Yaron Brook Ayn Rand & Objectivism

(0:00 - 0:07) Coming up in this episode. What does a free society look like? It's a capitalist society. What does capitalism actually mean? You need freedom. (0:07 - 0:17) That's all capitalism is. It's not some sophisticated economic theory. It's just a political theory that says protect their rights, protect them from harm, protect them from fraud, and otherwise leave them alone. (0:18 - 0:34) You are now listening to the Here for the Truth podcast, hosted by Joel Rafiti and Yerasimos. All right, everybody, welcome back to the Here for the Truth podcast. I'm Joel Rafiti, got my co-host Yerasimos with me as always. (0:34 - 0:51) This podcast is all about challenging ideas, bringing diverse perspectives to the table, and all of the in-pursuits of deeper understanding. And today is no different. We're joined by Yaron Brook, former director of the Ayn Rand Institute, a passionate advocate for free markets and individual liberty. (0:51 - 1:15) This conversation, we dive into everything from his perspectives on capitalism, objectivism, the moral foundations of a free society, Rand's philosophical journey, and even to contemporary issues like Trump's presidency, AI, and the nature of altruism. Yeah, I think what's really important with conversations like this is that you may not agree with everything that you hear. And I think the importance is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. (1:15 - 1:28) We often see too often in our world today and on social media, where it's like you have to agree with every single thing a person says or else nothing they say has any value. And that's just not the case. And so we're here for the truth. (1:28 - 1:34) We're here to have all sorts of conversations. So hopefully you get value from this episode. Please enjoy. (1:35 - 1:55) Yaron Brook is a prominent advocate for free markets, individual liberty, and objectivism. Born in Israel and educated in the United States, he holds a PhD in finance from the University of Texas at Austin. Brook has dedicated his career to promoting rational self-interest, capitalism, and the moral defense of individual rights. (1:55 - 2:24) As the former executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, Brook played a pivotal role in popularizing Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism, emphasizing reason, individualism, and largely fair capitalism. He is a passionate speaker and writer, known for his articulate and forceful defense of capitalism as the only moral social system. He's also the co-author of several books, including Free Market Revolution and Equal Is Unfair, which explore the moral and practical benefits of free market capitalism. (2:25 - 2:39) He remains committed to advancing the ideas of reason, individualism, and capitalism as the foundation for a prosperous and just society. Yaron, thank you so much for being here for The Truth. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. No worries at all, man. Really, really excited for this conversation. (2:41 - 2:59) Ayn is someone who's definitely impacted me as a philosopher, I guess, more than anyone else. Having first read Atlas Shrugged in 2020, five years ago now, completely shifted the trajectory of my life personally, and super grateful to come across her work. I've been looking forward to a conversation like this for a while. (2:59 - 5:07) But before we dive into Rand, I'd like to dive into you a little bit and get deep into your personal hero's journey, some of the major rites of passage, I guess, even how you first came across Ayn's work and what led you down this path. Yeah, I mean, I was born and raised in Israel. And as I think almost all Israelis of my generation, we grew up very much in an environment, a socialist environment, you know, and very committed to socialism, to collectivism, to nationalism. And, you know, I had bought into all that, you know, all of those principles that kind of the state had tried to indoctrinate me since I was a very young kid and was successful. At age 16, I had a friend who, you know, we'd meet and talk, and he was spouting these capitalist ideas. And that was like, it surprised me and said, where are you getting this BS from? And he said, you got to read this book. And he handed me a copy of Atlas Shrugged. So at 16, I immersed myself in Atlas. It took me a long time to read, because I fought it. I didn't want to believe it. I didn't think it was true. And I'd like to say, you know, I fought Ayn Rand and she won. By the end of it, I was convinced that she was right, that everything I'd been taught, everything I'd been raised on was basically false, and that what the world needed was a real revolution, an intellectual revolution. And I wanted to better understand this. So I kind of spent the next few years delving into ideas. In those days, it was pre-internet, way pre-internet. You know, you had to go scrounge around, use bookstores to find books. I was in Israel, it was hard to find anything. And for three years, I don't think I met another person who agreed with me. So I thought I was like the only person in the world who thought these ideas. There was, again, no internet. (5:08 - 8:21) Connectivity did not exist. And, you know, that's how I really started the journey. So I studied ideas. I read her books, ultimately connected with people who admired her in Israel, moved to the US, and connected with kind of the bigger kind of objectivist community that's here, got to know a lot of the people who, the leading intellectuals in the objectivist movement, and got to study with them, got to be their student, which was exciting and fun. And in 2000, I was asked to come and run the Ayn Rand Institute, and that kind of started my professional journey as an advocate for these ideas. It's amazing. Well, one question I always like to ask people, especially when they're like learning things that are going against, let's say, the status quo within their communities or their families, like when you started reading Atlas Shrugged and you started grappling with them, but as you started adopting more of the worldview and realizing Ayn Rand had something to say, were you like shouting from the rooftops? Were you having conversations with like family members and friends? I mean, listen, you got to read this book. And like, and what was their response? Yeah, I mean, I was an obnoxious teenager who had just discovered the truth and wanted the whole world to know of it. I also, in my naivete, as I think all 16 or 18 or 20-year-olds are, I thought, you know, if I just explain it to them, they'll all get it and they'll all convert, right? And so yes, I argued with everybody. I yelled at everybody. It was a big deal. I learned fairly quickly that it was all a waste of time. First of all, I didn't know enough to argue, right? I was too ignorant to actually be a promoter of these ideas. It took me, I don't know, it takes about a decade to really integrate these ideas well enough so that you can really become a rational advocate for them. And then of course, being obnoxious doesn't convince anybody. You're not going to turn anybody's mind. And the other thing is your family's not going to change their mind, right? I mean, it's too entrenched. They've devoted too much of their lives to a particular set of ideas. It's very hard after the age of, I don't know, 40, to change your mind about pretty much anything, nevermind your basic fundamental philosophy, because it's just now hardwired in, you know, you've wide-edged your brain. Now people do it. I've known people who've done it, but it's very rare and it's very unusual. So I tell young people today, just accept that your parents will never agree with you and find whatever shared values you have with them and enjoy that. And don't go into family gatherings in the intent to convert anybody. It's a waste of time. Avoid the confrontation. There's just no value in it. You know, you can say, I disagree, and be respectful and say what you think in a respectful way and then walk away. There's the argumentation. I mean, maybe it's good practice, you know, but just take it as practice. Don't take it as you're actually going to change anybody's mind. (8:23 - 9:32) Well said. Yeah. I guess, okay, diving into RAND more specifically, for those that I guess that, I mean, Ayn Rand has been pretty influential in our work and what we do here. So some of our audience might have a baseline understanding, but I guess for those that don't, can you give us like a brief history of Ayn Rand and how she kind of began to form her philosophical worldview? Sure. I mean, if we look at her biography and she was born Alicia Rosenblum in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905, middle-class Jewish family. She witnessed the Russian revolution from her, basically from her apartment. It was right in the streets in front of her in St. Petersburg. Lived under communism, lived there during the kind of the civil war in Russia and the family moved around, tried to avoid the worst of the war, but basically lost their business, which is a pharmacy, lost their apartment. They had to share it with other people. She witnessed the real evil of communism. She went to college where she was expected to tow the party line. She didn't. (9:32 - 10:01) From a very young age, was rebellious and an individualist, very much an individualist and hated communism, hated communism from day one. There was no question. And if she'd stayed in the Soviet Union, she would have been killed. I mean, there's just no question about it. She would have not survived. Luckily, there was a small window of opportunity when she was about 21 to get out and she managed to get to the United States. (10:01 - 12:55) Basically, everybody knew she would never come back. But except for, I guess, the communists who gave her like a short period of time to go out and come back. But everybody knew she wouldn't come back. She shows up in the US with nothing, right? I mean, she has family in Chicago. She goes and lives with them for a few months, but then she goes to Los Angeles. Her dream, by this point, her dream was to be a writer and she loved Hollywood. She was just enamored with Hollywood. She had seen the movies in the silent movies in that era. She knew a lot of the kind of movie stars and directors and everything. She shows up to Hollywood with nothing. And she shows up at the Cecil B. DeMille studios. I don't know if you guys know who Cecil B. DeMille was, but he was like bigger than Steven Spielberg, right? He was the guy in Hollywood in 1920s, in the late 20s. And they tell her, don't call us, we'll call you. And she walks out of the office and there's Cecil B. DeMille sitting in a convertible right there in the driveway. And she's kind of this little Russian girl. She's staring at him. And he says, what's going on? What are you doing? And she tells him a story here from Soviet Union, wants to be in Hollywood. He says, okay, you want to be in Hollywood? Let me show you how Hollywood. Get in the car. She gets in. He takes her to the back lot where he's shooting the King of Kings, story of Jesus, of all things. And basically gives her a pass and tells her she can be an extra. She becomes an extra in the movie. So you could see the scenes where there's Ayn Rand and the King of Kings in the silent movie. And from there, she launches a Hollywood career. She starts out in the wardrobe department and doing odd and ends jobs in Hollywood and stuff and lands up writing scripts. And she writes a play that is successful and makes it off to Broadway. She writes her first novel, We the Living, which is kind of semi-autobiographical about a young woman's struggles in the Soviet Union. And then she writes The Fountainhead. And The Fountainhead is a book that's rejected by 12 publishers. Everybody says, oh, it's too philosophical. It's too idealistic. It's too this, it's too that. Nobody wants to publish it. Finally, she finds a publisher, but they're not that confident in the books. They only print a few copies, like 2000 copies or something. Word of mouth, this book explodes. It becomes a New York Times bestseller. They have to rush into more printings and she becomes the celebrated author. They make a movie in Hollywood off of it, ultimately with Gary Cooper. And she continues to work somewhat in Hollywood with scripts. Some of her scripts get made into movies. (12:56 - 13:21) But right after The Fountainhead, she started working on Atlas Shrugged. She thought Atlas Shrugged might take a few years. It lands up taking 12 years to write. And she publishes that in 57. By that point, publishers are coming to her. They want the book. She doesn't have to go seeking publishers out. And it comes out in 57 to horrible reviews. Pretty much everybody hates it. (13:21 - 14:04) The New York Times hates it. William F. Buckley's National Review hates it. The worst review ever written of Atlas Shrugged was written by Whittaker Chambers, a former communist turned conservative, typical. In the National Review, Buckley makes it his mission to kick her out of the conservative movement, if you will, out of kind of the modern right. And, you know, but the book sells. It sells like crazy in spite of the fact that the reviews are all negative. Yeah. Well, what were the critiques? You know, anything from this is what Whittaker Chambers says. This is a horrible philosophy. (14:05 - 20:55) It's a philosophy of fascism. It's a philosophy of to the death chambers go. So he's suggesting it's a philosophy of Nazis, right, to the death chambers go. You know, to, on the other hand, the writing is terrible. The villains, they all know people like this. There's no villains like that. I mean, welcome to 2021, 2025, where