideas
'cause it's hard to figure out what's right.
So we start with trying to come up
with mystical explanations for the existence
of the things around us.
And that I think very quickly leads to some people
being able to communicate with the mystical stuff out there,
and some people not being able to communicate,
and some people wanting to control other people
and using those pseudo explanations as a way to control.
So you always have,
Rand called it Attila and the witch doctor.
You always have a witch doctor, the mystic,
the philosopher, the intellectual,
the philosopher king is a unity of the...
And you have an Attila,
you have somebody who wants to control other people,
who's willing to use force to control other people.
And when those two get together, that's when things go bad.
And unfortunately, 95, 98% of human history
is when those two are together.
And so the not having them together,
having the right ideas,
and the right ideas are ones that are not exclusive
to those guys and where we don't allow Attila
to have that kind of physical power over us.
That's an exception and that's rare.
And that's what needs to be defended.
- Stalin's not personally killing people.
Hitler's not personally killing people.
Charles Manson's not personally killing people.
They need their goons.
- They need their goons,
but they also, they don't have original ideas.
Nothing Stalin says is original to him.
He needs a Marx, even Lenin.
They all need a Marx.
They all, and Marx needs a particular line of thinkers
that come before him that set him up
for these kinds of ideas.
So Stalin both needs his goons,
even though he's somewhat of a goon, particularly Stalin.
- He was a bank robber, yeah.
- And then, so take Lenin.
Lenin, I think, is a better example
'cause Lenin's more intellectual, if you will.
But Lenin needs his goons.
He needs his Stalins.
But Lenin also needs his Marx.
And we don't want to let Marx off the hook
because Marx knows, I think, implicitly,
that his ideas have to lead to Lenin and Stalin.
His ideas are not neutral.
- I don't think it's implicit at all.
I think Marx very much glorified revolution,
blood and terror.
This is not implicit in the slightest.
- No, absolutely.
I mean, there are letters between him and Engels
where they talk about which peoples
will have to be eliminated
'cause they don't have that proletarian thing, right?
So I think certain peoples in Southern Europe
are not appropriate for the utopia to come
and will have to be gone.
- And Marx also had this concept,
which we still see today in garbled ways,
of polylogism, which is if you're a capitalist
and I'm bourgeois or I'm a worker,
you just, your logic is different than mine.
It's literally gonna be impossible for us to communicate.
And at a certain point, you're gonna have to be liquidated
and they pretend that doesn't mean murdered,
but it means murdered.
And very quickly, everyone becomes a capitalist or bourgeois
and then you have the holodomor and things like this.
- No, he knows exactly where it's gonna lead.
And this is why people say, "Oh, Marx is not evil.
"He just wrote books."
No, it's the people who write books
who are responsible for the way history evolves.
And they know, they know.
The bad guys certainly know the consequence of their ideas
and they need to bear the moral responsibility
for what happens when the ideas are implemented.
- Here's the, wait, can I ask a question?
- Yeah.
- 'Cause I think I know more about Rand than Yaron does.
So let's see.
- Oh. - Okay.
- The gauntlet's been thrown down.
Who did Ayn Rand say is the most evil man who ever lived?
- Immanuel Kant. - That's right, correct.
- No, that I know.
I mean, it's a big deal that Immanuel Kant is,
and most people don't understand why
because if you read Kant, there's certain passages in Kant
that sound pretty liberal, they sound pretty,
he's for the, it sounds like he's for the individual,
he sounds like he's for the American Revolution,
things like that.
But when you actually read his philosophy
and what he's trying to defend
and what he's trying to undermine,
he's trying to undermine the foundations
that make the revolution possible,
that make freedom and individualism possible.
He's trying to destroy the Enlightenment,
and the Enlightenment is, are those ideas
that make freedom, individualism feasible.
He's trying to undermine reason,
and without reason, we're nothing,
we're not, we can't survive as a species.
So, and that's why she thought he was the most evil person,
because his ideas undermine the very foundations
of what it requires to be a human being,
reason and individualism.
Those are the things he's trying to eviscerate.
- I know you've talked about Hoffman before.
So Hoffman is a modern day attempt to--
- Who's Hoffman?
- Donald Hoffman?
- Donald Hoffman.
- Donald Hoffman is the University of California,
Irvine neurologist, neuroscientist, something like that.
So I met him once, and we were at one of these conferences
where you do a quick intro, you sit
and you do a quick intro, his introduction was,
"I've just written a book that proves
"that evolution has conditioned us not to see reality."
- Okay, that is very Kantian.
- Yeah, and he is basically just presenting pseudoscience
to defend Kant's position about epistemology,
and about metaphysics, and there's nothing original there.
And he puts up a bunch of equations,
and he says, "I ran a simulation, and it proves I'm right."
- So, Yaron is a little bit frustrated
with Donald Hoffman's work.
Let me--
- I'm not frustrated, I just think it's completely wrong,
and it's anti-life, anti-mind, anti-evolution.
I think he's an anti-evolutionist at the end.
And I think it, you know, any time you say,
look, here's the important point.
Any time you say reality doesn't exist--
- Or that you can't perceive it.
- Well, who are you?
What do you mean by, what do any of your words mean?
What does anything you say even mean
if it doesn't refer to something
that's actually out there in reality?
- Let me try to defend this point of view,
because in a certain kind of sense,
I hear it as being humble in the face
of the uncertainty that's around us.
Sort of, you know, when you speak with the confidence
of Ayn Rand and yourself, that reason can be like
this weapon that cuts through all the bullshit of the world
and makes us have an ethical, moral life,
and all those kinds of things,
you kind of assume that reason is a superpower
that has no limits.
- Wait, hold on.
- Hold on a second.
Okay, but--
- I got this one.
- See, this is already leading to murder by words.
- Yeah.
- And we've been only talking for 20 minutes.
- If the two of us wouldn't get together,
wouldn't get along together on an island.
- We just make him our slave.
We're all gonna get along.
He's just gonna do the work.
- But I'm afraid I cannot provide any value as a slave,
so this is not gonna end well for me.
- We can provide value as dinner.
- That's the problem I'm trying to get to.
- That's a solution.
- Okay, but Donald Hoffman says that there is,
he makes an argument that, exactly as you said,
that what we perceive is very, very far
from actual physical reality.
§03Transcript · 15:12–22:49
In fact, we're not able to perceive
physical reality at all.
And he also makes the bigger claim
that evolution prefers beings
who are not attached to reality.
So evolution created creatures
that are basically functioning way outside
of what the physical reality is.
- I got this, I got this.
Okay, 'cause there's a lot to unpack here
and I hate all of it.
Okay, first of all, no, no, I'm serious.
First of all, when you were making that comment
about how reason is a superpower beyond limit,
you're being ironic, but it's true.
And I'll give you one example, which is astronomy.
If you look at the physical size of the universe,
it's literally in one sense incomprehensible.
So he's right in the sense that I do not understand
and none of us understand what it means
for 93 million miles away for the sun to be.
It's a number on another screen, right?
That said, the fact that my mind,
and I'm not one of the great thinkers of all time,
is capable-- - Close, but--
- We're getting there, is capable of appreciating
what the sun means, what heliocentrism means.
The fact that we can, you're a math person,
that you could look at galaxies and reduce it to 10
to the 64th power in terms of distance,
that shows the unlimited capacity
of the human mind and reason, number one.
Number two is if he says that evolution favors
those who are not in touch with reality,
and I don't know in what context he's saying that,
'cause that sentence could mean a lot of different things,
evolution is what guides,
reality is what guides evolution.
Evolution works because you are fitted
to the reality of the situation around you.
It's not that someone is sitting down and says,
"Well, I'm gonna add a fin to this animal
"and that fin helps it swim," I engineered a check mark,
it's that mutations occur,
the vast majority of these mutations are against reality,
they do not further this animal's life
or this plant's life or this fungus's life,
but the ones that are in touch with reality,
such as, okay, it's really cold here,
there's no predators here, if I could figure out,
and I'm using that term very loosely,
a way where I could survive in the cold,
I don't have predation, it's really great.
So the fact that unconsciously and mindlessly
this process can force the mutation and evolution
of the form precisely means that they're in touch
with reality, now if he means the consciousness
is not in touch with reality,
that's another thing that I really hate.
- You're referring to the reality as like
the biological reality of evolution,
but all of that is based on many other layers
of abstraction that ultimately has quantum mechanics
underneath it all, and he's saying somewhere
along the layers, you start to lose more and more
and more attachment to the actual--
- Hold on, can I have one more second?
- Sure, sure.
- I do not, I despise the idea.
I say despise, I'm not using this, I'm not joking,
and the idea that the reality we don't live in
is somehow more real than this.
That is a very dangerous idea to say,
well quantum works in this way, and I'm sure he's correct,
and none of us disagree with that.
What we perceive macro works in a different way,
well that's the real reality and this is fake.
Bullshit, this is the real reality,
that is a different type, a sub-subset,
but no one's living there.
- Well and it's a sub-subset--
- And humanity is the starting point.
- It's a sub-subset that has to integrate
with this world.
There isn't two worlds, one in the quantum world
and one here, they're integrated.
Now we might not have the scientific knowledge
to know how they're integrated, but so what?
We know that there's only one reality and that's this one.
He has this difference, he says evolution
matches up to fitness not to reality,
and he creates this dichotomy between fitness and reality,
but that's complete nonsense.
There is no such thing as a concept of fitness
outside of fitness to what?
To reality, that fitness and reality are the same thing,
they're not separate things.
So the whole way he sets this up intellectually
is wrong, I think to some extent dishonest,
and certainly philosophically corrupt, and it's Kantian.
Again, he's accepted Kant's ideas
and everybody pretty much has accepted Kant's ideas
for the last 200 years, and they give it a different facade
and he's giving it an evolutionary facade,
but it's just a facade for the same idea,
and that is that somehow because we have eyes,
we cannot see because the light waves
are going through a medium
and that medium necessarily distorted.
The medium changes the resolution at which you see, right?
Like if I take off my glasses,
I'm seeing it a little differently,
but the thing is still there,
and the thing is still there in the way I see it
'cause the handle, I'm grasping the handle
and lifting the cup.
That's not an illusion, that is a real cup.
- So do you think some things are more real than others?
For example, money.
There's a bunch of things that seem real.
This is not an animal farm reference.
- Is this gonna be about love?
There's nothing as real as love, right, Lex?
(laughing)
What is love?
- Love is a fundamental part of the quantum mechanics, yes.
No. - No.
- No, no.
Is there some things that have become reality
because we humans in a collective sense believe it?
- You can't believe something collectively.
Now, it doesn't become real.
What does it mean to say something's real?
That is, you can, so love, for example,
love's a good example, right?
Love is an abstraction, right?
It's not something I can touch.
It's not something I can see,
but it's certainly something you could feel.
- Well, it's something you could hit.
- Right? (laughing)
- We love differently.
You and I. - I don't think that's true.
I think I'm just so honest about it.
- You can't hit love.
You can't, love is an abstraction.
So is love real?
Yes, it's real 'cause I feel it.
It's an existent, but it's not an existent
in the same sense as this cup is.
So, you know, abstractions are real,
but at the end of the day,
all abstractions have to be able to be,
you know, reduced to actual concrete
so that you can either see it.
- I really don't like criticizing someone whose work
I haven't read secondhand.
So I wanna take this away from speaking about him personally
'cause I'm not familiar with his work, but I--
- He's a nice guy.
- That makes me like him. - Yeah, no, I met him.
- That makes him like him less.
I think--
- I'm gonna take you back talking about fitness,
evolutionary fitness.
- I think there's disingenuousness
when we talk about the word real
in terms of ideas are real versus the cup is real.
And you try to switch back between those two meanings,
and it's a little bit of linguistic wordplay
that is trying to force a point that's not accurate,
in my opinion.
- Well, I think the issue is,
and what he's challenging is,
and what Kant is challenging is,
do we know reality?
And I think the answer is, yes, we do.
We know reality, we observe it.
Now, do we know everything about reality?
No, we can't, for example,
sense what a bat senses as reality, right?
A bat observes reality through, what is it?
- Sonar.
- Sound waves, right, through sonar, right?
So it has a different sense, but it's the same reality.
It's still a table.
The bat's spatial relationship to the table
is different than ours,
but the object is still the same object.
- But how do you know that's true?
Are you not just hoping that's true?
Or assuming that's true?
- No, that's what no means.
No means I have identified an aspect of reality.
That's literally the definition of knowledge.
Now, if you say, how are you certain?
Well, that's a whole other question,
but one of the reasons I know it was certain
is 'cause this happens.
And I know this is gonna happen,
§04Transcript · 22:50–29:25
and if I tell you, if you go downstairs,
you're gonna see Mr. Jones,
and you walk downstairs, and I see Mr. Jones,
at the very least, something's going on there.
- So what about all the things
that mess with our perception?
For example, we've talked about psychedelics before,
talked about in dreams where you're detached from this.
I mean, there's certain things that happen to your brain
to where you're not able to perceive.
- So you're not perceiving reality, that's right.
So your brain is creating a different reality.
It's not real.
- How do you know it's not real?
How do you know the elves will meet in an alligator tail?
- Because partially because I need to take a drug
in order to do it, because I'm asleep when I'm dreaming.
It's not reality.
That is clearly a creation of a mind.
It's not a creation.
- Hold on, let's get to the psychedelics.
- The drug is real.
- If you are, I think you're gonna be thinking,
I'm joking a lot more than I am this episode.
I'm gonna be the humanist objectivist.
He could be the court jester.
In terms of psychedelic,
when people are perceiving these elves,
these machine elves, these other entities,
whether they could either be real or not, I don't know.
But the point is that doesn't go to his broader point,
because if these beings exist,
and the only way to perceive them is to take a drug,
they still exist.
This is just, for example,
if I'm walking outside in the woods at night,
and there's a deer, and I can't see it,
but if I put on night vision goggles, I can see it,
that deer was there the entire time.
It's not that the night vision goggles
caused the deer to appear.
You can recreate it not only using night vision goggles,
but you can then use sonar,
you can use other mechanisms
by which to prove that the deer is there.
The thing with psychedelics is that,
now I don't know,
because maybe I'm the least experienced
with psychedelics here probably.
My guess is every time you take the psychedelic,
you have exactly the same experience of the deer?
No.
Second, are there other mechanisms,
other scientific mechanisms
by which I can find the deer out there,
other than the psychedelics?
- We don't know yet.
- No, well, we don't know yet.
- Well, but this is Occam's razor, right?
The simplest explanation here is the most likely,
and that is that you've taken something
that's messing with the chemicals in the brain,
something is being, your brain can project, we dream.
Nobody's arguing that the dream is real,
and reality is not, or if they are, I think they're nuts.
The dream is a dream.
Your brain is creating an image of telling you a story.
Psychedelics are simulating the same thing.
That's probably what's going on
until there's evidence to the contrary.
- Well, hold on.
I'm gonna disagree with you a little bit,
because let's take Adderall, for example.
No one here disagrees that that's something
much more simpler and less out of this world.
I think what he might be speaking to,
I know Joe Rogan talks about this
and other people in this space,
is that when you take certain drugs,
it changes your perception.
It doesn't have to be otherworldly.
It can change your perception of what's around you.
And as an example, what they talk about is,
the three of us are talking,
there's lots of other stuff in the room.
We're only aware of it vaguely on a personal level.
- So it changes the-- - Hold on, let me finish.
- No, I don't do that.
I'm Israeli. - You're about to start.
- Back to the desert island murder.
- We just resolved it within three seconds.
There's no conk.
- He's trying to get us--
- Yeah, it's not gonna happen.
- Exactly, I'm trying to create murder.
- No one has asthma.
It's gonna be fine.
- 'Cause if the two of you murder each other,
there's more food for me.
I'm just saying.
- You eat robotsy alcohol.
- Ratings would go up.
Viewership would go up.
- Yeah, it's good for the ratings, yeah.
- But if you take, for example, Adderall or Speed, right?
People, like you focus on things,
you perceive things that aren't there,
but that doesn't mean those things
weren't there to begin with.
There are absolutely ways to change human perception,
chemically, through glasses, through getting drunk.
None of that changes the fact that the reality underneath it
is real and is causing this effect.
- Absolutely, and it has a particular nature, right?
And all it's doing is changing the focus, right?
So if I take off my glasses, I'm seeing the same thing.
I'm just seeing something's out of focus.
And maybe in the distance, I can't see something.
It's just gone.
And then I put it on, there it is.
That thing was always there.
It's just the sensitivity I have to it has changed.
And it's absolutely not sensitive to everything equally.
And drugs can change the relative sensitivities.
It doesn't change reality.
It changes our ability to focus on reality.
- Let me give you one simple example.
The microscope.
I forget who it was.
His name was with an L.
The scientist who discovered it,
he had a drop of water and he's seeing monsters,
the protozoa in this drop of water.
For him, it must've been, it is like a drug experience.
Like, wait a minute, I'm drinking this.
And there's alien beings whose shapes are completely crazy
in this water.
Those beings were always there.
Those beings were there before any of us were here.
They've been there for billions of years.
But because he had this apparatus,
now he's able to see protozoa.
No one's arguing protozoa are extra dimensional.
No one's arguing they're supernatural.
Amoebas are well-studied, paramecia, all the other lots.
So if these elves, the machine elves are real,
and the only way to perceive them is through DMT
or something like that,
that doesn't contradict the broader point
that they've always been there.
And this is the mechanism for perceiving them.
- So here's the word I was looking for.
It's a word actually Greg taught me this.
So Greg, so let me, so it's resolution, right?
So it's resolution.
My resolution changes with the glasses.
My resolution gets finer with the microscope.
So there's probably some bacteria here on the table.
- 100%.
- There's no doubt about it.
I can't see them.
So I need a microscope to see them,
but they're either there or they're not there.
And I have the tools to discover
whether they are there or they're not there.
And that's called a microscope.
Now they could be even smaller beings
that even with a microscope, I won't be able to define,
but that's completely arbitrary to claim that,
that they're there until I find a tool
to be able to discover it.
The same with what you see if you're seeing other beings
when you're taking psychedelics.
Unless you find another tool to be able to see them with,
the simplest assumption is probably the truest assumption.
- But even the not simplest assumption
doesn't contradict the broader point.
- No.
- Which is again, if that's what it is.
- Reality is what it is.
If it turns out that there are these creatures
that you can only see with psychedelics,
then there are these creatures
that you can only see with psychedelics.
And our resolution while we're not on psychedelics
is not fine enough to observe them.
- So what?
- That doesn't change the fact that we evolved
to survive in reality as it is.
- What do you do with the possibility that our resolution
as it currently stands is really, really crappy?
That basically--
- Well, it's not.
- No, but you don't know that.
- No, we know it completely.
- Compared to who?
- Compared to the future possibilities
like artificial intelligence.
- It is true.
- Or us, hundreds of years in the future.
§05Transcript · 29:27–36:30
- Fine, but that's not relevant.
- Much, much, like orders of magnitude.
- No, but here I'll use the standard
that Hoffman uses, evolution, right?
The reason I know that our resolution is phenomenal,
is phenomenally good, right?
Is look at us.
We're sitting here comfortably in an apartment
with air conditioning and in warm Austin with microphones
and it can't, where did all this stuff?
We're really good at survival and changing environment.
Indeed, if you look at the species that we know of,
there's not a species that come anywhere close
to our ability to deal with reality,
to observe to reality, to understand reality
and to shape it.
Now in the future, well, we'll come up with machines
that can figure out stuff that we have no clue about today.
- Yeah, but so--
- That's only because we're so well suited to reality
that can we create those machines.
- And I promise you, in the future,
it's gonna be much more what you're saying.
That's how it's gonna happen.
- No, but the thing is, when the creatures from the future
look back to the things we're saying now,
what I ran and saying, what you're saying with certainty,
do you think they'll laugh at the level
of how much confusion there was, how much inaccuracy?
- Did you, no.
- No, no, no, let me get this one.
You know what they're gonna do?
They're gonna do what you do when any of us read Aristotle
or read any of these great geniuses of the past.
It's like, these people didn't have electricity.
They didn't have warm clothes or anything,
and they're able to figure out the diameter of the earth.
Like the creativity to be,
and to get it within a few miles, the creativity,
and to figure out the speed of light
when you don't even have a stopwatch.
When you look back, a lot of it's nonsense,
and we, but at the same,
it's like when you're talking to a kid.
You disregard the nonsense,
and when they get something right, it's all, that's you.
So it's never a numbers game, right?
So it's the few that validate and justify the rest.
So when you look at Aristotle, he's talking about the,
there was one of those causes, which is like time travel,
and it doesn't really make sense,
but you look at the rest of his stuff,
or even Plato or any of these greats,
it's like, oh my, this is an amazing miracle.
And not, I wouldn't say literally miracle,
I got you, Ramon.
But at the same time, yeah,
a lot of these other people had stupid ideas.
You don't care.
You care about those great, great minds,
and how they moved us all forward.
To this day, we still study Pythagoras.
- Of course, and it's not even,
it's not even just the sciences and the math.
Think about the philosophy.
I mean, how much is there to learn from reading Aristotle,
or Plato, Socrates, when you disagree with them?
I mean, how many giants have there been
in all of human history that have had the minds
of a Socrates, a Plato, and an Aristotle?
A thousand years, will they look back at Plato
and Aristotle and admire them?
Absolutely.
Will they find certain things that are wrong?
Yes, but certain things that Aristotle discovered
are absolutely right and will always be right.
Certain things that Einstein discovered
will always be right.
I think a lot of what he came up with,
will some things be discovered to be wrong?
Yeah.
But you know, that wouldn't shock me.
But the genius and the truth
of the we know today is amazing.
It's stunning.
To be pessimistic about us,
because in the future we'll know more.
Not pessimistic, but more humble.
There's no reason to be humble.
I mean, I really think humility is a vice, not a virtue.
What's there to be humble about?
Look at life.
This is amazing.
We should be--
But the word humble has different meanings.
No, I know, I know.
Okay, okay.
I was going to get it.
Yeah, yeah, okay, I'm sorry.
I was going to get it.
I mean, humility in the sense of,
you know, humility in the sense of not appreciating
the genius and the ability and the success
and all the stuff that we as individuals,
I think, in our lives,
but as a culture, as a movement,
if you think about movement in terms of those of us
who respect reason have achieved in spite of the odds,
we should be proud of that and pride is the virtue.
Humility in the sense of,
yeah, I know there's more to know.
I know there's a lot more to know
and in the future we'll know more, sure.
But I don't think that's the way.
See, I take humility as the way the Christians use it,
which is the other way and I think it's a real vice.
It's don't think of yourself too much
just 'cause you can think, you know,
that's no big deal or just 'cause you can create this.
It is a big deal.
Your achievements are a big deal
and you should take credit for them.
So be careful with the word humility
because the real meaning is the Christian meaning,
which is a very, very bad meaning.
Well, hold on.
Let me be a little pedantic
'cause there's no such thing as real meaning, right?
So there's different meanings, okay?
Hold on.
I'm not gonna get into semantics
but here's another real meaning
that you're not gonna disagree with,
which is the smartest person on earth
is ignorant of 99.9% of knowledge, right?
So if I meet someone who is less intelligent than me
and less informed than me,
it is still certain that this person has things to teach me.
If I go to a mechanic and maybe this guy's dumb as rocks,
I don't know anything about cars.
What he tells me about that car
is I could take it to the bank.
He's gonna be in a position to inform me.
So one of the reasons humility is extremely important
is very often you have people,
and you see this very much in academia,
who think, you know exactly where I'm going, Yaron,
who think they're know-it-alls
and they think, "Oh, I have this degree.
"You're a layman.
"You've never been formally educated.
"Therefore, not only are you dumb and uneducated,
"and you're wrong."
And it's like, this person might be have,
one great example of this,
and this is an example Yaron might not like,
is a lot of times you have these native populations
and they'll have a better understanding
of the animals around them,
the plants, the fruits, whatever,
and you'd have these scientists and be like,
"Oh, they're talking about this monster in the woods.
"Yeah, whatever, this giant ape."
But it was real, it was the gorilla.
But you dismiss them 'cause,
"Oh, these are stupid, ignorant, whatever people."
That's kind of changed to some extent,
but that is an aspect of humility
that I think behooves especially highly intelligent people
because there is such a presumption to be dismissive
of people who you regard as less than,
but they're often right.
- So I agree with all of the concrete examples.
I just think we should come up
with a better word than humility.
And I don't have one 'cause I'm not a woodsmith.
This is not my strength.
But humility is a word from the Christian ethics,
and it means something very specific
in the field of ethics.
And it means the opposite of what I think virtue requires.
It's demeaning, it's to put you down,
it's to resist pride.
And I think pride is a very important thing.
- I don't know, Yaron.
- But again, you have to define your terms properly.
- Hating myself has been quite useful for me as a-
- Well, but that's 'cause you're Russian and Jewish.
So by- - What?
This changes everything.
(all laughing)
- This is what happens, right?
We're brought up to feel exactly that way.
- Lex has been a good Russian boy.
So we got him. - Oh my God.
- What is this? - What is this?
- Gematogen, what is this?
- Gematogen? - Is that what it says?
- Yeah, it's gematogen.
I can't, I'm blind.
§06Transcript · 36:32–43:25
- Yeah, but- - As long as you're good
Russian mind chick, we have candy for you.
- But is it kosher?
(Lex laughing)
Did you check if it's kosher?
- This is Ukrainian, my friend.
- Oh! - Oh my God.
That is a sin. - How dare you?
- That is really sinful.
- You know, me and Sonai were born in the same town.
- I'm kidding.
My dad's Ukrainian, don't get mad.
- So I don't think self,
what did you, how do you define it?
- Self hate?
- Yeah, I think self hate is quite destructive.
- Speak for yourself, Yaron.
- I think that humility is quite destructive.
Humility in the sense of, I'm no big deal.
No, I mean, if you've achieved something in life,
you are a big deal.
You are a big deal because, you know,
look, you got the two of us to fly into town
just to sit down here and have a conversation with you.
You're a big deal.
- He says more about you than me.
(laughing)
- We're just, we're just lonely.
We're lonely, depraved.
- I'm not lonely, but I might be desperate.
(laughing)
- I'm starting to question your ability to reason
with the decisions you're making.
On the aspect of, and I should mention
that "The Idiot" by Dostoevsky is one of my favorite novels,
and there is a Christian ethic that runs through that.
- I mean, because, yeah, I mean, particularly,
but I hate to bring this up,
but particularly Russians and particularly Russian Jews
and particularly Eastern European Jews
are incredibly Christian.
There is a real Christian theme in Judaism
that's about guilt.
Guilt is not, there's no guilt in Judaism.
King David doesn't feel any guilt.
Solomon doesn't.
There's no guilt in the Old Testament.
Plenty of guilt once Christianity has an impact on Judaism.
We're raised to feel this way.
We're raised to be humble.
We're raised not to feel special.
We're raised to think we're no big deal
and our mothers put us down and use that against us
and try to inflict guilt on us.
They raise us up and then they knock us down.
It's a mechanism, but it's a cultural mechanism,
and I think it's very destructive
to self-esteem and to happiness.
- And I'll give you a great,
he's absolutely right with what he just said.
- I disagree.
- Well, yeah, why is he right?
- Because my family, for example,
still doesn't really understand how I could pay the rent
'cause I'd have gone to an office.
And when I started out trying to be a writer,
the immediate reaction isn't,
which a lot of times I talk to kids, right,
and they have these aspirations,
and I'll tell them, "Go for it while you're young.
"If you fail, you'll go to your grave."
I tried my best.
I didn't make it happen.
Whereas if you don't try and never achieve,
you are gonna feel horrible for the rest of your life.
And this is the example I use all the time.
I bring up many times.
I go, "Go to any bookstore
"and look at all those terrible, terrible books
"on the shelves that you wonder, 'How's this a book?'"
That could be you.
You could be that crappy writer.
But the thing is, in that culture
that Yaron was talking about,
you tell your family, "I'm gonna be a writer."
Who do you think you are?
Why do you think you're gonna be?
You're no Stephen King.
And it's like, why do you have to be Stephen King?
Why can't you just be a mediocre,
crappy writer making the rent?
- The best that you can be.
- But even that is an amazing accomplishment.
If I don't have to go to an office
and I write books that not that many people read,
this is the story of my life,
at the same time, I do have pride
'cause I made this happen.
You can be the best version.
I mean, this is a cliche,
but you can be the best version of yourself.
It's not a competition.
And yet, our Jewish mothers,
that's not what they aspire us to be.
They aspire us to be the best version
of what they imagine, what the culture imagines,
what society imagine.
