 Welcome to a discussion of radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, laissez-faire capitalism, and individual rights. The Yaron Brook show starts now. Good afternoon, how you doing everybody? It's actually still morning here in California where I'm broadcasting from. But for most of you, it's afternoon. It's a good afternoon. Good morning. You know, hoping you're having a great weekend. All right, I mean, we just, we had an interesting week this week. You know, Weinstein probably, the whole story with Weinstein probably filled up the airwaves much more than any of us wanted to hear about all the details of, you know, of that scandal and his immoral, ridiculous behavior. We'll talk about that a little bit. But I really want to, I really want to start off by talking about health. Can I know, I know, you know, everybody talks about this so much. I'm sure most of us are sick of it, but it's important, right? It's about our lives. It's about the quality of our lives, our health, you know, very few things are more important than our health. And this is a big, big political issue. But I think it's more than that. I think it's a defining issue of what we mean by being American. What America represents, what America stands for. And I talk a lot about that on this show because I'm an American exceptionalist. You know, I'm an immigrant to this country. I chose to be an American. I wasn't lucky, like many of you, by being born here. I actually had to take steps. I actually had to get up off my behind and take the risk of coming to this country and, you know, succeeding, not succeeding. And you know, I'm proud and happy that I did that, although I have to admit I'm worried about the country. My adopted country, I'm worried about you as I think all of us are. But I think this issue really, really frames what it means to be America. What are the founding principles of this country? How far we've come from those founding principles. And I want to do something today that a lot of times I think people who criticized Obama can criticize socialized medicine, don't do. And that is, I want to describe to you what an American healthcare system should look like. What an healthcare system based on American principles should and would look like. Now, the principle I want to talk about today and related to healthcare, and there's always a principle behind what I try to talk. And actually, this is a principle that's going to shape the entire show today. We'll call it personal responsibility. Because this is a country built in the idea of personal responsibility. But I want to delve deeply into what personal responsibility means. Personal responsibility actually means, because so many people talk about it and talk about it in superficial, narrow terms. And to me, this is a deep, important, meaningful concept, meaningful idea that is really at the heart of the founding of this country. This country is about leaving people free to pursue their own happiness. This is a country that believes, or at least in its founding believed, that every individual has the capacity, using his reason, using his mind to figure out what's good for himself and to go and pursue it. And if they don't, if they make mistakes, or they just are lazy, or they just don't figure out what's good for themselves, that's on them. It's not my responsibility to bail out my neighbor, every time he makes a mistake. It's not my responsibility to bail out my fellow Americans, wherever they might be, when they make a mistake. It's not my responsibility to be my brother's keeper, and it's not the responsibility of the government to serve as an intermediary between me and my brother and make sure that I am my brother's keeper. My responsibility in life is to take care of myself. It's to live the best life I can for myself, is to do and engage in the actions and in the thoughts, and in the thoughts necessary to achieve something with my own life and to make something of my own life. Other people's responsibility is to take care of their lives and to make the most of their lives. Now, this is not just a political question. This is not just about the government stepping away and letting us, each one of us, make the choices and make the decisions that are necessary for the fulfillment of our life. This is also a moral statement about the moral responsibility you have first and foremost towards yourself, towards your own happiness, towards your own fulfillment, towards your own flourishing, and only secondarily and only to the extent that it serves your own life to help your neighbor and to help your brother, to help your fellow American. But we are not obligated to do so. There is nothing in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence that says, that indicates, that suggests, or in the Federalist paper for that sense, that we have a moral obligation or political obligation to take care of everybody who makes a mistake out there, or anybody who's just too lazy to take care of themselves. It's not only about mistakes, mistakes that kind of morally neutral, but some people, people that just came off, people just behave badly, people just don't think, people just don't engage in what is necessary to live a fulfilling successful life. And is it my responsibility, therefore, to jump in and with my wallet open to rescue them at every opportunity? Now, that's what Obamacare suggests. And that's what the whole idea of Socialized Medicine suggests. Obamacare is not insurance. Socialized Medicine is not insurance. Obamacare and Socialized Medicine view healthcare as something, they view it as a right, a right that it's our responsibility to grant those who otherwise would not buy insurance, let's say. And Republicans have brought into this, this idea of universal insurance, that everybody must have insurance and that the government is responsible for making sure that everybody has insurance, is a moral travesty. No, it's your responsibility to buy insurance. And if you don't, that's on you, not on me. It's not my moral responsibility to bail you out. It's not my moral responsibility to subsidize your insurance. It's not my moral responsibility to pay for your healthcare if you have not saved and you have not bought insurance because you chose not to. Now, if you fall in a bad luck, we all know what the remedy for that is. We Americans are incredibly generous when we see somebody suffering for no fault of their own. Charity, it's called charity. And charity has always been part of American life. And when somebody falls in bad luck, if somebody, you know, gets in an accident or somebody, you know, just didn't have the income to be able to afford insurance for whatever reason, then, you know, they're charters, charity hospitals, they're charitable institutions, they're the charity of the neighborhood and the community. But there is charity. But you, because you have fallen on bad luck, because or because you have made bad choices in your life, you do not have a right to my wallet. You don't have a right to my time. You don't have a right to my efforts. My life is mine. That's what the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness means in a declaration of independence. You cannot have a right to healthcare because that right to healthcare necessitates that I provide it to you. Whether through money, by subsidizing your healthcare or whether if I'm a doctor, I have to treat you. I don't have to treat you. If you can't pay, why would I treat you? If you can't pay, a restaurant doesn't give you food. If you can't pay, a doctor has every right not to treat you. Now we can talk about emergencies, life-threatening situations, but generally a doctor is not your slave. A doctor is not required to take care of you no matter what. So Socialized Medicine assumes that the doctor is a slave and I am indeed a slave, that we're all a slave to one another, that we all are responsible for one another. We all have to take care of one another, but that is fundamentally anti-American. That is fundamentally anti-American. The idea of America is the idea that we are each responsible for ourselves, that our moral responsibility is to take care of ourselves, that our moral responsibility is to do the best that we can, to make the best choices, to think, to plan, to have a plan for life, not just a randomly, you know, drift through it, but actually plan it out so that we can afford insurance. Now we'll get to why some people can't afford insurance today, how government has created a situation where you can't have insurance today. Obamacare, Socialized Medicine, Government Intervention and Healthcare undercuts at every level this idea of personal responsibility. Now Donald Trump, President Trump, this last week made two changes to Obamacare through executive order. Not something I like generally executive orders because, you know, this is the imperial president, but if the only way to bring us more freedom is through executive orders that are reducing the negative impact of legislation, particularly legislation that's been deemed at least by some courts as unconstitutional. Wrong. I'm, you know, I'm all for it. So he did two things and we're going to take a quick break now, but when we come back, we're going to talk about the two things that Donald Trump did, why they potentially, why I think they're good, basically good, why I think they're too little and we need much, much, much, much, much, much more. Uh, why I hope Congress will take this up and actually start freeing us up. And then I want to talk about, and maybe that'll be the third segment, I want to talk about what would happen if we did away with Obamacare? What