pretty much everybody in Washington, left or right, is a character, a villain out of Atlas Shrugged. You know, to the hero's unrealistic, to your venerating capitalists. And you know, you have this horrible view of the working class and of the working man and of of regular folks. This is discriminatory or whatever. So, yeah, the whole spectrum left to right. But basically, she's you know, they portray her as a kind of a Nietzschean pro, you know, strongman, anti, you know, the common person and a borderline fascist or all out fascist, which is, of course, the opposite of, you know, she's not that at all. There's nothing there to suggest any of that. But that's how she's portrayed. So after Atlas Shrugged, she, you know, so throughout this whole period, her goal in her writing, as she says, is her ideal in literature, you know, core literature. And I think Fonhey and Atlas Shrugged are just great literature. They're great books to read. They're beautifully written. They're the opposite of what the critics said. And they're engaging. You know, you really get sucked into the story. Put aside the philosophy. They're just great, fun reads. Everybody should read them because they're fun. But her ideal was always, she wanted to portray what she called the ideal man, like the perfect human being. What would a perfect human being look like? What would his moral character be? What would his attributes be? And so she goes into an investigation through the 40s, 50s into, okay, what do philosophers say about the ideal man? What do they say about morality? What do they say about goodness? What do they say about heroism? And she's crushed. She's disappointed because all of them, she believes, are wrong about the human potential. And so in portraying the ideal man in Fonhey and Atlas Shrugged, she has to invent, she has to come up, discover a new philosophy, a new set of ideas. In order to do the literature, she has to become a philosopher. So she become a philosopher in order to do the literature. And then starting from in the early 1960s, really late 50s, she dedicates herself now to writing a pure philosophy. That is a philosophy, her ethics, epistemology, commentary on current events. She writes dozens and dozens of articles on what is happening in the politics and the culture of the United States in the 60s and 70s. And during this time, she's incredibly influential, all the TV shows have her. She gets her ideas out there and the novels continue to sell enormously. And then in 1982, she passes away. And at that point, the books are still selling amazingly and she is probably close to peak fame in terms of visibility in the culture. Now a short break from the episode. As I listened to Yaron discuss the importance of being the hero of your own life, I'm reminded of the deep work we do inside Rise Above The Herd. This program is something that emerged from our own healing journeys, our own desire to create the kind of transformative space that we wish we'd had access to earlier in our lives. And with that being said, enrollment is open only for, I think, 10 more days from the point that this podcast was released for the final ever round of RAS, Rise Above The Herd, starting March 4th. This isn't a marketing tactic. We've made the heartfelt decision that this will be our last time guiding people through this profound journey. And over the years, we've witnessed hundreds of beautiful transformations as people rediscover their authentic power and purpose. And I think what really makes RAS special is how we honor the whole person, mind, body, and spirit. We create a safe container for our students to explore their inner landscape, develop genuine emotional wisdom, and reconnect with their deepest truths. This work really touches every aspect of the life, from healing relationships to discovering authentic purpose. Now, we understand that considering this kind of deep work can bring up uncertainty or hesitation. And that's why we're offering personal 20-minute conversations, genuine discussions about where you are and where the RAS aligns with your journey. And so, you can schedule those and learn more about the program at hearforthetruth.com forward slash RAS. That is hearforthetruth.com forward slash R-A-T-H. So, if this resonates with you, we do invite you to learn more. Now, back to the conversation with Yiran. So, when objectivism begins to form for Anne, and I guess even her belief in the benefit and power of individualism, rational self-interest, free market capitalism, how much of this was formed from her actual experience in America, like meeting the Hollywood directs in the studio, being given opportunity, and realizing the potential of her being able to rise and become something, I guess, from being in more of an environment that facilitated that kind of opportunity, as opposed to how much of it was from, oh, let me study the foundations of the United States. I don't think any of that. I think really she develops the foundational principles of her ideas at a very young age. And basically, she develops them through, I think, a process, both of introspecting and identifying the value she is to herself, right? This is a rational egoism. This is a morality of selfishness. This is the idea that you are it. You're what's important in life. There's nothing else, really. Everything else is important because it's important to you. You, in that sense, are the standard. Your life is the standard. I think she develops that very early. She also loves, in her youth, very young, she loves reading romantic literature, whether it's adventure stories written by primarily French and, I guess, British authors of these heroic people who go do heroic things. And that just excites her. That is the kind of person she wants to be. And that's the kind of person she wants to admire. (20:56 - 32:25) And then I think she reads Rook to Hugo, again, politically, maybe not her kind of person, but deeper down, the hero-worshipping, the values, the struggle, the willingness to do anything, to achieve your aims and important aims, even if you disagree with them. So, these bigger-than-life struggles. So, all of that, I think, influences her. And she's constantly thinking about it. She's a genius. A lot of this is original. Now, I think by the time she comes to the United States, she knows that she wants to come to the United States. She even says at some point, I just read recently, at some point she thought England was the ultimate, right? She had mainly read about English heroes going out, adventurers going out and everything, and the British Empire and everything it represented. But then she ultimately discovers America. And when she discovers America, that's it. That becomes her focus. And I think she studies the founding principles of America, the founders. And then I think you're right in a sense that all of that is reinforced by the sense of freedom that you get when you come here. She fell in love in her first time she saw the skyscrapers of New York. She fell in love. She loved skyscrapers. And New York was by far her favorite city. She had to go to LA for professional reasons. But she always wanted to live in New York and landed up, of course, most of her life living in New York. So, the skyscraper, Hollywood, she was disappointed in Hollywood because so many of them were leftists. So many of them were real communists even. So, she was very disappointed in them. But the ability to rise up, the ability to be successful, that was America. And that just reinforced the ideas that she had about individualism. And then I think she came to the conclusion, again, I think fairly early on, because she's already involved in kind of a pro-capitalist movement in the 1940s before even the Fountainhead is published. She comes to conclusion, she's seen communism. She's seen capitalism. But she also understands that if you're an individualist, if you believe individuals should live for themselves, pursuing their own values, using their own mind, you need freedom. That's it. You need freedom. What does a free society look like? It's a capitalist society. What does capitalism actually mean? It just means freedom. It just means being left alone to pursue your values as long as you don't violate other people's rights, left alone to pursue your life as you see fit. That's all capitalism is. It's not some sophisticated economic theory. It's just a political theory that says, leave people alone, protect their rights, protect them from harm, harm in a sense of physical force by others, protect them from fraud, and otherwise leave them alone. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. So, kind of let's go there now. Capitalism today seems to be like such like a talismanic word, but that means so many different things to so many different people. And so many people seem so confused about what this socioeconomic system actually speaks to. Why is that? Like, is that an intentional distortion? Why does capitalism cop so much of the blame for kind of the pitfalls of society we're witnessing today? And people will kind of assume that we live in a capitalist society when in my view, it's not really the case. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's both conscious by some people and unconscious by others. So, for some, it's a confusion. For others, it's purposeful. And why would it be purposeful? Two things. One is, capitalism was an unbelievable, unmitigated, unquestionable success. It drove the West to the wealth that it has today. It basically eradicated absolute poverty. There's nobody who's really poor in America or poor in Europe. I mean, maybe some homeless people, but generally, even the poor in America have air conditioning, and they have cars, and they have iPhones. They're not poor. In a sense, people are poor in Cambodia or in Africa, right? And capitalism did all that. It basically eradicated poverty. So, capitalism was an unmitigated success. So, first of all, everybody wants to be associated with something successful. They all know that at the back of people's minds, they know whether they acknowledge it or not, yeah, capitalism works. We know that. So, everybody, from Elizabeth Warren to Donald Trump to real capitalists, everybody wants to be associated with capitalism. The second thing is that they also recognize that if you want to undermine something, one of the best ways to do it is to create confusion about what it actually means and to undermine it, in a sense, from within. Elizabeth Warren will come up and say, yes, I'm all for capitalism. I just want to make it better. I think we can, by regulating, by taxing, by controlling, by central planning, we can tweak it to make it better. Now, she knows that's not capitalism. She knows, though, what she's doing is she's undermining capitalism because she's associating capitalism with the current system. And therefore, every crisis, every problem, every issue that comes up in our culture, she can, and others can then blame on capitalism. So, capitalism has become, you know, the system that is. And everything that goes wrong from the Great Depression to the financial crisis is caused by capitalism. And therefore, how do you address these crises? But with more government, more regulations, more controls. And then you get a next crisis caused by the regulations and controls and more government, but you never blame that for causing it. You blame capitalism against, you get more government, more controls, more regulations. And today we have what Ayn Rand called a mixed economy that has a little bit of capitalism, a little bit of freedom, a little bit of being left alone, and a lot of controls and regulations and restrictions and environmental papers you have to write. I just read yesterday that they're building a new train station in for the commuter train in Boston. They're building a new train station. It'll be done by 2045, 20 years. It'll cost a hundred million dollars. And yeah, that's, and everybody just, yeah, cool. Okay, we'll have a new train station in 20 years. And it's like, that's insanity. I bet you the original subway in Boston didn't take 20 years to build with all the train stations and underground and all of it. This is above ground. And I saw a video of a train station in China that they put up in nine hours, hours, not days, hours, because they decided to do it and they just did it. And you can't do that in America anymore. You can't decide to do something and just do it. And unless you're the government and then you're going to screw it up because you need all this train of regulations and forms and you need to bribe everybody. You know, we don't call it bribes, but that's what you're actually doing in order to get anything done. So everything is blamed on capitalism. They like it that way. And because that increases their ability to control us. It's really interesting, Yaron, what you were just talking about, because I live in Topanga Canyon. I'm in Los Angeles County. We just had to deal with the fires here. We nearly flipped our home, but fortunately we were okay. But we have so many friends who lost their homes. And obviously the entire Palisades and Altadena. But I'm curious to see the impact this is going to have on individuals realizing, oh, I want to rebuild my house, but I have to go through all these steps. I have to get all these permits. I have to wait all these years. I wonder how it's going to impact their view of government. It's already happening to some degree. So I don't know if the time is right for more people to be exposed to Ayn Rand's work. I think it's marginal. People don't learn from experience. If they learned from experience, we'd be living in Las Vegas capitalist heaven right now, because capitalism works. It always