It's not about you in their minds.
And I've seen it.
I see it all around me.
People putting their kids down, putting themselves down.
It's not healthy.
- I've never told this story.
I'm gonna tell it now.
When I graduated college,
I was a temp for a while
'cause I didn't know what I wanted to do.
And when you're a temp, it's like playing roulette.
You're gonna have jobs that pay well, that suck,
and pay well, that are great,
or that are great, that don't pay well,
and suck, and pay poorly.
But when you're 21, you have that kind of space.
And my grandmother was talking to her brother.
He's talking about his kids.
She's talking about me.
She's from Odessa.
And she told me she lied to him
about how much money I was making.
And that's something I've never brought up,
and it still hurts me
because it's like your approval of me
should be a function of my character, my happiness.
And the fact that you feel ashamed
over how much money I'm making,
especially at this point in my life,
I thought was very, really misplaced priorities.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- I don't know.
I don't know what to make of that.
- I think there's a huge benefit
to the humility, terms aside,
for believing that others can teach you a lot.
Everybody can teach you a lot.
- I think we all agree on this.
- I just mentioned that, the mechanic.
- No, you do it. - We all agree on that.
- Exactly, exactly, that's the point.
But for that, I do believe you have to not
constantly sort of break your ego apart
and constantly question whether
you know anything about this world.
And sort of there's a negativity with it
that I think is very useful
and it's also very fulfilling, just constantly,
I don't know.
- It's the other way around.
I find that the more I know, the more I know I know,
the easier it is for me to learn from other people.
The broader a context I have,
the more curious I become, the more areas I know.
It's true that the more you know,
the more areas you know you don't know.
And the more I find myself attracted to people
who can teach me something about things I don't know.
Whereas if I was ignorant,
if I truly believed I didn't know anything,
I don't know how I would live.
It would really completely challenge everything,
everything about life for me.
Where would I even start?
You wouldn't know where to start.
So no, I think, and if you don't recognize what you know,
you don't have a full appreciation of yourself.
So really building a recognition of what do I know, right?
And how much do I know?
Is really crucial to living.
- And I'll tell you something else
that furthers my life enormously,
is when you reach a certain point in your career
and your life, and you're talking to people
who are a lot younger,
and they might be smart, driven, intelligent,
they lack data.
When you're 23, you don't know how to speak corporate,
you don't know what the code words are.
So if I am in a position to sit down with this kid
and be like, do X, Y, and Z,
and here's why I'm coming to this conclusion.
This is the information that released me this conclusion.
And I can save them from some of the suffering
I went through.
That is very gratifying.
It's making the world a better place.
And it's also the opposite in a sense of humility,
'cause like in this context--
- I'm an expert.
- Or I'm at least knowledgeable enough
that I'm comfortable giving you advice.
- Yeah, and look, everything I do is about me knowing stuff
§07Transcript · 43:28–49:56
that other people don't.
And I know a lot of stuff other people don't, and I do.
And it's fun.
I'm a teacher, I'm a teacher at heart, always happy.
It turns out I didn't know that early on.
But I like becoming an expert
and then trying to teach people.
It doesn't mean I know everything.
Quite the contrary.
Again, the more I know, the more I know
that there's certain things I don't know
and there's certain areas of expertise I don't have.
But look, pride is a broader concept than that.
Pride is about, and humility is the opposite of pride,
and Christianity has that right.
Pride is about taking your life seriously.
Pride is about wanting to be really good at living,
wanting to have the knowledge.
And I think what you're describing is,
you're describing is I'm constantly learning.
Sometimes I have to re-challenge myself.
I have to question what I believed
in order to gain new knowledge.
That's all good, but that is a drive
that is driven by pride.
You want to know.
There are lots of people out there that don't want to know
because they don't have that pride.
They don't have that commitment to live,
the commitment to achieving something.
- And I'm going to say something else
that I think is crucial.
Humility is extremely important when it comes to politics,
because if you feel comfortable telling someone
you've never met how to live their life,
that is a complete lack of humility.
- Well, I lack it, obviously,
'cause I tell people how to live all the time.
- Not through force.
- Not through force. - That's what I'm saying.
- And of course, not in the concrete.
I don't tell them, move to,
although I do tell people to move to Austin,
but I don't tell them,
this is what you do as a profession,
but I give them the principles,
'cause I think their principles are how to live.
- They're making the choice.
That's my point.
Politically, what I'm saying is,
it shows a lack of humility to be like,
I've never met this person.
This is how I'm going to take money from him.
I'm going to--
- See, but I don't see that humility.
There's nothing--
- No, it's the lack of humility.
- No, but it's not even a lack of humility,
because it's--
- Who am I to tell him how to live?
- No, of course you're not. - It's lack of humility.
- No, who are you to tell him how to live
is an issue of, it's an issue of force and rights
and a bunch of different things.
I don't think it's a lack of humility there.
I think it's a lack of being a human being.
It can be both.
- Sure.
Who gives you the right to dictate to somebody else
how to live their lives?
- Yeah, but that's a lack of humility
if you think you have that right.
- Again, we're using humility in a very different way.
- No, we're using the same way.
- I don't think it's a good--
- Because the person who feels comfortable,
they think, I know better than you
how you should live your life
to the point where I'm capable of forcing you
because I know it's going to be best for you
in the long run.
- And the answer is, you don't know.
- Right, but that's a lack of humility.
- I think in your mind, you're on humility
somehow tied to the Christian concept of humility
and so you're kind of allergic to the word--
- Well, absolutely, because it's part of,
if you look at the cardinal virtues,
the cardinal sins in Christianity,
pride is a cardinal sin
and humility is a cardinal virtue,
but they don't mean it in this sense
because they're happy to tell you how to live, right?
They're happy to be philosopher kings over your life
and they believe that's being humble
and you should be humble, by the way,
in listening to the Pope or listening to God
because what do you know?
You know nothing.
God knows everything, so you should shut up
and do what you're told.
That's the sense in which I don't think you should be humble.
I mean, it's a sense in which I always use
the example of Abraham, right?
God comes to Abraham and says,
go kill your eldest son, your only son, right?
Your only son, go kill him.
It's like, and what does Abraham do?
He says, yes, sir, I'll follow,
and he's a moral hero.
For Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,
he's a moral hero 'cause he follows orders
'cause he's humble.
I would tell God to go to hell.
Screw you, I'm not killing my son.
There's no way.
- I mean, he killed his son, so it's only fair.
- Well, this is before he killed his son,
so I didn't know that, right?
But no, but part of the evil of Christianity
is that he's killed his son
in the most torturous form of death possible.
I mean, the whole story of Jesus
is one of the most immoral, unjust stories ever told
and that Christians elevate this to a position of,
I'd love to have this conversation with Jordan, right?
Jordan Peterson.
The idea of elevating--
- That'll never happen.
- No, it won't.
But elevating Jesus, exactly,
elevating Jesus to a superhero status
for one of the most immoral acts in human history
is horrific.
So yeah, I mean, I'm opposed to God
sacrificing his own son, nevermind my son.
But yeah, let him go do it to his own son.
- But he didn't kill Isaac, he killed the goat.
- The story's about Abraham, not about God.
First of all, God is mean, right, to put Abraham through that
but Abraham has to assume that he's going to kill his son
and he lifts his, he's going to do it and he stopped.
So the whole point is obedience.
That's where humility leads to.
It leads to the opposite of the story you were telling.
It leads to people saying,
"Yes, I should be told what to do.
"Where's the authority who actually knows something?"
'Cause I don't know anything.
No, I know a lot and I know a lot about my life.
- The science--
- So you stay away from my life
'cause I have pride in my life.
The science is settled, right?
Look at these experts.
Who am I to argue with these experts?
They tell me to drink dog pee, I'm gonna drink,
what am I, not drink dog pee?
- Yes. - Yeah.
- Let's go back to the island.
- Speaking of which.
- We're on island again?
- We're back to the island.
And let's go to the island, let's--
- I live on an island.
- Everything's an island in some context.
Like Earth is an island, this universe is an island
in a multiverse.
- There are no multiverses, there's only one universe.
- All right, so let's invite Jordan Peterson to this island.
- You wish, hold on.
- Submit.
- Hold on a sec.
Hey girl, what you doing?
Lex, Lex Friedman, look him up.
- Lex who?
- Yeah, exactly.
- I don't know. - Lex who?
- Lex has as big of a following almost as Jordan does.
- I know Jordan, I know his family actually
through Jim Keller, who's his relative, he's an engineer.
So, and I just talked to Sam.
Who is perhaps a little bit aligned in some sense
on your perspective on religion and so on.
So let me ask, is there some--
- Religion, yes, but--
- Other things, no.
- Sam Harris.
- Sam Harris, yeah.
Oh, sorry, Sam Harris.
- He's on first name relationship with these guys.
- Look at this inside baseball.
I just talked to Sam.
(laughing)
- I thought--
- Let's talk about humility, let's talk about humility.
My buddy Sam, I was talking to Barack, you might know him.
- I simply--
- Humility went out the window.
- I'm just a natural language processing model
§08Transcript · 50:00–58:03
that I assume that once I mentioned Jordan Peterson,
it becomes an obvious statement what Sam means.
This is how neural networks think.
This is how robots think, Michael, you should know this.
I thought by now you'd be a scholar.
- I forgot what I was being humble.
(laughing)
For the sake of the audience.
- Humility, everything can teach you something,
even a robot.
- Okay, so do you think there's value in religion
or broader, do you think there's value in myth?
And as we've been talking about the value of reason,
do you think it's possible to argue in society
as we grow the population of our little island
that there's some value of common myths,
of common stories, of common religion?
- There was value.
There is no value today.
So human beings need explanations, right?
They need a philosophy to guide their life.
They need ethics, they need some explanation
of what's going on in the world, right?
And it's no accident that the early religions
had a river god and they had a sun god and a moon god
'cause everything they didn't understand,
they made god, right?
So they had multiple gods
'cause they didn't understand very much.
As human understanding evolved, increased,
as we knew reality more, right?
We came to the conclusion of, you know,
this is very inefficient to have all these gods.
This is a genius of Judaism, right?
Let's just have one bucket to put all the stuff
we don't know in and we'll call it one god.
And then we don't, as we gain new knowledge,
we can just take it out of the bucket that's god
and put it into the bucket of science.
At some point though, at some point,
and that point certainly came
during the scientific revolution, I think,
we could come to the conclusion that no,
we don't need this bucket that's called god
to explain the things that we don't know.
We can say we don't know.
And we're learning.
And slowly, our knowledge is increasing
and yet there's a lot more that we don't know,
but we don't need to throw it into some bucket
that's called god in order to have it.
And I think that's true for morality
and it's true for everything else, right?
As we gain the tools to understand what morality requires,
we don't need a set of commandments.
We can figure out morality from human nature
and from reality.
So I don't think we need religion anymore.
I think religion needed to die probably about 200 years ago
and was dying, I think, up until Kant.
It seemed to be dying.
And one of Kant's missions, as he says,
is to revive religion against the attack of reason
and the enlightenment.
Now, mythology is a little different
'cause it depends what you mean by mythology.
Certainly we need stories and certainly we need art.
Art is a, and Rand writes about this a lot.
And she's an artist and she writes,
I'm a huge fan of "The Romantic Manifesto,"
which I think is one of her underappreciated masterpieces.
- Oh, I hate it.
Okay, that's okay.
- Yeah, so I think we have a real need, right?
As a conceptual being,
we have a need for aesthetic experiences.
We have a need to concretize abstractions,
to concretize abstract ideas,
to concretize the complex nature of the world out there.
And that's what painting, sculpture, to an extent music,
but painting, sculpture, literature does for us.
So to the extent that mythology serves that purpose,
it's just art, right?
To the extent that it serves another purpose,
that is that it's a way for the gods
to communicate with us
or it fits some kind of preexisting mental construct
that we have as, again, kind of a Kantian perspective,
right, that we have these categorical imperatives
and this mythology links up to that,
then I think it's false.
It's not helpful and destructive.
So I believe religion today
is a destructive force on planet Earth.
I think it's always been a destructive force.
It was just a necessary force, right?
You needed an explanation.
People needed something to believe in.
Once you get philosophy and once you get philosophy
that starts explaining real life, real world,
you don't need religion anymore.
And indeed, it becomes a destructive force.
And you look around the world today,
it's an unbelievably destructive force.
Everywhere it touches is bad for life.
Again, mythology depends.
Art is essential, very, very crucial to human existence.
- I mean, I'd love to hear what you think,
but you don't see religion and philosophy and mythology
as just a continuous spectrum?
- Yeah, so religion is a primitive form of philosophy.
- But I don't think-- - It's pre-philosophical.
- Where I thought Yaron was gonna go and he didn't go
was that I think, I agree with what he's gonna say.
Rand was a mythologizer.
In certain specific contexts, Atlas shrugged as a myth.
It's one thing to sit down and say,
these are the people who move us forward.
These are the values that are important.
When you experience it through a story, through a movie,
through a TV show, a poem, or a painting,
it affects you in a very visceral, very different way.
Talk about American history.
You have the founding fathers,
then you have the myth of the founding fathers.
Now, unfortunately, the term myth often means lie,
but it could mean, in a useful sense,
an abstraction to help you systematize and concretize ideas.
So you have the myth of Reagan,
you have the myth of Thatcher.
The reality often falls very short.
But when you look at how these different figures
are mythologized, not only is it very inspirational
on a personal level, very motivating on a personal level,
it's also a great way to concretize ideas
because just how humans think.
It's one thing to think about ideas,
but when you see someone who embodies these ideas,
Miss America, I was saying earlier,
I had an astronaut on my show,
these people might be jerks,
but when you look at them,
one specific aspect of their life and you extrapolate it,
that can be, to anyone, very motivating.
And it's very important for people to have the belief
that happiness and achievement is possible
'cause it's very hard to keep that in mind,
especially if you're depressed,
if you're anxious, you're unemployed,
you don't have a girlfriend,
you think it's gonna be like this forever.
And then you look at someone's story
and they're like, you know what,
that astronaut I interviewed, Clayton Anderson,
he applied 13 times, didn't get a callback,
applied the 14th time, got a callback, didn't get the job,
15th time he get the job, he talks to kids.
And he goes, listen, apply 13 times.
Even if you don't get the callback,
you'll still feel I'm doing something.
And having heard him and the myth of Clayton Anderson,
this is gonna tell people, yeah, you know what,
that could be me.
- Absolutely.
And it's not just happiness,
it's the fact that virtue works, that integrity.
I mean, what's the power of the fountainhead?
I know you love the fountainhead.
Part of the power of the fountainhead is
Howard Rock's absolute commitment to integrity.
He is committed to integrity and he's happy, right?
And it's very rare in life to see that,
to actually see a concrete of that.
And it's very hard to hold it in your mind.
Yes, I'm gonna be stuck in the quarry
or I'm gonna be stuck doing this horrible job,
but if I stick to my principles, I'm gonna be Howard Rock.
Now I've got that concrete.
I know I can immediately relate to that success.
So I think art is essential.
And I think in a sense,
what we do to Thatcher and Reagan is art.
You have to be careful in true stories,
not to diverge too far from reality
'cause then when you discover the reality,
you don't want to whitewash it.
And particularly when it has political implications
and then it's really bad.
So particularly with Reagan and Thatcher,
you have to be careful
'cause they want anyone near as good
as people try to make them out to be.
But these are powerful, powerful, powerful stories
and people are moved by it.
And the integration of emotion with reason is crucial, right?
One of the goals to be happy
is to bring your emotions in line with your thinking.
And I think that stories and arts more broadly.
And when I go and see Michelangelo's David,
it does the same thing to me.
§09Transcript · 58:04–1:05:57
I can stand up to anybody 'cause he did and look,
he succeeded and it makes sense that he could, right?
- So there's a really interesting idea
of bringing your emotion in line
with your thinking, with your reasoning.
So Ben Shapiro famously has this saying,
how do you like that transition, Michael?
You give me props?
I know you do.
- He's not Ben, it's Ben Shapiro.
- Yeah.
- Someone is not taking your calls.
- Benny.
- I guess it's the daily don't take the caller.
- Back to the island with the murder.
I think we know--
- Murder island.
- We would know who would be committing the murder.
I have the suit for it.
So he has the saying of facts don't care about your feelings
and that always, I've always felt badly
about that statement somehow, like it was incomplete.
So it's interesting too that you mentioned
bringing your emotions in line with your thinking.
Like what do you think about that statement?
- I got this one.
What Ben is doing--
- Ben.
- Ben, what he's doing in a loose way
is attacking Kantianism 'cause Kant,
there's this, it's almost impossible for Westerners
who aren't schooled in this to understand
the idea of philosophical idealism
'cause it sounds so crazy that you're like,
these great minds of all time can't really be saying this.
I must be missing something.
So the idea of, when we hear idealism,
we think John F. Kennedy, right?
It's an example.
You aspire things, you think life could be better than it is.
That's not what it means in a philosophical sense.
In philosophical idealism, it means ideas
are more real than reality.
That I have this idea, then this comes along.
It's the reality that isn't correct.
My idea is still correct.
A good example of this that you see all the time
on the internet is when they refer to Mitt Romney
and John McCain as rhinos, Republicans in name only.
And it's like, who is more a real Republican?
The nominee of the party, the senator,
the governor of the party, or some person in your mind
who has never existed and there's no evidence
for them existing?
So what Kant did is he bifurcated reality
into what we see around us, the phenomenal world,
but then it's inferior.
The real world, the noumenal world, we can't access it.
Because we have eyes, we only see the thing as it appears,
not as it is in itself.
And because of this, everything we know
is a shadow and is secondary.
- And that's Plato, right?
- Yeah. - Straight out of Plato.
- Right, and the real reality is this realm of ideas.
So when Ben is saying facts don't care about your feelings,
what he is really saying is reality comes first,
your feelings have to be a response or a reaction to it.
You can't say this is how I feel.
This table doesn't care.
You can yell at it all day long,
it will still be indifferent to your emotional state
because it comes first.
- So it's a great statement.
I think he's cribbing it from Ayn Rand in a sense.
And I-- - I love it, yes.
- There's a sense in which he is.
I mean, who popularized that kind of idea?
And Ben has read Ayn Rand quite extensively.
- Not enough. - Not enough.
- Well.
- Not enough to reference her.
- He does wear the yarmulke, so yeah, obviously.
He may be read enough but didn't understand enough.
But so-- - Shot fired.
- It's absolutely reality, reality is unaffected
by your emotional state and your feelings about it.
And this is a great claim against the idealism,
the philosophical idealism of much of the world out there,
both left and right.
I think politically, culturally,
the left and right are detached from reality.
They live in a different dimension, in a different space
that they are creating in their own minds
that has nothing to do with the real world.
And when they fail, they make stuff up
to justify their failure, right?
So this is, you know, all of really the ideas
that are promulgated today on both sides
are this kind of detached from reality.
We're putting emotions or ideas before reality itself.
But I believe that, you know, emotions are responses.
They're responses to reality
conditioned by our existing concepts.
- You're gonna have to talk slowly to talk emotions to Lex
'cause he doesn't really understand what that is.
- I don't understand.
- So really, you gotta really--
- But he's big on love.
- What is love?
- But he's big on love.
- He's trying to learn.
- Pretty big on love, I'm all in, I'm a love maximalist.
I mean, I could create, we could create an environment
on this island where you would really feel emotions.
Like fear is an emotion.
- That's the metaphysical terror.
- We could easily terrorize you to the point
where you felt fear, right?
So we could teach him about emotion.
But emotions are response to reality.
So some people, for example,
you could take five different people
and show them exactly the same thing.
And some of them would feel fear
and some of them would actually, you know, feel indifferent
and other people might feel love, right?
- I think Leonard Picoff uses the example
of looking through a microscope and seeing a,
I don't know, a virus or bacteria.
And for one, it's a scientist, he's made a new discovery.
He feels pride and love and, you know,
the one has no clue, right?
And he's looking at this and it means nothing to them
and somebody else might look at it and, you know,
it's a bacteria, you know, and they feel fear
because of what it could do to them.
So it's conditioned by what you know,
what your values are and your level of knowledge
and what the thing is out there in reality.
And it's that into, so your emotions respond to that.
So aligning your emotions with your reason
is making sure that your emotions are really conditioned
by what you know explicitly
versus what you've internalized implicitly
that you might not agree with anymore.
You know, things might happen in your childhood
and they probably do, right?
Where you get a trauma, I don't know,
I'm afraid of dogs and maybe when I was a five-year-old,
some dogs jumped me and I don't even remember it, right?
But I came to a conclusion when I was five,
dogs bad, dogs dangerous, right?
And now anytime I see a dog, oh my God,
that bringing my emotions aligned with reality, right?
With my ideas is, no, now I understand dogs
don't have to be scary, I can work through this
and there are various techniques and hopefully
if there is such a science of psychology,
but in psychology to get you to the point
where you can get rid of that fear
and align your emotion now with your explicit ideas
and that's what I mean by that.
- And let me build on that,
talking about your friend Putin,
I think I mentioned this before, maybe on the show,
he was meeting with Angela Merkel.
- Oh, Vladimir, please.
- Yeah, Vlad, my boy Vlad.
He was meeting with Angela Merkel.
Angela Merkel has a fear of dogs.
So he brought out his big Labrador retriever.
Now for people who don't know,
Labradors are very big dogs,
but they're also like the least aggressive.
It's like you could punch them in the face, they don't care.
That dog is not going to be more likely to attack
just because she's scared.
And I know they say animals can sense fear,
domesticated dogs, if they see you're scared,
they're not gonna be aggressive.
They're gonna try to, I remember when I was a kid,
I will never forget, there was this dog, Rex,
this German shepherd, I'm five, this dog is gigantic.
And I'm sitting on the couch,
the German shepherds have been bred for intelligence.
They're very bright dogs, they're very good with kids.
He's sitting next to me, this thing is three times my size,
he very gently puts his paw on my leg to be like, kid,
like he can sense my fear, he's like, I'm not gonna do it.
Like, I wanna be your friend.
I'm still freaking out.
He licks my hand, it's just very scary.
You know, animals are so bright,
but that's the thing is,
in terms of facts don't care about your feelings,
that dog is not more likely to attack someone
because their emotion is so intense.
It's not that I feel something very strongly,
therefore this thing is more likely to happen.
§10Transcript · 1:06:00–1:12:39
So my intensity of my emotion does not in any way correlate
when you're being irrational
to the likelihood of that thing actually happening.
- No, you could have a dog
that does respond to your emotion.
- Oh, of course.
- Right, but then it's not--
- It's not responding that way.
- But then that's part of reality, right?
That's a fact of reality
that certain dogs respond to certain emotions.
- But isn't this emotion a part of reality?
Like, okay, let me say a word.
- Yeah, so part of that, I would even say,
don't let your emotion about your emotion, right?
'Cause sometimes you have an emotion about your emotion.
- Don't be repressed.
- Don't be repressed, and identify the emotion as reality.
And evaluate it, don't judge it, evaluate it.
Is it a rational emotion?
Is it consistent with my, like,
if I'm afraid of these dogs, if I feel that fear,
is it rational to be afraid of these dogs?
- But you're speaking to your own individual trajectory
as a human being as you grow through the world
and try to understand reality
and connect yourself through reason to reality.
What I'm talking about is a term like lived experience.
When you observe and analyze the,
you know, conversations with other people
to try to understand how other people see the world,
doesn't emotion fundamentally integrate into that?
Like, is an emotion lived experience?
So everybody experiences the same reality,
but the way they experience it might be very different,
and that has to do with what?
- With their values, with their conclusions,
with their ideas, with their experiences,
with a million different things.
- But is it-- - But at the end of the day,
it's about the conclusions that they come to,
which are then shaping their emotions.
But look, emotions are not something
to be avoided or ignored.
That is, I can sense your emotions to some extent.
- That's a lie. - Right?
(laughing)
Okay, it is Lex.
I can sense his emotions.
I can sense Michael's emotions,
and that's part of the facts of reality, right?
So if Michael responds to something
that I view as really, really important, right?
If we were standing in front of Michelangelo's David,
and Michael responds to Michelangelo's David,
who goes, "Nah," and turned his back to it and walked away,
that would be really meaningful to me, right?
That I would respond emotionally to that,
and cognitively I would say,
"What is it about Michael that makes him respond this way?
"That gives me a lot of information about him."
So emotions are information-laden, right?
But they are not primary.
They are responses, responses to something.
So one must be very aware of one's own emotions,
recognize them, and analyze them,
and one should be aware of other people's emotions,
if they're important to you.
If they're not important to you, it doesn't matter, right?
You don't care about a stranger's emotion.
Yeah, like a stranger walks up to Michelangelo's David
and says, "Eh," and walks away,
then I go, "Okay, I'm glad you're a stranger."
(laughing)
Now, I'm not sure what Michael's response
to Michelangelo's David was or is,
so I'm a little worried about what he's gonna say.
You got candy too, that was great.
(laughing)
Do I get Ukrainian candy?
I thought I was special.
I can't read either.
What's this say, Joshua, what does that say to him?
Is this Ukrainian candy as well?
I thought it was sent to me.
Do you know that Atlas Shrugged
was the best-selling book in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016?
Do you know Atlas Shrugged was translated to Russian
by someone who's now a crypto billionaire,
and he made six copies, and I have one of them,
and I sent it to my great-grandma.
No, there were more than six,
but yeah, 'cause I have a copy too.
Okay.
Not I personally, they instituted a copy.
I sent it to my great-grandma,
and she said, "Why is he sending me this?
"I wanna read books about love."
And I'm like, you know what?
It's just about love.
(laughing)
That's what you should have said.
What's that, is that say?
So this says it's (speaking in foreign language)
It has vitamins and minerals.
It, there's a bunch of--
If it's in Russian, I don't believe it.
(laughing)
It just sounds really--
(laughing)
It sounds really strange to read
like health information in Russian.
There you go, exactly.
I'm already distressed--
Look, there's a Yorshik like you have.
Exactly.
I mean, I like Kiev much more than I like Moscow.
Wow, strong words.
But this is not, it's like hard candy.
I don't know.
I think this, some of my friends sent me
that's made with blood to give the kids iron.
Whose blood?
Like cow blood.
Oh.
Like with chocolate.
All right.
You can keep it.
(laughing)
It's all you.
All right, I'm keeping both of these.
But can I speak to something
you're talking about with emotion?
Something that is very pernicious in terms of emotion
is people denying the validity of their own emotions.
And here's one example.
Someone could be in an abusive relationship
or had an abusive childhood.
And they think, well, I didn't have a black eye.
We had dinner on the table.
It wasn't abusive.
'Cause you hear some other story.
So they feel their emotion isn't valid.
Or like, oh, he never lays hands on me.
He gets drunk and is mean to me.
He's still basically a good person.
You're denying that emotion.
And that emotion is a response to something real.
There's an expression,
I have friends who are in 12-step programs.
There's an expression there, which I think is very profound,
which is if it's hysterical, it's historical.
Meaning if some minor incident
is having an extreme disproportionate impact on you,
think, ask yourself, why am I responding
in such an extreme way to some minor thing?
And I will tell you, 10 times out of 10,
you'll go back and you'll be like,
oh, I'm feeling now like I felt when I was eight
and my dad came home and he was a total jerk
and I didn't do anything wrong and he thought I had
and I was completely powerless.
And now I'm in the same situation my boss.
I'm not that eight-year-old.
In one sense, I am, in another sense, I'm not.
But I feel the same way I did as a kid.
And this is a very useful mechanism
in terms of furthering one's happiness
'cause you kind of deprogram all those things
that you've picked up as a child.
- But it's also, if you're feeling something wrong,
even though you're trying to rationalize it in a way,
it's not abusive 'cause he's not hitting me.
No, the emotion is telling you something real
about what's going on.
So acknowledge it and fix the situation, right?
So one of the powers emotions give you
is they send you signals about something
that might not be in cognition yet.
And when you examine the emotion,
it brings it to cognition and now you can act on it.
So maybe the boss is abusive,
but I didn't really think of it in those terms.
And my emotions is sending me signals.
And now that I signal it, I'm gonna resign.
I'm gonna find a better, another job.
I'm gonna complain to his boss or whatever.
I'm gonna take action.
- Why do you think Ayn Rand is such a controversial figure?
Last time I spoke with you on this particular podcast,
the amount of emails I've gotten,
positive and negative, and certainly negative.
I don't usually get negative emails.
- Yeah, but you did.
- Yeah, I can't relate.
I'm sure mine were only positive.