would we replace it with? What would, and what would, if we did away with not just Obamacare, what if we really freed up, really freed up healthcare? What if we created healthcare system that was based on the idea of personal responsibility? What if we freed up the American system? So there was based on the idea of, God forbid, America. What would an American healthcare system look like? It's not what happened before Obamacare, but what would a truly American healthcare system look like? A healthcare system based on American principles. All right. You're listening to your own book show on the blaze radio network and we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. This is the Yaron Brooks show. Love. All right. So, uh, we're talking about Obamacare, personal responsibility, what a healthcare system would look like if the government got out of the way and just left us alone, which is what it's supposed to do. So, um, you know, Donald Trump did this two slight little tweaks, uh, this last week to Obamacare. The left and most of the media just freaked out. It was the end of the world. People were going to die in the streets of America. You know, the hysteria was just so typical of what the left does. Uh, you know, they know how to take care of all of us. God forbid any of us should get, should have to take on more personal responsibility because the fundamental idea that the left has in terms of government is, we as individuals are too incompetent, too stupid, too, too, too irrational to take care of ourselves, companies and the markets, capitalism would just exploit us, use us, uh, defraud us and, uh, and what we need is the government and only the government, government experts who are truly rational, really, really smart as compared to all of us who are just dumb and stupid. The, you know, really, really smart to decide what kind of insurance policies we can buy and at what price and what we can afford and what we can't afford and what kind of health treatments we should get and what is, oh my God, really, really bad for us. They have to protect us. They have to protect us. So the first thing Donald Trump did is he's allowing a new type of policy. These are policies that are going to be, I mean, it's nowhere near as much as I would like, but this is kind of, he's trying to get something through given Obamacare. And I think a lot of this is, is posturing because he's trying to push Congress to actually, to actually do something, right? So this is the idea that associations will be able to offer healthcare plans that are free from Obamacare restrictions. So one of the things Obamacare does is it says if you want to offer an insurance, a health insurance plan, you have to cover all these things. And you have to make it with a very low deductible and very low copays. So what Obamacare does is it dictates to insurance companies and to us as consumers, what kind of policies we should have. What Trump is allowing for is the sale of insurance plans that don't meet these standards by calling them association plans. Now we'll see how this evolves. There's still a lot of uncertainty because a lot of regulations, I guess, have to be written and all kinds of stuff. We won't know for months what this actually means. But the stereo on the left is, oh my God, you'll get plans now that don't cover all the things that you need. And you're too stupid to know that. So you're going to be conned into buying an insurance plan that's bad for you. I mean, this is from the New Yorker, a typical kind of left publication. This is what Trump's executive order makes life easier for con men because you see in the mind of leftists, and unfortunately in the mind of a lot of Republicans as well, business equals con men. Business equals fraud. Business equals exploitation. We have the government to protect us from those evil capitalists. We have the government to protect us from those evil providers of insurance. But really what we have government for, because this is the bottom line, because we're too stupid to identify con men, we really have government to protect us from ourselves. Because look, we're just too stupid. We're just too irrational. We don't have a long-term perspective. We can't think. Now, granted, our educational system is really, really trying hard to make that a reality that we really can't think. But that's the assumption behind so much of the policies coming out of Washington, left or right, that we as individuals cannot take care of ourselves. And therefore, we need those smart, smart people who know what's good for us to take care of us. So what would happen if young people decided that they want a kind of very bare-bones, simple insurance plan that only covered them in case, I don't know, they got into an accident and they had to go to hospital because on a day-to-day basis, when you're young, you're pretty healthy, you don't have to go see the doctor every time you get it cold, you don't have to go see the doctor for a lot of things. So when you do go to see a doctor, you pay him a bill and that's it. But yeah, if you get into an accident, you don't have the money to pay for that. That's what you want insurance for. Oh no, no, no, no, the left tells us. You can't have an insurance policy like that. That's terrible. What if your circumstances change and you're not smart enough to know what kind of insurance policy you need, you need the government to make sure that all these things are covered, that the whole gamut, the whole array of benefits are covered. I mean, it says here, healthy people are going to be drawn to these association plans because they're healthy and young. They don't need comprehensive coverage. All true, that's great. And they are making what they believe is a rational calculation. Good for them, they are being rational. But what happens is if all the healthy people buy these kind of minimal coverage policies, then who's going to take care of all the non-healthy people or the people greater risk? Isn't it the job of the young to sacrifice for the old? Isn't it the job of the young to pay higher premiums in order so old people can have lower insurance costs? No, no, no. You shouldn't have to pay for other people's risk. If somebody else in my neighborhood has built a house that's a fire trap, my insurance should go up because he lives in a fire trap. How does that work? That's his problem, not my problem. Sorry. That's what personal responsibility means. Take responsibility for your own health because I'm not going to subsidize it. Don't be obese because obesity is associated with bad health outcomes. Take responsibility for your own health. Take responsibility for your own savings. Save money to cover health costs. Save money to pay the insurance. That's what personal responsibility means. It means take your life seriously, plan for it, rationally think through what it means to be alive and what's going to be required to sustain your life in a healthy way. Don't just buy whatever Obamacare throws my way the government's taking care of it. They've covered me. No, the whole idea is that responsibility should return to you. But the left doesn't get this. And again, I don't think anybody on the right gets it either. But the left doesn't get it. To them, it's like, wait a minute, this is about social responsibility. This is about the healthy subsidizing the sick. This is about, you know, so if you have to existing conditions, of course you get the same rate of some young healthy person. How is that right? How is that just? It's immoral. And again, it betrays the idea of personal responsibility. If you can't afford health insurance, then you depend on charity. Save money. If you get old, you know, hopefully you've saved some money by the time you're old because insurance is going to cost more because you're more likely to be sick. That's the way insurance works. The higher the risk, the higher the premium you pay. That's why if I buy life insurance today, it's going to be much, much more expensive than if I bought it 20 years ago. Why? Because I'm more likely to drop dead today than I was 20 years ago because I'm older. Getting older, right? I'm getting old. What can you do? Right? Basic insurance principles. This is not hard stuff. The riskier you are, the more you pay. If you drive like a nut, you have lots of speeding tickets as I have. Period. You know, I get speeding tickets in clumps. Like I don't get them one and then a few years later, another one. I get like three in three weeks and then I'll get up. I don't get them again for two years and then I get three in three weeks. So, you know, but if I get a lot of speeding tickets, my risk profile is written as in my insurance rates don't stay flat. I don't expect some more responsible driver to be subsidizing my irresponsible driving. My driving is not irresponsible. I know what I'm doing when I drive fast, but of course that's what everybody says. That's how they rationalize it. I have a good car so I can afford to drive fast. Anyway, so this is an insurance. This is, this is, you know, redistribution of wealth. That's all Obamacare is. And of course, what is covered is the same thing. It's central planning. I don't need, like in California, every insurance policy you buy has to cover pregnancy. I don't need pregnancy coverage. I've had two kids. That's it. I'm not having anymore. I don't want to cover pregnancy and yet I have to pay for that. I don't want to cover acupuncture. I tried it, doesn't work on me, but I have to pay for that. So the centrally planned system one minute is a system that negates personal responsibility. It's a system that negates personal health. It's a