does. And socialism doesn't. Did Californians learn anything from the blackouts? Yeah, I hear you. Did they learn anything from the dozens and dozens and dozens of government failures that have happened in California for decades now? They've learned nothing. So yeah, they'll be upset, and they'll learn, and they'll pay their... Luckily, it's generally places where people have some money. They'll pay their lawyers to grease their wheels, and they'll get it done. And they'll complain bitterly. And when the next election happens, nobody will represent capitalism anyway. So will they vote for a little bit less regulation? Maybe, but it'll be a little bit less. And then once the guy gets in power, he won't actually cut regulation. So nothing happens. Will they be open to more Ayn Rand? Maybe, but that is true. They were open to more Ayn Rand after the financial crisis. Ayn Rand's sales went through the roof. Yet how many of the people who actually read or understood anything she said and were actually willing to be committed to those ideas? Very few. We didn't get a capitalist revolution. We got Donald Trump instead. So it's not like people learned from the Great Recession, where Atlas Shrug was literally happening in front of their faces. You'd think they would have gotten it. It's going to take a long time, primarily because Ayn Rand's philosophy is not primarily about capitalism. She argues that capitalism rests on deeper philosophical foundations, morality and epistemologically. And that is very hard to change people's minds about. It's very hard to change people's minds about morality. And it's very hard to change people's minds about epistemology. And that's where the rubber hits the road. It's not about capitalism. None of the arguments, nobody out there actually makes good anti-capitalist arguments in economics. Almost all of them boil down to arguments about capitalism being mean, capitalism being immoral, capitalism being about inequality, which is nasty. It's all about morality. It's never about economics. Yeah. Well, you've invoked the name, Donald Trump. So I guess we'll go there briefly. It would seem from the outset that moving away from bureaucrats and I guess putting in place an entrepreneur who's going to run successful businesses, knows how to do things a little bit more efficiently might seem to be a step in the right direction, I guess, from a Randian perspective. I kind of want to ask you, what's your perception of Donald Trump? Is it more efficient? Is it a more optimal way to run government? And what's kind of your overall view on where we're at? I mean, I view Donald Trump as a ignorant clown. I think that it turns out, yeah. I mean, if you had a real good entrepreneur who had a good political philosophy, Donald Trump has no political philosophy. Donald Trump has a finger he puts out into the wind and changes based on what certain people influences guide him towards. (32:26 - 33:20) MAGA runs Trump, not the other way around. I think the best example of this was a rally he did. First of all, his initial rallies in 2015, 16, he'd try out different slogans. And when he got the loudest cheers, those would become his campaign slogans. But then the best one was that when he was starting to run now for this round, he initially invoked the fact that he had, amazingly, probably the best thing he did in his first term, driven the pharmaceutical industry to develop vaccines really, really quickly and streamlined the FDA. He did something miraculous. He got the FDA to approve a vaccine really, really, really quickly. Everybody said it would take three to five years. He said, no, it's going to be done in less than a year. And it was done in less than a year. Amazingly, it could have been done even faster. But put that aside, right? Amazing. (33:21 - 34:08) So he goes out in front of his things and he praises his vaccines, his vaccines. And the audience boos, right? Because they're all anti-vaxxers. And not only does he stop doing that, but he becomes best friends with RFK. And now we have the head of Health and Human Services be an anti-vax guy, right? So he's gone all the way to where MAGA is and abandoned anything that he might or might not believe. He was always pro-abortion. He became anti-abortion. He was, I mean, ultimately, he was a Democrat. And he's still, in many respects, still fundamentally left. So Donald Trump has no political philosophy. (34:09 - 34:36) MAGA has no political philosophy. It is a philosophy of emotion. It is a philosophy driven by a lot of bad ideas, xenophobia, fear, hate, hate and fear. It's primarily a philosophy that's driven by negativity. Whatever the left is for, we're against. Now, I'm against the left too. (34:36 - 36:48) But it's mainly driven by knee-jerk reactions against the left. Whatever the left is for, they're against. So I think Trump is kind of an empty vessel that emotes a lot and is bombastic and claims a lot of things, but is unbelievably ignorant, particularly when it comes to economics, world affairs. He doesn't understand the world. He's weak. Putin is going to twist him around his little finger in Saudi Arabia next week. It's already started. I mean, Putin is an evil guy, but he's an evil guy who knows exactly what he wants and he knows how to get it. Trump is a weak guy with no ideas, doesn't know what he wants, and will succumb to Putin easily. Again, he already has. He has no idea of foreign affairs and what to do with it. But economics, his ignorance is unbelievable, right? I mean, his story about tariffs and trade is mind-bogglingly stupid. It's so bad, right? So now, in spite of that, he could do a lot of good things, right? So in his first term, he brought in a lot of good people and those people in different agencies and different departments deregulated, not in the way you would want that could survive, which is to change the law. They did it at the agency level. So yeah, for businessmen, Trump is great because the deregulation allows them to do things they couldn't do otherwise. So that's good. Maybe he could build the Boston train station in 15 years instead of 20 under Trump. It's not a revolution, but it's moving in the right direction. I think the same thing will happen here. I'm particularly excited about energy. I think that he has brought in some really, really good people into the energy department who are actually going to do important things in terms of our grid, in terms of power, and in terms of fossil fuels. I think there's some other areas where there'll be a lot of good stuff done. It's hard to tell if Doge is going to do anything except create a lot of headlines. I think they're very good at creating headlines. (36:49 - 37:15) It turns out most of the headlines they are wrong about. That's right. Right now, there's a big headline about we're paying hundreds of millions of people who are dead, social security, which is completely wrong and not true. And Elon Musk knows it, but he's great at marketing. So why not dominate the headlines by telling the story? It's completely false. So there's a lot of this stuff that he'll claim we're cutting $4 billion a day. (37:16 - 37:34) Not true. There's no $4 billion. But anything they cut, cool, I'm all for. So if they find fraud and waste, good. But the idea that they're going to shrink, dramatically shrink the deficit is bizarre. The only way to shrink the deficit is by starting to cut Medicare and social security. (37:34 - 38:15) They won't touch Medicare and social security. And it's not fraud in Medicare and social security. You literally have to change the benefits. You literally have to restructure them, which Donald Trump has said he won't touch. They can't touch interest on the debt. Interest rates are not determined by our government. And they probably won't touch military spending much. So you can't cut the deficit if you don't touch those programs. So it's all a lot of smoke and mirrors. It's a lot of showmanship. Trump is an entertainer after all, and he's entertaining. He dominates the headlines. He's very good at that. And there's an element of amusement about it all. If it wasn't so sad, it would be funny. (38:17 - 38:29) So I'm very negative on Trump. Now, the only good thing about Trump is the alternative, maybe it was worse. So it's not like I like Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton. (38:30 - 40:23) They're all awful, horrific, terrible people and don't understand economics in a different way, but they still don't understand economics and they would have done real harm to the country. So it's a question of, do you want Donald Trump's harm or do you want their harm? There's a sense in which I'm a little more afraid of Donald Trump's harm, because I think a lot of good people are mesmerized by him, which is false and what happens when... That's not good when good people are mesmerized by something like this. But second, Donald Trump, more so than the Democrats, I think, has the ability to move us towards authoritarianism. The left would like that as well. It's not that the left is... But he is better at it. He can actually rally people around, I don't know, whatever it is, cars, or maybe it's J.D. Vance, or maybe somebody on the right has the potential to move us more dramatically towards authoritarianism. And I just don't see how America at this point avoids some form of strong man authoritarianism in its future, given the nature of the Democratic Party and the nature of the Republican Party. Nobody in America today, nobody speaks about liberty, speaks about freedom. Notice that nobody talks about the founding fathers. There's no reference to the founding fathers and nobody talks about the constitution. I mean, the Democrats are talking about the constitution funnily enough. They have no clue what it means and they don't really believe in it as a combat Trump. But Trump came out with this tweet yesterday about whatever you do to save the country... He who saves his country violates no law. Yeah, violates no law. I mean, that's what Julius Caesar said. That's what every fascist in history has said, right? So I'm above the law. I'm doing it to save the country. Nobody actually says, I'm doing it because I love power. (40:23 - 44:19) They all say, I'm doing it to save the country. So it's dangerous times. But, you know, America is pretty strong. So at the end of the day, I'm still hopeful and I think we can overcome. Yeah, great. You're on. Are there any individuals that are, I guess, espousing more of Ayn Rand's ideals that get into politics or they just stay away because they're like, there's no fucking point? No, but, you know, if you ask me who I'm excited about in politics today in the world, I'm a huge Millet fan. I mean, I don't agree with everything he says. I certainly don't agree with everything he done. I understand that on Friday, he pumped up a meme coin, you know, one of these coins. Then he went up and then it crashed and people are really upset, which is stupid. Why is he getting into that? I think he's trying to copy Donald Trump, and which is not good because he's so much better than Trump. I mean, he is a politician who actually has principles. He actually believes in a free market. He really does believe, at least in economic realm, in liberty. He is an economist. He actually understands economics. He's not ignorant about economics. And in spite of the fact that he doesn't have a majority in his Congress, right, he doesn't have a Republican House and a Republican Senate, his enemies control those, has managed to pass legislation, managed to do the hard work, managed to bring down inflation in Argentina to the lowest it's been in five years. Economic growth is going to grow at 7% this year, just as has done an amazing job turning the Argentinian economy around. That's what we need in America. What we need is somebody who understands economic liberty, who really is going to fight for economic freedom, and understands that in order to do that, you have to go to Congress. You have to fight in the trenches in Congress. You have to do the dirty work of politics and get the stuff you want passed. But for that, you have to actually know what you want, right? Trump didn't do that the first term. And you know how we know that? Because he couldn't even repeal Obamacare, right? Imagine if Trump really cared about Obamacare and getting rid of it, and had gone into the trenches, you know, and twisted arms, and really fought for it, and gone to the American people, and talked to them and said, call your congressmen, call your senators right now. He never did any of that, never went to Congress, never appealed to the American people. So he lost a few votes, and as a consequence, couldn't repeal Obamacare, something he had promised to do. And he's not even talking about it this time, right? They're not even considering repealing Obamacare this time. So, you know, Millet is a hero, I think, and should be the standard for politicians now, with some of his behavior, where he mimics Trump, an exception. So he's the one guy, and he mentions Ayn Rand when he talks, so he does. And look, it used to be, this is the funny thing about the Republican Party, right? Not that long ago, during, what was it, during Obama, Ted Cruz went on the Senate floor, and did a filibuster, I think it was like a 48, 24, classic filibuster, where he stayed on the floor, talked all the time, right? Classic filibuster. And as part of the filibuster, he opened up Atlas Shrugged, and started reading long passages from Atlas Shrugged. Can you imagine Ted Cruz doing that today? Ted Cruz has basically sold his soul. He doesn't believe in freedom, in liberty, in capitalism, in free markets. He never mentions it. He never talks about it. He's become a complete