- It was mostly women sending pictures
for me to forward to you.
- And you didn't send me any of them.
- Oh, it's the wrong email address.
§11Transcript · 1:12:43–1:20:12
I'm sorry.
I kept bouncing.
I was looking at your email.
- Oh, so this is love.
(laughing)
- Love hurts.
Okay.
- Yes, no, I--
- But why do you think she's such a divisive figure?
Why do you think that she provokes such emotion
in both the positive and the negative side?
I'd love to hear both of your viewpoints on this.
- Well, I think on the negative side,
and both on the positive and the negative side,
I think it's because she's radical.
She's consistently radical.
She upends the premises, the ideas
that are prevalent in the culture,
that were brought up on, that are like, you know,
they're like milk and, you know,
the basic stuff that we're growing up.
You have to be altruistic.
You have to live for other people.
That's just basic stuff.
Nobody challenges that.
Nobody questions it.
And if they do question it,
they usually question it from the perspective
of a cynic or a bad guy, right?
You mentioned the Joker, right?
Before we started, right?
That, you know, I'm gonna upend the world
because I don't care about other people, right?
So they're presented with these two alternatives
and it's real in people's lives, right?
You either live for other people or you're a evil SOB.
And, you know, yeah, most people are neither one of those,
but the ethic is right here.
It's living for other people.
And when you challenge that,
they have no way cognitively to go with that.
And the only place they can go with that cognitively
is to the Joker.
It's the evil guy.
It's the somebody who wants to smash everything
and destroy it.
Because they don't have this alternative conception of,
oh no, you can be rationally self-interested
and that does not involve destruction
and that does not involve, you know,
exploiting other people.
They can't conceptualize that.
It's not in their framework.
So it's the fact that she's so consistently
on the side of self-interest, for example,
on the side of capitalism, on the side of freedom.
It's the fact that she dismisses faith
to the extent that she does or to the extent that I do.
That alienates people 'cause that is completely different
from what they brought up.
Now, the flip side of that is,
it's also really interesting to some people.
So, you know, a lot of, you got some positives, right?
And I got a lot of positives from that appearance.
I know a lot of people came to my podcast
because I appeared on your show.
Why?
Because they hear something that's completely fresh,
new, different, they've never heard before.
It appeals to something in them that maybe, you know,
a lot of people say, I read Ayn Rand
and it confirmed everything I believed.
Now, for me, it didn't.
It was the opposite.
It turned upside down everything I believed.
But there are a lot of people out there
that have a sense that something's wrong in the world,
that altruism is wrong, that socialism,
just the stuff and religion is wrong,
but they don't have an alternative.
It hasn't coalesced.
And they listen to a lot of podcasts
'cause they're trying to get ideas of what is it,
what is it that I'm sensing that's wrong out there?
And suddenly somebody comes out
and gives them some clear explanation of things.
And they go, wow,
that's what I've been looking for my whole life.
So that's the positive for people.
You know, and I read Ayn Rand, it just all made sense.
It all clicked and it made clear
that everything I believed to that point was just wrong.
It just didn't integrate.
And I always knew to some extent it didn't integrate,
but there was no alternative, so I believed it.
What else was there?
I remember saying to myself as a kid, probably 15,
why should I, why is morality all about other people?
Why is that?
Well, that's just the way it is, right?
And I couldn't come up with an explanation.
She gave me the explanation
and she gave me the explanation why it's wrong to do that.
And I think, so I think that's why people respond.
It's just too radical.
It can't fit into their cognitive framework
that they're being brought up on,
that they've been educated on,
that just their whole life revolves around.
- Michael, you don't bring up Ayn Rand
that much in conversation,
except as kind of references every once in a while
as part of the humor of just the general flow
and the music of the way you like to talk.
Well, why do you think you don't integrate her
into your philosophy when you're like explaining ideas
and all those kinds of things?
Like, why is she not, you know,
a popular reference point for discussion of ideas?
- Because I don't know if you're everyone's gonna agree with
or can agree with me.
I think for a certain percentage of the population,
actually I talked to someone from the Ayn Rand Institute,
I forgot his name, older guy with glasses,
and he didn't disagree with me.
He said, this is changing.
I said, I think for a certain percentage of the population
who are uninformed about her work,
higher than 10%, less than 50%, you mentioned Ayn Rand,
they have been trained to think
this is identical Scientology.
So as soon as her name comes up,
it's like, okay, I'm out the door.
I'm not gonna have anything to do with this.
And everyone who follows her is a crazy person.
That's one thing that has happened.
Another thing is Rand in her personality
was very aggressive and antagonistic.
She was for a long time, the lone voice in the wilderness,
being like, this isn't like,
like one of her big adversaries in a certain sense
is Milton Friedman.
And she really hated how Milton Friedman was like,
oh, you know, having rent control is inefficient.
And she's like, inefficient?
We're talking about mass homelessness and people dying.
And you're talking about this,
like what color tie goes with this color shirt?
Are you in, like, and in fact, it's hilarious.
There was an organization called
the Foundation for Economic Education, FEE.
Leonard Reed was the head of this.
And there were a series of letters and she was helping him.
She was much more philosophically grounded
in certain contexts than he was.
And there was an essay, a pamphlet that he published
called "Roofs or Ceilings."
It was co-written by Milton Friedman,
later Nobel Prize winner,
and George Stigler, also later Nobel Prize winner.
And basically the argument was,
well, if the government controls all housing,
how's that going to work out?
And she's sitting there and she's typing in all caps.
So, you know, she's holding on the shift key and doing this.
- On a typewriter.
- On a typewriter and being like, how?
And you can imagine her with her cigarette holder,
apoplectic, being like, how is an organization,
ostensibly devoted to free enterprise,
discussing this Stalinist idea in the most casual of terms?
She's like, have I taught you not?
And what's amazing is, so at FEE,
they only have her letters because she sent them to Reed.
The Ayn Rand Institute must have Leonard Reed's letters.
I was able to, knowing Rand enough,
predict exactly what the conversation would go like
because he also did something she didn't approve of,
which is he asked other people for feedback on her work
and she goes, I gave this to you to read.
Who are you shopping around to some jerk
that I don't, I need their approval, what are you doing?
So it was a very interesting situation.
But, so that's one issue.
- Now remember, this is Ayn Rand when she's young.
- She wasn't that young.
- Well, I mean, she's relatively young, right?
It's before Atlas Shrugged.
- It was before Atlas Shrugged.
- So it's before she's super famous
and before this is, the found has been published,
but, you know, she's trying to work with others
and they're disappointing her left and right.
- Yeah, so, and also when you are a,
what she takes away from bad people
is you have these kids, right?
And you're gonna sit down with them
and they're gonna be like, yeah, I'm gonna take your guns,
I'm gonna lock you in your house,
I'm gonna take 60% of your income and all this other stuff.
§12Transcript · 1:20:16–1:27:12
And they might, up to reading Rand,
they might sit down and have a discussion
and Rand goes, hey, you know what?
You didn't have to give them an answer.
You could say, go to hell,
we're not having this conversation
and you have no right to one second of my life
and this is not a legitimate opener.
This is a declaration of war.
This isn't like, it's not like if I sit down with you,
I run like, hey, Ron, here are my plans for your wife.
Go to hell.
This isn't a conversation we're having.
Oh, I'm gonna make you unsafe in your house.
What?
This is not a discussion.
So what happens is these people who five minutes ago
were able to have a debate with this kid
'cause people read Rand when they're young often.
And now that kid is like, yeah, I'm not even talking to you.
It's her fault.
Whereas in reality, it's that person's fault
because that person had no right,
although they've been trained
to the contrary of our culture,
to believe, yeah, I'm gonna sit down
and we're just gonna equally have a discussion
over our own life and you have one vote
and I have one vote and we're gonna,
and Lex has a vote and that's just how it's gonna be.
Like, this is madness. - No, it's Lex.
- And Rand's not having it.
So I think those are two issues.
And there's some other things
which I don't need to get into,
but one of the things that Rand said consistently
in her life is that her philosophy
is an integrated whole, right?
So to be an objectivist isn't just like,
I like Atlas Shrugged.
It means I accept objectivism as a totality.
Since I do not, I think it is proper
to be respectful to her wishes and not constantly be,
especially given that I have somewhat of a platform
to be like Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand,
because I don't think Ayn Rand would have liked it
if I was talking about Ayn Rand this much.
- So how do you deprogram?
'Cause I don't like to bring up Ayn Rand
just because I do see what,
like how people roll their eyes, essentially.
So how do-- - What's the upside?
- What's the upside, exactly?
But what is that, can you speak to that programming
that people have? - I think you're
unprogramming people.
I mean, look, at the end of the day,
if you talk about the ideas and the ideas make sense
and people are attracted to the ideas,
then you say, oh, by the way, and this came from Ayn Rand,
that's how you deprogram them, right?
If you make the ideas prevalent in the culture,
if people start viewing self-interest
as something that's interesting and worthwhile
and something worth investigating,
and they said, oh, that came from Ayn Rand,
then I think that we'll deprogram them
and get them changing their minds about these things.
And also, going on shows where people are gonna watch
your show no matter who you bring on, right?
So even though, now you do,
if you put Ayn Rand in the title,
that immediately reduces the number of people who watch.
So in the future, you shouldn't.
- You put Michael Malice in the title
and then at least the female population too.
- The female, absolutely.
- It's just to see.
- That's right.
So you go and you try to make them as credible as possible
to as many people as possible over time.
It takes time.
And ultimately, I don't think the culture
will have this response to her.
They might still disagree with her,
but I think over time, and already you're seeing it,
younger people, I think today, are far less.
There was a generation who never read Ayn Rand
and was like this, bring out the garlic and the crosses,
we don't wanna have anything to do with her.
Then, and I think today, there are many more people
who've read her and might disagree or not disagree, right?
And then there were a lot of people who haven't read her,
but who are not opposed to it
or willing to engage.
So I think it's changing already.
And I think in 20 years, it'll be completely different.
- And just two more things that she does
that I think it says that I think people find
very, very off-putting given our culture.
One is she will, basically, you could sit down with Rand
and be like, your fear is not in any way
a hold on my freedom.
Just that one sentence.
And for a lot of people, that's very off-putting
and very harsh, it's correct.
But for them, it's just like, wait a minute,
I'm still scared.
It's like, I don't care.
Like, for example, like with lockdowns and things like this.
It's like, well, I'm scared
and maybe I have a right to be scared.
- Ah, gotcha.
- Or like, I'm scared that you have a gun in your house.
And it's like, I respect that you're scared.
I don't care.
As you say, at the end of the day, this is my house.
I'm going to live my life as I please
as long as I don't hurt other people.
Well, you are hurting me 'cause I'm scared.
No, that's not--
- This is the feeling versus fact.
- Yeah, yeah.
So that is one situation where--
- It's like a feeling versus freedom, essentially.
- Yes, where Rand, I mean, puts a lot of people off.
I also think that historically,
a lot of people who are drawn to her
are drawn to her for the wrong reasons.
That a lot of times, like Howard Rourke, the hero,
we're going to still say hero.
You're supposed to say protagonist, but hero.
The hero of The Fountainhead, he's extremely intelligent,
but he's also extremely uncompromising.
What often ends up happening is you'll have a young kid
who is somewhat intelligent,
but then they pick up the personality,
and now you're someone I can't work with.
And then it's like, you're not Howard Rourke.
Relax, you're not that skilled, you're not that talented.
But because the character has to be a personification
and have certain aspects together,
when kids read that, they might get the wrong idea.
That's not Rand's fault.
- And it's more than that.
It's so, so, I completely agree with that,
but it's even broader than that.
So here is, in my view, one of the geniuses of the millennium
presenting a philosophy.
And she's got not just the questions,
in my view, she's got the answers.
And you're reading them at 16, and you're reading the answers.
You don't know at 16 that this is true.
- Yeah, yeah.
- You might have a sense that it's true,
but you don't have the life experience,
the learned experience.
You don't have the facts, you don't have the knowledge.
You're picking up truth.
It's just being absorbed.
You're accepting it as true, but you don't know it's true.
And then you go out into the world advocating for it,
which we all did, or at least I did, when I was 16.
And you're obnoxious.
You can't prove what you're arguing for,
because you don't have the experience.
So it took me, I don't know, 10, 20 years, probably 20,
to figure out that I really do think
what she said was true.
But I didn't know when I was 16.
When I was 16, I just absorbed these ideas
and accepted them in a sense,
with some connection to reality, but in a sense, unfaith.
At least presented it that way.
And as a consequence, you come off as a detached
from reality, obnoxious human being.
I think a lot of young objectivists are,
and it's hard not to be, because you are.
You're confronted with genius.
And you're not a genius.
I certainly am not a genius.
And I'm confronted with just genius,
and I have all this information in my head now.
I can't articulate it.
And it's hard to deal with yourself.
There's an inside joke.
- No, you said I'm confronted with genius, I point to us.
- Yeah, yes, I mean, I'm confronted with you guys.
I'm at an age where I know how to deal with geniuses.
- But I'm gonna say, there's something else.
This is not why people don't like her,
but there's something that the Fountainhead does,
which I think is very, and I don't blame her,
but it's a bad consequence.
If you read the Fountainhead and you're young
and you're intelligent and talented,
the message, at least I got, and I know I'm not alone,
is you are going to think that you're gonna be a pariah,
that a lot of people are gonna be against you,
and you're basically doomed for a short period
§13Transcript · 1:27:15–1:34:24
of being isolated and alone.
And that may have been the case
when Fountainhead was written.
But I think now with the internet,
and in my experience, both as a youth
and someone who's a little bit older,
I didn't appreciate,
and you're not gonna get it from that book,
and you can't get it through that book
'cause it has to have a certain narrative,
how many people who are a little older are giddy
when they find young talent.
How inspiring it is, how exciting it is.
Like when you talk to these kids
who are doing things on the internet
or writing or whatever achievement,
you want them to flourish.
You're not threatened by them
as the antagonists of the Fountainhead are.
And that doesn't come through in the Fountainhead
because of-- - But it depends
on your profession, right?
I mean, for some of these-- - Sure.
- Parts of the world are better than others.
If you're an artist, at least the way I conceive of art,
and you wanna go study art today,
you're gonna be pooh-poohed
and look down on-- - Oh, of course.
- And so on.
So yeah, I agree.
I mean, in my generation, when I read "Ein Renn,"
there was no internet, and I was in Israel,
so we were isolated, and there was nobody else
who had shared their ideas.
And you did feel that kind of isolation,
but Rourke gave you, to me, he didn't teach me about,
you know, you're gonna be isolated,
'cause partially it's 'cause I wasn't,
maybe I was humble, right?
(Rourke laughs)
- You thought you were Israeli.
- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
When I read "Atlas Shrugged,"
I identified with Eddie Willis.
- Okay. - When I read
"The Fountainhead," I didn't identify with Howard Rourke.
- How old were you when you read "The Fountainhead"?
- So I read "Atlas" when I was 16.
I probably read "Fountainhead" when I was 16 1/2, 17,
something like that.
- That is an unfair war crime.
- And I read-- - You read "The Fountainhead"
after "Atlas Shrugged"? - Yeah.
- If anyone listening to this--
- They should read "Fountainhead" first.
- If you read "Fountainhead" after "Atlas Shrugged,"
that is a war crime. - No, for me--
- I swear to God. - For me, reading
"Atlas Shrugged" was much more important.
- It is more important, but my point is,
I think "The Fountainhead" in many ways is redundant
in certain aspects if you read "Atlas Shrugged" first.
And because "The Fountainhead" is such a masterful book
and such a personal book-- - I agree with that.
So ideally, you would read "The Fountainhead" first.
- That's all I'm saying, yes.
- But-- - And here's the other thing
people don't appreciate, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
People think Rand's always about politics,
politics, politics, politics.
"Fountainhead" is not a political book.
- At all. - It's about,
well, she talks about it as "Politics of Man's Soul," sure.
But it's about ethics, how important everyone has to have
a moral code.
That's the other thing why people find Rand off-putting.
If you have young people who now find it very important
to live a moral life, who are like,
"What does that mean to have morality, to have ethics,
"to live with integrity?"
For people who have gotten a little older,
who have made these little sacrifices,
who are like, "I'm not gonna fight at work.
"Do I really need to look for another job?
"Yeah, my wife's kind of getting annoying,
"but am I gonna make a fight about it?"
These little sacrifices that they make every day--
- And big ones. - And big ones, absolutely.
So when you have someone who's saying,
forcing you to look in the mirror and say,
"Those little sacrifices and big sacrifices you made,
"you did the wrong thing, and you're evading
"that you betrayed your own conscience,"
that, to many people, I think, is very threatening.
- But this is why so many people say
that Ayn Rand is for 14-year-old boys.
- Yeah, right. - Right?
- You're brought up. - And there's a reason why
it appeals to 14, is a little young, but 16, 18,
it's because those are the ages
where we're still open to idealism,
idealism in a positive sense, right?
To beautiful things, to ideals, to seeking perfection,
to seeking a great life.
I think as you grow older, most people become cynical.
They give up on their ideals, why?
Because their ideals were wrong, and their ideals failed.
Right, my parents were socialists when they were young.
Those ideas failed, so where do you go from socialism
if your ideals fail? - Cynicism, yes.
- To cynicism. - Which is horrible.
- Right, all adults, almost all adults out there are cynical,
and that has failed, the idealism,
and when they look at the young people,
they see their idealism, oh, well, that's,
I was idealistic, too, and they don't question the idea,
well, they're good ideals and they're bad ideals,
they're right ideals and they're wrong ideals,
and that's why they attribute it to youth.
So it's a threat to a lot of people,
a lot of people who it's too late for.
For some people, it's too late to change their minds,
and they know it, and they're too invested
in the job, in the wife, in the compromises.
- In the comfort.
- And they're too invested in the comfort,
too invested in compromise, too invested in comfort,
and they know that they shouldn't be,
they know they should change,
and these young people are challenging that,
and that is really, really scary for them,
and that's why they reject it
without too much consideration.
- One of the things Rand, the working title
for Fountainhead was Secondhand Lives,
and Rand had two definitions of selfishness in that book.
One is selfishness in the sense of,
my life is the most important thing,
it's not the only important thing,
my family would be number two, friends,
they certainly are extremely high values,
but you can't have these secondary values
without the first value.
- But in the context of my life, right,
'cause your family might not be a value, right?
You might hate your parents.
- Sure, the point being, selfishness.
Then there's the other kind of selfishness,
which is Peter Keating, one of the villains of the book,
which is he's selfish in that he's greedy,
he's looking out for number one,
but he has no values, he has no sense of character,
he just wants to be wealthy,
he wants to have a beautiful wife,
he wants to have a big house, why?
He couldn't tell you, because other people have it,
and he wants to have it more than them.
His sense of reference is other people,
he's living secondhand.
The problem with that is, a lot of young people read Rand,
and when they start arguing online,
they just start trying to talk like Rand,
whereas Rand would be like, be original, be an innovator.
If you want to argue for objectivism in Rand's views,
take her ideas, articulate them in your own way,
'cause that's a good way of showing
that you understand what she thinks,
but what they end up doing is just talking like her,
it sounds dated and comical,
and that's going to be off-putting,
'cause it's like, Rand wouldn't expect someone else
to sound like Rand, she's her own person.
- And she, of course, wouldn't view Keating as selfish
in any sense, because, or even greedy,
greed is a tricky word, but--
- He was selfish in the old school sense.
- Yeah, he's selfish in the old,
but even there, it's not as if he has some passion
and he's going after that passion no matter what,
I'm getting light sheets, steel, I'm getting,
he doesn't have, his passion is painting, right?
And he doesn't pursue his passion,
he pursues what his mother wants him to pursue.
And he pursues money and--
- Status, he's a statistician.
- He's completely second-handed in the sense
that he follows other people's values, not his own.
- Can we actually just backtrack,
and can we define some of these ideas
that Ayn Rand is known for of selfishness?
Selfishness, egoism, egotism, greed,
I mean, those, basically all of those words
are seen as negative in society,
and Ayn Rand has been reclaiming in her work those words.
So, can you speak to what they mean?
- I think she's trying to, and Yaron might disagree,
I think she's trying to be needlessly provocative,
and it's off-putting, and on one hand,
maybe you wanna be a provocateur,
'cause that gives you people like,
§14Transcript · 1:34:26–1:41:16
what does this woman mean?
On the other hand, many people
are gonna be viscerally put off.
When Ayn Rand was on Donahue in 1979,
he asked her explicitly,
"Define to me the virtue of selfishness,"
which is the title of her collection of essays as well.
And she, this is Rand, immediately says,
"Use a different word, self-esteem."
And it's like, yeah, it's like,
why are you championing this word
which has extremely negative connotations?
Whereas if you just say,
and this is thanks to her and her work,
"My life matters, my values matter,
"I'm not gonna apologize for that,"
that is a lot less off-putting
than this caricature of Rand, which is,
when people hear "I'm for selfishness,"
they hear, "Oh, someone's bleeding out in the corner,
"but I wanna get a Coke, that's nice."
She condemned that.
She says, "I'm against this kind of sociopathy,
"that's absolutely crazy."
But that word selfishness--
- It goes a mistake to be provocative
in this one dimension, to go and to stick with it.
I mean, she's stuck with this idea
of selfishness and so on.
- This term, and I often use terms for provocative effect.
- Yes, this is true.
You're a master, you're a scholar of the trolling arts.
- Thank you, sir.
But I think this is one example
where the costs outweigh the benefits.
And go ahead, your honor.
- Yes, I'm open to that idea,
but I don't think that's right.
When you actually dig deeper into what people object to,
they're not objecting to the word,
they're objecting to the ideas.
And she addresses this explicitly
in "The Virtue of Selfishness,"
in I think the introduction.
- Wait, hold on, I gotta ask for clarification.
You're saying they're objecting to the ideas,
but when they talk about her,
they're not talking about her actual ideas,
they're talking about the caricature.
- Well, sure, but the caricature is a defense mechanism,
not to have to deal with the ideas.
Right, so they create the caricature
in order to ignore the ideas,
in order to, and some of them do it consciously.
Like when people like Krugman and others do this,
they know exactly what they're doing.
- Well, Krugman's an, is Ellsworth Tewi.
- Yes, he's the perfect Ellsworth Tewi.
And he knows Ayn Rand, he's read Ayn Rand,
and he knows she's the enemy in some sense.
He knows--
- Check out our episode with Krugman.
I think it's number 90.
- Yeah, it was a great conversation.
- Didn't get as many views as me, but what are you gonna do?
- Well, you got a Nobel Prize, so what you got?
- I got a ticket to heaven.
Sorry, Paul.
- Yasser Alphard has a Nobel Prize.
- And Hitler was Times Man of the Year for a few times.
- But you, that really bothers me when people bring that up.
Are you really--
- Yeah, Time of the Year, Man of the Year--
- It's called a joke, Michael.
- Is it?
- Man of the Year is not representative of good,
it represents the most influential person of that year,
and Hitler was.
- Absolutely.
- So what were you upset about?
- When people like, well, look at Time Magazine,
they call Hitler Man of the Year, like you're on set.
They won't say this guy's awesome,
they say this is the guy who moved on the world the most.
- They know it's sanctioned him, that's it.
- It's not like he was Stalin.
- I don't go out there.
- Now that's who they like.
Hitler's terrible.
- Oh no.
- The Stalin guy.
Oh no, no, I'm not even joking.
- The attitude of people between Nazism,
or fascism, and communism is stunning.
- In my upcoming book, I have all the receipts,
how the things that they were saying about Stalin
at the time are, if you look back, it's unconscionable,
and these people have had no accountability
for what they did.
- But it's not even at the time,
and we need to get back to the selfishness stuff,
but it's not even at the time.
So I was once, I think I've told this story,
I was in the green room going on John Stossel's show,
and I saw a bunch of libertarians, right,
in the green room, all hanging out,
and this guy walks in, this young guy walks in,
and somebody says to me, he's a communist.
I said, what do you mean?
Said, they said, no, no, he's a card-carrying,
real member of the Communist Party, he's a communist.
And I said, and that's okay with you guys?
And they go, yeah, yeah, nice guy.
And I'm like, no, this is not acceptable.
- Hold on, let me quote Rand.
Rand said she would rather talk to a philosophical Marxist,
right, did she not say this?
- Yeah, but this is a communist,
in the context of 21st century, right?
So I said-- - But not 20th.
- Well, in a sense that we know exactly what.
- Sure, sure. - We know exactly.
- Oh yeah, yeah, that's-- - So I'm like,
this guy has the blood of 100 million people on his hands.
I'm not letting him off the hook.
So I engage with this guy, and literally,
we get into this, I'm telling him what I think of his ideas,
and therefore what I think of him.
Then the people from the wardrobe department come out,
and their chairs are put aside,
and this little gladiator ring.
It's like the libertarians are sitting there amused,
'cause to them it's just,
you know, and I'm not gonna name names,
but to them it's just like, yeah, he's a communist.
- No pun intended, I'm gonna name names.
- And I said at some point to them,
I won't name names, because,
I said at some point to them,
if somebody walks into a room and says, I'm a Nazi,
do you just treat him as, okay,
let's go hang out and get some drinks?
- I do. - I don't.
- I do, 'cause I wrote a book about this,
the new right, and I did talk to Nazis,
and I went to North Korea--
- Yeah, 'cause you were writing a book.
- Yeah. - Right, but you're not,
you're not gonna hang out with a Nazi or a communist
just like the regular person, right?
To me, a Nazi and a communist are the same.
- I don't, okay, please explain this,
'cause first of all, any time you have equivocation,
I hate that, because I don't like equality,
I think it's a bad concept.
We're all sitting here as Jewish people, right?
We're from the Soviet Union.
To say these two things are basically the same,
it's a matter of life and death for all of us.
We'd be dead under Hitler.
We're not doing so hot under Stalin, but we're still alive.
- Sure.
- So there's some very big difference.
- Sure.
- And one more thing.
- So within the context--
- Just hold on, one more thing.
There's also one very big difference
in that one has a lot worse of a brand name,
and the other does not, even though the other should.
- It's a brand.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Yeah, so I agree.
So there's a context in which I would fear
Stalin more than Hitler.
There's a different context in which I would fear Hitler.
But as ideologies, they are equally evil.
- Wait, wait, but--
- Not the same, because the difference
is between communism and fascism,
but as ideologies, they're equally evil.
They both view the individual as insignificant, unimportant,
and they both basically wanna kill
any independent-minded--
- But you're equating communism with Stalinism.
So you're--
- No, I'm equating communism.
I don't know what Stalinism is.
I don't care.
Stalinism is one version of communism.
- It's an implementation.
- Communism is an evil ideology, no matter who practices it.
- I don't think that's, I think that's too loose,
because here's one example.
The first person who went to the Soviet Union from the left
and denounced it was Emma Goldman.
She was an anarcho-communist, right?
So she went there, she got deported from the United States.
She went to Lenin, to his face.
Hold on, let me finish.
§15Transcript · 1:41:17–1:48:10
You're already dismissing what I'm saying.
- Me?
- Your body language, your emotions.
Listen, history doesn't care about your feelings either.
She goes to Lenin, she goes,
"We're supposed to be about free speech.
"We're supposed to be about the individual freedom.
"What are you doing?"
She goes, "Free speech is a bourgeois extravagance.
"You can't have it during a revolution, too bad."
She comes back to the West.
Wait, he's right?
- Yeah.
- Oh no, yeah, correct, yeah, I just said, yeah, yeah.
- He's more consistent.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's more consistent.
- She's a compromise.
- Yeah, you're right.
She comes back to the West, the big red Emma,
the big hero of the left, and she goes,
"You guys, this is a complete,"
she didn't say bad, she was very randy.
She goes, "This is pure evil.
"This is horrifying.
"What they're doing to the workers,
"which you supposedly care about, completely oppressing."
And when one person described it, they go,
"When she got up to talk, it was a standing ovation.
"And when she was finished, you could hear a pin drop."
Because she wasn't some capitalist.
She wasn't some bourgeois conservative.
She was as hard left for violent revolution as it gets.
And so I don't think she, as a communist, is an evil person.
- I think she is.
Because if she wasn't evading, and with Rand,
and I think in reality, the essence of evil is evasion,
is ignoring the facts of reality,
is putting your feelings ahead of your facts.
She would realize that what was going on in the Soviet Union
was the inevitable consequence of her ideas.
- That could be just as dumb.
- So she could have changed her mind.
She could have, coming back to the Soviet Union,
said, "These ideas are wrong.
"I now repudiate my ideas,
"not just their implementation, but my ideas."
