 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Elect House Function podcast with Ashton Cohen. I'm Ashton Cohen, very pleased to be joined today by Yaron Brooke. Yaron is one of the most unique and deep-thinking intellectuals in the public sphere today. He's particularly interesting because he's someone who doesn't fit into the classic Democrat-Republican right-left paradigm we see in the US. So, from his perspective, I really enjoy, I think you guys will as well. Yaron is the host of the Yaron Brooks show, and he's the chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute. Yaron, thanks so much for being with me. Sure. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. I appreciate it. I want to start off with an explanation of your philosophical framework because I think it needs to be discussed. A lot of people don't talk about it, at least in the mainstream news. You're someone to describe yourself as an objectivist, which is essentially a follower of Ayn Rand's philosophy. So, for those not familiar, what is objectivism? And why is it a better way of thinking, better for society, better for individuals, than something like Marxism or socialism, which seems to be all the rage these days, particularly among the younger class, particularly among the so-called intelligentsia and the elites and our college institutions. So, objectivism is, as you said, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. The reason to follow it, the reason to take it seriously, is because it's true. Truth matters. If you care about your life, if you care about the world, then you should be a truth seeker. Hopefully, everybody's a truth seeker. I think Marxism and socialism are false. They're false, both they're impractical and they're immoral. All you have to know is a little bit of history and that should exclude anybody from being a Marxist or socialist. It is an unmitigated disaster. So, what is objectivism other than in actual detail? So, at first, I encourage people to read Ayn Rand. It's hard to describe a whole philosophy on one foot, but I will try to do that. It's a philosophy that argues that reality is what it is. It's not what you make, it's not what you wish it to be. It's not the creation of some outside consciousness. So, it is fundamentally an atheist philosophy that believes that existence exists. It's not created in prayers and wishes. Don't change it. It believes that we have the tool to know reality. There's a lot of talk out there about our senses and our valid and we don't really know what real reality is. Nobody actually lives that way. We all live assuming that we know what reality is and we have a tool to know reality and that's our senses and our reason. Our reason connects us with the actual world, with the actual reality. We are aware of the world out there. And again, we don't learn about reality from our emotions. Emotions are not tools of cognition. They're beautiful things. It's great to have strong emotions, but that's not how you learn about the world. It's not how you should make decisions about the world. And we don't learn about the world. We don't discover truths through revelation. It's not some mystical ability. You don't need to take LSD to discover the truth. You don't need to. I don't know some people claim you don't need some connection to, I don't know, some mystical power to discover the truth. The truth is available to all of us and it's available to all of us through the use of our reason. And then the only entity that actually reasons, that actually discovers truth, that is actually connected to reality is the individual. There's no collective consciousness. Any more than there's a collective stomach. You can't eat for me. You can't think for me. So thinking the responsibility is on the individual. The individual is the unit of measurement. We're not ants. We're the colonies, the unit. We are human beings where the individual can do his own thinking. And as a consequence of that, the individual's life is what matters from a moral perspective. The purpose of morality is to guide you towards life. We're not programmed to know what's good and what's bad. You know, good and bad have to be discovered. Good is that which leads to life. Bad is that which destroys life. So the morality and the objectivism is a morality of egoism. It's a morality that places your self-interest, your happiness as your moral purpose in life. So we don't believe in sacrificing other people. We don't believe in placing the wellbeing of other people above our own. We also don't believe in getting other people to sacrifice for us. You know, so we're not exploiters and we object to being exploiters or being exploited. And of course, the only political system that recognizes the validity of the individual and leaves him free to pursue his own happiness is the political, economic, social system of capitalism. That is a system that recognizes the individual rights of every individual, which means the individual freedom, your freedom to act based on your judgment in pursuit of your values in the ultimate pursuit of your happiness, you get to do what you want. And the role of the state is to protect your freedom to do so and nothing else. So we're pro-capitalism. We don't believe in socialism or any form of