accolade of Donald Trump. He'll do what, if Donald Trump says tariffs, he'll vote for tariffs. If Donald Trump says, we need RFK, a leftist, anti-capitalist, nutcase to run our health services, Ted Cruz is going to vote for that. He's become a completely mindless follower. And the same thing with Lee from Utah, who used to cite Ayn Rand all the time. (44:20 - 44:55) Johnson from Wisconsin, who used to cite Ayn Rand all the time. They've all become mindless followers of Donald Trump. That's the negative impact he's had on the Republican party. He took whatever elements of liberty and freedom and capitalism existed there, and he's perverted them into this mega insanity. So should we take over the emergency broadcast system and just broadcast John Galt's speech? Like on repeat? I mean, who would listen? Everybody would go on TikTok, turn it off and go on TikTok, right? You'd have to boil John Galt's speech to TikTok videos. A little soundbite, a little soundbite. (44:55 - 45:02) It's kind of impact in the world today. No one has the attention span. It's true, right? I mean, that is a long speech, even when reading it. (45:03 - 45:23) It's a long speech, and it's meant to be read, and it's meant to be read slowly, and it takes time, and it's deeply philosophical. It might be that, you know, it's one of the most important speeches ever written, maybe the most in terms of philosophical, intellectual content. It's the speech that can change the world if people take it seriously, but nobody does. (45:23 - 45:45) Oh, very few people do. That's a challenge we have. Yeah. Real quickly, Ron, I just want to get into something real quickly, because you talked about Hollywood before. I haven't had a chance to watch the trilogy that they made of Atlas Shrugged. I know, I know. I don't want to. I wasn't planning on it, but I wanted your- I mean, the first movie was really bad. Yeah. (45:45 - 45:50) And then it only got worse. Yeah. By the third movie, it was just a joke. (45:50 - 46:30) They tried to modernize it, right, with using like railroad- They modernized it. Look, you could do a lot of things. You're going to have to change the book in order to make it into a movie. There's no question about that. You might have to get rid of some characters. You might have to simplify the plot. You might have to modernize it. I don't know. I'm not a script writer, right? You have to do a lot to it. But they had B and C-level actors, and it just was corny and silly. Atlas Shrugged is, I think, amazingly written, and to turn it into a movie, you have to be an amazing director and amazing actors, and they didn't have that. They didn't do it. (46:30 - 46:48) Yeah. Unfortunately. If you want to see Ayn Rand interpreted into a movie, basically, there are two good movies. One is there's an Italian production of We the Living, which has a great story behind it. If you want, I can tell it. But it's in Italian with subtitles. (46:49 - 48:33) It's gorgeous, just gorgeous. It's beautifully filmed, Italian filmmaking. The actress is gorgeous and amazing. The actors are really good, and it's in black and white made during World War II. You can find it on DVD, on Blu-ray. It's coming out on Blu-ray soon, cleaned up with new subtitles. Ayn Rand saw it and was blown away. She thought it was... Nobody asked her permission to make it, right? They just made it without her permission. And yet, she said it was the best movie made from her books. It was so beautifully done. And then, of course, The Fountainhead, which she was involved in the production, is good. It's not as good as I think it could be, but it's good. We the Living is a really good movie. So, I would encourage people to go watch that. Yeah. I want to watch that for sure. I love The Fountainhead. I watched that a decade before I even read any of her books, and I loved it. So, finally, I was like, okay, let me read some of the material. Yeah. I want to get your views on something. Obviously, you feel very strongly about RFK, who you raised before. And it's interesting when you compare that to The Tenant of Freedom. Do you think a lot of people who consider themselves freedom-minded kind of rose up in the 2020 era with the mandated vaccines, forced vaccines, lockdowns, etc? And you think that's kind of something that feeds people's interest? How do you balance freedom with what we witnessed during 2020 and 2025? Because it seems from the outset, that's why RFK became popularized. We witnessed a disappearance of freedom. Yeah. But here's the thing about COVID. (48:34 - 48:50) COVID was an example of how America has become completely tribal. Nobody left or right cared about evidence, facts, science, medicine, reality. It was 100% tribal. (48:50 - 49:18) Mm-hmm. Biden and the left was pro-vaccines, so we're anti-vaccines. Is there science behind you being anti-vaccines? No. But we're anti-vaccines because the left is pro-vaccines. There was lockdowns. The fundamental violation of freedom were lockdowns. (49:18 - 49:23) Lockdowns were horrific. They were done under Trump. Trump was a huge advocate of lockdowns. (49:23 - 50:09) He actually chastised the mayor of New York for being too slow locking down the city. And when Georgia was the first state to open up after the lockdowns, he had a press conference. Trump had a press conference in which he said, I have not approved opening up yet. You still need to be under lockdowns, right? So first of all, people are rewriting history. Lockdowns are something that Trump advocated for and was pro. Lockdowns were a massive violation of our liberty and freedom, and nobody spoke up against them. When we were locked down in March, April, May, June, nobody was out in the streets against it. Nobody spoke up against it. People started waking up to the evil of lockdowns when Biden started to do it, and then Republicans opposed it. (50:09 - 50:27) But there was no real fundamental opposition to lockdowns. You know, there was masks. You know, it's questionable. Masks work, don't work. There's some question about it. But it became almost like a badge of defining who you are, left or right, whether you wore a mask or didn't wear a mask. (50:27 - 50:37) It wasn't about the situation, like maybe if you're really crammed together in a closed room, maybe masks make some sense. They don't protect you 100%. Maybe they protect you a little bit. (50:37 - 51:07) Maybe some masks are better than others. There's no nuance, right? If you're in one group, if you're pro-liberty, you're against masks. If you're against liberty, you're for masks. That was kind of the perception. I remember Republicans going into people upset about private businesses requiring masks. Private businesses have every right to require masks. They can require you to wear long pants. They can require you to wear a button-up shirt. They can require what they want. (51:07 - 51:50) It's their private property. And yet, so-called advocates of private property wanted to force private businesses on how to behave vis-a-vis masks, right? I mean, there was a complete breakdown. And this is the beginning. This is, I think, the beginning of the end of any liberty movement in the United States was COVID. Because the people who were pro-liberty generally gravitated towards completely irrational positions that ultimately required the state to intervene. The reality is vaccines are unbelievably safe. I've looked at the data. I know stats. I can do econometrics. I'm a finance guy. I've looked at the data. I've spliced it up any way you want. (51:51 - 52:23) Vaccines are unbelievably safe. COVID vaccines, unbelievably safe. Should children have been vaccinated? No. Children didn't need to be vaccinated. Young people probably didn't need to be vaccinated. Vaccines are primarily for old people or people who have pre-existing conditions. And the health authorities deceived us about that. Should school children be denied schooling? Absolutely not. Schools should have been open from day one, right? From day one. (52:24 - 55:48) But not because, I mean, and again, schools were locked down under Trump. So this is not a left-right thing. It never was a left-right thing. It's a science versus anti-science thing. And those of us who advocate for liberty, who can be against lockdowns, against forced vaccination, against government forcing us to mask, and yet pro-vaccines, we don't have a voice in the world today, right? Nobody is out there. That's the true, I think, voice of liberty who can look at science, look at the facts objectively, and then move forward and not be tribal about it. But I think most of the world turned tribal. Yeah, it was very politicized for sure. My question, I'm just curious, should people have the right to determine what medical procedure they want to take part in or not? Sure. Of course. And notice that there was very few actual vaccine mandates at the federal level, right? They had a mandate for soldiers. The federal government has every right to mandate vaccines for its own troops. You can leave if you don't want them. Businesses have every right to mandate you get vaccinated. Schools have every right to mandate you get vaccinated. You don't want to work in that business, you can leave. It's employment at will, so you can leave whenever you want if you don't like what the business is doing, and the business can fire you if they don't like what you're doing. And vaccines are reasonable in a time where at least people think there's an epidemic and they're worried about it to mandate for a business. The I have an employer, absolutely an employer can make those decisions. I can say, you can only come to work in masks, or they can even say, you can only come to work unmasked. If you come with a mask, we'll fire you. That's fine. That's what private property means. That's what private business means. But again, that's not the kind of nuanced position that I saw during COVID. I saw it politicized and tribalized and an anti-scientific mentality rising up on the right, which I think is manifested in RFK, who I think is a kook. I mean, I can't say enough bad things about RFK. He has no credibility on anything. Yes, he's got a great body for a 70-year-old. I hope when I reach 70, I have even a bit of a nice body as his. He works out a lot at the gym and he probably eats well. Good for him. And yes, I agree with him. People don't eat well in America, and you don't need RFK to say that. Look at the obesity crisis. But to then go on and to spout all the nonsense he spouts, and again, RFK is not pro-liberty. It's not like RFK wants to say, I'm going to provide information and let people choose. RFK, if it was up to him, luckily I don't think it is, would easily force all Americans to eat a good diet that he thinks is right. He's not against the state intervening in our diet. He's absolutely for it. He was a leftist, a far leftist his entire life. He's an environmentalist lawyer who sued every company for all kinds of BS stuff that are anti-capitalist and anti-freedom. So he represents the exact opposite of liberty and freedom in my mind. No, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. Obviously, a lot of people have lots of different opinions about these subjects. (55:50 - 56:46) Let's just dive right into objectivism. Now let's get into Ayn Rand's work, your work, and just for anyone who isn't aware, what is objectivism? And let's go from there. So objectivism is Ayn Rand's philosophy. I mean, and kind of on one leg, it basically is the idea that in metaphysics, which is the foundational ideas in philosophy, what is the nature of reality? She held that reality is what it is. It is not what you want it to be. It is not what you wish it to be. It just is what it is. A is A. The law of identity hold, the laws of causality hold, and our consciousness is there to basically observe it. We are conscious. We are aware of the reality that really exists. So if all human beings go away, the world is still there. The laws of physics are still there and so on. (56:50 - 59:38) That's the opposite of kind of a belief that there is some mystical entity that basically dictates the world, a god or a mother earth or whatever the kind of mystical entity is, that it basically dictates the functioning of the world. The world just, it is what it is. And it also negates the subjectivism of we invent the world as we go along. It is all in our minds. We come up with it. So she negates both of those. And then how do we know what the world is like? We have that capacity. We have the capacity to reason. We have the capacity to be aware and to integrate and to abstract from what we observe in the world out there. We can create abstract ideas. And this is the power of reason. Reason is our only means of knowing the world. We don't know the world by any other means other than by through our senses and by use of our reason. And so she rejects any form of mystical revelation, any form of some revealed knowledge of any form could be could be from Plato, Plato believed in revealed knowledge, or from religion. But she also rejects the idea that you can feel what's true. The whole leftist postmodern, there is no truth. Whatever you want it to be, that's kind of the idea that you create your own reality. The whole subjectivism, she rejects that completely. Reality is you have the tool to identify truth. You have the tool and that tool is reason. And of course, only individuals can reason, no collective consciousness. There is no ability of a group to think, only individuals think. Individual is the unit that matters. So in morality, the unit that matters in morality is you, your life. What does it take for you as an individual to live the best life that you can live? How do you live a flourishing, happy, successful, prosperous, amazing