And then I would have said,
"Yeah, she'd been mistaken before,
"and now she's confronted reality."
But if she stayed a leftist,
if she stayed a leftist to that extent,
not just a mild leftist, but a leftist,
then I think she's dishonest, and therefore immoral.
- But you're using three words identically.
You're saying dishonest, immoral, and evil.
- Okay, so evil is an extreme form of your morality.
So okay, so she's immoral.
The ideology she holds is still evil,
'cause the ideology. - Maybe she's delusional.
- She might be delusional.
- But delusional and evil aren't the same.
- But she can be delusional.
She cannot be delusional.
See, I'm willing to accept a delusion
before she's gone to the Soviet Union and seen it.
Once she's gone to see it,
I don't think that excuse holds anymore.
I think now she's being confronted,
and she's lying to herself about the implications of it.
Logically, it's inevitable that what happens
in the Soviet Union has to happen in any communist context.
- So to play a little bit of a devil's advocate here,
is it logically inevitable?
Can you imagine that there is communist systems
where the consequences we've seen in the 20th century
are not the consequences we get?
Imagine future societies under different conditions,
under different, with the internet,
different communication schemes,
different set of resources. - As long as human beings
are what we are.
Now, the Borg, you remember the Borg from "Star Trek"
or whatever the series was? - Okay, nerd.
(both laughing)
- Yeah, I mean, no.
I'm a nerd, okay.
- The Borg. - It's the highest
of compliments. - The Borg.
- In this household. - The Borg
is the highest of lex. (both laughing)
- The Borg is communist, right?
The Borg is a different species.
It has a different biology.
It has a business, different form of consciousness.
Now, whether such a being could survive evolution
is a question.
Whether such a-- - Well, ants,
they don't have to be intelligent.
- Yeah, but then the question is,
can you have free will, human cognitive cognition,
and be a Borg?
I don't think so.
But maybe, maybe in another planet.
But human beings-- - You gotta take DMT
to meet the Borg. (both laughing)
- So human beings, no.
Communism is anti, the reason communism's evil
is it's anti-reality, anti-human nature,
anti the individual, and therefore it is inherently evil.
It cannot result in anything good coming out of it.
Only bad can come of it.
- Do you think you could have predicted that
before the 20th century? - Yes, and plenty of people did.
It's not-- - You know who did?
Mikhail Bakunin.
Mikhail Bakunin, who was an early communist,
Marx's rival, in 18, this is gonna be in my upcoming book,
in 1860, he sat down and wrote an essay,
goes, "What Marx is advocating is insane.
"This is gonna be worse than the czar.
"You're talking about complete totalitarian nightmare.
"When you put this into practice,
"it's gonna be something we've never seen before.
"It's a pure horror."
But he was a hardcore leftist.
- Look, Marx predicted it, right?
We talked about this-- - Yeah, that's true.
- Marx, at some point, says certain people
cannot be part of the politic,
and they have to be liquidated.
So this idea of mass murder and mass killing,
it's not new to communism,
it is an inherent part of what it means.
You're either proletarian or you're not.
And you look, and in Marx, it's in Marx, right?
The individual doesn't matter.
Now, he might matter in his utopia,
'cause he knows he's got a marketing problem.
See, Marx has a marketing problem,
because the fact is you have individuals.
How do you convince individuals
to give up their individualism,
to give up the individuality?
What you say is, well, we have to go
through this difficult process to get to this utopia.
And in this utopia, I mean, he's very Christian.
I mean, this is the other thing about Marx.
- About the end times, yeah, yeah.
- Marx is very Christian in everything,
in his morality, in his collectivism,
and in the end times.
The end times for Marx is going back to the Garden of Eden.
The end time for Marx is you don't have to do anything.
Food is just available.
Wealth is just available.
You can do your hobbies, you can do everything.
You can do whatever you want,
whatever feelings, whatever.
So it's going back to Garden of Eden
perception, perspective on human.
So he knows what that is gonna require.
It's gonna require this dictatorship,
the proletarian, to get there.
And he never tells you how we get there, right?
There's no game plan.
- Where there's a rule, yeah, yeah.
- There's a dictatorship, then there's utopia.
- It's like the underpants notes.
Step one, dictatorship.
Step two, question marks.
Step three, utopia, yeah.
- And the question mark is where the action is, right?
Annihilate.
- Yeah, you yada yada the important part.
- And people buy this garbage, right?
So there's nothing of value in Marx.
I mean, let me be very clear.
There's nothing, he gets capitalism wrong.
He gets the proletarian wrong.
He gets the workers wrong.
He gets the labor theory of value is wrong.
There is nothing of value.
There's nothing of value in communism.
It is a wrong, unfitted to human nature ideology
from beginning to end.
- The clarity with which you speak is just not something I,
I don't think I have that clarity about anything.
So I, I mean, it has to do with that thing
that where everybody has something to teach you.
I just feel like I've been reading "Mein Kampf" recently,
for example, for the first time.
- Something to learn from Hitler?
- Well, there's a lot to learn from Hitler.
- About the nature of evil, about wrong ideas,
not about anything good, not about anything positive.
- So yeah, so that's probably a really bad example.
- But why is Hitler different than Marx?
- Well, that's a very good question.
- No, I get that, but in terms of ideas,
why is Hitler different than Marx?
§16Transcript · 1:48:11–1:56:07
Why do we have to assume there's something to learn from Marx
but there's nothing, but we acknowledge
that there's nothing positive to learn from him?
- Because, I mean, all right.
- I can tell you something in the sense that like,
there's an interesting question is,
how did this person get from step A
to being able to implement the ideas?
- I know you, everybody should read,
anybody who's interested should read Marx
because it's really important.
It's important in the history
and a lot of people were influenced by it.
Why was it influential?
What is it that he says that appeals to people?
I find it interesting to see all the parallels
with Christianity and I think that's why,
to a large extent, it appeals to people
because they got to give up
the unimportant part of religion
and got to keep the fun parts of religion,
the important parts to them of religion,
the morality, for example.
But no, there's not something positive
to learn from everybody.
- In Ayn Rand's view, in your view,
who was worse, Stalin or Hitler?
- I think worse is, this is something that I,
I'll do a Randian sin and be evasive.
It really drives me crazy when people sit down
and have these competitions about like,
if someone who's Jewish brings up the Holocaust
and someone who's African-American brings up slavery
and this is a conversation that I think is pointless
and very hurtful and harmful
and it is really like silly and ridiculous.
So it might make sense in like some kind of stoner context
about like you're doing the math and trying to figure out,
but it's like, and yeah, you could be like,
what would you rather have like this kind of cancer
or full-blown AIDS?
In short, I mean, there's gotta be life expectancy,
but these are such, I'll evade your question, reframe it.
I think we understand,
and a lot of this is a function of the propaganda
at the time, and I'm not using the word propaganda
in a negative sense, the horrors of Hitler and Nazism.
I think, and one of the things I'm trying to solve
with my upcoming book, there is a very poor understanding
about the horrors of Stalinism
and what that meant in practice.
One of the reasons I wrote "Dear Reader,"
my North Korea book, and what I was shocked and delighted by
when I started writing "Dear Reader,"
I thought to myself, look,
I have very little capacity to affect change,
but I can tell stories, I can write books.
This is my competency.
If I move the needle in America, we got it pretty good here.
If I move the needle in North Korea,
this could have really profound positive consequences.
And so I set a very limited goal,
and that goal is to change the conversation
about North Korea, to stop it being regarded
as a laughingstock, and start regarding it
as a existential horror.
And the metaphor I use always,
and we brought up earlier, was the Joker,
'cause people look at Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il, his father,
they look at a clown, this guy's a buffoon,
and that's valid, and I go, and I said,
this is what I can do, I can move that camera a little bit.
And now that camera, instead of looking at Kim Jong-un,
Kim Jong-il, you see behind him,
literally millions of corpses.
And when you see people putting on these performances
in these shows, look at these fools,
then you're like, everyone, those people,
their kid has a gun to their head right now.
If someone puts a gun to your kid's head,
you're gonna put on clown makeup?
Yeah, you are.
What color?
Put on the shoes, whatever you want.
So in terms of, people do not appreciate
the horrors of Stalinism.
I think this is a big fault of the right wing.
You can't expect necessarily the New York Times
to do this because of the blood on their hands.
And for a long time, I was berating conservatives.
I go, this was the big right wing victory,
bloodless largely, the victory of the Soviet Union.
No one's talking about it, no one's informing.
And let's be clear, there are very many people
who are Democrats, who are on the left,
who are violently opposed, literally violently opposed
to the Soviet Union and its horrors.
This is not necessarily a partisan issue.
And I'm like, all right, I'm gonna do something about it.
So I know that's not really literally your question,
but that's kind of information that features.
- Let me ask you that question if it's okay.
So which can we learn more from,
from a historical perspective looking forward?
Like which has more lessons in how to avoid it,
how to, and just general lessons about human nature?
- Well, I mean, I agree with Michael
that it's not important who's more evil,
'cause they're both evil and they're both just so evil
that the differences don't matter.
What matters is what is the ideology?
What are the consequences?
What do we understand from it?
What are we worried about?
What are we gonna avoid?
So I'm not worried about Nazism, Qua Nazism,
because everybody hates Nazism.
I mean, it's uniform that that's out.
Even the people I think on the far right in America
are staying away from the cliches of Nazism,
although some of them are stupid enough not to.
But in the end, if the United States
goes authoritarian right, it's not gonna be Nazism.
It'll be some other form of fascism,
because that is so obviously being understood
as evil and bad that there's almost no understanding
that the evil of communism.
I mean, you brought it up earlier, right?
Almost nobody understands that communism
is an evil ideology, that there's nothing worthwhile there,
that any attempt to go in that direction
in any sustainable way is destructive.
There are, as you mentioned,
there are economists out there claiming they are communists.
I mean, I find that despicable,
that anybody would claim to be a communist economist
or communist anything, because I think that's,
it's a ideology that has no basis,
but we haven't learned that.
So to me, communism is the much bigger threat,
because we still think it's some kind of beautiful ideal
in the world around us.
I think Nazism's out, but I think fascism
is a massive threat out there,
'cause I don't think we've learned real lessons of,
nobody knows what Nazism, fascism is.
Everybody thinks fascism is Nazism.
They don't recognize that in a sense
we are already fascist,
and that we're certainly heading in that direction.
So they don't know what it is,
and again, we haven't studied,
and the real lesson here is we haven't studied
what unifies them both, 'cause there's not a big difference
between fascism and communism.
There's no big difference between Nazism and communism.
- What does unify them?
- What unifies them is the common good, the public interest.
What unifies them is this idea
that there is some elite group of people
who can run our lives for us, for the common good,
for the public interest.
- And that you don't matter.
That's the most important, yeah.
- You as an individual, you individual don't matter,
and they will dictate how you live.
And so these are philosopher kings,
it goes back to Plato's philosophy.
But it really unifies it.
Think about communism.
Communism is about the sacrifice of the individual
to the proletarian.
Who is the proletarian?
It's this collective group here.
Who represents the proletarian?
Well, somebody has to.
Somebody has to tell the proletarian what they believe in,
'cause they don't know,
'cause there is no collective consciousness.
So you need a Stalin.
And this is the point about Marxism.
Marxism needs a dictator,
because somebody has to represent the values,
the public interest, what's good for the public.
Nazism needs the same thing.
Just Nazism replaced proletarian with Aryans,
the Aryan race, and you have exactly the same thing.
You need a dictator to tell us
what's good for the Aryan people,
so we can do what's good for the Aryan people.
- So it's impossible to have a communist system
or a fascist system without a dictator naturally emerging.
It's not possible to have a Georgian.
- It's not naturally, it's ideologically.
- It's absolutely impossible to have that.
On scale, you can certainly have communes,
where people behave communistically.
- Because it's not inside the ideology
that that should happen. - Hold on, let me talk about this,
because let's talk about fascism,
§17Transcript · 1:56:08–2:03:55
'cause fascism, definitionally, is gonna have a strong man.
I don't even know how it could be fascism without that.
And let's talk, what you said earlier on
is about how people don't know what fascism is.
- Fascists don't know what fascism is.
So there's a superb book by John Diggins
from the early '70s called "Mussolini and Fascism,
"The View from America."
So I find Mussolini to be a far more interesting figure
than Hitler, because he had a much more nuanced career.
He was much more of an innovator.
- He was an intellectual, which is shocking,
'cause he always comes across as a buffoon,
but he was actually a thinker and a--
- So why did he not resist Hitler at all?
- Hold on, hold on.
So one of the things with fascism is it comes,
it's a direct line from Kant to Mussolini.
So basically, there is a philosopher who I adore,
who I'm sure you don't, called Schopenhauer.
And Schopenhauer, the question became,
Rand was not a particularly humorous person.
She had some moments of wit.
There's a great moment when she was on Tom Snyder's show
in 1980, I believe, and she's talking about Kant.
And she goes, "Immanuel Kant and all his
"illegitimate children, if you catch my meaning,
"she mean all his bastards."
But the host, Tom Snyder, did not pick up on it.
If you watch it on YouTube, you could pick up on it.
And what happened was once Kant bifurcated reality
into the phenomenal world, the pure idea world,
and the numeral world, the question became,
well, what is the nature of this world of ideas?
And Hegel had it meant reason.
I don't know even know what that means theoretically,
that the world of reason is idea.
Schopenhauer, who hated Hegel,
who constantly attacked him by name
and Hegel's followers in his work,
he was a very big innovator in a malevolent way
'cause he said the nature of reality, this idea, is will,
meaning the universe doesn't care about you
and it's constantly in this reality
putting urges in your mind, values.
And when you denounce these values and urges,
that's the basis of morality.
And from there, it went to Nietzsche
and the will isn't mindless, it is a will to power.
Mussolini took this and basically said,
because the will to power is the real reality,
the Kantian idea, therefore all of this is secondary.
So if we will it, we can make it happen.
When you have this concept of my willpower
is stronger than reality and you're like,
okay, how's this program gonna work?
We can make it happen.
That was why fascism is not a very coherent ideology
because explicitly, there's a book called,
from 1936 called "The Philosophy of Fascism,"
which tried to codify this.
'36, this is a long time ago, where they're like,
we're against reason and explicitly rationality.
We are for willpower, for strength.
And if you are strong enough and united enough,
you can force these things to work.
So there's a lot that is not taught about this ideology.
I highly recommend people read the books from the time.
And what was fascinating about Mussolini
is he was regarded as the moderate.
Because the 1930s, you had the Great Depression,
all the intellectuals said,
this proves capitalism can't work.
The Great Depression, obviously, air quotes,
is capitalism's fault.
Then you have the alternative, the USSR.
Well, that's not tenable for us.
Here comes Mussolini.
And Mussolini says,
I'm gonna take the best of both worlds.
I have aspects of markets, capitalism,
but I don't have this chaos,
but I also don't have complete government control
of the bureaucrats.
I'm gonna have this combination.
And there was a Broadway song,
You're the Top, You're Mussolini,
that was later edited out
because that's when he took a bad turn.
But this is kind of the fascist idea.
- And it's about power and it's about control.
That's the essence.
It's about will.
So they don't care.
Fascists don't care who owns stuff, owns in quotes,
because what's important is who controls it.
So you can own your home,
but if I get to tell you when you can sell it,
for how much you can sell it,
and what you can do on that home,
then I'm in control of it.
That's the essence of fascism.
And if you think about it,
we live today in a much more fascist economic context
than anything else.
We pretend that corporations are private,
but when everything they do is regulated,
who they can hire, how much they pay them,
when and how they can fire them,
what they can do on their property,
it's all control.
That's the way fascists start controlling everything.
- But it's not possible to have checks on power
and balance of power at the top of fascism
or communist systems.
The question was whether in fascist systems
or communist systems,
we're saying the dictator naturally or must emerge.
- I don't say emerge.
The dictator's the one who makes the fascist system.
- Yeah, fascism, well, it could emerge,
because for example, I think today in America,
we're moving much more towards fascism, socialism.
And at some point that'll manifest itself
in some kind of dictator.
And the dictator might be different
than a Mussolini or Nazis.
It might be couched in some kind of pseudo-constitutional
American-- - It would be a lot easier
for a female to be a fascist dictator in America
than a male, because you have that softness.
She's not gonna come off as a strong woman.
People won't see it coming, in my opinion.
- Maybe, I think it's gonna be,
I have my own view.
I think it's gonna be a nationalist,
religionist, environmentalist.
I think somebody who can combine those three--
- Well, Hitler did those, yeah.
- Yeah, exactly.
And somebody who can combine those three
and articulate the case for it, I think America's ready.
- So you think it's possible for fascism
to arise in the world again?
- Oh, of course, it never went away.
- It never went away. - They just adopt the name.
- Because the fundamental ideas, the Kantian ideas,
the ideas that are behind fascism never went away.
They're still as popular, if anything, more popular
than they were back then.
Marx is as popular.
I think these ideas are prevalent, they're out there,
and absolutely, I think America's ready for them.
Again, it won't be quite in the form
that we've experienced in the past.
It'll be in a uniquely American form,
counts to the flag, and of course,
it was counts to the flag before.
But no, yes, an authoritarian,
some form of authoritarianism is necessary,
'cause the fundamental principle behind
both communism and fascism is the unimportance
of the individual.
The individual is nothing.
The individual is a nobody,
and the importance of the collective,
the collective will, the collective soul,
the collective consciousness.
But the collective has no will,
has no soul, has no consciousness.
So somebody has to emerge to speak for the collective.
Otherwise, everything falls apart, right?
So it's necessary, whether it's a committee
or whether it's one person, how exactly,
somebody has to speak for the collective.
Even a committee doesn't function as a committee, right?
Most committees, particularly when the committee
is about dictating how people should live,
somebody is going to,
because now it becomes really, really important,
somebody is gonna dominate that committee
and rule over it, because you don't want
independent voices, 'cause the individual doesn't matter.
The individual doesn't count.
- And also, people are naturally hierarchical,
so you have seven people,
and they ostensibly have the same role.
Someone is gonna emerge as a leader naturally,
and some people are gonna be followers.
- Yeah, it's the same reason you cannot have
the Richard Wolff-type socialism of,
and this is the more, if you will,
innocent part of his ideas.
Oh, why can't we have corporations all be worker-owned,
and everybody votes on everything,
and we vote on who should be CEO?
No, communism, fascism, most ideas
necessitate ultimately authoritarians,
and that's most of human history.
We forget again.
§18Transcript · 2:03:57–2:11:08
This idea of liberty, this idea of freedom,
even the limited freedom we have today--
- It's a recent invention.
- It's a recent invention.
It happens in little pockets throughout history.
We had a little bit of this democracy stuff, partial,
only a few, some people got to vote,
and it wasn't rights-respecting,
because they didn't have the concept
of rights in Athens, right?
You had it in a few Greek cities.
We maybe had a version of it in Venice.
We had a version of it in city-states around the world.
But then it was invented by the founding fathers
in this country.
That's what makes the founding of America so important
and so different and such a radical thing
to have happened historically.
Freedom is rare.
Authoritarianism is common.
- So I was looking at some statistics
that 53% of people in the world
live under authoritarian governments.
- Only 53.
Oh, because India is democratic,
so I guess they don't count India.
But yes, it used to be 100.
- How do we change that? - Exactly, yeah.
- How do we change that?
- And even the authoritarianism in a country like China
is a lot less than it used to be under Mao, right?
So they were better off than they were under Mao.
That's a reality.
How do we change it?
We have to declare,
we have to change the ethical views of people.
This brings us back to selfishness.
Because as long as the standard of morality
is the group, others,
as long as the standard of value
is what other people want, what other people think,
as long as you are alive only to be sacrificed to the group,
that's why you have to challenge Christianity,
as long as the Jesus on a cross
dying for other people's sin
is viewed as this noble, wonderful act
instead of one of the most unjust things
to ever happen to anybody,
as long as the common good and the public interest
are the standards by which we evaluate things,
we will always drift towards fascism,
some form of authoritarianism.
- Can I ask a question?
I think there's something that has to go
along with what Yaron was saying,
and I know he's gonna agree with me, which is technology.
Because if it becomes harder technologically
for the authoritarian and more expensive for him
to input or force his edicts,
that is going to create a pocket of freedom
regardless of what the masses think.
And the masses, hold on, let me finish.
The masses as a rule are not going to be able to think
in general anyway.
I have a much more elitist view of mankind than Rand does.
Let me give you one specific example,
which I mentioned in my book, then you write.
Let's suppose it's 1990, not that long ago,
we all remember 1990,
and we're having an argument about censorship.
And Yaron says, "I want full sense,
"full freedom of the press, freedom of books,
"publish whatever you want, whatever, free speech."
And I say, "Well, what about books like Mein Kampf?
"What about, you know, people read this,
"they have the wrong idea.
"What about child pornography, things like this?
"Like, where are you gonna draw the line?"
And we could argue along.
Lex appears from the future, and he goes,
"Hey guys, this conversation is moot."
And we're like, "Lex, you look exactly the same."
I'm like, "Yeah, of course, robots don't age."
And you go, "I'm from the future."
And I go, "Wait a minute, black president?"
And you go, "Look, this conversation is moot
"because in a few years from now,
"you will be able to send any book,
"anywhere on earth, at the speed of light.
"You can make infinite copies in one second,
"and you could send it to anyone such that
"they can only open this book if they know a magic word."
And I go, "Well, how much is this gonna cost?"
"Oh, it's free."
And I go, "Wait, wait, you're telling me
"I can make infinite copies of any book
"and teleport them at the speed of light,
"anywhere for free?"
And you would say, "Yes."
We would think he's insane,
but that's the status quo, right?
So technology has done far more
to fight government censorship of literature and ideas
than has spreading the right ideas.
So when you have things like crypto,
which makes money less accessible
than a gold block in your house,
when you have things like people
being able to travel quickly,
those are also necessary compliments
to having the right ideas.
And Rand herself said that she couldn't have come up
with her philosophy before the Industrial Revolution.
So as time goes forward, and we have more technology,
and we have more discourse--
- But for very different reasons, you said that, right?
- Sure, but it's also a lot easier
to persuade people of the right ideas.
- So I kind of agree.
Maybe I'm more pessimistic,
or maybe I don't get the technology completely.
- That's 'cause you're a boomer.
- There you go.
(laughing)
- Okay, boomer.
- I get that insult a lot.
(laughing)
I think I'm the last year of the boomer generation.
I think I hit that last year.
It's a mindset, there you go.
(laughing)
- I love you so much.
- So the reason she said she couldn't have developed her,
the reason she said she couldn't develop the philosophy
without the Industrial Revolution
is the link between reason and wealth
was not obvious before the Industrial Revolution.
And that, for example, it's not obvious to Aristotle.
Aristotle doesn't see the link
between rationality and wealth creation.
Business is low, and money is barren.
Money is barren.
Interest has no productive function.
Bankers don't have.
So you had to see it existentially to be able to see
reason is the source of wealth creation.
So I think that's a little different.
Now, there is a sense in which, yes,
technology makes it more difficult for authoritarians
to achieve their authoritarianism.
I'm not convinced that they can't.
- I didn't say can't.
- Yeah.
- Okay, I didn't say can't.
- Yeah, so I don't think--
- At a certain point, I'm just saying--
- They can turn off the electricity.
- I'm just saying it becomes more expensive.
- Yes, it becomes more expensive, no question.
It becomes more expensive.
And we're still beings that live in a physical reality.
Therefore, they can still harm us in this physical reality.
- But let me say this.
It's gonna sound as absurd.
If there was technology that we could teleport anywhere
on Earth at the speed of light,
that would certainly go a long way
towards hurting authoritarianism.
- Sure, if there was some way to go.
And of course, they could teleport too.
And this is, of course, the danger
of they can use the technology too.
- Sure, absolutely.
- And look at what the Chinese are doing
with social scores and with monitoring people
and cameras everywhere.
So there's a sense in which you probably had more privacy
before some of the technology.
- Oh, absolutely.
- So it's not obvious to me that,
so to me, it's all about ideas.
And if we don't get the ideas right,
technology will be used for evil.
Yes, and it will allow some of us maybe to escape
for a little while in some realms, but others not.
You know, Iran and North Korea do a pretty good job
shutting themselves away from technology,
although a lot gets through in the Iranian,
at least with Iran.
I don't know about North Korea, how much gets through.
- It's real undermining them, which is wonderful.
- Yeah, which is great.
So yes, but it's more than that.
And this is what leads me to be optimistic.
It's that we live in a world today
where seven billion people basically have access
to all of human knowledge, all of human knowledge.
It's not like in Rome, when Rome fell,
all of human knowledge disappeared.
Now, some of it escaped to Byzantine,
§19Transcript · 2:11:10–2:19:02
some of the Byzantines had,
and ultimately land up with the Arabs
and found its way back into Western civilization
through them.
But a lot of knowledge disappeared, just wiped out, right?
How to build a dome, how to build a big dome,
how to have, you know, in Pompeii, they had faucets,
that running water, and faucets.
They didn't have faucets for another thousand years, right?
A lot of, they couldn't build tall buildings
once Rome came down.
- The Great Pyramid of Egypt was the tallest building
on earth till like 1840, it was crazy.
- Rome was a city of a million people.
Other than China, there wasn't another city
of a million people in the West
until London in the 19th century, 1500 years later.
So it all disappeared because all of it was concentrated
basically in one place.
Today, none of that exists because of the internet,
because of universities everywhere, institutions.
I mean, think about how many engineers
there are in the world today, right?
Who have basically all different,
basically the same level of knowledge
on how to build stuff.
So even if the United States went to some kind of dark ages,
it's unlikely the whole world goes into
that kind of dark ages.
So I am optimistic in that sense
that the fusion of knowledge is so broad today
that other than wiping out all the electricity
on the planet, everything electronic on the planet,
it's just, it's not gonna be possible to control us all.
And in that sense, technology is gonna make it possible
for us to survive and to stay semi-free,
'cause I don't think full freedom, but semi-free.
'Cause full freedom, you need the ideas.
'Cause full freedom means you need
some political implementation.
- No, full freedom is anarchy, but we know that.
- No, well, we need to get into that
because we can't leave without pointing out
that we fundamentally disagree about that.
- Oh, that's beautiful to be continued on that one.
Let me ask about one particular technology
that I've been learning a lot about,
thinking a lot about, talking about,
which is Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general,
but Bitcoin specifically, which a lot of people argue
that the Bitcoin, that setting ideas aside,
when you look at practical tools
that governments use to manipulate its people
is inflation of the monetary, within the monetary system.
And so they see Bitcoin as a way for individuals
to fight that, to go outside those specific
government-controlled systems,
and thereby sort of decentralizing power.
There's a case to be made historically,
the 20th century, that you couldn't have Stalin,
you couldn't have Hitler, you couldn't have much of the evil
that you see in the world if they couldn't control
the monetary system.
- You couldn't have had the New Deal.
And FDR realized this very quickly.
- Oh, yeah, that's why he confiscated all the gold.
Everybody knows FDR is gonna come into,
to become president and gonna confiscate the gold.
So one of the mythologies, the myths
about the Great Depression is that
there were all these bank runs that,
well, bank runs happened because everybody was afraid
that FDR would get elected, confiscate the gold.
So everybody ran to the bank and took the gold.
Little did they realize that he would confiscate
their private holdings in their own backyards.
He would dig, he would force them to dig up the gold
from their own backyard.
But yes, one of the first things FDR did
in spite of denying it throughout the campaign,
he was asked about this over and over again and denied it.
One of the first things was take over the gold
and take the United States, the Federal Reserve
off the gold standard so that they can, in a sense,
print money and that he could start spending.
- Yeah, what people don't realize,
just to clarify what you're on set is FDR,
this is something that's so crazy to us that we think,
okay, I'm misunderstanding it.
FDR made it illegal for people to own gold
unless it's like a wedding ring.
And before that, contracts, because inflation was a concern,
I make a contract with your own.
Right, I said, okay, you're either gonna pay me
in $1,500 for my work or the gold equivalent
because if that $1,500, you know,
Weimar Germany and you have hyperinflation,
I don't want that $1,500, just give me the gold bullion.
And FDR said all of those clauses,
he broke every contract.
- No limit.
- They don't matter.
So now if I say, Eron says, okay,
you owe me three feet of drywall.
And I go, here's three feet of drywall, it's 12 inches.
And you go, wait, wait, wait, three feet is 36 inches.
You go, no, no, not anymore.
I was like, what am I supposed to do?