system that negates one's ability to flourish and succeed. It's a, it's a system that provides all the responsibility for our well being to central planners, to government that is supposed to be then going to take care of you. Really? You want to rely on them to take care of you? All right. So when we come back, we've got a hard break coming up in a few seconds. When we come back, we're going to talk about the ending the subsidies that Obama did, that Trump did. Obama would never end subsidies, increased subsidies. And we're going to talk about that. And then we're going to talk about what does the healthcare system look like in a true free market? What would it really look like? Ten. All right. You're listening to your own book show on the Blaze radio network and we're going to be back. Stay with us after this break. So I don't know if you've noticed the new format on the Blaze now. It breaks are much shorter. You get a listen to me more. Less of the less of the important revenue producing commercials, more intellectual content. I love it. I love it. This is one way in which the Blaze is improving the experience and it's great. By the way, if you want to call in, you're welcome to do so 888-900-3393. Interested in your views on personal responsibility as it applies to healthcare. Now we're going to introduce a new segment of the show today. It's going to be in the last segment, right? In the second hour, the last segment in the second hour. And we're going to call this, we're going to do this every show. We're going to call it moment of reason. It's going to be more than a moment. It's going to be about 10 minutes of reason. And it's basically going to be an open mic. It's, you know, hopefully I'll be able to take one or two calls during that period. And during that period you can ask whatever you want to ask. So it's completely open. Right now I'd like only calls on the topic of healthcare, on the topic of Obamacare or free market solutions to healthcare or anything like that. But in this moment of reason, complete flexibility in anything. So if you want to call in advance, make sure you get on the line, make sure you get a slot there. You can ask me about foreign policy. You can ask me about healthcare. You can ask me about, I don't know, me. You can ask me about you. You can ask me about personal responsibility. You can ask me about anything you want. Music, art, I don't know. You know, even what's his name? Harvey Weinstein. You can ask me about Harvey. We will get to Harvey Weinstein in a little while. All right. Second thing about, I keep calling Trump Obama, and that's not by accident, you know, two of my most hated presidents. Sorry, guys. Don't like Trump. Don't like Obama. The second thing Trump did was end one subsidy. He couldn't end the second subsidy because it's in the law. He ended one type of subsidy. This is a subsidy that paid insurance companies so that they would provide, it was kind of a deal, kept with the insurance companies. They committed in the law, I think, to provide insurance policies that had low deductibles, that had low copays. And the government committed to, in exchange for the insurance companies, doing that to giving them compensation for all the money they would have to spend relative to higher deductibles, higher copays. So again, central planning at its best. This is typical Obama kid. Let's assume the market doesn't know what people want. Let's assume people don't know what they want. Let's cram down their throat's insurance policies that the market would never provide low deductible, low copay insurance policies, which don't make any economic sense, make them economically feasible by subsidizing them. Now there's a quirk in the subsidy. The subsidy is, the amount of money is not approved by Congress every year. The administration, the executive branch gets to do that themselves. Now that could be deemed unconstitutional. The idea being that any allocation of funds has to be done by Congress and the executive cannot allocate funds. Now we'll see how this all plays on the courts and it's likely to be played out in the courts. But at the end of the day, it's a gray zone. So what Trump has done is saying, we're not going to pay the subsidy. We're just not going to pay the subsidies. You still have to provide those insurance policies that you're required to do under Obamacare, but we're not going to pay you to do it. So it's kind of screws the insurance companies. Unjustifiably, I think it's not their fault. It's Obama's kids fault. But it takes away the subsidy and now we'll see what happens. Really what will happen is insurance companies are going to have to raise the premiums. Some people won't be able to afford the insurance because the subsidy is gone. But on that hand, insurance companies won't be able to offer cheap alternatives for the people who don't want to pay for the low deductibles unless these association things get going and become popular. So it's good that you get one government subsidy eliminated, but it doesn't solve anything long term. Now, one of the things that's interesting when these things happen is, again, how the left responds to this and how they deem it. So here's one response by this guy, by the Washington state's insurance commissioner. He says, to me, it is a tax that's being imposed by the president on the people that are most financially challenged. So note that taking away a subsidy from an industry is a tax on the consumers. Wow. Talk about 1984 double speak. No, taking away a subsidy is taking away a subsidy. It's government spending less. It actually should ultimately reduce taxes because it means the government has less claims against me to pay for those subsidies. But that's how they think of it. They think of your money as not yours. They think of your money as theirs. They think of your money as the states, as the government's. And then you're not responsible for it. You can't be responsible for it because you're too stupid. We've already established that, right? So they, the central planners will, will figure out what to do with your money. And it's not yours anyway. It's societies. It's the governments. And that's how they view taxation. Taxation is not stealing your money. Taxation is not theft. No. Taxation is just redistributing the money that belongs to society to begin with. Again, take away the individual completely out of it. Ignore personal responsibility. Ignore that it's yours. Ignore that you built that. Again, harking back to, to Obama's agenda. All right. So these are the two things Trump did. Now, let's talk a little bit about, this is nothing, right? This is just, just tiny little things that are going to have very minute impact on, on our health care and on health care policy and on everything out there. This association thing we'll see in the months to come where it has any impact at all. My fear, and I'll say this and then we'll talk about the solution. My fear is, is that this accelerates the collapse of Obamacare. Now Trump gets blamed for that, not just Obama. And that what they all get together at the end is come up with a big compromise. You'll get the moderates in the Democratic Party and the moderates in the Republican Party and Donald Trump sitting down together and coming up with a new plan called a Trump care, which will be even more like socialized medicine than Obamacare was. That's my fear. And socialized medicine, just to be clear in my view, and I'm not going to talk about it much now, is a disaster. And I lived under socialized medicine in Israel, Israel that has all those great doctors, Israel that has more doctors per capita than I think any country in the world and health care was not good. He is not good, right? So that's not what we want. But I fear, I fear that in spite of what Trump has done, or maybe to some extent because of what Trump has done, because there's no comprehensive reform, because the Republicans are fundamentally moral cowards and are incapable of actually pursuing real systemic reform, real systemic movement towards a free market solution to health care. I fear that as a consequence of all that, we will ultimately get a much more socialized health care system because what we have today will collapse. And again, it'll be Republicans fault because here they had an electoral mandate to come up with an alternative to Obamacare and they folded, Trump folded, they folded, everybody folded, and nobody, nobody, nobody on the right has presented us with a vision for what an alternative to Obamacare looks like. What does health care in a free market look like? Now that is what we're going to talk about when we come back from this, from this break. We're going to talk about that vision. We're going to talk about how a health care system works when government steps out of the way. I'm just going to outline this. I'm not going to get into details, although I'm happy to answer any of your questions. You can, you can ask me those questions 888-900-3393. Anything about health care 888-900-3393. And so after this break, we're going to give you my vision. Yaron Brooks' vision. This is the Yaron Brooks show on the Blaze Radio Network. We'll be right back. So that's kind of a different music. That's new. Kind of not the usual bumper music. All right. This is Yaron Brooks and we're talking about health care. So what would a free market health care system look like? What would that, what would be the principal? Well, the principal would be personal responsibility. The principal would be you as an individual are responsible for your health care and the government is neutral with regard to whether what kind of health care you