life? That's the job of morality. It should teach you how to live a good life. So she rejects the idea that you should sacrifice to other people, that other people are your standard of morality, that good means sacrificing yourself to others. You should pursue your values for your sake, not for the sake of other people. But she also rejects the idea that other people should sacrifice to you. That is, you shouldn't be in a position demanding other people's sacrifices, exploiting other people. You shouldn't allow yourself to be exploited. You shouldn't exploit others. You should live your life by the use of your reason in pursuit of your happiness. (59:40 - 1:02:13) And the only political system that allows you that is a political system that recognizes individual rights. It recognizes the inalienable right of every individual to live his life based on his mind in pursuit of his values, free of coercion, free of force. Force is the enemy of reason. Force is the enemy of the individual. So free of coercion and force to live your life freely. And that's capitalism. So she rejects any kind of a sacrificial political system like socialism or fascism. She rejects any kind of statism, socialism or fascism, anything that puts anything above the individual, that puts the state, the nation, the group, the race, the ethnic origins, anything above the individual she rejects. It's about the liberty, freedom of the individual to live his life based on his ideas, his principles, using his reason. And that's a political system. She's a big believer in the original kind of intents of the American political system. She thought they did an amazing job. It could be improved, but given the knowledge that we have 250 years later, but they did about as good as they could back then with the knowledge that they had. The left is all about focusing on the minorities. And one of my favorite quotes from Ayn Rand is, the smallest minority on earth is individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. And I always feel like that lands. Absolutely. And absolutely. And, you know, the left is always about minorities, except when it's inconvenient for them, right? For example, unless you're Jewish, and then they're not for you. Not today. So it's an issue of, the left has morphed, to be more consistent in the last few decades to be pro the oppressed. It's not even oppressed. It's to be pro the weak and the meek. And anybody who's weak and meek is good, by definition is good, right? So if you're a group in America who's poor, then you must have been oppressed. There must be systemic something against you to make you oppressed, right? If you're an individual that is confused and depressed and weak, then you're a good guy. And everybody else must have done something to you. (1:02:14 - 1:02:23) The standard is equality of outcome. So if you're Palestinians, you know, you're obviously the good guys, because you're poor, and you're weak, and you're unsuccessful. So you must be the good guys. (1:02:23 - 1:03:06) Israel must be the bad guys, because they're strong, and they're successful, and they're rich. Jews must be the bad guys, because they're rich and successful, and they get lots of noble prizes. Versus, you know, I don't know, a trans, black, something or other, must be the good, because they're so weak, and unhappy, and unsuccessful. So everything they do, they rank based on how poor and pathetic you are. That is the basis of their morality, and the basis of the geopolitics, and the basis of how they think. And, you know, the origins of that are funnily enough, the origins of that come from Christianity. (1:03:06 - 1:05:58) So in that sense, they close the circle. Really? Can you speak more into that connection? Yeah, I mean, the meek shall inherit the earth. It's harder for a rich man to get into heaven than a camel to go through the eye of a needle. You go on and on. There's someone on the mound, is all about- Love thy neighbor. Love thy neighbor like thyself. No, I don't like my neighbors. I don't even like my neighbors often. Never mind the love of my neighbor. I certainly don't love my neighbors. I love my wife. I love myself. Some neighbors I like. Some I like more. Some I like less. But love my neighbor. Give me a break. One of my favorite analogies that Rant speaks into is her take on the Garden of Eden story. Like Adam's being kicked out of Eden for having desires, for wanting knowledge, for wanting freedom. It's a great- I mean, the Garden of Eden explains so much of the world in which we live. The Garden of Eden story. So in the beginning of the Garden of Eden story, Adam and Eve are basically pre-human. That's how I see it, right? They're animals. They can't think. They don't have reason. They have no knowledge. They haven't eaten from the tree of knowledge. They can't think. They're taking care of the garden. They have no sex. They don't know of sex, right? They're just animals. They're just there. They're just nothing, right? They're just nothing. And they don't have to be productive. They don't have to work for a living. Food is just provided to them, right? So no work, no values. No real values. In that sense, in an animalistic sense, they become human when they eat from the tree of knowledge and their reason is awakened, right? And for that, they're penalized. What is the penalty? They now have to be productive. They now have to go work for a living. And I guess as a reward for that, maybe they get sex, but sex is immediately viewed as a negative thing, right? Sex is the initial fall of man is associated with sex. So the Garden of Eden is very much a story of modern man. What do we all want? I mean, if you ask people kind of what they want, they want the Garden of Eden. They want to go back. And conservatives and the right and the left share this because I once debated a guy who said, he was a conservative, a well-known conservative, Andrew Sullivan. And he said, look, some of us just want to sit on our back porch in our rocking chair and just chill. We don't want change and technology. This capitalism, it's very disruptive for my ability to chill on my back porch, unthinking. And that's what they want. They want food to be provided, manna from heaven by the state, I guess, replace God with the state. They don't want to think. They don't want to really pursue values. It turns out that in modern society, people don't want sex. The quantity of sex people are having these days has plummeted. (1:05:59 - 1:07:17) You know, Garden of Eden is, and to me, getting thrown out of the Garden of Eden is the best thing that's ever happened to man. We now get to work. We get to be productive. How much fun is that? We get to think. We get to discover new knowledge. That is amazing. We get to have sex. Of course, that is, you know, super fun. I mean, getting thrown out of the Garden of Eden is the best thing that ever happened to humanity. I don't want to go backwards to the Garden of Eden. That would be unbelievably boring and dull. I don't want to be an animal. I want to be a human being. Yeah. Well, it's the responsibility of living that taps us into our potential for greatness. Exactly. Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yaron, what's the objectivist perspective on having children? Because I feel like sometimes people talk about like, oh, objectivists don't have any kids, blah, blah, blah, blah. Except for all the objectivists who have kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And almost everybody else. I mean, I didn't have kids, but almost every other objectivist I know has kids. Right. I mean, the perspective on having children is if you want children, have them. And if you don't, don't. The legitimate reason is not to have kids. Ayn Rand, you know, her career was all consuming. It was everything to her. She did not want to devote the time. And she said and she realized having kids is a massive responsibility. (1:07:17 - 1:10:34) It's huge. And if you had kids, if you have kids, you know this, right? It's time consuming. It's you have to think, you have to really invest in the kids. It's a massive responsibility and incredibly time consuming. And some people, for whatever reasons, decide not to have kids. That's the shit. Most of us, I think most human beings want to have kids, particularly if you have a positive view of the future and you're excited about life, you want to have kids. And therefore, we're willing to dedicate the energy and the time and the effort to having the kids and to devoting to them. So, you know, what objectivism's view on having kids is if you're going to have them, do it right. Yeah. Take it seriously. Take your responsibility. You're taking on a huge responsibility. Know what you're doing. It's one of the reasons, one of the reasons I'm pro-abortion and I say pro-abortion, not pro-choice on purpose because I'm pro-abortion, is I want to give parents every opportunity in the world to change their mind. Because I know what could happen if they screwed up, how bad that is. I want people who have kids to really want kids because that is the precondition for, you know, taking responsibility for it. Being a good parent is wanting it. If you don't want it, don't do it. I guess, how do you, how do you kind of balance that with like the individual right of the baby in utero? Fetuses don't have individual rights. They're not individuals. They're not human beings. Their potentials, they will become human beings if under the right circumstances. Under different circumstances, they won't. Once they become human and individuated, once they become individuals, they gain rights. But they're not. They're part of the mother. They're completely dependent on the mother. They're dependent for all the nutrients on the mother for every single thing. They're dependent on, not just dependent in a sense of, but they don't chew. They don't digest. You know, their body is not functioning in a way that makes them a separate entity. The mother digests for them. The mother does everything for them. And they are an appendage on the mother. Once they get, once they're born, they have full individual rights, but only once they're born. Is this like an objectivist point of view where everyone in the objectivist community feels this way? Or is there like division within? Well, this is certainly Ayn Rand's view. It was certainly Ayn Rand's view. And I'd say, you know, I don't know, almost everybody, all the intellectuals within the objectivist movement, I think, agree. You know, I'm sure that people, the objective, people call themselves objectivists out there who don't agree. But yeah, it's pretty strongly held, I think, within the objectivist movement. Again, I don't want to speak to every single individual, but generally it's generally held, yeah. It's a question of when the rights begin, and rights don't begin with life. Obviously, life begins before, but rights do not begin with life. Rights begin with individuation, and individuation does not happen until you're out of the womb. (1:10:35 - 1:12:06) Yeah, but it's interesting. What if a child is born and has disabilities, and is still completely dependent on the mother and on the caregivers? How do you define an individual? It's now an individual. If you're saying dependence means non-human- It's not just dependence in a sense of, yeah, every baby that's born is dependent, right? They cannot go out and forage their food. Somebody has to bring them their food, but they chew, they digest. They're actually a living biological entity that is independent now, that is functioning independently. A fetus is not functioning independently. It is completely dependent on the mother in its very basic biological functioning. It doesn't breathe. It gets its oxygen from its mother. Every single thing that you need for life, it is being delivered by the mother to the fetus. It's only when it comes out, why does the doctor smack the baby? To get its lungs to work because they haven't worked, right? Now it's breathing on its own, and now it is a living being. It is a self-sustaining, self-directed being before it's not. It's a completely different existential state. When you're in somebody else's body, none of your biological functionings are actually self-sustaining to being born. It's why we celebrate birth so much. It's a big deal. It's not a little deal. It's a huge deal. (1:12:07 - 1:12:14) It's a change. We don't celebrate conception. Yeah, sperm meets an egg. (1:12:17 - 1:13:18) A cell splits up. Nothing that exciting has happened yet. Well, people do celebrate being pregnant. Yeah, of course. If you want to be pregnant, it's an unbelievably beautiful, amazing, thrilling thing. You've got a living being developing in your body that's going to become a human being. If you're a woman, believe me, you can ask any woman this, you don't want to be pregnant forever. Pregnancy is a means to an end, and that end is the baby being born. But yes, absolutely. It's a thrilling time up until eight, ninth month when you can't wait for the baby to be born because it's tough. Yeah, got you. Before you were mentioning how inherently within people, they want to be in the Garden of Eden, right? And psychologically- Philosophy drives them to that, Christianity, and religion drives them to that. (1:13:18 - 1:14:33) What I want to talk about is psychology, because psychologically, people have this womb regression instinct. They want to be held. They want to be cocooned. They don't want responsibility. They don't want to deal with the reality of life. I want to ask you, what's Ayn Rand's relationship to psychology? Did she mention psychology? Did she mention someone like Jung? How did psychology influence her work, if it did at all? I think she