And because you have, when you print more money,
the value of every individual dollar matters less,
it becomes that much harder to plan anything,
either in the government level or in the private level,
because if I'm managing outlays,
if I'm trying to pay my workers,
I'm trying to build factories, I'm thinking long-term,
and I don't know what this dollar is gonna buy in 10 years,
that puts an enormous incentive for me to spend it now
and not save it, 'cause if I save it,
it's gonna be worth a lot less.
And the worst thing about inflation,
and this is something I think people who are pro-capitalism
don't talk about enough, they do talk about it,
I would just like to see it more,
this by far hurts the poorest of the poor the most.
When we came to this country, my mom told me
they would go to 86th Street in Bensonhurst
with the fruit stands to buy Mikachka some grapes,
and you go to this fruit stand,
and she'd walk all the way to the other corner,
and if it was three cents more a pound or less a pound,
she'd walk all the way back, 'cause that three cents mattered.
Now if I have this dollar,
and it's 5% inflation or whatever,
and next year it's 95 cents,
me and you, the three of us might not care,
but if I'm destitute hand to mouth,
and I've got 5% less,
that is really a material consequence of my life.
So inflation really is evil,
because it hurts the people for who those pennies matter.
- Well, one of the ways the government gets around that,
and it's because they get smart to that,
is they index everything.
So they index just the security, they index welfare,
they try to make sure,
but that only makes you more dependent on them.
And the people in the modern context
that the inflation hurts the most are savers,
people trying to save money,
and Fed policy right now is just horrific
if you're a saver, 'cause the interest rates are zero,
you get nothing on your saving,
and cost of living is going up,
maybe not at a huge level, but it is going up,
and yet you can't even save to keep the value of your dollars.
So- - Here's the other-
- And the government controls,
and this has massive perverse effects,
because it's not just the prices go up,
it's the prices don't reflect reality anymore,
so some prices go up, some prices might not.
Investments get distorted, things get produced
that shouldn't get produced,
and then people like Richard Wolff turn around
and blame all the distortions, and the perversions,
and the crashes, and the financial crisis on capitalism,
not on the fact that the Fed,
look at the financial crisis,
financial crisis was caused, you could argue by inflation,
and we could get into that if you wanted,
but that's probably a three-hour show just that, right?
It was caused by the Federal Reserve,
and yet who got blamed for the financial crisis?
Who would Richard Wolff is gonna jump up and down,
this is a crisis of capitalism,
this was caused by capitalism,
but capitalism is the negation of the Fed,
capitalism says there should be no Fed,
that's item number one on the list
of the things capitalists want,
is to get rid of the Fed,
and then grant you guys your wish,
have competition for currency,
and let's see if Bitcoin wins, I'm skeptical,
but I don't care, my point is under freedom,
I don't care who wins, I just want free choices,
and let the best currency win,
I doubt that becomes Bitcoin,
but it doesn't really matter if I'm wrong, right?
- Let me add to this, and I think people appreciate,
and this is a leftist, leftism at its best,
that the government and the banks
are in bed with each other,
this I don't think is particularly controversial statement.
- Well, I don't like that statement,
let me just say why I don't like it,
and then I don't like it 'cause it assumes
that they're equal partners,
or that this causality goes in both directions.
From day one, and this is really from day one,
§20Transcript · 2:19:05–2:26:28
of the establishment of the United States,
banks have been regulated by the state,
and the reason for that is primarily Jefferson,
and other founders distrust of finance.
So from the beginning,
banks are being controlled by the state.
Now, over time, if I'm controlling you,
you wanna have influence over me,
because I get to, so yes, they get into bed over time,
but so I don't like it that they're in bed together,
one is dominating over the other,
and the other is participating,
because what choice do they have?
- I should explain to you how things work
when you get in bed, and it's not always equal.
- Well, okay, so--
- Okay, so let's talk about safe words,
which is a very Randian topic, she doesn't like those.
Read the, I had to read that scene three times
in the fountainhead as I quickly--
- I'm sure you did.
- I was reading.
- I'm sure you did.
- Yeah, no, 'cause I'm like, I looked at the back cover,
I'm like, a woman wrote this book in 1943,
I must be misunderstanding this scene.
- And it's '43.
- Yeah.
- She sure had a lot of shades of gray.
- Yeah, so, no, she hated that.
Only black and white, no, but what I meant is,
2008, right, you have the bailout of Wall Street,
whereas in 2020, we saw every medium and small business
under the sun go under, there's not even a pretense
that these are going to be a bailed out.
So the priorities of the politicians, in my view,
are always gonna be towards powerful entities,
powerful corporations, and they're not gonna be
about the medium guy, the middle guy.
Let me just finish my point,
'cause I see you champing at the bit.
- Yep. (laughs)
- At the very least, if you have regulation,
people influencing each other.
With Bitcoin and with crypto, that is not a possibility.
You do not have any agency who is king of Bitcoin,
who is the Federal Reserve of Bitcoin.
There is no organizing, organization, management team.
Now, you could say this is a bad thing,
but you can't say that this is a different thing to money,
as opposed to Federal Reserve System.
- Yeah, so I agree with that description of Bitcoin,
my problems with Bitcoin, and elsewhere.
Let me just say about the financial crisis.
I don't like it phrased that way again.
They let Lehman go under, and destroyed Lehman Brothers.
In the past, they destroyed Drexel Burnham,
because they didn't like Michael Merkin.
They are vindictive. - Yes.
- It's not an accident that the Treasury Secretary
at the time was an ex-chairman of Goldman Sachs,
not Lehman Brothers, and Goldman hates Lehman.
And the next day, they bail out AIG.
What I got out of financial crisis more than anything,
and by the way, there wasn't a bailout,
so it wasn't even a bailout,
because they gave money to every bank,
whether they had problems or not.
And indeed, I know several bankers,
including big banks like JP Morgan and West Fargo,
and a friend of mine, John Allison of BB&T,
who told them explicitly, "We don't want your money.
"We don't need your money, we don't."
And they were basically, a gun was put to their head,
and they said, "You don't take the money,
"we'll shut you down," basically, right?
The equivalent of that.
And so, they A, wanted a virtue signal.
So, there's a big virtue signal.
We're taking care of things, don't worry.
We've got everything under control,
even though they were completely panicking,
and they had no clue what they were doing.
One of the things that the financial crisis
really illustrated was how pathetic, ignorant,
and incompetent the people at the top are,
and they knew it.
And so, Paulson goes to Congress,
says, "Give me $700 billion.
"Don't tell me how to use it, 'cause I have no clue.
"Just give it to me, and give me authoritarian power
"to do it any way I want."
And that was not out of a sense of grandeur.
That was a sense of panic.
He had no idea.
He had no clue.
None of them did.
They bailed out everybody they could,
everybody within their periphery.
When they thought it was appropriate,
they were vindictive about some people like Lehman.
It was complete arbitrary use of power.
The bankers didn't benefit from this.
Indeed, many bankers that took their money lost from it.
Bank stocks got crushed after the bailout.
Before the bailout, bank stocks were doing okay,
and right after top was announced,
bank stocks crushed because this was bad for banks.
It wasn't good for banks.
This is just central planning gone amok.
It's not them bailing out elites.
It's them throwing money at a problem
without knowing what they would actually do
and what the consequences would be.
- Right, but the point, sorry, we agree.
The focus will always be on bailing out elites.
It's almost-
- But little banks got money too.
- No, I'm saying that last year,
there's no talk of saving Ice and Vice,
saving Century 21, saving all these other industries.
- But sure they were.
If you look, it's just, sure there was.
If you look at what the Fed did,
the Fed was bailing out third, fourth class businesses
in all kinds of areas
that you wouldn't consider elitist areas.
Oh, PPP, the way-
- You're talking 2008?
- Yeah, no, I'm talking about now.
I'm talking about COVID last year.
What the Fed did was unbelievable.
The kind of bonds that they were buying, even 2008,
even after 2008, I couldn't believe what they did last year.
PPP, the Payroll Protection Program,
was targeted at everybody.
Everybody got PPP.
It's not about, I don't think it's about bailing out elites.
It's about securing their power base.
And if they believe that securing their power base
is Wall Street, then they'll bail out Wall Street.
They believe securing their power base
is writing checks to restaurant owners all over the country.
They'll write checks to restaurant owners
all over the country, which is what they did with PPP.
It's all about power for them.
And it's whatever will achieve power,
whatever will result in power.
I don't think it's about elites.
I don't see elitism in the bailouts of last year.
- I agree, it wasn't last year.
I'm saying that's one distinction between 2008 and 2020.
And I do think, just one more thing.
I do think getting in good bed with the elites
is a great mechanism in general
for maintaining one's power.
- Oh yeah.
- Yeah, that's not disputed.
- Depending on how we define the elites.
- Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- You mentioned there's some criticism towards Bitcoin.
There's a lot of excitement about the technology of Bitcoin
for the resistance against this kind of central
state pursuit of power.
- That's part of my criticism,
'cause I don't think it works.
So yeah, I can imagine a world,
I can imagine, I'd love to see a technology evolve
that where money is competitive
and it's a financial instrument
that the government cannot touch.
- You think the state is too powerful in Bitcoin?
- I think two things.
I think right now,
and maybe this won't be true in the future,
right now I think crypto is,
it cannot function as money right now.
It just can't.
- But it does.
- No, it doesn't.
It functions as a mechanism to transfer,
it's a technology that allows me
to transfer fiat money from place to place,
but it doesn't function,
because, and it can't because it's too volatile.
- Wait, wait, I've sold things with Bitcoin.
- No, I know you have.
But I can sell things,
I can buy things and sell things with my airline miles.
There are lots of ways in which you can use things as money,
but it doesn't make them money.
- If you're using something as money, it's money.
- So let me take something you, no.
So let me take something you said before
and it contradicts I think Bitcoin.
You said one of the things about money is that it's stable.
I know what it's gonna buy tomorrow, right?
This is why we're against inflation,
'cause I know what the dollar today I can plan,
because I can't plan,
§21Transcript · 2:26:29–2:33:51
I don't know what Bitcoin's gonna be worth tomorrow.
So I can't plan with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is way too volatile to serve right now as money.
Now, the argument from Bitcoin is this.
Yes, it's still being adopted.
At some point, it'll reach a certain crucial mass.
- High point of coinization, yeah.
- Yes, and then it will become money
because at that point it can be used as money
'cause they don't have a stable value.
Maybe right now it's not useful as money
because I can't predict what,
I can't invest in it knowing what the value will be
in five years.
Right now it's an asset.
It's not a monetary unit.
It's much more functions as an asset.
Assets value can go up.
- Oh, I agree it's functioning much more as an asset
than as money, that's not in dispute.
I agree with that completely.
- So I don't think it's money.
But so I think it's still,
I think it can compete as a money with something tangible.
So I think in a free market,
some kind of crypto backed by gold
would be more successful.
- So Bitcoin folks argue that Bitcoin
has all the same fundamental properties that does gold.
So it's backed by, there's a scarcity to it
and it's backed by proof of work.
So it's backed by physical resources.
And so they say that it's a very natural replacement
of gold, so it doesn't need to be connected to gold.
- So the two things that gold has that it doesn't have.
One is gold is not finite.
Gold supply actually grows over time.
Bitcoin at some point is truly finite.
At least unless you count the fact
that you can split Bitcoins and create coins,
but that's a whole other question, right?
So that's one.
The second is that gold has value
beyond its use as a currency,
beyond its use as-
- For jewelry and stuff.
- Yeah, but you minimize that,
but jewelry and stuff has been important
for the human race for a hundred thousand years.
You can find jewelry in caves,
for the cavemen designed jewelry and wore them.
So we obviously as human beings value jewelry a lot.
And almost all jewelry evolved to be made out of gold
because whatever it is within us is attracted to shiny,
shiny gold in particular, shiny object generally.
So there's something about gold that appeals to human being.
There's some value that gold has
beyond its being a currency.
It doesn't, it's not, Bitcoin doesn't.
Now it's not enough to use it as money.
Lots of things appeal to human beings,
but those are two characteristics.
One, that it's not finite.
And second, that it is a value beyond
that Bitcoin doesn't have.
- Don't you think the finiteness
could be framed as a feature?
The scarcity of Bitcoin?
- No, because I think it creates a real problem
with scarcity economically.
It's the issue of planning.
There is a mechanism,
there's a beautiful mechanism in markets
that as the supply of gold is in a sense,
the quantity of gold is,
prices are going down 'cause there's too little gold, right?
So the value of gold in a sense in dollar terms,
the prices are going down.
What happens then is there's an incentive
to then go mine for more gold, right?
Because it becomes cheaper and cheaper to mine
as the price goes down.
So you mine for more gold.
So it keeps increasing and it keeps increasing.
Basically very correlated
to the rate of increasing productivity.
That's the beauty of gold mining
'cause prices are related to gold.
Gold is the dominant money
and it increases at just about the same rate
as productivity.
So it keeps prices relatively stable.
You still have bouts of inflation and deflation,
but it keeps it relatively stable.
With Bitcoin, it's finite, it's ends.
Now prices will only decline.
What rate will they decline at?
They'll decline at the rate of productivity increases.
It's hard to predict what product,
at the rate to which productivity increases.
For example, technological shocks
can change that dramatically.
You could get bouts of dramatic deflation,
dramatic price drops that could be problematic
in terms of planning the same problem of inflation
just reversed that you had before.
So, again, it's a technical issue.
I'm sure there are ways to get around it.
And again, I'm not sure.
I don't know if you guys consider Bitcoin the end
or the beginning, that is, is Bitcoin it?
Or is Bitcoin just the first example of a technology
that might evolve in the future?
I was just gonna say,
there's the same technological issue with regard to gold,
which is we now have the technology
that was very expensive to turn elements
into different elements.
And at a certain, yeah, you could fire electrons at it
or whatever, you can make gold.
They figured out how to do it.
It's not cheap and it's all big process.
If gold is the standard,
a lot of resources are gonna be going toward
turning other things into gold,
making the production of gold cheaper.
And that's gonna have a similar consequence
that Lauren's talking about.
That's kind of the category of security
that Bitcoin has talked about,
that it's very difficult to do that with Bitcoin.
But I would argue that it's exceptionally difficult
to do that with gold.
It is now, but the thing is, there's not a huge incentive.
If gold is the basis and if gold is worth that much.
But gold isn't worth that much.
Gold is worth, let's say-
I'm saying in this world that we're talking about.
In the future, yeah.
Gold is not gonna be worth more.
Let's say right now gold is about 2000 bucks.
It's less than 2000, but let's say it's 2000 bucks.
That's its price in terms of dollars.
So you'd have to, it would have to be worthwhile
to create something of $2,000.
How much would you be willing to put into it?
At some point, you're right.
And at that point, I think gold stops being money.
Right.
'Cause it's useless.
Once I can create it like silicon,
then why not say I can make out official gold?
So I'm just not, I don't think Bitcoin is the solution.
I think, I don't know what the solution is.
I wish I was that innovative,
but I think you need a solution
that has more of the characteristics of gold
than Bitcoin currently has.
And I guess I'm surprised at a lot of the technologists
who view Bitcoin as the end game,
where it strikes me as it's the birth of a new,
it represents the birth of a new technology.
And who the winner in that technology is gonna be,
we have no clue.
Bitcoin is one of the players.
There are other players.
There might be a new technology
that is even better than anything we can imagine right now.
So Bitcoin doesn't strike me as optimal
and that we should be moving towards something better.
Can you please stop shilling Rand coin for five minutes?
You know where there was Rand coin?
There was Rand. South Africa.
No, I was-
There are currencies in Rand.
No, I mean-
Ayn Rand is the South African $1.
Ayn Rand coin was, I was in China in 20,
I think it was 2015 or 14.
What's that?
China. China.
I was in China 20, something like that.
And this entrepreneur came up to me.
She said, she's bought this massive quantity of land
in this area in China, it's a little secluded.
She's starting what she's calling Gold Gulch.
She's serious.
And she's issuing, and she issued cryptocurrency
based on the land, right backed by the land,
called Rand, but Ayn Rand,
with a little portrait of Ayn,
little portrait in the marketing.
Ayn Rand, I don't think it went anyway.
You're not gonna be a janitor?
A janitor in China at Gold Gulch, yeah.
By the way, I do wanna point out something
I do enjoy about objectivists.
I constantly talk about Ayn Rand and her vampire novels.
Ayn.
That's the joke you're on, thank you.
§22Transcript · 2:33:53–2:41:18
And inevitably someone feels they need to point out
that she did not write vampire novels
and her name is actually Ayn.
So thank you, thank you, Aaron.
We've been talking for two hours.
I own her copy of "The Fountainhead."
Somehow I thought her name was Ayn, thank you, thank you.
Ayn is an anthem.
- So this is really interesting way of phrasing it,
which is- - I was kidding with the Ayn.
I know you knew how to pronounce it.
- I know you know, you know.
- Yeah, I just got confusing.
- I think we all know,
and we all know that we're jokers here.
There's no Batman in this conversation.
(laughs)
- So it's an interesting way to frame it.
Is Bitcoin the end or the beginning of something?
And I've, as sort of with an open mind
and seeing kind of all the possibilities
of technologies out there,
I also kind of thought that Bitcoin
is the beginning of something.
But what the Bitcoin community argues
is that Bitcoin is the end of the base layer.
Meaning all the different innovations
will come on top of it.
Like for example, there's something called
lightning network, where it's basically
just like gold is the end.
And everything is built like the monetary systems,
like cash and all that is built on top of gold.
Bitcoin is the end in that other technologies
are built on top of Bitcoin.
That's their argument.
And there's an interesting component.
- I get that and I hear that all the time.
And I just, I don't quite understand that.
And I think Bitcoin has limitations
that potentially other cryptocurrencies might not have.
I, you know, my attitude to it,
something like this is large extent
I don't understand technology.
My view is let it play out.
I think I have more fear of physical,
the ability of the government to crush these things
than I think many in the community.
So for example, so I gave a talk,
Bitcoin, you know, and they were hyping
the acceptance now, a lot of vendors
are willing to accept Bitcoin and this is great.
And I said, yeah, it's absolutely great.
I mean, more options is better than few options.
But I said, you know, that that could be taken away like that.
Now it's true that we could exchange Bitcoin
and the government wouldn't know,
I think wouldn't know that we do.
But once he's advertising on his website
that he accepts Bitcoin, or once he tries to turn his Bitcoin
into particular goods, once you manifest it
in the physical world, now the government can step in.
So the government could say, you can't sell anything
to anybody using Bitcoin.
They can do that and you won't be able to sell it.
It will be, you have to go into the black market.
So--
- But that isn't able to sell it,
just to just sell you in the black market.
- Yeah, but that's where the government thrives, right?
The government thrives on letting you do stuff
in the black market so they can decide
when to put you in jail or not, right?
So if I'm buying a sweatshirt from the government,
sorry, if I'm buying a sweatshirt
from somebody using Bitcoin,
the government can't monitor my exchange of Bitcoin to him.
But they can monitor the sweatshirt being sent to me, right?
That's where they can interfere.
And I think that at some point,
to the extent Bitcoin is successful, it will be stopped.
That is, and that's what'll stop it from becoming money.
See, money can only become money,
it can only become money if people are using it as money,
right?
And if the government can stop it being used,
if I can't go to the grocery store and use my ATM
that charges on Bitcoin or whatever, then it's not money.
And I think that the government is going to step in
and stop people from doing that.
And that's what I, so I have more respect and fear
for the power of government today.
- I don't see that at all.
However, I could be wrong.
And I'm sure Yaron hopes he's wrong.
- Absolutely.
(laughing)
I hope the government just give in
and the Fed, Tamar says, "Yeah, let Bitcoin thrive."
But I think they'll want to regulate and control it.
The only way to regulate and control it is to stop it.
- Yeah, there's a bunch of people who argue
that Bitcoin is too compelling to government
that they'll actually embrace it like a choice--
- But that assumes government has positive goals
and wants to do good things.
You can ask--
- No, no, it's greedy.
They say government is greedy because they,
well, Bitcoiners have this whole lingo.
They say, "Number go up."
- Government is not greedy.
Government is not greedy for money.
Government is greedy for power.
Government is greedy for control.
Government is much more,
now money's good too.
They'll take the money if they can get it.
But it's not fundamentally about money.
It's fundamentally, and this is something
that many libertarians don't understand.
This is something many of the Bitcoin community
don't understand.
They have far too benevolent a view of politicians
and the people in government today.
- By the way, I'm a liar.
- And I know why he's laughing.
I think I know why he's laughing.
- You know exactly why I'm laughing.
- And we should get to that issue at some point here.
But, you know, so I think there's a lot of naivete.
- Yeah, there's a lot.
- Speaking of naivete.
- A lot of it, Jaron.
- No, I'm not naive.
I'm actually providing the warning
and all these Bitcoiners are saying,
"No, no, no, government doesn't function that way."
- No one says I'm naive.
Naive people think they're not naive.
- Well, so let's put this on the table.
Speaking of naive, I still, more than the two of you,
by far, I think, have faith that government can work.
Okay, let's put that on the table.
- I got it, I'm not trying to be pedantic.
What do you mean, work?
Government can achieve goals, that is not in dispute.
- Can achieve goals effectively to build a better world.
- Okay.
- A functioning society.
- So I'm gonna take it one step further than you.
- Oh, boy.
- The only way to achieve a better world
is through government.
- Michael, what do you think about that?
- He almost dropped it.
I said it on purpose that way.
- I'm glad that the mask is dropping.
- You cannot achieve, you cannot have liberty or freedom
without a government.
Now, not anything like the governments we have today.
So I think the idea that you can have liberty or freedom
without government is the rejection
of the idea of liberty and freedom.
And the undermining of any effort, any attempt to do it.
So in that sense, I do--
- He's sitting right here, right?
- Lex, I know, exactly.
On this side, we can agree with Lex, which is unusual.
- That government is good for freedom.
- You're agreeing with the guy who's reading Mein Kampf.
That's not a surprise.
- Who's dressed in black.
- Yeah, that's the bad guys.
- No, the fascism, I mean, the road to fascism is anarchy.
It's not--
- What the hell are you talking about?
Can you give me one example of when anarchy led to fascism?
- Well, every example of a stateless society
leads to authoritarianism, every single one
in all of human history.
It has to because--
- Wait, you're saying Weimar Germany was anarchy?
- Well, it wasn't pure anarchy, but it got close.
But no, I said the reverse, by the way.
I said the reverse.
I didn't say that every form of authoritarianism
started with anarchy.
I said that every situation in which human beings
lived under anarchy led to authoritarianism.
So I said the flip.
- Anarchism isn't a location.
Anarchism is a relationship.
The three of us are in an anarchist relationship.
Every country is in a relationship of anarchy
toward each other.
The US and Canada have an anarchist relationship
toward one another.
And to claim, going back to Emma Goldman, who I love,
in 1901, William McKinley, President McKinley,
§23Transcript · 2:41:24–2:48:29
was shot by this guy Leon Salgas.
And it was very funny, but he was a crazy person.
And they arrested him.
He shot the president.
And they go, "Why did you shoot President McKinley?"
And he just goes, "I was radicalized by Emma Goldman."
And she's like, "Oh, God damn it."
So now she's on the lam.
She had nothing to do with this guy.
She's trying to flee.
She gets arrested.
They caught her.
And she said, and this is the hubris of this woman,
which I admire as the subject of being good hubris.
She goes, "I'd like to thank the cops
"for doing what they're doing.
"They're turning far more people into anarchism
"than I could do on my own."
So given everything you've said in these two hours,
and then to pivot to being anti-government
is being anti-liberty, I don't feel I have to say anything.
- Well, okay. - That's right.
- For people who are not familiar, if you're,
I don't know why you would not be familiar,
but Michael Malice talks quite a bit
about the evils of the state and government,
and espouses ideas that anarchism is actually,
what is it, the most moral system,
the most effective system for human relationships.
- There's this great book called "Atlas Shrugged,"
and the author posits an anarchist private society.
She calls it Galt's Gulch,
where everything is privately owned,
and no one is in a position of authority
over anyone else other than the landowner.
That's an anarchist society.
- And there's one judge and one authority.
- Yeah, and that's what everyone--
- So if you violate, no tools.
- And that's what everyone has voluntarily moved there
and agreed to be under.
- It's a very small community, right?
- Sure, that is right.
So I have no problem with competing governments.
- That's the definition of anarchism.
- What's that?
- That's the definition of anarchism.
Case closed, okay, end the show.
- No, no, no, no, no. - End the show,
I got him over.
- Not definition of-- - Mission accomplished.
- Not definition of anarchy at all.
I'm all for competing governments.
- Hold on, you get more cookies.
Good job, he did it, he did it.
Yay, Aaron, you brought him over.
Red Rover brought him over. - More Lithuanian.
(both laughing)
- What is this clout, Jeff?
- I'm Lithuanian, that's my people.
(speaking in foreign language)
- It's honey. - Oh, it's honey.
- No claims of health or nutrition.
(both laughing)
- The other one claimed health, this one no claims.
No, I'm for competing governments
on different geographic areas.
That's fine.
- Why does it have to be over, okay, let me--
- It's really crucial that it's on different,
so you don't have two judges in Gold Sculpture,
you have one.
And there's a reason why.
There's one authority, there's one system of laws
in Gold Sculpture that all the people
under the Gulch abide by, there's one.
- There's two, 'cause they're in America.
- No, they're not, the whole point is they're not, right?
- They're not in America, they're in Colorado.
- I know, but the whole point of the novel
is they've left America.
- They haven't left America.
- They've hid themselves, so they're not
under the authority of the American government.
- But they are, don't you get it?
- But they're hidden, they're supposed to be--
- The whole point is that they're hidden
so they're not under the--
- No, no, no, if the three of us hide,
we're still under the authority of Washington.
- No, but not if they don't know that we exist.
- But this is why they haven't established a state,
and it's not a government, and it's not in that sense
an example of really the way we form societies.
It is a private club that is hidden away
from everybody else.
- Fine, I'm fine with that.
What happens if an American kills a Canadian in Mexico?
- What happens if an American, it depends,
depends on the nature of the governments
of the three places.
- Right, but usually what happens in most of human history
is that America will launch a war
either against Mexico or Canada.
- Okay, just first of all--
- So usually violence results in much more violence.
Anarchy is just a system that legalizes violence,
that's all it does, and in international affairs,
that's the reality.
The reality is that the way you resolve disputes
that are major disputes is through violence.
- Ayn Rand said the definition of a government
is an agency that has a monopoly of force
in a geographical area.
So you can't complain that anarchism
is legalizing violence when the definition of government,
according to Rand, is legalized violence.
- No, because you're taking the definition of violence
the way she defines it, right, in this context.
A, she talks about retaliatory force only.
- Has that ever happened?
- That's not the point.
- That is the point.
- Before there was Aristotle, was there an Aristotle?
Before there was an America, was there an America?
The fact that something has never existed
means it will never exist before.
The fact that the ideas haven't been developed
to make something exist means that it will never exist
before, you know, we're young, human race is a young race.
The ideas of freedom are very young.
The ideas of the enlightenment are just 250 years old.
The idea that you can't create the kind of government
Ayn Rand talked about, I talk about,
that it's never been before means it'll never happen again.
That's a silly argument.
- It's not a silly argument, it's you're being a Platonist.
- No, not at all.
- I'll explain to you how you're being exactly a Platonist.
So if I was sitting in 1750, arguing with Thomas Jefferson,
he was telling me what kind of state he was gonna create,
and I said, "Has a state like this ever been created?"
And he said, "No, was I being a Platonist?"
Of course not.
- No, you're being a Platonist. - You know, things change.
- You're being a Platonist now.
Here's why you're being a Platonist now.
Because one of the things that Aristotle believed in,
one of the things that Ayn Rand in other contexts
believed in, the cover of her book,
"The Philosophy Who Needs It," is,
I think it's the Sistine Chapel, the cover,
or wherever it is.
Aristotle and Plato walking.
- No, it's not, yeah, but--
- What's that painting?
I forget what it is.
- It's the School of Athens.
- School of Athens, thank you.
- It's the Raphael.
- So Plato's pointing toward the heavens
while they're talking,
and Aristotle's pointing to the earth.
- Reality. - Reality.
- Absolutely.
- So if you want, there's two approaches.
There's the Descartes, Cartesian approach,
which is I sit in my armchair and I deduce all of reality.
Or if I wanna study the nature of man,
if I wanna study the nature of dogs,
if I wanna study the nature of the sun,
I have to look around.
I have to open my eyes, I have to look at data.
It's very difficult.
You know, when Rand was on Donahue,
he asked her about,
"Aren't you impressed with the order in the universe?"
And she goes, "Oh, now you have to give me a moment."