get, how you, how you take care of yourself, neutral as long as you're not committing fraud, as not, and you're not cheating. As long as you're not lying and stealing your health care is your responsibility. What policy you buy, how you buy it from whom you buy it is your responsibility. And I mean the government is neutral. That means the government doesn't give you any special tax favors for buying insurance through your employer, whether you buy it yourself or whether you don't buy it at all. There is no tax advantage. There's no regulatory issues. There's no, the government is just uninvolved. It doesn't care about what treatments you get. It doesn't care about what medical advice you get. It doesn't tell the doctors how much to charge you. And by the way, when I say free markets, I mean free markets for everybody, just because you're over 65 doesn't make you, you know, the responsibility of the government doesn't make you somebody who the government has to take care of. You know, when you're 65 you have more wisdom supposedly than when you're young. Why would the government suddenly be responsible for you? So I'm talking about no Medicare, no Medicaid, no government, no Obamacare, no government responsibility for healthcare at all. Each individual is then responsible and then what would happen? Well, we need insurance because really bad stuff can happen. You can get cancer, you can get into an accident, but we need insurance to cover those really, really bad events in our lives. Look, all of us have automobiles, all of us, even poor people have automobiles. And we don't buy car insurance to cover oil changes. Even the service that we have to do like every, I don't know, 20,000 miles or 10,000 miles or whatever that can cost hundreds of dollars. Sometimes I just paid, I don't even want to say how much you paid. I had to get four tires, I had to get brake pads and new brakes and everything, four figures, right? We don't have insurance covering that. We take that as part of the cost of owning a car. And what do we have insurance for? For accidents, for unforeseeable things, for things that happen and can really suddenly, you know, my whole car can be wrecked. We don't even buy insurance for little scratches, for dents, only for major things. And if you're smart when you buy car insurance, you buy it with a large deductible because you want the cheapest insurance possible only to cover you when really bad stuff happens. And then you want to be fully covered because you don't want to be sued by somebody you might have hit or, you know, that's the kind of stuff that can really bankrupt you. That's the kind of stuff you need insurance to protect you. The same is true with healthcare. What we need are insurance policies that cover us so that when we get really sick, we're covered for that $100,000 hospital bill because you had surgery for the chemotherapy, for those drugs that are incredibly expensive. That's what you need insurance for. Now, insurance should be private. And insurance private, you don't have some of the preexisting conditions problem because you own the insurance policy. You could buy a long term insurance policy just like you can buy long term life insurance. And you can it would be priced you can roll it over from year to year when you lose your job or when you leave a job or when you change jobs, you don't suddenly lose your health insurance policy. That's absurd and ridiculous. It should be yours just like your home insurance is yours, just like your car insurance is yours. Now, what about preexisting conditions for like babies or whether you develop them and your insurance runs out on you? Well, one of the things you could buy in a free market is insurance against preexisting conditions. For example, when you get pregnant, you could go to an insurance company and buy a policy that guarantees that if your baby's born with some problem that would exclude them from the insurance markets and the normal features. This provides insurance for that problem so that your child can get insurance for everything else. Such policies, there's a demand for them. And the market would supply them this idea that they, oh my God, markets fail and we need all the stuff and we don't get it from markets. Where have you been living the last 250 years if you believe that? Oh my God, where have you been living the last 250 years? Markets are beautiful, amazing, phenomenal things. Now imagine, if you shop for health insurance, just like you shop for insurance, people compete it online, the price is well visible. And imagine then that most of your health insurance health costs were out of pocket. So when you went to the doctor, you'd know, you'd say, you know, how much is going to cost? I've got, I've got, I think I've got the flu or, you know, I've got a pain in my back or what's it going to cost? And the doctor's actually published their prices just like, just like mechanics do, just like, you know, or you go to a number of them and you ask them how much is it going to cost to fix this carburetor? Because the insurance policy is not going to cover it. I'm going to cover it. So I need to know what the price is. And you shop it around. And maybe even you get radio agencies coming in and saying, yeah, this doctor charges more, but you know he's better. You're paying for quality. This doctor is a little shady. So even though he's really cheap, you might want to watch it. I mean, imagine the boom in information that you would get as a customer, where hospitals had a published their price. And by the way, you'd have copays. So even when you went into surgery, you might want to check around the hospitals and find out what the costs are and what the quality is. And hospitals would have to provide that information because user-consumer would demand that information before you use them. And suddenly you'd have pricing lists and you could compare. And you would shop. Hell, we shop for clothes. We go and try on a dozen different shirts and we haggle with the salesman sometimes. And you know, we try on different shoes. But when we get our healthcare, we just go. We don't ask questions. We don't shop. We don't get second, third, fourth, fifth opinions. I had back surgery six years ago. I got eight second opinions. I didn't want the surgery. Now, in eight different doctors told me I needed surgery. I said, okay, they're probably right. And plus I understood and I saw the evidence and everything like that. But imagine if we actually shopped for the most important product, one of the most important products certainly in our lives, our health and that our insurance company encouraged us to shop. It didn't just say, here's five doctors. You have to go to one of these. Here's the hospital. We're going to send you to. No, I don't want that insurance company. I want a different insurance company that gives me more options. And I don't want to pay. I'm willing to pay the first X amount of dollars, maybe the first $5,000, maybe the first $20,000. I'm willing to pay. It's that bill for $100,000 I'm worried about. And one of you and some of you will have different criteria and you'd get different policies. Right? We'd have a way of different policies. Even today, if you go shopping for car insurance, think of how many different policies you have. And yet with health insurance, they all look the same because Obamacare forced them all to look the same. Pretty much all look the same. But we're all different. We're going to have hundreds of different types of insurance policy. Now the left is going to say, and some on the right will say, look, you're on, you're just too stupid. Oh, no, no, no, you're smart enough. You've got a PhD in finance after all. But you know what, wink, wink. Most people out there are too stupid to figure this out. Most people out there be defrauded. Most people out there are going to buy bad policies. Most people out there are too stupid to know what's good for them. And we, the smart philosopher kings, the smart left, we don't want people to be responsible for themselves because they can't do it. They just can't do it. I mean, this is the most anti-American, anti-enlightenment, anti-individualistic perspective possible. But that's what our politicians hold. They are going to tell us what's good for us as individuals. Really? Take care of your own life. Leave me alone to take care of mine. So a proper health insurance policy, a proper free market world, would be one of individual choice, would be one of individual responsibility, one of personal responsibility. That's the dream, both in the insurance market and in what kind of procedures the doctors can offer us. We want choice. We want transparency. We want capitalism. We want a marketplace. That's my vision. I don't think there's anybody in Congress who shares my vision, unfortunately. All right. So when we come back, I'm happy to take your calls on this issue. I see we've got one caller we're going to take. We're going to take the call from Neil. 30. But if you want to talk about health care, call in and we're going to pick up on Harvey Weinstein and post the responsibility after this relatively lengthy break. You're listening to your Unbook Show on the Blaze radio network. Welcome to a discussion of radical fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, laissez-faire capitalism, and individual rights. The Your Unbook Show starts now. All right. Welcome to the second hour. I hope you're having a great Saturday and we're talking about a horrible topic now. I'm sorry. But actually, let me take this call. Let's take Neil before I get into Harvey Weinstein because I'm not looking forward to that. Hey, Neil. How's