considered psychology, Jung and Freud and all those guys to be in what she called the pre-scientific era. She thought they were mostly not that good and not that insightful. They didn't have a proper conception of man. They didn't recognize the world of reason in man's life. So she did not have much respect for any of the psychologists, really, the big names of psychology of the early, of the 20th century. She had a view that psychology still needed to be a science to be developed, that there was a lot of work to be done. There was an important science. But in order to develop psychology properly, you had to have the appropriate respect for human reason and for free will, for example. Most psychologists today don't even recognize that human beings have free will. So I'm not sure what exactly they're practicing. (1:14:34 - 1:17:11) So you need to have respect for reason first and foremost. I'm just speculating. I think she'd have some respect today for cognitive behavioral theory, which is a psychological theory that is centered around cognition, centered around the idea that we're thinking beings, that we're reasoning, rational beings. I mean, again, she'd reject a lot of their ideas. For example, they reject free will. She'd reject that. But I think she'd have some respect for that because at least it's centered around the right thing. I don't believe that we have a so-called instinct to be held. I think if you're raised in the right way, then you are encouraged and you are... I don't think you need to be encouraged, I think. I think what happens is we hold people back today. People want... If you look at little children, you guys have kids? We've got three. Yeah. You look at those kids, they want to go out and explore. If you don't hold them back, they're going to go run out the yard. They're going to go up the street. They're going to do all kinds of things that you would be horrified by. But they want to go out there and discover the world and figure it out. They want to fall. They want to scrape their knees. They want to get scratched up. And it's we cocoon them, particularly modern parents. We're the ones who prevent them and hug them and all sloppy over them. And then they develop a need to be protected and cocooned. But if you leave kids, if you let kids express what they are, which is human beings who are incredibly curious and adventurous and want to discover the world around them, then I think you discover that that coddling is secondary. It's not primary. It's sure. Do I want to get a hug from my wife? Absolutely. Do I want to get a hug from a stranger? No. Do I want to get a hug by the government? Absolutely not. Do I want RFK to hug me? Keep the guy away from me. So no, it's completely contextual. So I don't think that's a primary. I think the primary is curiosity and the willingness to explore. And I think we smother that. We as parents smother the natural inclination of children. You're right. We're not strangers anymore. So if I see you in person, I'm giving you a hug. Okay. I'm Greek. I come from a Greek culture. I'm all for hugging. It's fine. It's just not a basic need that I have. I love it. (1:17:11 - 1:19:05) But I grew up in Israel where people did not hug. And we'd always make fun of Americans. Even when they met strangers, they would hug them. And we thought it was funny. Now I've become an American. So I do as Americans do. I hear what you're saying. I think, again, I'm not a parent, but with the kids, they have to provide some safety at certain points, but then it's like, when do you allow them to foster that inner spirit of exploration and growth? And yeah, and we become helicopter parents. I mean, again, culturally, not anybody in a specific, we become helicopter parents. If a kid scrapes his knee, we look at who to sue. I just think of how I grew up. And yeah, I went to school and I did all the things, but God, we climbed up things that if I saw my kids do, I would be terrified. Because our parents weren't around. So we did unbelievable stuff. And I think that's a healthy way to grow up. It's a healthy way to grow up to take risks once in a while to get hurt, because it's important to learn from failure and to explore and to allow kids to be curious. Yeah. Yaron, can you talk about Ayn Rand's and Nathaniel Brandon's relationship? Obviously, he was her intellectual heir at some point and then they had a fallout and there's division within the community and some people may be aligned more with Brandon than Rand. I'm just curious your thoughts on that. I'll say a few things. I mean, I don't think it's that important. At the end of the day, I think everything should be judged based on the quality of the ideas and whether those ideas fit you. I mean, I think they fit everybody, but whether you embrace them or whether you take them seriously and what you do with them. Nathaniel Brandon was a young fan of Ayn Rand's. (1:19:05 - 1:21:09) He loved it. He was obviously brilliant. Guy was really, really smart. They met when he was very young. He had read The Fountainhead and basically became her number one student. He was truly brilliant and had an ability to explain the ideas to young people. And he also had a certain entrepreneurial spirit to him. She just wanted to write and he was the one who organized and created, in a sense, a movement. He organized lectures and organized stuff. I only met him once, but I read his autobiography, so I'll just base this on what I read from him. He was also a world-class jerk. All the bad stuff that people associate with objectivism, that's Nathaniel Brandon. Being stupidly, in an inappropriate way, kind of Judge Randall, psychologizing people, being nasty to people, being very rigid in a irrational kind of sense. He was that. She didn't see it for some reason, so she was enamored by him. And they landed up, at some point in the 60s, I don't remember when, they landed up having an affair. It was an affair that she was married and he was married. They didn't lie. Everybody knew about it. The spouses all knew about it. But for a period there, they were having an affair in the 1960s. And then at some point, she discovered that he was also sleeping with other women. That is, it wasn't just that he had an affair with her and he had a wife, but there were other women involved and that he was lying about it. And this idea of, we're not going to lie, we're going to be open with the people who matter, had been shattered. And she viewed this as a massive betrayal. I'm sure she felt it as a personal betrayal, as a lover would, but also as a philosophical betrayal. He was dishonest. (1:21:09 - 1:23:36) Honesty is one of the primary virtues in objectivism. And as a consequence, there was a big split. I don't think people understood the nature of the split because they didn't know the affair had happened. They didn't know it had a personal dimension. And she never explained and he never explained until after she died what was going on. And yeah, people, in a sense, took sides. And later on, Nathaniel Brandon, I think, went off and he did some good work, but some kind of crazy, weird stuff that I don't think is consistent with objectivism. And he attacked Ayn Rand, he attacked objectivism. His autobiography, I think, is a mess and very self... If you read it, I think he comes out the bad guy. He's writing it and yet he comes out the bad guy. So I think that's the outline of the story. I'm sure there's a lot more detail in there, but again, I don't think it's that important. You can read some of Nathaniel Brandon's books and come to your own judgment about them. And you can read Ayn Rand and figure out what you want to do with it. I want to make one point about this. Ayn Rand was a revolutionary pretty much everything. So the fact that she was a little different when it came to sex or sexual relations, romantic relations, should not surprise anybody. So she was a pioneer. She did stuff. Every thought she had was... Almost every thought she had was different and new. And the fact that she fell in love with somebody young and still loved her husband and had a relationship with two men, it doesn't surprise me. It surprised me... It turned out badly, which I think it almost always does. I think given my knowledge of reality that, yeah, it's hard to sustain two relationships, hard enough to do one. But she wasn't going to just buy a dogma that you have to be monogamous or something like that. She experimented. She discovered it didn't work, moved on. It was the 60s too. I mean, come on. I guess. Although she was not in the 60s, right? She was already quite... I wouldn't say old because she was younger than I am now, but she was not young. (1:23:36 - 1:26:22) Yeah. So I guess what's your thoughts generally speaking on Nathaniel Brandon's work on self esteem? And do you think that he added anything to Rand's view? It seems in reading Brandon, he's broadened the definition, I would say, of reasons to include intuitive faculties, more emotional faculties, things of that nature. What's your general stance on all that? Yeah. I mean, I think that's where he goes off. He goes wrong. So I think the closer he is in his work to Ayn Rand, to the period where he's with Ayn Rand, the better he is. His best book by far is, I think, The Psychology of Self-Esteem. His first book, I think it's an excellent book. I think Rand partially edited that book, and I think it's really good. And I think the fundamental ideas there on self-esteem and psychology and about the role of reason in psychology is absolutely right. And I think Ayn Rand had a deep, deep, deep understanding of psychology. And maybe I didn't answer the question before. She rejected conventional psychology. But if you read almost all of her essays of politics, all of them have a psychological dimension. And indeed, how can you be a novelist without being a psychologist? You have to write characters. You have to give them a psychology. You have to give them emotions and thoughts. So I think she was very, very observant and very, very sharp when it came to psychological ideas. And I think she had a big part in developing Brandon's theory of self-esteem. So I think his books right after that are not bad. I think his book on romantic love is pretty good. I think some of his other early work on self-esteem is pretty good. And then I think he takes a wrong turn. He moves away from objectivism. And yeah, he brings in so-called intuitions and all kinds of other stuff that I think is mumbo-jumbo. I think that's a technical term. So do you personally, I guess, completely reject intuition? You've never yourself experienced having a feeling about something that turned out to be correct or on the mark, or had the sense of avoiding a situation or being drawn towards a situation. How does your innate pull and push towards certain experiences of people in life? All of that happens, but it depends what you mean by intuition. There is such a thing, and what's his name? The guy who wrote Blink and- Malcolm Gladwell. Yeah, Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in Blink. (1:26:23 - 1:26:35) And of course, he's building on work that's been done by, I forget, the Nobel Prize winner. God, I'm terrible with names. Anyway, there's fast thinking and slow thinking. (1:26:36 - 1:27:05) And what he means by that is you automatize certain things. That is your subconscious is in the background. You've thought about a lot of stuff. You're constantly thinking about stuff. So if you're really good at something, then you automatize it. Is it intuition to... I don't know if you've ever driven a stick shift, right? In the beginning, when you drive a stick shift, you literally think, do I need to be in second? Do I need to be in third? You do all that. (1:27:05 - 1:28:32) And then it just becomes a habit. Then you're just like this, right? Is that intuition? Or is that just you've automatized something really, really well? When the tennis ball is coming at you at 120 miles an hour, not at you at Federer, 120 miles an hour. He's not thinking, but it's all based on the practice, the thought, that everything he's done for years and years, he's automatized it. When somebody who's an expert in discovering art forgery, and this is an example, I think, out of Blink, because he's seen so many paintings, because he understands the nature of it, he can look at a painting and say it's a fraud before he even understands why it is. It's not intuition. It's the fast thinking. It's the thinking that's already been done, observing this quick integration, and you know it. And we all do that. We do that when we drive. We do that when we meet somebody and we get that first impression. We don't really know the person, but that first impression, because you're cuing in on things that we've had experience with, certain expressions, certain looks that they have, the way they look at you in the eye or don't look you in the eye or whatever, whatever the cues are that you can really boil them down. But yeah, so that kind of fast thinking definitely occurs. There's no question, but I don't think that contradicts anything. And you don't get that as a... Notice the artists. If you have autism, you don't have that because they don't have the cues. (1:28:32 - 1:28:46) And if you're a child, you don't have that because you don't have the experience. So you need the experience and you need to be able to pick up the cues in order to have that kind of what you'd call fast thinking. Which, yeah, I guess you could call it intuition. (1:28:46 - 1:30:50) But my fear is when people talk about intuition, it's mystical or it's something genetic or it's something embedded in you somehow. It cannot be explained. And I would say every intuition I've had, if I really thought