And the point she made,
which was very hard for many people to grasp,
it's hard for me to grasp,
is one's concept of order comes from the universe.
You can't have a disorderly universe
'cause order means describing that which exists
and which has existed.
Now, if you are looking at governments throughout history
that have always existed,
and when you were on Lex, you said,
"What I'm talking about has never existed."
- That's right.
- To say that this, therefore,
that that has a possibility of working in reality,
I think is certainly not a point in that favor, number one.
And number two, Jefferson was a fraud.
What Jefferson argued how America would look
did not come true.
Jefferson's concerns about the Constitution were accurate.
And the fact is the federal government
did become centralized, did become a civil war.
So if you told Mr. Jefferson,
§24Transcript · 2:48:31–2:55:52
"The government you're positing can't work,"
you would have been correct.
- That's not what I'm saying.
It's not the issue of can it work or not.
It's the issue of can something exist
that hasn't existed in the past?
It's a silly argument.
Now, we can argue about the facts of reality
whether such a thing can exist,
but to say it hasn't existed in the past
is not an argument about whether it can exist in the future.
But that's the argument you made.
- No, no, you're talking about history
and now you're dancing around it.
- No, I'm not.
- Yes, you are.
- I'm saying that something different happened
in the founding of America.
It might not have been perfect.
Might not have been ideal.
It might have been some people even think it was bad.
- Sure, it was different.
- If something different happened,
and you could have sat 20 years before and said,
"Well, that's never happened before,
"so it can't happen in the future."
That is a bad argument.
That's not a good argument.
Irrelevant.
- No, but you're making the argument
that just because something hasn't happened before,
that's certainly not a point to say it's likely to happen
or possible.
- No, I'm saying, first of all,
I agree that everything we know about what's possible
or what's not possible has to be from reality.
That we agree completely.
I think anarchists completely evade that point.
I think you guys live in a world of mythology,
of abstraction, of Descartes,
to imagine the kind of anarchy
that David Friedman or Rothbard describe.
It's complete fiction, and it's complete mysticism.
- Okay, let me ask just a few dumb questions.
So first of all, what do we do with violence
in terms of just natural emergence of violence
in human societies?
- Sure.
So the idea that anarchism proposes
is that we would, as the community grows,
there may be violence,
and then we together form collectives
that sort of fund mechanisms that resist that violence.
I'd love to sort of talk about violence
because that seems to be the core thing.
That's the difference between the state
that has a, was definitionally, I guess,
is the thing that has a monopoly on violence
or controls violence in such a way
that you don't have to worry about it.
And then the anarchism, I don't know.
- I know, I'm just laughing 'cause--
- I'm using bad words.
- No, your definition is accurate,
but the point is that being the definition of the state
versus how states act in reality is just absurd, yeah.
- So, and then the idea that anarchism would be
is that it's more kind of a market
of defenses against violence.
So you have like security companies,
and then you hire different ones
that are more competent.
- You have things being made affordable.
You have more accessibility to security.
You have accountability when people misuse their power,
and you have more layers of security
than having a government monopoly.
What's that, every, objectivists understand,
and they don't deny this.
This is something they talk about constantly,
is anytime you have a government monopoly,
it's going to have enormous distortions as a consequence.
It's going to be expensive.
It's going to be ineffective.
And when you're talking about ineffectiveness in markets,
that's not just like the cup sucks.
It often means mass death.
It often means persecution.
So this is something that anarchism,
if not entirely prevents, certainly mitigates enormously.
- So can I just, as a thought experiment,
say it was very easy to immigrate to another country,
like where you could just move about
from government to government.
Would that alleviate most of the problems
that you have towards the state,
which is like people being free to choose
which government they operate under?
Wouldn't that essentially become--
- Ask him, yeah.
- So like, what is, I'm trying to understand
why governments aren't already the thing
that's the goal of anarchism.
The kind of collectives that emerge under anarchism
seems to be what government--
- You're equating two terms.
So there's something called like private governance,
and there's government.
So for example, if I go to Yaron's house,
and he has a rule, take off your shoes, become your house.
If you wanna really be kind of silly about it,
you could say he's the governor.
But it's really nonsensical to say that.
If you go to Macy's, right?
If you wanna return your sweater,
Macy's rules are right up there.
You have seven days.
If you don't have a receipt,
you're gonna get store credit.
If you do have a receipt, you get a refund.
So every organization, every bar, every nightclub,
your house has rules of governments.
This is, it's often they're unspoken.
This is unavoidable.
No one in America by law has to pay a tip,
but it's just customary.
You go at the waiter, you give him 15, 20%,
so on and so forth.
Now, what anarchism does is it says,
okay, security is something that is of crucial,
essential human need.
We all need to be safe in our property,
safe in our purpose.
The organization that by far is the biggest violator of this
and always has been, always will be is the government.
Why?
'Cause it's a monopoly, 'cause it has no accountability.
And look at the rioting last year, right?
If you have one agency,
pretend it's not the government, pretend it's Apple.
And Apple has the, in charge of security in this town.
People are rioting, people are looting.
And Apple says,
"Yeah, we're not gonna send people into work.
"And if you try to defend yourself,
"we're gonna put you in jail as well."
That's the problem of having a government monopoly.
And that's something that anarchism solves for.
- So, okay.
But don't you, 'cause you said no accountability.
Don't you mean to say poor accountability?
- No, I mean to say no accountability.
- But isn't that the idea of democracies?
- I'm not for democracy.
- No, not for democracy,
but like the system of governments that we have,
there is a monopoly on violence,
but there is a, I mean, at least in the ideal,
but I think in practice as well, there's an accountability.
- I do not think that's--
- I know you're a critic of the police force
and all those kinds of things,
but the military is accountable to the people.
- I do not agree.
- The police force is accountable to the people.
Perhaps imperfectly, but you're saying not at all.
- Not at all.
And we've seen many examples of police officers
doing horrific things on video
and they don't even lose their pension.
- But there's a lot of amazing police officers, no?
- I mean, no, there are not.
- So you're saying by nature,
police is like a fundamentally flawed system.
- No, by nature, government monopoly on police
is a fundamentally irredeemable system.
We'll talk about private security.
If I have a private security firm,
you could have that under a government,
and as a result of my private security,
my person who I'm bodyguarding gets shot,
that's going to be very bad for my company
as compared to competing companies.
However, when you have a government monopoly
and I get people shot, what are you going to do?
- So the problem is that all the examples
are going to be within the context of an existing government.
This is why I said the cell phone example
and all these other examples of us being here.
We're not in anarchy, that is absurd.
We're under a particular system of law
and the system of laws applies
and we know that this particular system of laws applies.
So the problem is when you have--
- There are many laws that we're not going to be enforced.
That we're not-- - Sure, we know that.
- Violence related? - No, there are lots of laws
that are not going to be enforced.
Right, and that doesn't make this anarchy
because there are other laws out there.
§25Transcript · 2:55:54–3:02:15
They could be enforced, which makes it an enormous risk.
But look, there's a number of issues here.
There's an issue of the role of force in human society.
- I got to clarify a thing
'cause I think you misunderstood what I said.
I'm not saying that America is anarchist.
What I'm saying is the three of us
have an anarchist relationship between us
because none of us have authority over the others.
That's what I'm saying.
- But that's a bad use of the word anarchy.
- No, that's the correct use of the word anarchy.
- It makes it meaningless.
It makes it, every time any people get together,
they have an anarchistic relationship.
- Yes. - No, we have
a voluntary relationship.
- That's what anarchism means, voluntarism.
- No, it doesn't.
It's a political system. - You wanna get a dictionary out?
- You're taking a word and it's accepted usage,
and then you're saying, oh no, it means--
- You mean like selfishness?
- Maybe, and we never finished that discussion.
You're taking a word, we're taking a word
that you're defining as, and replacing it with voluntary.
Now, voluntary-- - Okay, fine,
I'm not for anarchism or voluntarism.
Fine, go ahead. - But let me,
let's understand what voluntary means, right?
So we, for example, go into stores
and there's a certain relationship
that we have with the store that we engage
in certain voluntary transactions with that store.
Now, I believe that that works
because there is a certain system of law
that both the store and we have accepted
that makes that possible.
Now, if that didn't, there are certain people
who would like to walk into the store
and just take the stuff, right?
So there is a, not, we might not,
but there are certain people
who might want it to go into their store.
There's a certain system of laws
that regulates the relationship
and that defines the property rights
and then provides protection for the property rights.
Now, you would like all that privatized.
That is, the store would have its police force
and that would be privatized.
Now, I don't believe that force can be privatized.
And there are many reasons-- - And it shouldn't.
- I don't think it can.
And I don't think, I think it's a--
- That's an interesting distinction.
- I don't think it can because I think
that it's an unstable equilibrium, right?
I don't think competing police forces can work.
At the end, the police force with the biggest gun
always wins and always takes over--
- That's not true. - And becomes authoritarian.
- Look at Iran and Iraq, excuse me.
We had the bigger guns, we didn't win.
Look at Afghanistan.
- We didn't, we didn't win partially
because none of that is an example of anarchy.
- No, but you said, you just said
the guy with the biggest gun is gonna win.
- Yeah, the guy with the biggest gun--
- We didn't win in Vietnam.
We had the bigger guns.
- But again, you're taking it outside of a context.
That was a context in which,
that was a context in which countries are fighting,
not a context in which there is no country.
- Okay, let's suppose you, Yaron, have a rocket launcher.
- Yes. - And there's 100 people
with handguns, how are you gonna win?
You have the biggest gun.
- Oh, believe me, I could win.
- With one rocket launcher against 100 people?
- Yeah, it's just, well, it depends how many rockets
I have in the rocket launcher
and whether I'm willing to use them.
But that's, but so now it's democracy
because there are more of them that they win.
Look, any one of these scenarios, all it does,
so let's go back to the store, so--
- This is fascinating, by the way.
I'm really enjoying this.
I just wanna say that.
This is great.
(laughing)
Because-- - I'm glad you are.
I am enjoying the pain.
- And I'm also enjoying the comments
that are gonna happen.
- Oh, the comments, the comments are gonna be
overwhelmingly on your side.
I know that. - I don't think so.
- Because people like honesty. - I don't think so.
- No.
- So I think the anarchy position is completely dishonest.
- I'm a modern day, what's his name?
What's the guy who was defending communism?
- Oh, Richard Wolff.
- I'm a modern day Richard Wolff.
(laughing)
- There's a sense in which I think anarchists
are evading reality in the same sense.
You know, so we've got this--
- Do you think I'm dishonest or delusional?
- I think you--
- Calling someone dishonest is a really specific--
- That's true.
- I think you're delusional.
- I think you're delusional
and I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt
of being delusional.
- Okay, good.
- And we all love each other. - That's fair.
- And as I said-- - Life is long.
- And as I said on the show, on the previous interview,
I said only smart people can be anarchists
because it requires a certain level of abstraction
of being divorced from reality that is hard
for people who are actually connected to reality.
- He makes a good point 'cause I always talk about this
with people on social media and they talk about
a lot of people who buy into the corporate media narrative
and how they're dumb.
I go, it's easier to train smart people than dumb people.
It's easier to convince smart people of the systemic
that's divorced from reality than somebody's dumb.
- They can deal in abstractions.
They don't have to deal with the concretes
that actually happen.
This is an example I gave debating another anarchist.
- Who was it?
She must have sucked.
Well, you were the best.
- They were Hoppe fans.
- Oh, okay, Hoppe.
- Hoppe fans, not one of my least liked,
the people I liked the least in the world out there.
- You like them better than the communists, don't you?
- Barely.
- Oh, come on, seriously?
- Yes, 'cause I think it leads to the same place.
I really do.
I think it leads to gulags.
- Fine.
- I think anarchy leads to gulags.
And I think Hoppe's view of anarchy
definitely leads to gulags.
- I'll grant you just for the sake of argument
that it leads to gulags.
However, surely you concede that they are against gulags
whereas the communists have no problem with it.
And that's a big--
- I think some do.
I'm not sure people like Hoppe do
because if you read some of his stuff, one wonders.
But once monarchies and he once--
- No, he said monarchy is a preferable to democracy,
which is true.
- No, it's not.
Oh, God.
I mean, one of the problems with anarchists is--
- One judge, that's the monarch.
- One of the problems, yeah.
One judge, one authority.
This is why I think-- - The monarch.
- That's why I think--
- So you're Hoppean.
- Anarchists are Hoppeans.
- So Yaron Brooks is Hoppean.
- No, I'm not Hoppean. - Get in the chopper.
- I don't want one judge.
I don't want an arbitrary judge.
I want an objective judge.
- There's an essay by John Hasnas,
I think his name, I'm gonna bungle it.
It's gonna be in my upcoming book on anarchism.
And he just discusses,
and it's a very long, complicated technical issue,
that the idea of objective law is incoherent.
- Well, yeah, I mean, that's why we disagree so much.
Because I think objective law is the only coherent system.
- Do you disagree that we, in effect,
have competing systems of law under America?
Meaning there's different ideologies.
You have the Sotomayor ideology
versus the Scalia ideology.
And that effectively, and the point being,
when you and I file a lawsuit,
it completely depends on who the judge is.
- Yes, and in theory, in theory,
I don't think the system works this way,
§26Transcript · 3:02:17–3:09:59
but in theory, the way the system would work
is that on new issues, there is some competition.
- Hi, it's nice to meet you.
- Siri, I wasn't talking to you.
Technology.
- Capitalism.
- So in theory, the system works,
and this works, I think, with competing states,
but also with competing legal views,
particularly on a new issue.
There's some, this is how common law worked, right?
There's some evolution of it,
and at some point, that gets codified into the law,
and it gets objectified in that sense.
That is, there's some conclusion that people come to.
This is the role, in theory, of a legislature,
and the legislature would be nice
if it was composed of people
who had some idea of legal philosophy.
- Sure.
- And it gets codified.
And when it, because these things are complex,
and at some point, it goes through all the arguments,
and then a certain truth emerges,
or a certain truth is identified,
and that's what gets encoded in law.
That's what the purpose of a legislature is.
Now, if you have competing mechanisms
that don't converge on one authority,
because there's no one authority,
there are multiple authorities.
That is, in a sense, there are multiple governments,
or multiple systems of enforcement, right?
Then you get not just something emerging out of it,
what you get is competing legal systems.
Competing legal systems that now have
competing mechanisms of enforcement.
Competing police forces, competing militaries,
however we want to define it.
And now there's no mechanism to resolve that.
Now, yes, we could negotiate,
and there's goodwill, and so on, right?
- Yeah, there you go. - No, no.
But now we're talking about the law,
what each view, each position views as true and right.
And it might involve, for example,
it might involve the fact that the legal system
has come to the conclusion that it's okay
for children to have sex with adults,
and this legal system thinks that is evil and wrong.
- Sure. - Right?
And something has happened between the two.
How do you resolve that conflict?
There is no resolution.
If this adult wants to have sex with this child,
this legal system thinks it's okay,
that legal system thinks it.
The only way to resolve that system
is through one system imposing itself on the other.
An example of countries is exactly that.
When you had monarchies,
when you had little states all over the place,
the way any kind of dispute was resolved
when there were issues of territorial disputes,
or issues of marriage, or issues
of different legal interpretations of how, was war.
- No, it wasn't. - War, yes, it was.
- It was marriage.
A lot of times people would marry a princess
from another country just to have peace.
- Sure, forced marriages, which was not very pleasant.
- I'd rather sacrifice one princess than a country.
- No, I don't wanna sacrifice anybody.
And in addition, I don't wanna sacrifice anybody.
- I wanna sacrifice the royals.
- And in addition, well, I don't want royals.
- Well, that's what sacrificing means.
- I think royals are pretty disgusting.
- Okay, I agree.
- And then on top of that,
look, those periods in history are filled with violence,
much more violence than we have today,
much more bloody than they are today,
far less freedom than we have today
in terms of individual freedom.
- You're comparing this to 20th century.
- Yes, I'm comparing a monarchy, right?
You said that's preferable to democracy, right?
I'm comparing-
- I'm saying Hoppe said that.
I'm not saying I'm saying that.
- Oh, I thought you agreed with that.
- To some extent, but I'm not gonna die in that hell.
- Hoppe said that, and I think it's ridiculous.
These kings and queens were fighting constantly.
I mean, the wars back then were violent in a way that-
- Unlike now?
- No, much more violent than now.
If you look at the actual percentage
of people killed in war-
- Yeah, the Steven Pinker book.
- Yeah, if you look at the percentage of people,
and not just that, you can look at the other stats,
that the percentage of people killed in war back then
were far greater than the percentage of people
even during World War II and World War I.
So, anarchy, and David Fiedman loves to quote
the sagas of Iceland about how wonderful the anarchy,
and I mean, it's funny 'cause a lot of people
who read David Fiedman never read the sagas.
It's worth reading.
The sagas of the Iceland are filled with violence,
constant violence, constantly people killing each other
over, "I stole your chickens and you slept with my wife."
The only way to resolve disputes,
the only way to resolve disputes was violence.
There was no authority, there was no mechanism
to resolve these disputes.
There was a council, but the council
couldn't enforce anything, so in the end of the day,
we just resolved the violence.
And this is legalized because there is no mechanism
by which to make the violence illegal.
So, all anarchy is is legalized violence,
constrained up for a while,
and up until people stop that constraint
by arrangements between the security organizations.
But the security organizations have us by the balls,
to put it figuratively, right?
They really do.
- Sure, unlike the state?
- Oh, the state today has it,
but I would much rather live in this state,
much rather live in this state,
much rather live in many more authoritarian states
than this, than a place where there's constant violence.
- I have a bunch of questions, but I'm enjoying this.
- Here's why everything he said is wrong.
- Okay, yes.
- First of all, the idea of competing legal systems
is inevitable, because what Rand talked about
is what she wanted was, and this is really kind of
Eric out of character with her broader ideology is,
I think this was her term, and I'm not saying this
to make fun of you, when she has a judge
and he's looking at the information,
she wants him to be basically,
I think she used the word robot,
someone without any ideology,
that they're just looking at the facts,
they're not bringing their kind of worldview to it.
- I take it as a compliment.
- You are welcome.
I think that given otherwise, her correct view
that ideology, state-constituting ideology
is just a slur for someone's philosophy,
that someone, especially someone as erudite,
educated and informed as a judge,
has to, and in fact should, bring their ideology
to their work is in one sense a little contradiction
in her view, number one.
Number two is, we have right now the DA in San Francisco,
I forget his name, he's the son of literal terrorists,
communist terrorists, and he has made it the decree,
unilaterally, that if you shoplift for less than,
I forget, $200, we're not prosecuting.
- Yeah, I know that.
- You know this guy, right, right, right.
So now you and I, and Lex, I'm sure, probably,
agree that his ideology is abhorrent,
that this doesn't help poor people,
it doesn't help shop owners, it creates a culture,
an area where it's just deleterious to human life.
However, he has, in one sense,
given that he is a state operative,
a legitimate worldview.
- Can I ask you just a quick question?
- Sure.
- Why couldn't a security force in a particular context say,
yeah, if you take stuff from that store,
we're not gonna have any problem with that?
- I agree with you, that's very fair.
That's a very legitimate question.
The point is, in the context that I'm talking about,
that firm is like, wait a minute,
I'm hiring you for security,
you're saying we're not gonna provide security,
why am I writing you a check?
And we have examples of this in real life.
If I get into a car accident with you, right,
you have your car insurance, I have my car insurance,
if your car insurance had their druthers,
they wouldn't pay me one penny.
If my car insurance didn't have their druthers,
they wouldn't pay you one penny.
We already have all, you were saying earlier
that we need to have one kind of umbrella mechanism.
There are already more cases than you can count
where there's private arbitration.
Now, the argument is that private arbitration only works
§27Transcript · 3:10:02–3:17:04
because they have recourse to the government.
But my point is, there's many examples
where even though that recourse is theoretically possible,
it's not a realistic concern,
specifically because they know
that if you have recourse to the state,
you have no concept of what that outcome
is going to look like,
except knowing it's gonna be exorbitant,
it's going to be time consuming.
Talk to the--
- We can't use the state, right,
I mean, I'm as critical as the state as it is right now,
maybe not as critical as yours, not as critical as yours,
but I'm quite critical of the state as it is right now.
But let's say we got into a traffic accident
and you have a Rolls Royce,
and I destroyed your Rolls Royce,
and my insurance company now owes your insurance company
a lot of money.
And let's imagine it's a lot of money just for the sake--
- And that you're clearly guilty.
- Yeah, clearly guilty.
And my insurance company looks at the books
and it goes, you know, I don't, really,
I don't wanna pay this.
- Sure.
- And you know what,
I've got bigger guns than his insurance company.
- Sure.
- And I'm just gonna take over their insurance company.
And hostile takeover takes on a whole new meaning
when I can muster guns on my behalf
than in a hostile takeover in a capitalist context.
That to me is what happens,
that to me is inevitably what happens.
And I think this is where the delusion comes in.
The idea that everything,
that when big money is involved and power is involved,
remember, again, the same kind of politicians
who today get into politics are likely to want to run
some of these security agencies
'cause they'll have a lot of power over people.
So same kind of, maybe sociopaths would be--
- I don't think it's the same skillset,
but that's a separate issue.
- I think it very much is.
But--
- You think the people in Washington
are the same as CEOs psychologically and skillset-wise?
- Well, today's CEOs, yes.
- Okay.
- Yes.
- You might be right.
- Because I think that's what's rewarded for a CEO
is somebody who could get along with government.
- Okay.
- And I think the kind of CEO
who is gonna run a security company,
which is not just about business,
it's about the use of force, it's about control,
it's about negotiation with other entities
that are using force, diplomacy.
Then, and we should get back to objective law
because I think it's essential to this whole argument.
- I would love to get back to something.
- I think all you get into is security agencies,
fighting security agencies, and again, the biggest gun.
And I don't mean here the guy
who has the biggest literal gun,
the rocket launcher versus the guns.
- I got excited for a second.
- By the biggest gun?
- Yeah.
- The party that has the more physical force,
however that is mustered either by numbers
or by weapons is going to dominate.
- Can I--
- And will take over everybody else.
Now, one of the things that's common
in a market is takeovers.
It's consolidation.
And here, the consolidation can happen through force
and you can roll other security companies.
And that's exactly what will happen
until you dominate the particular geographic area.
- Okay, so let me explain why I disagree with that.
You were just saying, and I agree correctly,
I agree with you, that, listen,
if I have access to the bigger gun,
why am I paying you or whoever's paying whatever?
I'm just gonna use force and not pay them.
We have that right now, it's called lobbying.
So instead of me, and I'm sure in your example,
you weren't being literal,
instead of the insurance company literally having the army,
they could be like, hey, let me call Corruptco,
with the mafia.
- I agree.
- Go out and take them out.
By having this federal government, as you know,
and certainly I'm not a fan of,
has, takes more through asset forfeiture
than burglaries combined.
What asset forfeiture is, people don't even understand this.
This is something crazy, which you are on.
- It's unbelievable.
- It's as opposed to me, as opposed as I am,
which is I'm a cop, I go to your house,
I think you haven't been charged or convicted of anything,
I have evidence.
- It's usually in a car.
- Yeah, yeah, but no, it's like drug deals, okay?
I go to your house, you're a drug dealer.
I say, and you can understand the reasoning,
well, if someone is getting profit
through illegal mechanisms,
their profit isn't real, their property,
and they shouldn't be rewarded that property.
So basically, I go to your house, you're a drug dealer,
I seize all your property.
You don't really have recourse,
even though you haven't been through deep,
I'm just explaining to the audience,
been through deep new process and SOL.
That combined, for people who don't know,
is more than the total amount of burglaries in America.
It's a huge, and what happens is the police department,
which seizes your car auctions,
it seizes your house auctions,
it's a great way to line their pockets.
This is a huge incentive, it's horrible.
It's a huge incentive for police departments to do this,
because it's like, look, this guy's a crook,
maybe he's not a drug dealer, but he's clearly a pimp.
Let me just take all his stuff,
and it's gonna go to the community.
- Well, and the rationale originally was,
if I try him, in the meantime, he'll take that money,
and funnel it somewhere else, and hide it,
and I'll never be able to get access to it.
And it was passed in the 1970s,
under the original Caesar laws,
what kind of RICO Act, going after the mafia.
And one of the reasons I despise Giuliani as much as I do,
and there's very few politicians out there
that I despise more, is because he was the first guy
to use RICO on financiers.
And so it wasn't even a drug deal.
It was, you were accused of a financial fraud.
- Not, you weren't shown to be guilty, accused.
- Yeah.
- All your assets basically were forfeiture.
- Innocent until proven guilty, went out the window.
- If you were managing money, you were done,
you were finished.
- So you're saying this kind of stuff
naturally emerges with the states.
- Hold on, so my point is, what are presented
as the strongest criticism of anarchism,
are inevitably descriptions of status quo.
What you're describing is already the event.
I am a big insurance company, I don't wanna pay you,
I call Washington, either I pay you
and Washington gives me a subsidy.
So what you're describing is an inevitable aspect
of having a government.
- So what I'm describing is the inevitable evolution
of anarchy into a government.
I just think that the--
- Markets don't consolidate into monopoly.
That's a leftist propaganda myth.
- Not markets where you have substitute products,
but this is the problem.
The problem is force has no substitute.
That is force is not a product you can have.
So this is my fundamental issue
about turning competing police forces.
Force is not a product.
Force is not a service. - It's a service.
- It's not a service and it's not a product.
- Security is not a service?
- No, well security in the context of a legal system is,
but this is the point, the legal system,
the laws are not a service or a product.
They are a different type of human institution.
Science is not a product or service.
It's a different type of human institution.
There are different types of human institutions.
Some are marketable, you can create markets in,
some you cannot.
Law is not a marketable system.
- Can I ask a question quickly?
Is there any other field other than law
that you think you can't create markets?
- Well, science.
Science is not marketable.
The science itself is not marketable.
Well, sure, science is true.
And the same, I think, is in law.
§28Transcript · 3:17:05–3:24:16
Law is not marketable.
Law is the system that allows markets to happen.
You need a system of law, whether it's private law
in a particular narrow context or whether it's broader law.
Law is the context in which markets arise.
So one of the reasons we transact is we know
that there's a certain contract between us,
explicit or implicit, that is protected by a certain law,
whether it's protected by private agency,
the government doesn't matter,
but there's a certain contract that is protectable, right?
By a system. - Theoretically.
- Theoretically, yes. - Yes.
- So law is the context in which markets arise.
You don't create a market because there's nothing above it,
in a sense.
There's no, it is the context
that allows markets to be created.
Once you market it, markets fall apart.
- So hold on a second.
Yaron, hold on.
So you think that law could be a market?
- And it already is a market.
And we see it, for example, eBay.
If I am buying something from Yaron,
I won't even know his name.
I don't know, maybe he's in another country.
And he screws me out of the money.
I don't have access, I can't sue you.
Or if I sue you in England, good luck with that.
You're not gonna argue that I'm gonna sue you.
What happens in this case,
which has already been solved by the market,
eBay and PayPal, which has access to your bank account,
they act as the private arbiter.
They're gonna get it wrong a lot.
Not even a question, just like Yaron's not gonna argue
that the government right now gets it wrong a lot.
That's not even a question.
The point is, at the very least,
I'm going to get my resolution faster
cheaper and more effectively.
So the issue with having any kind of government, anything,
and Yaron's not gonna disagree with this,
is at the very least, it's going to be expensive,
inefficient, and cause conflict.
- Yeah, but I think what it allows is exactly--
- We don't even know what the Supreme Court's gonna judge.
- Again, you're moving us to today's environment,
which I'm against, right? - I'm moving us to reality.
- No, but reality doesn't have to be what it is.
I mean-- (Zubin laughs)
- That's the most anti-Rand quote.
- No, in a sense-- - Reality doesn't have
to be what it is. - In a sense of the politics.
The political reality. - I know,
but the quote by itself is great.
- I know, I know, you'd love to--
- He agrees with Donald Hoffman, is what he's saying.
- Yeah, it turns out I agree with Hoffman.
- He's an elf, is what it is.
- So it's, where were we?
So I believe that because we have
a certain system of government, right,
it allows for these private innovations to come about
that facilitate certain issues in a much more efficient way
than the government would deal with it.
But it's only because we have a particular system
that has defined property rights,
that has a clear view of what property rights are,
it has a clear view of what a transaction mean
or what contract law is,
and eBay has a bunch of stuff that you sign,
whether you read it or not. - Sure, of course.