it going? It's going good. Good. Today, I actually wanted to ask two questions. One about freedom and the one that you brought up before about health care. Well, why don't we start with the health care because that was the topic we just talked about. Yeah. Well, we'll start with that. Okay. Okay. So with health care, usually, I've noticed that the general thing that conservatives and objectivists would say is like, if you have just like a purely free market, then prices will go down and quality will go up. And I tried bringing up to my liberal professors and they were like, oh, well, it's just a theory. We don't know if you'll work in practice. And I just, yeah, I know it's funny. And honestly, I just want to know, Yaron, is there any examples of this theory working in practice so I can just like shove it in their faces? Well, there isn't in sense of an entire health care system, unfortunately, because there is no free market health care system in the world. And that's one of the sad tragedies of what we stand today. And if it's not going to happen in the US, where is it going to happen? Because it should be you have health care systems that are closer to freedom than the US, I think Singapore is an example of that. But even that is not complete free markets. But here's a few examples that I think can be used. They're more narrow, if you will. Take, for example, LASIK surgery. The thing about LASIK surgery is it's not covered by insurance. And so you have to pay out of pocket, which is part of what I think the free market would generate for all of health care. What has happened with LASIK surgery over the last 20 years? It's been around for a long time, maybe more than 20 years. The prices have gone down consistently, and quality has gone up consistently. Massive competition, advertising, marketing, you know exactly what you're going to pay in advance. You can find ratings of doctors, you can get reviews of doctors who do LASIK surgery, and you can pick and choose and find the best doctor that provides it. I would say the same thing is true of some of what we call it voluntary plastic surgery, breast augmentation, all kinds of treatments for wrinkles and aging and things like that. Unregulated, relatively speaking, I mean everything's regulated, but less regulations isn't covered by insurance. And as a consequence, the prices have come down. I think, you know, I'm not an expert on breast augmentation, but I think quality has gone up. Risk has gone down. And again, you can shop, right? You can go out there and you can get prices from doctors. You can figure out what makes sense, what doesn't make sense. Look at the innovations like Botox injections and other injections. I mean, if you value this kind of stuff, it's an innovation. And so, you know, facelifts, mini facelifts, all kinds of stuff like that, that you're not going to get covered. Prices have come down, quality's gone up, you know, and risks have gone down as quality has gone up. So, I think when you look at specifics like that, what you discover is, yeah, the market works perfectly. The other thing that's kind of a joke is, it works everywhere. Everywhere markets. Now, let me just say something about prices. Prices don't always come down. Like, have prices for computers come down? No, because the computers have gotten better and better and better and better. So, price per unit of computing power has crashed, has tumbled, right? But the price of a computer has actually stayed fairly flat. The same would happen in healthcare, I assume, is that the prices wouldn't necessarily come down, but the quality would go up through the roof. But in that sense, price would come down. Now, you'd have variety, you've had choice, you'd have procedures that nobody could imagine. I'll give you an example of a procedure that just ticks me off because it's personal to me. I'm having back surgery again, unfortunately, in a few weeks. And as part of the surgery, I've asked the doctor to inject the space between my vertebra, the disc space, with stem cells, and also to put it on the facet joints. You can look that up what that is, right? So, I want stem cells because, you know, there's a chance they work. It's not a lot of evidence one way or the other. Now, the problem is that my doctor's told me I can do that, but I have to use inferior stem cells. And I said, what do you mean? He said, ideally, I would take stem cells from your fat. I have plenty of fat for him to take it from and create stem cells from the fat or separate the stem cells from the fat and use those stem cells. But the FDA does not allow me to do that. And I said, why not? He said, I don't know, but they don't allow it. So, I have to use bone marrow stem cells, which are still okay, but they're not as good. Now, wait a minute. These are my stem cells. This is from my fat. I'm not taking your fat. I'm not taking anybody else's fat. You can't take the stem cells out of my body. No damage there. We know that. Spin them to separate the stem cells from the fat and inject those same cells back into my body. No, FDA doesn't allow it. You can do it with bone marrow. So far, maybe now that I've done the show and the FDA will hear me, they won't allow it anymore. But you can do it with bone marrow. You can't do it with fat stem cells. So, one of many examples, of course, you can't do it with embryotic stem cells. You can't do it with all kinds of other things that measure improvements in free markets. All of that, the government would get out of being involved in what procedures, what treatments you could do. That would be up to you and your doctor and the hospital and insurance company and so on. All right. You had a second question, which you might answer now, and I might leave for the last segment. But what is the question? Okay. The question is this. I was, I basically introduced Aaron Rand's book Anthem to my girlfriend, and she said she loved it. But she looked in the back and it tells her her whole philosophy. And there's one thing that she had, she had trouble comprehending was the epistemology. And what she said about epistemology is that reason is, in her opinion, is not the only means of cognition or knowledge. All right. Let me do this. I'm going to try to answer that question in the last segment of the show today because I want to go into Harvey Weinstein, and I want to continue on the theme of personal responsibility. Thanks for calling, Neil. Really appreciate the call. And it's a good question your girlfriend has, and I will try to answer it at the end in the moment of reason that we're now adding. The last segment in every show on the blaze is going to have what we're calling a moment of reason where I answer any question you have, any question you have on any topic, including very philosophical questions, personal questions, whatever you want. Actually, I don't promise to answer the question, but you can ask anything you want. So let's talk again about personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is owning your life, owning what you do, taking responsibility for your own actions. And when you do something good, that's yours. And we'll talk about that in a little while. You do something bad, that's your responsibility. You have to pay for it. You have to pay for it psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. And if you've caused damage to other people, you have to compensate them. And we talked about this in the context of healthcare, right? Healthcare is your responsibility. You, you're responsible for figuring out what treatment you're responsible for buying the insurance, you're responsible for what insurance is right for you. You should be responsible for choosing your own doctor. You should be responsible for choosing the hospital and all of this stuff. You have to do the research. And you have to, you know, there's a reason why education is valuable so that you can do these kind of things. You can make these kind of choices. Now the marketplace, I believe would make it a lot easier because they'd be all kind of rating agencies and information and things like that. But it's your responsibility. Now, this is true of healthcare, but it's also true of your own personal life and how you live your life. So I'm going to take the break right now. But when we come back, I want to apply this idea to what's going on with Weinstein and the woman who accusing him and how this is related to personal responsibility. And of course, you know, he's just checked himself into one of these sex clinics because he's a sex addict. I don't know if you knew this, but Harvey Weinstein is a sex addict. And this could get, this is treatment. He could be treated for this. All right. You are listening to your on book show on the blaze radio network. You won't hear this stuff anywhere else. So don't leave. We'll be right back after this break. All right. So Harvey Weinstein, what do you even say? I mean, I'm sure you've all know the story. I mean, this guy has been harassing women, even accusations of rape, masturbating in front of them, touching them, you know, inviting them to watch him take a shower. And the guy's ugly. I mean, on top of it all, I mean, can you imagine these are beautiful young women using his power over them using power in order to get sex out of them so that they can get good roles. So they, you know, some women have stood up to him. I mean, I think Angelina Jolie basically has never worked for Weinstein because she walked out of one of these situations and said, I don't want to work for that creep. Others stood up to him, but still worked for him. And others folded and had sex with him and did whatever