about it, I could explain. Have you come across the Telepathy Tapes, a recent very popular podcast that's come out into a study of basically autistic people who turn out to be evidently telepathic, like beyond doubt, they're proving with experiments that they're reading their parents' minds. They're communicating with other autistic individuals, like time and time again, in objective reality, turning to be experientially true that they're knowing... I haven't seen it. I'm going to stay skeptical until I see it. I'm a skeptic. Right. I mean, I remember when the guy was bending spoons with his mind and everybody was verifying it. It was completely verifiable and it was all a scam. So, you know, what do you call it? Grandiose claims need grandiose evidence. Something like that. Strong claims need strong evidence. I hear you. I think it's important to remain skeptical and open at the same time. Well, open to a certain degree. Can you talk about Ayn Rand's view of emotions or your view of emotions? Sure. I mean, emotions are like this fast thinking. Emotions are integrations based on past conclusions that we've had. So if we concluded when we were three years old that dogs were dangerous because a dog barked at you and scared the bejesus out of you, then it could very well be that when you're an adult, when you see a dog, you feel fear. It's because you came to some conclusion when you were a kid about dogs. We come to conclusions all the time, conscious and sometimes unconscious. Certainly when we're children, it's unconscious conclusions. The emotion is a response to the conclusion. It's not the response to the thing. It's a response to the conclusion we've come to about the thing. And there's some great examples. (1:30:50 - 1:32:33) You can take three different people and show them exactly the same thing. They will have three completely different emotions based on, you know, I think Rand or Picoff used this example of, you show them a slide of a, you know, under a microscope and they see these squiggly things running around. And a scientist would look at it and be elated because it's confirmation for some major discovery he's made. Immediately, the emotion comes to him. He's elated because he immediately knows what this means to him. You know, you or I would look at it and go, we'd have no emotion. Somebody who's afraid of science would look at that and feel fear because what are we doing? What, you know, this is, this is scary stuff. Look at what's going on. And so you're completely, your previous knowledge and your previous conclusions completely shape your existing emotions. And part of what psychotherapy should do is figure out where your emotions come from, what conclusions you came to, because some of them are not conscious. And this is where I think cognitive behavior psychology is quite good and try to undo them, right? No, dogs are kind of friendly. Let's, you experience dogs in a friendly environment, so you're not afraid of them. And your emotions will change. I mean, we all know our emotions change when our conclusions change, like you fall in love and then you discover something nasty about the person you fell in love with. And suddenly you don't love them anymore. You know, you, so we all, we all know this. When our conclusions change about a person, our emotions follow. Our emotions always follow. (1:32:33 - 1:34:20) They don't lead, they follow. They're, what would you say? The effect, not the cause, right? Absolutely. They're an effect. They're not a cause. They're not primaries. They're not, and they're not means to knowledge. You don't, they're knowledge about you. They're not knowledge about the world. They tell you about you, about your values, about your conclusions, about your thinking. They don't tell you about the world out there. What might you and Ayn Rand disagree on? I mean, nothing important. Nothing in philosophy. I'm not a philosopher, so I don't, I don't, I don't have the pretense to, you know, to be critical of a philosophy. So I don't know of everything, anything I would disagree with on a philosophy. I'm sure there'd be particular issues around current events that we might disagree with. I don't know. She, she said she would never vote for a woman president. Yeah, I'd happily vote for a woman president if they were better than the clowns we have today running for president. So, you know, that wouldn't bother me. You know, there's certain aspects of her philosophy. Maybe I don't fully understand her perspective on femininity, masculinity, other things. So, you know, should we have ended World War II or not before Pearl Harbor, you know, or even after Pearl Harbor? I mean, there are a lot of practical things. Would we agree completely on Ukraine right now? Would we agree on Israel? Although I'm pretty convinced, I'm pretty convinced that if, that if I disagreed with Ayn Rand about something in current events today, she would convince me she was right. She was so much smarter than I am. (1:34:21 - 1:35:14) So, I really think that it wouldn't be that hard for her to convince me, but we don't have that, we don't have that test. So, we don't know. What do you think Rand might think of the, I guess, advancement of AI today? You know, I, I, this is one of those things. I, I, I don't know. I, I hate questions of what would Ayn Rand think of because- What might, what might she think? She was a genius. I am not. So, I can tell you what I think, and I can tell you what I think she would think. But look, AI is a misnomer. There is no such thing as, what is AI is not intelligent. It's amazing. It's, you know, stunning, but it's just a statistical model running an algorithm, basically giving you an average result. It's not measured against reality. (1:35:14 - 1:35:27) It's not about truth. Indeed, AI wouldn't know what truth is because it doesn't have a measure of truth. Truth requires the ability to be conscious of reality, and AI is not conscious. (1:35:28 - 1:36:29) And I don't think AI can become conscious. Consciousness is, as far as we know, and, you know, I could be wrong, but as far as we know, consciousness is a feature of life. Only living things are conscious. Computers are not alive. And you can't make them alive just with zeroes and ones. There's something biological about life. There's something about the combination of atoms that make it alive. And I don't think a computer is ever going to become alive, and I don't think a computer will ever be conscious. Now, I do think that we will get to the point where we can create life, and we will be able to embed a life with a computer inside of it, and it might be able to be conscious, right, because it's got the combination of a life. So, I think the future is going to create stuff that a lot of people today would probably be super scared of and be horrified, but I think it's coming whether you like it or not. So, we will be able to create life at some point. That life will be conscious. (1:36:29 - 1:37:54) It will be much smarter than we are. It potentially will be a lot stronger than we are. And, you know, human beings will change. We will not be the same in a thousand years as we are today. We will be a lot stronger, a lot smarter, and we'll probably have chips inside of us. So, the barrier between human beings and computers will probably be wiped out. And Elon Musk is already working on it, right, with his, what do you call the company? Neuralink? Neuralink. I mean, that's the beginning, right? The beginning of the combination of computer and human way. Imagine if you had AI capability of speed, you know, observing the internet, right, at your disposal by thinking about it. Not even by asking Claude, or ChatGPT, but just thinking it, and ChatGPT is already there. That's the future. I don't think the future is computer becoming conscious and wiping human beings out. I think it's a merger of human being and computer in some kind of way. That's, I think, the progress of human evolution. I think that's the next step in evolution. It's not us changing biologically. I don't think it's computers coming alive. I think it's combining computers with life. But that's me being science fiction. Mm-hmm. Yeah. (1:37:54 - 1:39:36) So, you know, my view of AI is it's great. It's not as dangerous as they think it is. And it has basically infinite upside. If we had capitalism today, we could be experienced rates of growth that we've never seen in terms of GDP growth, rates of wealth creation we've never seen. I think AI opens up the possibilities of humanity becoming so much richer, so much more productive that it's hard to imagine, unless you're a sci-fi writer, what that leads to. And the only thing holding us back is regulations, and controls, and government, and government, you know, big unlimited government. And that's not changing, sadly. And of course, the real danger of AI, if we want to think about the dark side, is that authoritarianism in the future could become a lot more dangerous, right? Imagine AI running all the surveillance campers. Imagine surveillance campers like in London where pretty much every street is covered by camera. Imagine that plus an AI on top of it. Yeah. China is moving in that direction, right? China, the main use of AI in China is to survey its own citizens, to monitor what they do, and how they behave, and all the financial transactions. That is the real danger of AI. In a free market, that wouldn't be a danger. We wouldn't care. But in the world in which we live, that is spooky. Yeah. Speaking of science fiction too, it's like the idea of even having something implanted where someone can monitor your thoughts. (1:39:37 - 1:39:57) Somebody can hack your thoughts. Hack your thoughts, you know? And based on that, based on even hacking your thoughts, or just monitoring your thoughts, you're like, oh, you're getting arrested because you had this thought about hitting someone over the head with a bat. Yeah. It's kind of already happening. It's the enemy of freedom, no matter what the level of technology is. The more advanced the technology, the worse the outcomes could be. (1:40:00 - 1:41:19) Are you, I guess, what are your thoughts on Bitcoin? Are you an advocate or a fan of Bitcoin? Do you think this does something to advance free market capitalism, having a store of asset that, I guess, appreciates, doesn't appreciate? Isn't that the whim of printing money in Federal Reserve, central banking, et cetera? Oh, God. I don't get Bitcoin. It doesn't make any sense to me. I'm a finance guy. It doesn't make any sense to me. I could store sand in my apartment, and the government can't get to it, and it's not influenced by the Federal Reserve. But it has no value unless other people want sand. Bitcoin only gains value because people want Bitcoin. Why do they want Bitcoin? I don't know. I have no idea. Well, I guess because they don't trust fiat currency. I don't trust fiat currency anyway. But why Bitcoin? Why not sand? Well, I think that the argument is that, in their minds, and as far as we can tell so far- It's finite. It's finite. Okay. But there are lots of finite things that you could engage in. The fact that it's finite doesn't give it value. So I just don't get where the value comes from. (1:41:20 - 1:45:22) So in my view right now, it's a speculative asset. It goes up or down based on people's sentiments around it. Again, I'm a finance guy. So if you give me a stock, I want to know what the cash flows are, the profitability, what its future prospects are. Can a company make money in the future? Is it going to lose money in the future? I want to know what interest rates are going to be and what they are, and then I'll figure out what I think the stock is valued. If you come to me, what is Bitcoin valued at? I have no idea. Where do I start? What are the cash flows? Isn't that scarcity that gives anything value? I think Rand once made the analogy of the only reason that humans have values is because our life is finite, whereas a robot can't have values because it can't prioritize things. Well, an immortal robot can't. You have to have an endgame. You have to have death in order to- In a sense, you have to have death as a possibility in order to feel anything, to have values about anything, to want anything. I think that's right. So yes, I mean, it's scarce, but so is, I don't know, you can think of a lot of things that are scarce in the world, and I don't really care about them. I don't want them because they're scarce. So it's the story. So Bitcoin is all about the story. What gives it value is, it's not even clear that, for example, having a finite number of something makes it good money. Good money, if I had to design a perfect money, would grow with productivity. The quantity would grow with productivity. It wouldn't be a finite amount. It would actually grow every year by productivity. And there's no reason why Bitcoin couldn't have continued to grow and the cost was electricity, which is the cost of electricity is related to productivity. Anyway, there are lots of things you could do. It's just, look, they've told a great story about hating the Fed. I hate the Fed like everybody else, maybe probably more than anybody who owns Bitcoin, because I understand what the Fed does and how evil of an institution it is. I hate fiat money, but I don't understand the story and why the story gives Bitcoin money, because I think that's what it is. It's all about the story. It's about convincing yourself you're free somehow. You're doing stuff unrelated to, you know, not monitored by the government, although Bitcoin can be monitored and anonymity is a mirage in Bitcoin. As we've seen over and over again, they managed to recover stolen Bitcoins and stuff like that. So it's a good story. I like the