- All of that is defined first,
and then there are massive innovations
at the level of particular transactions,
at the level of an eBay,
that facilitate increased efficiency, and that's great.
But the fact is, none of that gets developed,
none of that gets created.
In a world in which I might be living
under a different definition of property rights,
eBay might be living under a separate definition
of property rights, you might have a third definition
of property rights, and there's no mechanism
by which we can actually operationalize that,
because we all have a different system of law.
- There is a mechanism, we already have that.
Let's change the example I just used.
What happens if a Chinese person
who has different definition of property rights
kills an American in Brazil?
- Again, in a smaller community,
what happens is lots of violence.
- No, but I'm talking about right now.
If a Chinese person had--
- Right now, the only reason that it doesn't lead
to violence is because people are afraid
of even more violence, and it affects many people,
large numbers of people who don't wanna go to war.
But if you have small, in a state
where the states were small,
like in those little state, there was war all the time
for exactly those reasons, because the cost was lower,
because it was more personal,
because I knew maybe the person who was killed over there,
and I went to my king and encouraged him to go to war.
- You know why there was war?
- Violence is constant.
- You know why there was war?
Because there had been no Ayn Rand,
and good ideas lead to good societies,
which leads to good people, which leads to good behavior,
good interrelationships.
So now that we have Ayn Rand,
all this stuff in the past is irrelevant,
'cause if they studied her works,
Rand was on "Donahue" again, you can watch the clip,
and he asks her, she goes, he goes,
"You're saying that if we were more selfish
and acted more self-interest, there'd be less war,
less Hitler," and she said, "There wouldn't be any."
Right? - That's right.
Well, if we were all selfish,
there wouldn't be any Hitlers, right?
- But who do you regard as the overweening authority
if I am buying a product from you
as someone in England via eBay?
Who's the governing authority?
- The governing authority is,
are the legal systems in England and the United States,
which have to be synchronized pretty well.
- Right, but what I'm saying is--
- It's why eBay doesn't function in certain countries,
because there is no legal system--
- I agree with you.
- In those countries. - My point is,
why do those legal systems have to be a function
specifically of geography,
as opposed to, why can't I, sitting here,
I could sit here, you're not-- - Because--
- Let me finish my point.
I can sit here and be a British diplomat, right?
And as a British diplomat,
I'm going to be treated differently under American law
than you are as an American citizen, as you are.
Why can't you have that same process?
Sure, we're geographically proximate,
but I'm a citizen of this company,
and you're a citizen of that company.
Why would that be different, in your opinion?
- If it's England and the United States,
it's probably not gonna matter that much, right?
But if it's Iran and the United States,
then the fact that we're sitting next to each other
makes a huge difference, massive difference.
And the fact is that,
and Ayn Rand, I think, would be the first to acknowledge this
and this is why she was so opposed to anarchy.
It's not-- - That's not why.
- It is why. - It's 'cause of Rothbard.
- No, it has nothing to do with--
- Nothing? - It has nothing to do
with Rothbard. - Nothing.
- Nothing. - How do you know?
- Nothing. - How would you know?
- Because her argument against anarchy
is an intellectual one, not a personality--
- It's gotta be both? - Anyway, but--
- No, it has nothing to do-- - Back to it, back to Iran.
Back to Iran. (laughs)
- No, it has nothing to do with Rothbard.
- You don't know that, you're not a psychic,
or a necromancer.
- The only way we're gonna resolve this is arm wrestling,
right, it's through violence.
- Arm wrestling's not violence.
(laughs)
- Words are violence.
- Words are violence, Yaron.
- Words are violence, emotions are violence.
(laughs)
- So, wait, but-- - He throws me off
with this stuff, but that's the problem.
- Even facts and truths? - He's very, very good.
No, not facts and truths.
I mean, there's distortions and arbitrary statements,
because your statement about Rothbard
is an arbitrary statement that has no cognitive standing,
and therefore I can dismiss it.
So I'm not doing like this because I wanna dismiss it.
It has no cognitive status.
The fact that she disliked Rothbard
doesn't mean that everything he said
she was gonna dismiss because she disliked him.
- I agree with you, but what I'm saying is,
it would not be impossible-- - But there's no evidence.
- I'll give you, I'll talk, I'll give you some evidence.
Human psychology.
§29Transcript · 3:24:18–3:31:21
It is not impossible that if you hate some,
what's his name, what's that guy's name?
- Richard Wolff. - Richard Wolff, right.
It's not impossible that if Richard Wolff said something
that you would otherwise agree with,
hold on, let me finish, you'd be dismissive
or less likely to give him credit for it,
being a human being.
That's all I'm saying.
- It's as silly as to say Rothbard came up
with this theory of anarchy because he was pissed off
at Ayn Rand and wanted to write something.
- I don't know, bring it down,
because bring it down so that he can speak too
and let's keep it, because--
- I don't think we're getting agitated.
- No, you guys aren't.
No, no, no.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Bring it down not in terms of,
in terms of give more pauses so Michael can insert himself.
That's what I mean.
- See, private governance. - What's the point of that?
- Private governance. - No, God.
- Look, he's, look, it's private governance.
- I'm all for private governance.
- I'm trying to establish a geographic law of the land.
I don't know. - That's not the point.
- I do think that Michael's,
I mean, that's interesting that you disagree with this.
I do believe that psychology has an impact on ideas
and Ayn Rand, you don't think Ayn Rand had grudges
that impacted the way she saw the world?
I would like to think that--
- I don't think any of her grudges
entered into philosophical statements,
at least not that I can tell.
And I don't see, and given the centrality Ayn Rand gave,
and if you, to the role of government,
to the existence of government,
to the need for government, to establish real freedom,
and the way she defines freedom,
which is very different than Rothbard,
and the way she defines government,
to say then that her opposition to anarchy
is because of, I think is just an arbitrary statement.
- I didn't say because of.
I didn't say because of, I said followed by.
- And not, and I don't see why psychology would answer it.
Now, maybe the tone in which you responded to an answer
might have been motivated by that or something like,
but given the amount of thought she gave
to the role of government in human society
and why government was needed,
and why you needed laws in order to be free,
that freedom didn't proceed,
you needed the right hierarchy.
I think that we could say that,
give it at least the respect that she, this was,
she might've been wrong, right?
But she had a particular theory that rejected anarchy,
and the thought anarchy was wrong.
- Okay, hold on.
I really resent, and I'm not saying you're doing this,
the implication that if Rand was guided by her passions,
that somehow is a criticism of her or lessens her.
I think Rand was a very passionate person.
I think she loved her husband enormously.
She despised certain people enormously.
And I don't think that there's anything wrong with that.
- I don't think she would change her philosophical position
about something because she disliked somebody.
- I agree, but what I'm saying--
- Given the amount of thought she gave
to that philosophical position.
- All I'm saying is, it is possible
that if someone comes across ideas
that she had not considered before,
if she regarded this person as a bad actor,
like all of us, she would be less likely
to take them under consideration.
- Sure.
- That's all I'm saying.
- Sure, and I think other people confronted her
with ideas of anarchy.
I don't think Rothbard was the only one.
- Correct, Roy Charles as well, yeah.
- Roy Charles certainly did.
And she rejected them, and she rejected them
because she had, and whether you agree with her or not,
she had a thought out position
about why you needed to have this particular structure
in place so that markets and human freedom could exist.
- It's just really interesting
because this is the one time, in my view,
and please correct me if I'm wrong,
where she invokes need as kind of a basis
for political activity.
So let's suppose you want this federal government,
whatever you want, you don't want it like it is now,
but like your version of the government.
I don't see why it's an issue for you,
for me and Lex, to say we're not privy to Washington,
we're gonna do our own thing,
and given, if we go about our lives not initiating force
and being productive actors,
why she would have an issue with this.
- Why would I care?
- Well, you would care because if you're saying
the government has a monopoly on force
between these two oceans--
- So you can do that as long as you don't violate
somebody else's rights.
- Sure, but what I'm saying is
we just declare ourselves sovereign.
We're not gonna pay any income taxes.
We're gonna be peaceful people.
We're gonna get your,
and when Lex and I have disputes,
we're gonna call Joe, that's Joe Rogan.
You're never gonna get to meet him, but he's a good guy.
- I know.
(laughing)
- We're gonna call Joe, and Joe's gonna resolve it.
- He's so good at like, you know,
needling and getting you off topic that way.
It's really, he's really effective at it.
- He's Muhammad Ali and you're Joe Frazier.
- I always say when I debate communists,
I always say to them--
- You mean Lex?
- Yeah, maybe Lex, maybe I should--
- Tom Rad, I love you.
- That if they really believe--
- Burgundy, not Rad.
- If they really believe in what they think,
then they should be advocates for capitalism
'cause under capitalism, under my system of government,
capitalist government, right,
they could go and start a commune.
They can live a communist.
They can live to each according to,
to each according to his needs,
from each according to his ability,
all they want and live their pathetic,
miserable lives that way,
and the government would never intervene
because the whole view of capitalism is freedom,
is we live the way along, right?
As long as you're not violating my rights,
as long as you're not taking my property,
as long as you're not engaging with,
so in that sense, yeah, you and Lex can form your own thing.
I don't believe in compulsory taxes anyway.
So you and Lex can do your own thing, never pay taxes.
As long as you're not violating the laws,
and the laws are very limited, right,
'cause they're only there to protect individual rights.
So as long as you're not violating
somebody else's property rights
or inflicting force on anybody else, you're peaceful.
You can do what you want.
You know, don't have, yeah.
- Great, case closed.
- Don't have sex with kids, right?
- I will stop immediately.
- Good.
- The rest of us are just playing checkers
and he's playing chess.
- Yeah, I mean, a government
that protects individual rights properly
is a government that leaves you alone
to live your life as you see fit,
even if you live your life in a way
that I don't approve of, that I don't think is right.
I mean, that's the whole point, right?
- Okay, then we're in agreement.
- The only thing you can do is,
you know, try to enforce arbitrary laws
that you come up with on me.
- Of course, absolutely.
Okay, great.
- Wouldn't it be wonderful if we lived in a world
where rights protecting laws are superfluous,
but the reality is usually that somebody violates them,
whether by accident or intentionally,
and that you need some mechanism.
Now, if you guys can resolve that dispute
without getting involved, fine.
But if you guys land up not wanting, not resolving,
there is another authority that will help you resolve it.
- Yeah, I'd come to that.
- So can I ask you a question?
Under anarchism, what kind of systems of laws
do you think will emerge?
Do you think we'll have basically a similar kind of layer
of universal law to where like--
- Let me answer this, this is a great question.
I know what you're going to do with this.
This is often presented as a criticism of anarchism,
§30Transcript · 3:31:25–3:39:05
and this is actually something I think Yaron
would agree with as well in other contexts, which is this.
One of the reasons communism can't work,
central planning can't work,
and this was one of Mises' great innovations,
is if I could sit down, it's like asking,
what would the fashion industry look like
if the government didn't run it?
There's no way for me to know.
What the fashion industry is,
which all of us are in favor of it being free,
is literally millions of designers, of seamstresses,
of people who make the fabric,
also references throughout history,
and these creative artistic minds putting things together,
and every year, and there's no shortage of clothes.
In fact, we make so many clothes
that we send them in landfill sizes
to overseas poor countries,
and you have people in these desolate countries
wearing like Adidas shirts, they can't even read English,
but because we don't know what to do with all these clothes.
That's how the glory of free enterprise is.
The problem is, problem used loosely,
everything comes cheap and overabundant, like food.
- Well, it doesn't actually come overabundant.
It's done properly.
- Sure, that's fair.
- It's supply meets demand.
- Sure, that's fair, but I'm saying is like,
if 150 years ago you said,
you know, one day we're gonna have an issue
where there's gonna be so much food,
and then the kids are too fat,
it's just gonna be like,
"I have four who are dead in the crib, I wish."
I mean, what kind of paradise is this?
So what you would have,
we have this right now in certain centers,
you have the Hasidim, you have Sharia,
you have different, you have,
I'm sure in the medical system,
they have their own kind of private courts,
and court-martials is another example of this,
although obviously that's through the state.
So you would have innovation in law under markets
just the same way as you'd have it,
and we have this already.
Maybe it's not, Yaron doesn't like in terms of like,
murder and rape, and I can understand why,
but in terms of like, business and interactions,
he would have no problem with different arbitration firms
having different rules for like,
what kind of evidence is allowed,
maybe you only have 60 days to make your case,
and so on and so forth,
and the market is a process of creative innovation,
and it would be dynamic, it would be changing over time.
- So what's interesting relating to this is,
one of the ways Ayn Rand proposed
raising revenue for the government,
'cause she was against, was, let's say we have a contract.
We could just have it arbitrated
without government interfering,
but if we wanted to access the courts of the government
as a final authority, we would pay,
and that's how governments would raise,
some of the funds would be raised that way.
So there's definitely a value to having this innovation
and the public space,
but I don't believe that is the case with murder,
I don't believe that is the case with violent crime,
and it's funny you bring up Sharia,
'cause David Friedman, when he gives--
- Wait, I gotta ask you to clarify,
I'm not trying to interrupt you.
You were talking about with murder, I mean,
you would agree, I think, just to clarify for the audience,
that there is room for innovation in murder,
because there's things like manslaughter,
there's murder one, murder two.
- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't think it happens at a market level.
I don't think there's a market innovation for murder.
Somebody has to figure out what those standards are.
They will evolve as we gain more knowledge.
- But we're all agreement that the word murder
means very different things.
- Oh, absolutely, and if circumstances matter,
and what are you, standards of proof,
and standards of evidence, all of that,
there has to be a standard. - And consequences too, yes.
- All of that, there has to be a standard,
and that's what I think a proper government provides.
But, so David Friedman uses,
in some of his talks about private law,
he uses Sharia law in Somalia as an example.
Look, legal systems evolve privately, independent.
Yeah, authoritarian ones,
ones that don't respect the rights of women at all.
Are you married?
- No, no, but we all wanna have sex with our mother,
as Freud would say.
- Oh my God, can we make that a clip?
- Yep.
- Where the hell did that come from?
(laughing)
That's much better than what I was just saying about the kids.
- I appreciate that.
Okay, so we went in a voluntary way,
although sometimes for Yaron, and sometimes for Michael,
it felt involuntary, but we all got the big guns.
So how do we land this?
Clearly there's a disagreement about anarchism here.
- I think there's a big agreement,
because if Yaron was saying that if I wanna have
my voluntary stupid thing with you,
and his government is not gonna tax me,
and is not gonna insinuate itself
unless we're murdering each other, something like that,
I'm okay with that.
- So if you take the example of Sharia law,
which was mentioned earlier,
so if you have a little community within my world,
that imposes Sharia law,
if it starts mutilating little girls,
then you impose your law on it, right?
You impose the law on it,
because it's an issue of protecting individual rights.
If they wanna treat women, if women have to cover up,
and the women are okay with that, that's fine.
If the woman wants to leave, but is not allowed to leave,
that's where my government would step in,
and prevent them from using force against her.
And that's it, right?
- Okay.
- Now, I think it's more complicated than that, right?
Because I think there are complex issue property rights
often where it's not gonna be easy for you guys to resolve,
and particularly if you interact with people
outside of your community.
- Sure.
- But yeah, my view is government is there
to protect individual rights, that's it.
Otherwise, leave you alone.
- I think this conversation is gonna continue
for quite a while.
Michael has a new book on the topic
coming out eventually, one day.
So you're working also on, still called The White Pill?
- The White Pill, yeah.
And the first line of The White Pill is,
"Ayn Rand did not laugh."
I'm not joking, that's literally the first line.
- I believe you.
- 'Cause it opens up with her,
who knows what the book's gonna look like when it's done,
but as of now, that's the beginning.
'Cause it opens up with her testimony at the House
on American Activities Committee,
where she's trying to explain to these Congress people
what it was like when she left the Soviet Union,
and they are just befuddled by it.
- Can you explain she did not laugh?
- Well, 'cause the first line in the fountainhead,
spoiler alert, is "Howard Rourke laughed."
So this is a little inversion of that.
It says, "Ayn Rand did not laugh."
Because she had this,
Ayn Rand was a huge fan of America, as am I.
She took our political system very seriously.
She had enormous reverence for institutions.
One example of this is one of the villains
of the Atlas Shrugged is based on Harry Truman.
I think Thompson is the character's name.
And because she had such respect for the name,
for the title of president,
she refers to him as the chairman.
She couldn't even bring herself--
- She had a huge respect for the presidency.
I wonder if she'd still have it,
given the last string of presidents we've had.
- So having her,
which sets up the broader point of the book,
which I'm sure I'll be back on the show to discuss,
assuming this bridge hasn't been burned,
but I'll try my best.
- All three of us are canceled.
Some are more canceled than the others.
- Uh-oh.
I don't know.
- The point being, which sets up the broader point
of the book is how ignorant many people are in the West
about the horrors of Stalinism and communism,
but also how many people in the West were complicit
in saying to Americans, "Go home, everything's fine.
"This is great.
"Sure, this is why Pence stopped the race.
"They're sure there are mistakes."
And they really made a point to downplay,
§31Transcript · 3:39:08–3:46:36
really gratuitously, some of the unimaginable atrocities
of the communism.
And just one more sentence,
and going through the work and learning
about what they actually did is so jaw-dropping
that it's, and if I didn't know about it,
many people I'm friends with who are historians
who entered the space,
this isn't common knowledge to them,
then we can assume that almost no one knows about it.
And I think it's very important for people
to appreciate whether Republican, Democrat, liberal,
whatever, how much of a danger this is.
And I think Americans have this,
there's a book called "It Can't Happen Here,"
I think by Sinclair Lewis,
about a fascist who come to America.
American exceptionalism has a positive context,
but also have a negative context
where you think we're invincible.
All these horrible things that happen to other countries,
it can't possibly happen here.
We're America, we're special.
And it's completely an absurdity.
- Yeah, yeah.
Have you seen the movie, Mr. Jones?
- My friend wrote it, no, I haven't,
but Walter Duranty and his quotes,
I have a thread on Twitter,
Walter Duranty, for those who don't know,
he won a Pulitzer 'cause he was
the New York Times man in Moscow.
And endlessly, he was talking about how great it was,
how if you hear about this famine in Ukraine,
this is just propaganda, I went to the villages,
everyone's happy and fed.
A lot of it was explicit lies.
And when you realize you're talking about,
let's give them the absolute benefit of the doubt,
an accidental genocide, it's still mind boggling.
And also, Ann Applebaum,
who's just a phenomenal, phenomenal writer,
she wrote a book called "Red Famine,
"Stalin's War in Ukraine."
And she talks about how what people in America appreciate
is how clever in their sadism the Soviets were.
And what they knew to do to Ukraine is everyone is starving,
so they knew if you got some meat on your bones,
you're hiding food.
So they come back at night,
take your hand, put it in the door jam,
keep slamming the door, ransack your house.
They didn't have to find the food,
burn down your house, take all your clothes,
goodbye and good luck.
I don't recall saying good luck, yeah.
So it's--
- So I highly recommend the movie
because it's very well done.
It's very well directed.
It's beautifully made.
It's stunningly effective.
- Okay, good.
- In illustrating exactly that.
The scenes in Ukraine during the famine,
oh, your heart goes, I mean, it's crushing.
And it shifts to black and white.
It's very, very well made aesthetically,
so highly recommend it.
- And it's written by Andrzej Chalupa.
She's a Ukrainian friend of mine.
She introduced me, Janmi Park,
who's a big North Korean defector.
And this is the kind of thing
where I think more people need to,
when I wrote "The New Right,"
which talks a lot about the Nazis
or the kind of neo-Nazis,
one of their big complaints about,
against people who are Jewish is like,
oh, we hear all about the Holocaust.
How come you don't talk about the Holodomor?
I'm like, I'm trying to do my part.
I agree with you that we need to be talking
about the Holodomor. - Absolutely, absolutely.
And it's sad there are more movies that are anti-Soviet,
which tells you a lot about the view of the intelligentsia.
It's a great idea, it just was badly implemented.
And no, it's a rotten idea.
It's an evil idea.
And it was implemented-- - Which was correctly
implemented. - Exactly.
It was implemented exactly how it has to be implemented.
There's no alternative.
- Can we talk about "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged,"
and which character do you find most fascinating,
ones that kind of you meet in your own mind,
that you almost have conversations with,
or has an influence on you and your life in general?
- You know what character I like?
'Cause I know no-- - Good or bad, sorry.
- No one ever gives this answer,
but this is my, just aesthetically,
you know how sometimes you're drawn to a character
and it's, if this person were real,
you'd think they're just,
but there's something about the resonates with you.
I can't even explain this,
but I love the character in "Atlas Shrugged"
of Lillian Riordan, who's Hank Riordan's wife.
And what is amazing about her,
she says she's his wife, he's this big industrialist,
innovator, and she's this like former beauty,
but she's so cold and soulless that there's,
I mean, I joke about, you know, Anne Rand's vampire novels,
that character is as close to a literal vampire
as you're gonna see in "Rand."
And there's just this great scene
where, you know, Hank Riordan invents Riordan Metal.
It's this great metal, which is extremely strong,
but extremely, it's like light,
so this creates all these innovations.
And he brings her a bracelet
made of the first Riordan Metal.
This is his life goal.
This is like Prometheus bringing fire.
And she's like, "What the fuck is this?"
- It could've brought me diamonds.
- Yeah, it could've brought me diamonds.
What is this shit?
And Dagny, who's another industrialist,
she's a heroine, a very strong female character
in "Atlas Shrugged," is at a party,
and she goes, "I got diamonds, let's trade."
And Lillian's like, "You want this?"
And she's like, "Yes, 'cause that's the concretization
"of the human mind.
"These are rocks."
And Lillian's like, "Okay, whatever."
And that character is someone
who has a lot of resonance in our culture,
this kind of soulless.
It's easy to write a soulless male figure,
like Peter Keating, in some ways, is soulless,
but that, for some reason, when it's like a soulless female,
it seems that much more chilling and effective.
Do you not agree, though, that Lillian Riordan
is an amazingly, very powerful figure?
- Powerful figure.
And I think Riordan is, too.
And what I love about Riordan is his evolution, right?
He's so flawed.
He's a hero who's completely flawed.
And it drives me nuts when people say,
"Her characters are cartoonish, they never change,
"there's no emotion."
Really?
Did you read the same book I did?
'Cause if you take Riordan, and he's struggling,
and he's trying to deal with Lillian, and his family,
and all this stuff, and we know family members like this,
right, I mean, who are leeches and parasites,
but he's excusing them,
'cause that's what he's supposed to do.
And then as he evolves to fully realize,
what's going on, that evolution is difficult, it's hard.
Like the scene after he has sex with Dagny,
of course he gives a speech, but the speech is,
(laughing)
it's such a good speech in terms of conveying
his mind-body split, right?
He thinks he really had fun, he really enjoyed the sex,
right, but he thinks it's animalistic,
and he thinks it's a sign of his depravity,
and he thinks, and here he is, this woman he loves,
and he adores her, and--
- And this is not the one.
- And he can't, yeah, and he can't connect the two,
he can't connect the sex with the love.
He can't connect the sex with adoration,
and with the value.
So her characters are anything I think,
but cardboard characters, because I think Dagny,
and the scenes where she's listening to music,
and gets captured by the music,
and the way Ren describes that,
I think it's just beautiful.
Or the scene, my favorite scene in "Atlas"
is the scene where they're crossing,
where they're taking the first train ride
across the John Gold Bridge.
- Oh yeah, the end of Act One.
- And she's, they're in the engine room,
and it's traveling through.
And the way she's describing Dagny,
and it's almost like Dagny's having sex with the machine.
It's so powerful emotionally, the success,
the fact that they did it.
Everybody told them it was impossible,
and the train is going really fast,
§32Transcript · 3:46:38–3:53:58
and that whole, it's got a sexual vibe to it.
It's all about passion, it's all about success,
and it's all about the success of their minds,
and nobody else matters.
- What's really great about that scene,
just in terms of constructing the novel,
I'm not going to spoil anything.
So "The Atlas Shrugged" has three acts,
like three act structure is not uncommon.
And the first act is about Hank Reardon,
overcoming all this adversity at home,
in his personal life, and in his business,
to create this great achievement.
So Rand really makes the reader invested
in this character and his accomplishments.
He's unambiguously doing something good.
There's no downside here.
He's making it easier to transport people, transport food.
This is really just great.
And it's just, once you read it and you look back,
you're like, she does such a masterful job of making,
you have to be a fan of this person and root for them.
'Cause she's like, "Oh, you think things are going great?
"He's overcome?
"Hold on a minute."
And then the rest of it, she's just real.
And your sense of injustice is triggered as a reader
to such an nth degree,
because you saw what he went through to get to this point,
and now you're seeing it taking away people inferior to him.
And one of the quotes on Twitter I use all the time
is I'll see someone, politician or a bureaucrat or a thinker,
just advocate for something completely unconscionable.
And I'll just quote and say,
"My favorite criticism of Ayn Rand
"is that they say her villains
"are too evil and unrealistic."
Because the things that people posit with a straight face
are so much worse than she has in her book.
- And not just politicians, you find intellectuals today.
- Oh, of course.
- Way over the top.
Even when I read Atlas Shrugged, I was going,
"Nobody really talks like this."
No, they do.
- Let me give you one example.
There was a story she wrote, which she never published.
They published her journals, the Ayn Rand Institute.
And there was one character,
and this was a prototype of Ellsworth Tewi,
he was one of the villains of "The Fountainhead."
And basically the kid had deformed legs
or broke his legs or something like that.
And he wants to get leg braces.
And the dad is like, "Oh, we're not gonna do that.
"Why should you be better than anyone else?
"You should just have deformity."
- Accept your fate.
- Accept your fate.
And you're reading this, and I'm like,
"What dad is not going to give his kid leg braces?
"It's ridiculous."
But now it's not uncommon for deaf children
to not get cochlear implants and not be able to hear
'cause their parents say,
"Well, we're gonna lose deaf culture."
Hearing is just information.
And you're sitting there,
and whether you agree with this or not,
this is very close to what she was saying.
And when I read what she was saying,
I'm like, "Okay, crazy Ayn Rand, this is not a thing."
And it's like, "Oh, yeah, the craziness
"is that it's not braces, it's hearing."
- Yeah, and what evil to deny your kid hearing?
I mean, God.
- So here's the other thing.
If you want deaf culture,
which I would believe is a thing, sign language, whatever,
they could turn it off.
Yeah, if you want, give them the choice.
Tonight, I'm sorry, one more thing.
You know, Rand used the word evil frequently.
And I think maybe I can make the argument
she used it too loosely.
If you are denying a child the gift of music,
I will say that's evil.
- I agree, completely.
- Unambiguously.
Go online and watch videos of people getting hearing aids
and being able to hear for the first time.
- And seeing what happens to their faces.
- I promise you, you will cry
because there's no pure, I'm getting teared up right now.
There's no pure expression of humanity
and technology at its best
than seeing a two-year-old or one and a half-year-old
who can't even talk.
And then you see the reaction when they hear mom's voice.
It's so beautiful and moving.
- Absolutely.
- Yeah, there's a few things that's moving.
It's like, it's one of the ways
to rethink technology, perhaps.
- And there's this, it's really funny
'cause sometimes it'll be this tough dude, right?
And he's been deaf all his life.
And then they put hearing in,
the girlfriend's like, "Can you hear me?"
And he's trying to be tough for three seconds.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, he just loses his grip.
And you just sit there, it's just this.
- No, absolutely, and that's true of any sense.
- Like colorblind people seeing color for the first time,
that kind of thing.
I think there's a few.
- It's not quite the same, but it's somewhat.
But if you're blind and suddenly can see,
I mean, it's just stunning.
I mean, and how do we form our concepts?
How do we think?
We have to, we get information from reality, right?
We interact with reality through our senses
and that's how we become conceptual beings.
And you deny an element of that from a human being.
That is horrible.
- There's a potential that would then neural link to,
so further developments there.
So, I mean, on that, there's a powerful question
of who is John Galt?
I don't know if we can do this without spoiler alerts.
- Yeah, don't spoil the book.
- Okay.
- But you can say--
- What's the importance of this character?
What's the importance of this question?
- I mean, without the importance of,
so I once gave a talk on who is John Galt.
And who is John Galt in a sense
is anybody who takes their own life seriously.
Anybody who's willing to really live fully their own life,
use their mind in pursuit of their rational values
and pursue their happiness fully uncompromisingly
with no compromise and sticking to their integrity.
Anybody can be John Galt in that sense.