he wanted. What's interesting about Weinstein, I think, is how much is made of this. And partially, I think it's because it's Hollywood and we're so obsessed with Hollywood. But it's also the fact that we're getting much more gory details in this case than we have in other cases. But people forget the CEO of Fox News was accused of his exactly the same thing. Roger Ailes and had a quit Fox News. Bill Riley was accused of the same thing. Had a quitter show. Well, fire was actually fired from the show. And I was watching Fox yesterday and I was just like, I was incensed. You know, he was Hannity playing whole holier than thou. Accusing Weinstein, everything he said about Weinstein is true. But Hannity is basically, you know, covered up or made light of the accusations against O'Reilly and made light of the accusations against against Roger Ailes. There was there was nothing similar about Roger Ailes or anybody. This issue has become instead of this issue being about, you know, horrible men in positions of power using that power, exploiting that power to take advantage of young women using that power and actually using force. So actually probably engaging in some criminal activity. Instead of that being the story, it's become the story about Oh, the left and the right and the left. I mean, they are men in power. No matter what their political views are, who do this stuff and who should be condemned with the harshest means possible for behaving in this way. This is, this is horrific, horrible. And instead of holding them responsible as individuals, the entire debate becomes, well, the left is this and the right is this. And I mean, Bill Clinton, yeah, Bill Clinton was accused of all this stuff. And yeah, it's hypocritical of Hillary Clinton to go after Weinstein or to go after Roger Ailes, but not to go after her own husband. But yeah, she's a, I'm not going to say it on the blaze. They, you know, this is a family network. She's a horrible, horrible, evil woman. Right. So yeah, what do you want to catch an hypocrisy? That that's the thing you want to catch her on. But the fact is that they're all like this. And it's not about politics. It's about individual behavior. It's about individual responsibility. This guy's a creep. And the idea that he's addicted to sex is so bizarre and insulting to the term sex. Sex is a good thing. What does it mean to be addicted to something good, something positive? He's not addicted to sex. He uses sex as a vehicle to deal with his insecurities and his, and his, his, his lack of self-esteem. We'll get self-esteem in a minute. His, his, his confusions, his, his, you know, the fact that he's a screwed up human being. He's a messed up human being. That's what Weinstein is. And he's an evil human being because he's exploiting other people. As was Bill Clinton. As was Roger Ailes, to the best of our knowledge. As was Bill O'Reilly. You can't let any of these guys off the hook. They abused women. Now again, we're not talking about just saying to a woman, you're wearing a nice dress. We're not talking about this idea of, of, of, that people have the sexual harassment. You can't say anything nice. You can't, you can't hug anybody in the workplace. And you know, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking literally about physically abusing people, physically assaulting them, masturbating in front of people. That's just disgusting and sick and stupid. People don't want you to. So to, to, to let this off as well. This is what men in power do. Or, you know, these women wanted it. Or, you know, this is what it costs to be in Hollywood. Or he's a sex addict, is just absurd and ridiculous. And we have turned addiction into an excuse for everything in this country. We're now addicted to anything, anything, you know, cigarettes addictive and alcohol is addictive and sex is addictive and anything. I mean, anything we want to strain is an addiction. No, no, I mean, yeah, chocolate is addictive a little bit. I mean, try going off chocolate if you eat chocolate a lot. It takes some effort. It's called willpower. It's called, you know, convincing yourself to do something and living up to it. It's called overcoming your emotions and acting based on reason and not as an animal who just goes for the things it wants. It's not an addiction in the sense of, I don't know, a heroin addiction where to get off heroin, you really have to go to Kentucky and you, you get all these physical symptoms and it really is hard and you probably cannot do it without help. Give me a break. Now, obviously he might need help because he's psychologically screwed up, but the problem isn't that he wants too much sex. The problem is that he enjoys humiliating people. The problem is that he has no problem with using physical force on people. The problem is that he is willing to abuse his power over their lives in order to extract things that he knows they don't want. That's what makes him sick. And that's what makes all these guys sick to the extent that they do this. Left, right, center. This is not about politics. So personal responsibility. You have an urge to sleep with every young woman who walks into your office, overcome it, go get psychological help. And if you don't suffer the consequences, personal responsibility means you control your emotions. It means you control yourself. It means you place reason above everything else. You place logic about everything else. You place common sense about everything else, above everything else. I don't like the term common sense because it's not that common. And a lot of times it's not that sensical, but it requires effort. Reason requires effort. Living a good life requires effort. Being moral, being ethical requires effort. But it's not that hard to figure out that you don't do this kind of stuff to young women. That's not hard. And it's not a sickness. It's a choice. It's a choice not to take responsibility for your own life. It's a choice not to use your mind to make your life better. It's an example of somebody with horrible self-esteem, horrible, horrible, in spite of the power, in spite of the success, all of that is just a facade. All of that is fake. There's no self-esteem there. And I want to talk about self-esteem after the break. But this isn't about politics. Now, there's another sense in which there's personal responsibility here. And that is, everybody knew this was happening. Not everybody. A lot of people knew this was happening. And they didn't say anything. They didn't do anything. They didn't take responsibility. These women who settled and didn't say anything. I mean, I understand that they wanted the money. But what you're doing is by doing that, you're placing other women at risk. You're letting this monster get away with it. Jane Fonda, who didn't have firsthand experience, but heard about this from other people, just sat there for a year and did nothing. Now, you could make an argument that that was about politics because both she and Weinstein were Hillary Clinton supporters and they didn't maybe. But even after the election, she didn't say anything. So it's not about politics. It's more about the fact that she didn't take responsibility for the knowledge that she had to take down a human being. I hate to call him a human being who is acting in a despicable way. Now, the other thing that shocks me is that everybody in Hollywood right now is saying, oh, Weinstein wasn't the only one. Weinstein wasn't the only one. Everybody does it. There are a lot of guys, a lot of big-time producers here in Hollywood are doing this. Well, name names. Now is the time to name names. It's the time to actually expose them. We've exposed Weinstein. One good. Let's expose the others who use the casting couch as a tool over people. Even if they didn't commit criminal crimes, what they're doing is immoral. Let's expose the immorality. Why is Hollywood staying silent? Where's the person of responsibility that all these people who are saying, oh, we know there are lots of other people who do this? Name names. Tell us who they are. Don't play games. This is not something to play games with. This is serious stuff. These are people's lives at stake. This is your entire industry. And this is true all over the place. We need many, many more people out there calling out bad behavior, bad behavior, whether it's at Fox or MSNBC or Hollywood or any way in business. If you're acting like a monster, it's the silence of the people around you that makes that possible. So, personal responsibility. Right now, I call on Hollywood, all those stars, name names, make lists, call them out, particularly if it was done to you first-handed. But even if you've heard about it, if you've got significant evidence, you don't want to be sued for libel or something like that. But if you think you're on solid ground, let's do it. And let's get these people out of these sex addiction clinics in Arizona, where I think Gwynne's paying $2,000 a night. I'm sure that he's being pampered. And instead of recognizing to the extent to which it's monstrous what he did and what people like him do. Now, I want to talk about self-esteem because there's this perspective that self-esteem is a bad thing. That indeed, Harvey Weinstein had self-esteem, he had the power and that's what led him to do this. But that is not self-esteem. So, I want to talk about what self-esteem really is. And I want to talk about this notion that I've heard that you shouldn't care about self-esteem. And the problem with that is that the left, our culture, has turned self-esteem into something that it's not, into a mockery of itself, if you will, into a real mockery of what self-esteem