story, but I don't buy that it gives Bitcoin value. But, you know, people buy the story. People love stories. We know that. I mean, I love Atlas Shrugged. It's a story. They like the Bitcoin story and they're willing to put a lot of their money. And look, I didn't buy it. So I'm not super rich and the people I know who bought it are super rich. So it's hard to argue with the fact that they're rich and I'm not. I respect the fact that they made a lot of money. But look, I mean, it's a good example. You know, the Trump meme coin, right? Or the Millet meme coin, right? They put out a thing. What's the value of it? Zero. But why do people buy it? Because it's Trump. It's the same reason people used to buy, you guys are too young to know what Beanie Babies are, right? No, I do, I do. Beanie Babies. You know, in the 70s, people bought pet rocks. Like they named their rocks and they had rocks and they put them rocks. People do, people buy silly things to remind them of, I mean, there's certain emotional reason they buy it because... And the same thing with the Trump coin, right? He doesn't pretend it has value. He's not saying it has value. All he's saying is, buy a Trump coin. You get a Trump coin. You get Trump coin. You'll be able to say it and tell your friends you have a Trump coin. So everybody goes and buys a Trump coin and it's a story. So everybody buys Bitcoin because they think it's a libertarian solution to statism. (1:45:22 - 1:47:57) It's not, it never will be, but it's cool. So people buy it and so many people have bought it and it's gone up so much that now institutions buy it and everybody's convinced it's a new asset class. But I think Eugene Farmer, I don't know if you know who Eugene Farmer is, he's a Nobel Prize economist, kind of the father of modern finance. He said on a podcast recently, he said, Bitcoin will be worth zero in 10 years, or we're going to have to rethink economics from scratch because it just doesn't make any sense within our understanding of economics. I kind of agree with him, but it could last more than 10 years. But at the end of the day, I'm with Peter Schiff. I think Bitcoin is, when the story doesn't play out, which I think it won't, it's worth zero. I want to shift directions back to Ayn Rand because it's a major aspect of our work and it's a word that gets misused often, altruism. So can you talk about altruism from the Randian standpoint and what it really means? Yeah, so altruism is, because altruism goes beyond the Randian standpoint, altruism is a term coined by a French philosopher by the name of Augustin Comte, C-O-M-T-E. And Comte basically said that what it is, the morality of altruism is a morality that says you should always be selfless. You should work for the happiness of other people. You should work for the values of other people. You should never work for your own. So if you help other people because it makes you happy, not moral, it's outside the realm of morality because you thought about yourself. So you must be selfless in your moral actions. Only think of other people. In other words, you should be a sacrificial animal to other people's wants, desires. Now, I may have to ask the question, what about the people who get your sacrifices? Aren't they supposed to be set? Who are they supposed to sacrifice to? It's an endless stream of sacrifices. And it's basically the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and it's basically a philosophy of Christianity. I mean, think about Christ on the cross. He dies for other people's sins, not for his sins. I can understand dying for your own sins. No, he dies the most brutal, painful death possible for other people's sins. And we're supposed to admire him for that. (1:47:57 - 1:48:29) I mean, I'm horrified by that. I think it's the most evil thing possible. Why would I want to die for other people's sins? That's altruism. That's self-sacrifice. So Rand takes these philosophies seriously. Altruism, she says, is not about being nice to people. It's not about opening a door, helping an old woman across the street, or just being friendly. It's about sacrificing what is dear to you for the sake of a stranger. It's about giving up your life for the sake of somebody you don't know. (1:48:31 - 1:52:29) It's about being selfless, never thinking about yourself. That's what altruism is. And that, she says, is evil. In morality, that is evil. That is wrong in every dimension. I think it's probably worth clarifying what is her standard of good, just so those can understand. Yes. And the standard of good is your life, your success at living life. The standard of good is you, your life, your survival, your flourishing, and your happiness. And the only way to attain that is through reason, through rational thought, by being a rational being. Yeah. And so this is obviously a stark difference between somebody's rational self-interest to want to help an old lady across the road or them being enamored by obligation and guilt and feeling like they're going to be judged by other people if they don't do so. Or ignore other people. There's nobody around. Nobody will see it, but they feel it's a moral obligation, a moral duty to help the old woman across the street. And of course, Ayn Rand would also say, it might be in your rational self-interest, given the circumstances, not to help the woman cross the street. That's okay. Let's say you're rushing to a job interview, and it's really, really important. Then you're not going to help the old lady cross the street. You're going to make the job interview. That's more important to you right now. Absolutely. It's your kid drowning and the neighbor kid's drowning. You save your kid first. Why? Because he's your kid. And you shouldn't feel guilty about that. You shouldn't apologize for it. He's yours. So your rational values are going to dictate your behavior. All human beings are not the same. I don't love my neighbor. I certainly don't love my enemy. I'm not going to turn the other cheek to my enemy. So all of that is a rejection of altruism. All of that is kind of a self-esteem, a perspective of I value my life. My life is what's important, and I'm going to act in the world in pursuit of my values. In some cases, that means helping other people. In some cases, it means not helping other people. It depends on the circumstances, the context, and what's going on. Yaron, when Ayn Rand, in her philosophy, utilized the word selfishness, did it have the same connotation then as it does now? It feels like there's way more negative connotation now. It was the same negative connotation back then. She did it on purpose. She wanted to rub it in. She said, I'm using this term for the exact reason that you hate it, because you might pretend that you don't like selfishness because it means being a lying, cheating, scheming SOB. But I know that you really hate the word selfish because it has the word self in it, because you reject the self, because you actually reject this idea. So I'm going to use it on purpose because I want to poke you. I want to remind you that my philosophy is about the self. It's about individuals pursuing their own value. So no, the negative connotation for the word selfishness has always existed. If you read the introduction to selfishness, the unknown idea, selfishness, the virtue of selfishness, she explains why she's using the term. Cool. I guess this is obvious, but I want to ask you anyway, why do you think Rand is left out of university modules and major philosophical canons to such an extent? I think it's a couple of things. I think one is she's challenging everything they believe in. She really is unique in every part of philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. She has a whole theory of aesthetics. She goes against not just the mainstream, but pretty much everybody. She's not like anybody. (1:52:30 - 1:52:35) Maybe she's like Aristotle, but that's about it. She's not around anybody. So that's one. (1:52:35 - 1:56:05) So second is she doesn't talk philosophies. She doesn't speak their language. She actually talks English. She speaks not the average person's, but the intelligent person's language. When I talk to philosophers, and I often do, it's like half the time, I don't know what they're talking about. It's like rephrase that, put it in English, and then we can debate it. But you're using terms in ways that are just not... So it's hard for them to understand her. It seems to them that, yeah, this is shallow and uninteresting because it's not using the terminology that they're used to using. So there are some objectivist philosophers who are trying to bridge that gap, and there is more interest in Ayn Rand in academic philosophy than there was in the past. People are discovering she had interesting things to say about epistemology, about the theory of knowledge, about concept formations, and things like that. There's a revival of Aristotelian ethics called virtue ethics that I think is somewhat inspired by Rand, or some of the people involved in it are inspired by Rand, and they at least are taking her ideas seriously because, of course, she is a virtue ethicist in a sense. She's all about virtue. So I'd say there's slowly but growing interest in academia and her ideas. And that's, I think, to some extent because there are people in academia today who are trained on Ayn Rand and in philosophy who can help bridge the language issue between them. Yeah. Yaron, thank you so much for your time, man. It's been awesome to dive in on these topics with you and explore this to a greater degree, especially for our audience here. Sure. Pleasure. Always fun to talk about these things. Yeah. And just, I guess, in closing, how would you like to, I guess, direct our audience? How can they find your work? Yeah. Yeah. So I have a YouTube channel, Yaron Brookshow, so just my name, Yaron Brookshow, on YouTube. It's also a podcast that you can find out there. I'm on Twitter. Just my name on Twitter is my handle. If you're interested in delving more into Ayn Rand's works, which I hope some of you are, aynrand.org, A-Y-N-R-A-N-D-D-O-R-G, there's a ton of information there. We have an Ayn Rand University now where we teach courses in her philosophy and the application of her philosophy to students. We've got a graduate school, in a sense. We're training new intellectuals to go out there. There'll be a ton more YouTube channels and other things as we move to the future of people advocating for her ideas. So yeah, if anybody's curious, just Google my name and you'll get flooded. I mean, there's I'm the only Yaron Brook on this planet, so it's easy. And then there's thousands of videos and other material. But yeah. Oh, and most importantly of all, read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. I mean, go read Ayn Rand. Whatever you hear from me or from anybody else is going to be a pale imitation to the experience of actually reading the books, because it's not an intellectually thrilling experience. It's just an exciting read. It's fun. I read them back to back and they were incredible. (1:56:05 - 1:56:30) Yeah. I couldn't agree more. Atlas, for me, is, I guess, the number one impactful book that I've personally read in my life. I think it's really important people dive in. They try to let go of any preconceived ideas of Rand or conjecture or indoctrination regarding her philosophy and just go in with a blank slate. And this book, if you read it sincerely, it will change you. (1:56:30 - 1:57:03) I think it will. And it's had an immense impact on people already. There were a lot of people out there who were impacted by Atlas Shrugged. I mean, almost everybody of the founders of Silicon Valley, both on the venture capital side and the startup side, read Atlas Shrugged and it inspired them. So many of the CEOs of great American businesses over the last 50 years were inspired by Rand. They might not be objectivists. They might not agree with her on everything. But if nothing else, she will inspire you. She will inspire you to be the best human being you can be. (1:57:03 - 1:57:59) And just to reclaim the ideal of the heroic, to be the hero of your own life and to pursue your potential and to pursue your greatness. And when it comes down to it, what else are you here for except to value the fact that you live and you have dreams and they are within your reach? And that's, you know, people talk a lot about these days about finding meaning in life. That's it. That's the meaning of life. The meaning of life is a well-lived life. There's nothing outside of that. Be the hero of your own life. That's all the meaning and purpose you need in life is just to be a great liver. Live to your fullest potential. Be a hero to yourself. That will give you all the meaning and purpose, the only meaning and purpose that is required. There's nothing else other than that. And that Iron Man gives in spades. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Yaron. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show, guys. (1:57:59 - 1:58:02) No worries. Everyone else, thanks for listening. Take care. (1:58:02 - 1:58:38) Thanks for tuning in, guys. Before you go, if you've been resonating with these conversations about authenticity, purpose, and breaking free from what holds you back, we've created something for you, The Real AF Test. It'll take about three to five minutes to complete. No fluff, just the truth about where you really stand. Are you real AF or not? You can take the test at hereforthetruth.com. There's also a link in the brief below. And once you complete it, you'll receive our guide, The 10 Commandments of Being Real AF, along with insights to help break free from what's holding you back. Until next time, thanks for being here for the truth.