- I think one of the mottos I live by is all,
we are tasked to, maybe this is a little bit religious,
but I think your own is gonna agree with it.
I'm sure you'll agree with it.
All any of us can do is leave the world
a little bit of a better place than we found it.
And I think if you do that through hard work,
being honest, being not at the expense of other people,
you can go to your grave patting yourself on the back.
- I mean, to me, the leaving the world a better place,
yeah, I mean, that's not what drives me.
What drives me is, I mean, what I think drives people.
I think just live a good life.
And good life means a life you're happy living.
And part of that is the impact you have on the world,
but it's, so many people live wasted lives,
live mediocre lives, live conventional lives.
Maybe they even leave the world a better place,
but they didn't really, they didn't--
- But they didn't leave the world a better place.
- They left the world a better place,
but they didn't live their potential.
They didn't, or they died feeling guilty about it,
or they, a million different things.
So there's so many productive people.
I mean, think about all the innovators
and the technologists and the businessmen
who leave the world a better place by a big shot,
but are never happy, never happy in their own souls,
in their own life.
And to me, that's what counts.
And if you're gonna be happy,
you'll leave the better world a better place.
- And that's what John Vaught symbolizes.
- To me, it's living your life by your standards,
by your values, and pursuing that happiness.
- Well, I take, I'm sorry, I take in a different context,
'cause I think a lot of,
and I don't think you're gonna disagree with this.
I think a lot of times when you're young,
you have unrealistic expectations
about what you're gonna accomplish.
And you think to yourself,
well, let's suppose someone wants to go into politics.
Well, if I'm not elected president, I'm a failure.
That's nonsensical.
There's lots of people who are successful
who haven't achieved literally the top position in their role.
So if you can go to your grave,
having defending everything you've done,
and you've moved the needle in a pot--
- Yes, successes should not be relative.
- Yes, that's what I'm saying.
- So that goes back to second-handedness.
- Yes.
§33Transcript · 3:53:58–4:01:38
- Success is not being better than other people.
Success is not being the best.
Success is maximizing your potential, whatever that is.
And look, I know people,
I have a son who could be a really good engineer,
really good mathematician, really good scientist,
but he decided he wants to write comedy, right?
So he might've been a better mathematician
than he is a comedian, but that's his values.
That's his goals.
That's what he wants to do.
And hopefully he'll be really, really good at that.
And he'll be incredibly successful at it
and materially in every other sense.
But that's what you pursue.
- Yeah.
- So it's really being true to yourself in a deep sense.
And if you are true to yourself,
yeah, you'll leave the world a better place,
but that's not the essence.
The essence is you.
No, focus on you.
Focus on making your life the best life that it can be.
And if you do that,
you'll make the world a better place almost by definition.
- But yeah.
- You'll impact people.
- We're looking at the same thing in different ways.
It's at least in my little corner of the world,
it was disappointing how rare that is.
So one of the reasons I'm here in Austin
and one of the reasons my work gravitated towards Elon Musk
is because he represents that person for me
in the world of technology,
in the world of CEO, in the world of business.
It was very surprising to me.
The more I've learned about the world of tech,
how few people live unapologetically,
fully to their potential.
I'm sure people, others do that,
maybe music and art, I'm not sure.
I don't know about those worlds.
I do know about the technology world.
And it was disappointing to me
how many people compromise their integrity
in subtle ways at first,
but then it becomes a slippery slope.
- Can I say this?
There's this great quote,
and I always forget if it's Steinbecker, Hemingway,
and the quote, and this applies for money,
it applies for morality.
The quote was, "How did you go bankrupt?"
And he says, "Two ways, gradually and then suddenly."
It's very hard to one day be like,
"I have no integrity."
That doesn't happen.
It's very easy if it's like,
"Look, I stole this candy bar.
"What's the big deal if I steal this thing?"
Then you're still--
- People say there are no slippery slopes.
There are, and they're big, and they're very slippery.
And people slide-- - This is the biggest one.
- And people violate their integrity even without stealing.
Just little things about how they treat other people,
how they treat themselves, the values they pursue.
They don't go after the profession they really wanted to.
They compromise in ways that they shouldn't
with their spouse or with their mothers or whatever.
- They look the other way when they see injustice.
- And then they wake up one day when they're 40.
And this is why people go through midlife crisis.
Midlife crisis is a crisis where you suddenly realize,
"I didn't do it.
"I didn't live up to my standards.
"I didn't live up to my youthful idealism.
"I compromised and I sold out."
But I also would warn you about Silicon Valley.
Yeah, I think at the top, very few of them stick to it.
And partially, it's the political pressure is unbearable.
I mean, how would you?
How can you?
It would require to be a hero, and very few of them are.
But there are a lot of people who do really well
at all kinds of levels in technology,
who little startups, people.
And this is the point Michael was making.
You don't have to be the best.
- Yeah.
- You don't have to be a CEO to lift your max
and to live with integrity and to live a great life.
I know people who do, because they joined Amazon
or whatever, have just made a life for themselves,
an amazing life for themselves,
and have done great work at Amazon, let's say,
and then have lived a great life
because of the opportunity that created for them.
So I think there are more good people out there,
but yes, one of the saddest things of growing up
is even when you're a teenager and looking at adults
and noticing how few of them actually live,
I mean, are really alive in a sense of living their values
and enjoying their life.
And you start with your parents,
and you look across the people,
everybody lives such mediocre lives.
- Yeah, and the other thing is they don't have to.
That's what people don't appreciate.
- Particularly not in the world that we live in today
that's so wealthy.
And we all have so many opportunities, right?
- So by way of advice,
what advice would you give to young people
to live their life fully?
I mean, Michael and I have talked about this,
but it bears repeating.
So if you look at John Galt,
if you look at the highest ideals of a life we could live,
what advice would you give to a 20-year-old today, 18-year-old?
- Can I say, I don't think, and I think Rand would agree.
When Rand was writing John Galt, she says,
when you have this character's human perfection,
you don't want to get too close.
So he's a little bit of a vague character
because she was aware that when you're dealing
with day-to-day, the shine comes off.
I think Rourke is a lot better character for a young person.
- Or Reardon.
- Yeah, but Rourke is, the entirety of the Fountainhead
is Rourke, so and Reardon is one of several.
- We barely know John Galt.
- Yeah, but Rourke is someone where you could be like,
okay, and what Rourke also gives young people is--
- That's in "The Fountainhead."
- "The Fountainhead" is the strength to persevere
because when you're young, you're going to have down times.
There's going to be times when you're lonely.
There's going to be times when you don't have a girlfriend.
There's going to be times when you're out of work
and you're thinking, holy crap,
I'm falling between the cracks.
I'm going to accomplish, I'm going to be a failure.
And he gives them the courage.
There's even a scene in "The Fountainhead,"
which is this amazing scene.
I love that it's not talked about enough
where basically Rourke is looking at one of his buildings
and this little kid on a bicycle comes up to him
and, Yaron, please correct me.
And he's like, who built this?
And Rourke said, I did.
And the line is, Rourke didn't realize it,
but he just gave that kid the courage to face a lifetime.
And I think that is such a beautiful thing
where you can find inspiration in this character.
Don't become needlessly difficult.
Don't start parroting his lines.
You're not Howard Rourke and he's not a real person,
but there's aspects of him that you can apply to your life.
And here's something else, I'll give one example,
'cause this happened to me.
When I was working at Goldman Sachs,
I was doing tech support,
and my great-grandmother had passed away that year.
And I promised my grandmother I would have,
I've told this story several times,
I would have Thanksgiving dinner with her.
I was working second shift four to midnight,
and we were a 24/7 help desk.
And I got the schedule for the next week,
and I told my grandma I'm going to have lunch
with her on Thanksgiving.
And they had put me down from four to midnight
the day before Wednesday, which is my normal shift.
But then the day shift, the next day,
and I go to my boss, I go, first on second shift,
I'm like, "This Thanksgiving, I promised my grandma."
And they're like, "Well, if you could find someone
"to fill this, we'll do it."
And I asked everyone, they were like, "No."
And I said, "I'm not coming in."
And I 100%, not even a question,
if I asked my grandmother, "Can we have dinner instead?"
She would have said yes.
But this was one of those moments,
maybe this is from my huge ego,
where I felt like I was in a movie and I'm making a choice.
Am I going to ask grandma,
or am I going to just bend the knee?
And I go, I couldn't find anyone,
and I go, "I'm not coming in."
And they go, "If you're not coming in, you're fired."
And I go, "Fire me."
And they did fire me, and I have no regrets.
And 'cause if I'd compromised, I'd have money in my pocket.
But since I didn't compromise, I could look at that story.
Ran talks about how man is a being of self-made soul.
I could look at that story,
and next time I have a time where it's a tough decision,
§34Transcript · 4:01:42–4:09:18
where there's really pressure, I could be like,
"You know what?
"This is the kind of person you are, stick to it."
I'll give one more example, sorry, you're on.
I've given talks on networking, and I tell people,
I like to use humor because humor is a great way
to shortcut the brain and get the truth to them directly.
I say, "If you know someone is in town,
"it's their birthday, and they're not doing anything,
"take them out."
And I say, I do this for Rand reasons, I do it selfishly.
And the audience laughs, and I go, "You're laughing,"
but I go, "The guy who takes people out
"for their birthday is awesome."
That could be you, there's nothing stopping you.
You're just not thinking in these terms.
What's it gonna cost you, $30?
But for the rest of their life or a few years,
that person will remember you and be like,
"You know what?
"This person did right by me."
And I'll give you a concrete example
which changed my life profoundly.
Ted Hope, who was the producer of the film,
"American Splendor," which starred my mentor, Harvey Pekar,
sent an email to his firm that said,
"Harvey's in town with nothing to do.
"If you wanna hang out with him, here's your chance."
They worked at a film company, and I was the only one,
I got the email, I wasn't working there,
from a friend who took him up on it.
And as a consequence, Harvey wrote a graphic novel
about me, "Ego and Hubris," which is $250 on eBay now,
and it moves at that, not too shabby.
The point being, you know what?
Someone had a movie made about him,
someone is an interesting figure,
take the lunch and stay overtime for an hour.
But so many people don't think in those terms,
and there's so many opportunities for them.
So that's the advice I give.
And I think it's also good to give advice via anecdote.
So not only is the person getting the advice,
they are learning why you got to that point.
And maybe I'm wrong, but at least they've thought about it.
- Yeah, I mean, I agree with all of that.
And I like the line, Ayn Rand's line
about man is a self-made soul,
is a creature of a self-made soul, is huge.
And it's something most people don't realize.
And it's something that modern intellectuals undermine.
I mean, even somebody like Sam Harris,
when you keep telling people they don't have free will,
then you don't have a self-made soul,
'cause what is self-made?
There is no self, according to Sam, right?
He meditates and he sees that he doesn't have a self.
So you're undermining the ability of people
to take control of their own lives
and make the kind of choices that are necessary
to create the kind of moral character
that is necessary for them to be successful.
So I'd encourage people to go read
"Found Head and Outward Shrugged"
because put aside the politics,
put aside even aspects of the philosophy,
focus on these models.
These are, you know, Howard Walker's a great model
for all of us.
It's a great story to have in your head, in your mind,
when you encounter challenging choices that you might make.
And then spend the time, and this is,
I don't think I ever did this when I was young.
I don't think people do this,
but spend the time thinking about what your values really are.
What do you love doing?
What makes, what gets you going?
What gets you excited?
And how can I make a living at this?
How can I do this and live through this?
And then, you know, think about what kind of life you want,
what kind of, I don't know,
what kind of people you wanna hang out with.
Don't let life just happen to you.
Think it through.
What kind of people, for example,
if you want ambitious, excited,
maybe you should move to Silicon Valley,
to Austin, Texas, right?
If you wanna be around artsy people,
maybe you should go to Hollywood,
maybe you should go to New York.
You know, I don't know,
but figure out what kind of life you wanna live,
what kind of people you wanna hang out with,
what kind of woman you wanna spend your life with,
or what kind of romantic relationship you wanna have.
Figure that out and go and do it.
Don't sit around.
Life is not--
- Or try and fail.
It's okay.
You're gonna fail.
- Oh, failure, failure is absolute.
And learn from that failure.
And that's the other thing.
Think about what you're doing,
why you're succeeding, why you're failing,
and keep improving, keep working on it,
because it's not just gonna happen like this.
Nobody is Francisco to take a character out of "Atlas"
or to succeed at everything first try, right?
We all need to fail a few times.
We all need to, but what if you got to lose?
Every second is never gonna be back.
I mean, these are all cliches,
but they're all true cliches, right?
So think, figure out what your values are,
and try to apply your reason,
your rational thought on getting those values.
And try to, we talked about early on in the show,
in the interview, we talked about integrating your emotions
with your cognition.
I think that's crucial,
'cause you don't want to be fighting your emotions
as you move towards these things.
You don't want your emotions to be barriers
to your own success.
You want them to be cheerleaders, right?
To chew on when good things happen
and to be negative emotions
when it's justified that they're negative.
So work on integrating your soul.
So creating your soul, that's the real challenge.
- And I'll give one piece of meta advice.
When you're young, you're gonna be clueless,
'cause you're gonna be ignorant, you know the data.
Don't ask your dopey friends for advice,
'cause they wanna be helpful.
- Or your parents.
- But the friends wanna be helpful.
They're as dopey as you.
They're uninformed as you.
So they're just gonna give you platitudes
and you're gonna be worse off,
'cause now you're gonna be confused.
Especially with social media.
Reach out to people who are older than you,
who are accomplished.
You'd be surprised how often that you gotta send them 20 bucks,
buy them dinner, buy their book, whatever it takes.
You are getting free world-class advice for very cheap.
And that is really a mechanism for success.
- And here's something very unpopular and not sexy.
This is why people probably unfollow me.
- That's not why.
- Read.
Well, you'll tell me why after this.
Read, read, read.
Because you're not always gonna have access to those experts.
And I'm not just talking about self-help books.
I'm not even talking about self-help books.
Read the worlds with literature.
I mean, literature presents you
with all the different characters.
Read Dostoevsky, right?
Read Hugo, right?
Read all these authors that have taken time
to really create characters and put them in situations
that maybe you will never face those exact situations,
but you'll face similar situations.
And they play it out for you.
You'll see what the consequences are.
Great literature is a real tool for building your soul.
Great art generally, but literature in particular,
because it's more conceptual.
- Maybe you could speak to love
and relationship in your own life,
but in general, if we look at Alice Shrugged,
if we look at Fountainhead,
and maybe this is going to become a therapy session for Lex,
but also just looking at your own life in a form of advice,
how can you be a Rorik Riordan type character
and live your life to the fullest
in creating the most amazing things
that you're able to create,
and yet have others in your life that you give yourself to
in terms of loving them fully and having a family,
having kids, but even just the love of your life
kind of thing, how do you balance those things together?
Is there anything to say?
- I'll say one thing, 'cause then I'll defer to your own,
'cause he's the one who's married here.
I don't think it's a balance.
I think they compliment each other and feed off each other.
So it's like, how do you balance having shoes and pants?
It's like, no, you want both.
- You want it all.
- And having a great partner who thinks you're a badass,
and then sometimes they're on the stage and you're like,
§35Transcript · 4:09:20–4:16:24
oh my, I'm married to a badass.
That's the goal.
Am I wrong?
- No, absolutely.
It feeds off of each other.
It's synergetic.
It's completely synergetic.
The problem that people have, I think,
where they get into challenges
is when they view them as opposites, right?
Work or family.
Well, if you don't work the family,
you can't finance the family, but more than that,
why is your wife gonna love you, right?
What are the virtues that you're bringing?
If you don't maximize your own potential,
if you don't live the best life that you can live,
what is it to love?
And if she doesn't do the same thing, why do you love her?
So you don't get this conflict between work
and how do I have a balanced life?
Of course you have a balanced life.
You balance it based on your values,
and it's never gonna be the same.
The balance is, the time you spend at work
and with family when you're young
or when you have little kids or when they're grown up
is all gonna be different.
It's gonna depend on your priorities at the point,
but it's all gonna feed off of each other.
- So maybe another word outside of balance is sacrifice.
Do you think relationship involves sacrifice or not?
- Does he know what he's doing?
- I know, I think he's trolling you.
He's a troll.
He's a big troll.
Lex is the biggest troll on Twitter.
- Ever, ever, ever sacrifice.
- Never sacrifice.
- But see, he means sacrifice in the context.
- I know, I know, so I'm gonna define it.
So sacrifice in my world.
- Can I say one thing before we get sidebar?
Ran had a good example of what he's talking about balance.
So she was married to this guy, Frank O'Connor.
He was not as cerebral.
He was not intellectual.
That's fine, she was in love with him.
And I met someone who had been friends with Ran.
And a lot of times she'd have these conversations
with her acolytes till like four in the morning
about the most cerebral topics.
And I said, and he would always bring them food.
He'd stay up and kind of sit there in a corner.
And I go, when this was happening,
was he sitting there like,
oh God, here goes crazy old I'm and I just gotta be bored.
And they go, absolutely not.
He was so proud of her.
He was so excited.
In fact, when she got a lot of money
from I think selling Red Pond,
which was her screenplay, which never produced,
he told her you can buy any kind of fur coat
as long as it's mink.
He's like, you earned this, celebrate it.
So that was a good example.
- And that's a good relationship, absolutely.
No, sacrifice is the giving of a value
and expecting either nothing or something less in return.
You don't do that in a love relationship.
Your love relationship is a sense, a trade.
You're constantly trading.
You're not trading materially,
but you're trading spiritually.
Imagine if I only gave my wife,
if I gave spiritually and materially,
only in one direction.
I'd get sick of it.
She'd get sick of it.
It would never last.
It has to be in give and take constantly
in different ways, different values.
It's not a monetary exchange,
but it's constantly you're giving
and you're receiving and you're giving.
And that's gotta be in balance.
And I know a lot of relationship
where that gets out of bounds.
And at one party feels like they're giving all the time,
they're sacrificing.
They're giving more than they're receiving in a sense.
And it's over.
Now people use the word sacrifice,
like Jordan Peterson, sometimes he uses it both ways.
That's the problem.
People use it. - You know Jordan?
- I don't know him personally.
Jordan Peterson, I said.
I didn't call him Jordan, you see.
- Just wanted to be clear.
- He uses in his talks as,
sometimes he uses it as just as I described it.
And he's supportive of that,
like the sacrifice Jesus made, right?
And sometimes he uses as an investment.
But it's not.
If you're giving some, giving money now,
expecting a bigger return in the future,
that's not a sacrifice, that's an investment.
That's why we have two concepts for that.
And the same is true, if my wife is ill
and I've got a whole relationship build
around what I'm giving.
It's not that I'm not getting anything back.
What I'm getting back is that she is recovering, right?
Is that she is, she's still alive
or whatever it is that I'm keeping.
That's the value that I'm getting in return.
If I'm not getting that, why am I doing it?
'Cause I signed a contract a long time ago.
So it's not a sacrifice.
Children are not a sacrifice.
If I don't go to the movies
'cause I stay with my home with my kids,
it's because I love my kids more
than I love going to the movies, right?
And if I love going to the movies
more than I love staying with the kids,
then get a babysitter or don't have kids,
which is the better approach.
- Here's another tricky question.
What book did Ayn Rand say is the most evil book
in all of serious literature?
- Tolstoy? - It was Anacronina.
- Yeah, Anacronina.
- And the reason it was that book, which I haven't read,
please correct me if I get the plot wrong,
what Rand was saying is the plot is a guy
who's a big shot, I think.
He marries a stupid girl who has nothing of value
to offer him at all and she ends up killing herself.
Whereas Rand's version,
and we can take this out of the romantic context.
I am delighted when I could be of use to my friends.
It makes me feel wonderful
and not in a kind of parasitic way.
It's just like that I'm at a certain point
where they call me up, they're having a problem
and I've helped them with that problem.
- So Anacronina, he gives up the love of his life.
- Oh, is that what it is? - The intelligent girl,
the amazing girl.
He has an affair with her outside of marriage,
taints her, is married to the stupid,
but she gives him the prestige and everything.
- Oh, that's clearly very anti-Rand.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- And the smart, the one he loves,
she commits suicide in there.
- Oh, okay, I got it wrong.
- So it's about him choosing mediocrity
and nothingness over love.
So pursuing your values is so crucial.
So don't sacrifice, that doesn't mean
that if you wanna eat Chinese
and she wanna eat Italian,
you don't once in a while eat Italian on that day, right?
- Just noodles.
Just get noodles.
- That's silly, right?
That's not a sacrifice, not in the sense
in which we're talking about.
That's, you know, it doesn't mean don't compromise.
It doesn't mean don't compromise on the day-to-day stuff.
It means don't compromise on moral values.
You don't compromise on the big stuff
and you never sacrifice.
And that way you have a relationship that's built as equals
and as you admire each other.
And love at the end of the day is a response to value.
If you stop undermining your own value,
the person who loves you will stop loving you
or love you less.
If you love yourself less, you know, you have to,
Jay, Ayn Rand also said, in order to say I love you,
you have to be able to say the I, right?
You have to be somebody, you have to know yourself,
you have to have value.
And so love is a profound emotional response to value.
- So speaking of love and the three of us
being on this deserted island for time together,
somehow not murdering each other,
let me ask you, Yaron, Michael,
what is the most beautiful thing you find about the other?
So let's go Yaron first.
What do you think about Michael
that you appreciate about him?
- Let me just get these questions from him.
- That you think, what do you love?
§36Transcript · 4:16:27–4:23:58
- What do you love about Michael?
- That makes sense.
- Then he's gonna edit it.
(laughing)
- See, that makes sense to me.
- I just programmed him.
- Press play, it's all just a pre-recorded message.
- So I've never met Michael before, so this is my--
- That's not true, you have and--
- So I don't remember ever meeting Michael before.
- And you're the very beginning of the new right,
is me meeting you.
- I'm in the book?
- Yes.
- All right, well now I have to read his book
'cause I mean, am I presented positively or negatively?
- Very.
- Oh, okay, good.
(laughing)
- Alex is not so sure.
He's like--
- No, I like that he goes,
"Am I presented positively or negatively?"
I just go, "Very."
- Very.
(laughing)
- And he's like, "Oh, good."
I'm like, "Is it?"
(laughing)
- So he's, Michael's sharp, he's quick.
He's funny, although some of the humor is beyond me.
I'm not sure--
- That's a nice way of saying he's very intelligent.
- Yeah, he's definitely very intelligent
and, but also very engaging.
I think that's very engaging.
- And a sharp dresser.
- That's fun.
- And--
- Oh, he's definitely, well, yeah,
I'm gonna compliment him on stuff that's obvious
and everybody can see by the video.
- The sex appeal.
Let me also just comment one thing you mentioned
about you deriving joy from being of value to your friends.
- Yeah.
- You know, people talk to me about you sometimes
'cause you'll do humor about various things
and things like maybe you're some kind of crazy person
or something like that.
- Good, I wanted to--
- Yeah, I know you enjoy this aspect of it,
but I say that the reason I'm friends with Michael
is there's like real love there.
And like the kind of kindness you give to your friends,
to people like that are close to you, to your family,
is amazing, man.
So that's one of my favorite things about you.
Your intellect aside, your philosophies aside,
your humor aside, I think there's a lot of love in you.
That's what I really appreciate.
But enough about you.
I'm actually getting sick of saying nice things about you.
- You're always good at saying it.
- What, I take it all back.
- Can I say one thing?
You're joking, but this is something that's very key
and this is something in a random context.
It is very disturbing, and this is not by accident,
how in our culture it is poo-pooed to show kindness,
earnestness, appreciation, to tell someone,
you see this on Twitter where someone's like,
"You know what, I read your book.
"It's made my life a lot better."
Okay, simp.
And there is a real, and this very much comes
out of urban media circles, there's this real disdain
for showing appreciation, for showing happiness,
for showing kindness, and you don't know,
now that I've called it out, you'll notice it,
but when you see how common it is
and how people can't take compliments,
the effects of that are extreme and extremely negative.
- I gotta say about Texas, one of the--
- Texas in particular.
- So Austin especially, I mean,
I don't really fully know Texas, Texas,
but Austin, the friendliness, there's a reason
I've gotten fatter and been drinking a lot
is all the friendliness from random people
who are no longer random, they're just friends.
I've made more friends in one week
than I have in my entire stay in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- Yeah.
(laughing)
- Exactly, yeah, exactly.
- One and a half.
- You know what the number two means?
- I've never counted up that high.
- So this is what happens when people are free.
- No.
- When people are free and individualistic,
it's exact opposite of what people believe.
The more collectivist we are, the less free we are,
the nastier we are to one another.
Individualists who are pursuing their own happiness
are incredibly kind, friendly, and supportive people.
- Okay, and now your task with doing--
- Talk about bad juju.
- To practice what you preach,
is there in your soul that you can find
one beautiful thing to say about Yaron
now that you guys met for the first, second,
or third time, or at least in book format?
- So that's an easy one.
So what I like about Yaron is that I think he is taking,
one of the problems with maybe more old school objectivism
is that they would just use Ran's arguments in Ran's way.
And it's like, you're a parrot, you're not adding anything,
and you're not gonna be better than her.
So you give this talk about, I think you can compare,
was it Bill Gates to--
- Michael Theresa.
- No, no, who's the one who went to jail?
- Oh, Bernie Madoff.
- To Bernie Madoff, and you make the point,
you're like, does anyone here really think
Bernie Madoff was happy?
Like, yeah, he's successful and he's wealthy,
but does he go to bed being like, hey, I'm a great guy?
No, and his son kills himself
with all this tragedy that goes with him.
So I think anyone who takes an ideology or worldview
that I think is of value and adds to it
and articulates it in a new way,
I think is a great accomplishment.
I like how uncompromising you are in your views,
putting her views forward.
And I like how you illustrate how silly it is
to argue against anarchism.
So I don't really have to do any of the work.
As for you, and I've thought this before many times,
you were the first person I met
who I come at, literally the first,
other than my friend who went to yeshiva with as a kid,
who I come at us, there was a line on "Friends"
where Ross and Rachel were thinking of dating, right?
And they go, if we start dating,
it would be like the third date
'cause they knew each other well.
And then she's like, yeah, but it'd be like,
so it's like a plus and a minus.
Like, yeah, you're fast forwarding to seriousness,
but it's also the fact that you and I
have the same background,
like I can sit with your own or any of my other friends
and try to explain it.
The fact that intuitively you and I grew up the same
and I know that we have that background in common
does create a bond because I feel,
even if I haven't told you certain things,
you are going to understand me a lot better
than many of my friends who've known me for a long time.
I also really like how I feel,
this is a very new age term, but I'm gonna use it.
I feel very seen when I talk to you.
I think you see me for who I am.
You appreciate me for who I am.
And I also really like how,
and this is increasingly common as my platform increases.
So I'm very flattered by this.
You understand what I'm trying to do
and you don't try to get in the way,
even though it's your show.
You're like, okay, this guy's a performer.
He's doing his thing.
People appreciate it.
I appreciate it.
I'm not gonna try to drive their car.
And I think some people who are bad,
and I've not encountered this 'cause I would shoot it down,
but I think a lot of times people have a tendency
when they're hosts to try to drive the car.
And it's like, these things work when we come in here,
none of us prepare, you're prepared by me,
none of us talk beforehand and make it spontaneous.
And the audience really enjoys that more
'cause they know it's real earnest and dynamic.
- Yeah, I enjoy having you drive the car,
even though I believe you don't have a license.
- And you think we're gonna crash.
- No, I think he's an extraordinary interviewer
because of all those things.
He makes you feel visible.
And he does, but he also comes across as really earnest.
The questions are really questions
that you seem really interested in,
that you really want answers to.
It doesn't come across as canned
or I prepared my three book project questions.
§37Transcript · 4:24:02–4:25:12
- Thank you, Michael.
I was pretty sure that on a desert island,
this would end in murder, but now I believe it may.
- Well, given his comments on anarchy, it might still.
- It's gonna be human-sensitive.
- It might still.
- It might still.
- Might still, the day is young.
The night is young.
- This is just the beginning.
- This is a huge honor.
I've been a fan of both of you separately for a long time.
I really appreciate wasting all this time with me today.
I love you, Michael.
I love you, Yaron.
- We love you too.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Michael Malice and Yaron Brook.
And thank you to Ground News, Public Goods,
Athletic Greens, Brave and Four Sigmatic.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
And now let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx.
"Surround yourself with people who make you happy,
"people who make you laugh,
"who help you when you're in need,
"people who genuinely care.
"They are the ones worth keeping in your life.
"Everyone else is just passing through."
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)