really is. So, self-esteem is not getting praise from your parents or from your teacher or from your community. Self-esteem is not about getting a ribbon. Self-esteem is not about, you know, be treated the same as everybody else. Self-esteem is not about everybody patting you in the back and saying nice things to you. You don't get self-esteem from other people. And there was a YouTube video on Prager University about creating this strawman of what self-esteem is, all this nonsensical, subjectivist, collectivistic view of self-esteem. And it said, well, if that's self-esteem, you shouldn't want it. You shouldn't have it. You shouldn't have low self-esteem. You just shouldn't care about self-esteem. That's absurd because self-esteem is a legitimate concept. And I would say one of the most, maybe the most important value that you have, you should strive for great self-esteem and somebody with great self-esteem would never do what Weinstein did, would never abuse his power. So when we get back, I'll define self-esteem and we'll talk about what real self-esteem is like and why you should seek to have as much as you can right after the break. All right, so we're talking about Harvey Weinstein. We're talking about personal responsibility and self-esteem. And let me just say, some of you want to, some of you, I'm sure, want to blame the women, at least somewhat. And yeah, some of what the women did is certainly not honorable and, you know, some of them succumbed to what Harvey Weinstein was doing and some of them knew when they went up to his room what his intentions were. But look, you can't make those equivalent. There's no equivalent between those. This guy is a creep. He's a monster. He's a bad, bad guy. Some of these women were weak and it lacks self-esteem as well. And as a consequence, succumbed to his advances. But he is immoral. Now, you might, what he did in some cases might not be illegal, because he didn't use force maybe, but it's clearly immoral to use his position to extract sexual favors. And it's illegal if he used force than this. It seems like there's evidence that he did use force in certain occasions, certainly by groping, groping women, maybe even by raping them. We'll see how this all plays out. But don't go after the victim. There is clearly somebody here who has a predator and he needs to be called on as a predator. All right, let me, let me tell you what I think self-esteem is or what Ein Rand, Ein Rand thought self-esteem was. What I think self-esteem is, not just what we think it is. Self-esteem, is she to find it, is the certainty that you have, that your mind is competent of thinking and that you as a human being are worthy of happiness, worthy of living. So fundamentally self-esteem is this notion that I'm worthy of living, I'm worthy of being happy, and I'm capable of living and being happy, which means I'm capable of thinking for myself. This is the exact opposite of how the left views us, as we talked about with regard to healthcare. The left views us, and many on the right, as incompetent, as incapable, as not capable of taking care of ourselves. So this is the connection between self-esteem and personal responsibility. The idea is you should take on personal responsibility and know that you can take on that responsibility. That you have, your mind is competent to take care of yourself. You can choose your own health insurance. You can choose your own doctor. You can choose what procedure to take. You are not some bubbling idiot. You're not irrational and motivated just by your emotions. You have a mind and you are competent enough to use it and, most importantly, you are worthy of it. And I know this goes up a little bit against a lot of the religious teaching out there. You're not worthy. You're a sinner. You have original sin. No! I don't buy any of that. Any of that. Every human being born is born worthy of happiness, worthy of living. Every human being born has a mind capable of leading him towards happiness and success. There's no such thing as original sin. How can you have sinned before you're born? How can you have sinned before you've acted? You know, this life is not for suffering and for being miserable and for feel guilty. This life is to be enjoyed, to be embraced. This life is to make the most of it, to flourish. You only got one shot at this. Make the most of it. And that knowledge, hey, I can live. I can live a good life. I can achieve happiness. I have all the tools I need to do that. That's real self-esteem. And if you don't have that sense, then you'll never be happy. You'll never really be successful. Successful not in terms of money, not in terms of rank, not in terms of position, but in terms of living, in terms of what it means to be a human being, in terms of happiness and flourishing and fulfillment. So self-esteem is that, you know, again, I'll quote Iain Rand. This is about self-confidence, which is related to self-esteem. The man of authentic self-confidence is the man who relies on the judgment of his own mind. Such a man is not malleable. He may be mistaken. He may be fooled in a given instance, but he is inflexible in regard to the absolutism of reality in seeking and demanding truth. There's only one source of authentic self-confidence, reason, and, you know, that fits into the question we're going to deal with after the next break, the efficacy of reason. So not only is self-esteem required for happiness, self-esteem is required for living. Self-esteem is required for being successful in life. Self-esteem is a must. It's not a choice. And in the end of the day, you either have high self-esteem or low self-esteem or pseudo self-esteem. Sudo self-esteem is when you project confidence and I'm in this world and I know what's going on, but it's nothing there. It's empty. Harvey Weinstein and many of these women have pseudo self-esteem and many of them just have low self-esteem. That's what leads people to do horrible things. And the worst is when you have really bad self-esteem to the extent that you not only hate yourself, but you hate the world. And I talked a little bit about the Las Vegas shooter and other shooters like that. I think those are people who hate the world, hate reality, hate reason, hate life, hate themselves, but it's not just themselves that they hate existence out there. They hate the world and that's why they're willing to destroy, not just commit suicide. You know, I have no problem with them committing suicide. They hate their life, commit suicide, fine. I don't believe in laws against suicide, but it's the fact that they want to kill other people, people they don't know, people just listening to music content. That hatred is a hatred of existence. Somebody with self-esteem doesn't have that. They love the world. Now, how do you get self-esteem? Not by convincing yourself you have it, but by achieving things in life, by actually succeeding, by being competent in living, which means being competent in using your mind. You don't have to be a genius to have self-esteem. We're not talking about great achievements in science. It just means within your own capacity, you know, that you can make a living for yourself. So for example, giving people welfare destroys their self-esteem because then you're telling them you're not competent to take care of yourself, accepting that and they stay on welfare. To get self-esteem, proper self-esteem, you have to work for a living. You have to prove to yourself, yeah, I can put bread on the table. I can keep a roof above my head and my family's head. That's where you get self-esteem. From the knowledge of your competency, but how do you know you're competent? How do you know your mind is efficacious? How do you know your reason can help you survive in this world by doing it and achieving and succeeding? And that's why giving everybody a ribbon destroys self-esteem. It doesn't give the opportunity for people to succeed. And you know what? Sometimes failure is necessary for self-esteem. Sometimes we need to fail, fall flat on our face and say, okay, that didn't work. I need to learn from that. I need to do better next time. When you give everybody a ribbon, you take that possibility away from them because they don't fall. So they don't know they failed. But to be successful, you have to know that there's the option at least of failure. Our modern system takes that away. Everybody's a winner. Everybody's good. No, not everybody's good. Not everybody's a winner. Not everybody plays basketball the way Michael Jordan did. No, you have to have challenges. You have to achieve. And if you don't achieve, you don't deserve the self-esteem that comes from actually achieving. So self-esteem is crucial to your life. It's what makes acting in life, acting in life in a rational, competent, it's what makes possible taking on new achievement, new challenges, new things. So not only is it something you shouldn't avoid, it's something. Now you don't focus on it. You don't say, I need self-esteem. What can I do? But the way you get self-esteem is by challenging yourself constantly. And when you achieve something, recognize that you did it. This is the importance of pride. You've got to be proud in your achievements, not false pride, real pride. You got to pat yourself on the shoulder. You've got to recognize your own virtue. And if you do that, if you achieve, objectively achieve something and recognize your own virtue, you will get self-esteem. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When I come back, we're going to do this moment of reason. So you can call in, ask anything you want, 888-900-3393. I have one question in the pipeline, but you can call in with any question you want, 888-900-3393. Any topic? Anything? And we will be back. You're listening to Iran Bookshow on the Blaze Radio Network, and we'll be back right after this. All right, so this is what we call moment of reason, where I answer your questions, and you can call in with those questions, 888-900-3393. But I've also got some questions here that are written because we've got some chats going on here, online, people listening and chatting about it. So let me take some of those as related to self-esteem because just to kind of finish or flesh out a little bit the topic we started. Dwight asked, the Vegas shooter was wealthy, kept a roof over his head. That's not a lack of self-esteem. How do you explain this out to age? The fact that you're wealthy and the fact that you have a roof over your head is, does not guarantee that you have self-esteem. Those are necessary conditions, not being wealthy, but making a living is unnecessary, but not sufficient. To have a sufficient, what you need on top of that in order to actually gain self-esteem is to recognize the legitimacy of your own life and your own happiness. And the fact that your wealth, whatever wealth it is at whatever level it is, is yours that you created it and the value that that has. Look, and this is why I think that those videos on Prager University were so, I didn't like them so much because you have to work at getting self-esteem. Self-esteem doesn't just happen to you because you have to recognize your own value. You have to identify that your happiness is important, that achieving happiness is good. You have to at some level at least recognize the importance of your mind, a reason to achieving that happiness. So, and then you have to achieve and recognize those achievements, connect those achievements. In other words, use your mind to integrate those achievements with the importance of your life and with the prospect of achieving happiness and with everything else in your life. Life is constant work, mental work, integration. Stuff doesn't just happen to you. Good stuff doesn't just happen to you. If you want good in life, if you want happiness, fulfillment, flourishing, you have to work at it. The stuff that happens to you is almost always going to be bad. To get good stuff, you have to work, which means integrate, which means think, which means use your mind, use your reason. So, no, the shooter in Las Vegas had no self-esteem. He hated himself. He wasn't trying to achieve happiness. So, somebody asks here, is embracing nihilism the result of people who have zero self-esteem? It's one possible result. You can't be a nihilist and have self-esteem. Nihilism is the hatred of reality. It's the willful wanting of the destruction of reality. That is incompatible with the idea that I want to live. I want to have a great life. I am worthy of living. I am worthy of happiness. And I know that if I use my mind correctly, I will be happy. So, a precondition of nihilism is, I'd say, not zero self-esteem, negative self-esteem, a hatred of oneself. Nihilists hate themselves first, and then they hate reality second. And that's what the shooter was. He was a self-hater, but he was more than that. He hated existence. He hated the world. He had negative self-esteem. He had bad, low, pathetic self-esteem. But not everybody who has low self-esteem or negative self-esteem is going to be a nihilist. So, it's a necessary, but not sufficient condition. You need more than that to be a nihilist. You need that hatred of everything outside of you, not only hatred of yourself. That's what generates nihilism. Then I have a question. Do you think that Putin has self-esteem? No. I do not think, I don't know, of any politician who has self-esteem. Politicians in the modern world, I think George Washington had self-esteem. I think Thomas Jefferson and Madison and John Adams and those guys had self-esteem. Plenty of it. But anybody who gets often power, everybody who needs other people to give him his worth, Weinstein, Putin, Trump, all of these people have no self-esteem. They have pseudo self-esteem. They project confidence, but they are not. They're completely dependent on other people. They're completely dependent on their power over other people. Don't mistake the appearance of confidence with confidence. Don't confuse the appearance of self-confidence with self-esteem. Self-esteem means loving yourself and loving life. Nobody who loves life and loves himself wants to control other people, wants to exploit other people, wants to humiliate other people, wants to kill other people, wants to maim other people. That's not self-esteem. That's the opposite. That again is driven by some level of self-hatred, some level of self-hatred. So no, Putin does not have self-esteem. He is a little monster, a little dictator who thrives, thrives in quotes because it's not thriving as a human. He thrives on abusing and exploiting the other people. All right, and this relates to this question that I got earlier on about, is reason the only way in which we know things? Is reason our only source of knowledge? And the answer to that is, it's the only source of knowledge about the world out there. It's the only source of knowledge about the reality external to yourself. Now your emotions can teach you something about you, but even when you have an emotion and say, oh, I'm afraid, that's knowledge. I know I'm afraid. But to understand that fear, to understand where it comes from, to understand what the causes are, to understand if it's rational or not, you're back to reason. How do we know things? How do we know reality? We know it by using our senses, by observing, by accumulating perceptual data, by integrating into abstract concepts, by integrating those abstract concepts into even more abstract concepts. But it all goes down to observing facts of reality, things out there, including things about ourselves, our emotions, observing the process of our mind, our own free will. There is no other tool to know what's out there other than our eyes, our ears, our senses. And there is no other way to integrate that knowledge into concepts other than our mind, our integrating faculty. That's what reason is. So no, there's no other source for human knowledge than reason, than our rational faculty, than our rational thought. That's how we know about the world. And that's the only source of knowledge we have about the world. And that's why it's so linked to personal responsibility and self-esteem. Taking responsibility over your own life means taking responsibility for your own reason, taking responsibility for your own mind, accepting that your mind is your only means of knowledge, that you can't even rely on other people, you can't rely on anybody else. You have to decide who you can rely on and who not you rely on by using your mind, by using your reason. You have to decide what kind of life you want to live and what kind of life you don't want to live. You have to decide what kind of values you want to pursue and what kind of values you don't want to say. You have to decide on everything that relates to your life. Now, you know, I don't decide on what kind of medical treatment I'm going to get in a sense. I use experts, but I decide which experts to listen to and I don't just accept what they tell me blindly. I go do my own research, which is what the internet is so good for. You, that's what personal responsibility means. And if you are personally responsible, if you engage your mind in that way and if you recognize that you're doing that and that you are responsible for yourself and you take pride in being responsible for yourself and in achieving it, then you'll have self-esteem. Self-esteem is what you get when you act a certain way. Now, self-esteem is a value for Iron Randy was a cardinal value for me. It's a cardinal value. A value is that which you act to gain or keep. You have to act to gain it. You can't get it passively. What is the action necessary to attaining self-esteem? Reason, reason, reason and pride. You've got to be proud of yourself. When you do something good, pat yourself on the shoulder. When you do something good, say to yourself, yeah, I did something good and this is how I did something good. And this is, you know, this is the process and I want to continue to do that. Now, let me say somebody is asking the line between self-confidence and self-esteem. Self-confidence is just confidence. It's I am confident that I am able to do X. Self-esteem is much deeper than that, much broader than that. It's about I am worthy of living. I am worthy of happiness and I am confident in my mind to take care of me to achieve happiness that live as a human being. One minute. So self-confidence is required for self-esteem. But self-confidence is narrower. Self-esteem is broader, is broader. All right. Wow, covered a lot today and we got pretty philosophical here towards the end. But I think the self-esteem, we're going to talk about it more in the future. This is an important theme for Objectivism, Fine Rand, for me, for what I stand for, for what differentiates me from everybody from the other, you know, talk show radio hosts out there. I want, I want, I want to help you achieve happiness and the way I can help you is to unleash your own mind, unleash your own pride and expose you to a new way of thinking about morality, about ethics, which emphasizes the value of reason, purpose and self-esteem. All right. You're listening to your Unbrook show, the only place on the planet where you'll hear this material and we're on the Blaze radio network every Saturday, this time, this place. Talk to you next week.