statism. So the classic rejoinder to that and that we hear in, you know, the law of the major institutions today, including in academia is, well, that sounds all well and good, but you know, capitalism leaves people behind. It's mean. It's not, you know, socialism brings everyone up. It helps the people who fall through the cracks. It's in that way, it's more moral because we're, you know, we're all going to, you know, sort of hold hands and take care of each other. And, you know, that's what morality is, not pursuing your self-interest. Why is capitalism and, by extension, objectivism more moral than socialism which tries to help everybody out? Well, because socialism is defining morality wrong. And at the end of the day, it doesn't help everybody out. It actually hurts everybody. The standard of morality is not the well-being of everybody. The standard of morality, morality is something you as an individual are responsible for. It's you as an individual, it applies to you. And the purpose of morality should be how to live the most successful life for you, not for other people. You are not a sacrificial animal. Why should I live for the poor? I mean, you could argue and I won't, because I do care about the poor, but you can argue, why should I care about the poor? For what purpose? My life is mine. Now, I could argue that, you know, I want people to be successful because if they're successful, my life gets better. And I do argue that. But I don't care about the poor, qua the poor. I care about them because they're human beings and their well-being enhances my well-being and living in a world and I see value in human life. So the standard of morality is not the poor. The standard of morality is you. What system is best for you? Now, it turns out that even if you're poor, the best system is capitalism. The fact is that capitalism is the only system in all of human history to bring people out of poverty. Socialism never did that. Socialism is very good at taking the wealth that capitalists have created and redistributing it, but they don't create anything. They've never brought anybody out of poverty. Every country in the world that has brought people out of poverty has done it because they've implemented a little bit of capitalism. Not a lot, but a little bit. All it takes is a little bit. And that's true across the board. Socialism suppresses economic growth. Socialism destroys economic growth. Indeed, what happens in the socialism almost every way is that whatever has been created through a little bit of capitalism is completely destroyed and countries become more poor. And more people are poor as a consequence of socialism, not less. So I would argue that the moral standard is the wrong standard, but even by their own standard, socialism is a disaster. Well, you say socialism hasn't created any wealth, but what about all the great cars and innovations that came out of the Soviet Union? Yeah, I mean, some of you, you know, Millennium's Gen X should go find a museum where they have one of those cars and you can never step foot in one of those. These are death traps if they were put on a highway. Luckily, in the Soviet Union, they didn't have real highways. So, you know, they could drive at the slow speed and if the car fell apart, nothing would happen. No, they produced nothing. They created nothing. The areas in which they seemingly progressed were areas where they stole technology from the West. There was no innovation in the Soviet Union. There was no progress. And indeed, for the average person in the Soviet Union, it was nothing but stagnation, poverty, and misery. And that's why, by the way, the Soviet Union did not allow its citizens to travel. You couldn't leave the Soviet Union because they realized that if they allowed people to travel, they would never come back. This is why in Berlin, they built a wall to prevent East Germans, communist Germans, from escaping to the West, not the other way round. I know if you listen to Marxist enough and you believe that the Marxist paradise, you think that people are escaping capitalism to go and join the socialist East Germany. No, the wall was there to prevent people from fleeing the misery, the poverty, the pathetic life that they had under communism. So, yeah. I mean, history just reinforces basically my argument that communism has produced nothing other than misery and death. Don't forget that Soviet Union is probably responsible. Yeah. I mean, more importantly, they're responsible for anywhere between, depending on the historian who read, anywhere between 30 to 100 million people dead. And that doesn't include Mao Tse-tung, who's got another 40 to 80 million people's lives on his bloody hands. Communism is the most murderous regime in all of human history. So, I have no idea how it is popular among young people, why it's attractive to young people, given the basic history, other than to tell you that your professors, your teachers, are lying to you. They're not telling you the truth. And there are a lot of people on a lot of Marxists on YouTube telling you lies. So, you've got to open your eyes. You've got to read real history. You've got to figure out what really happened in these places and generalize from it to the fact that no way has socialism ever succeeded. If the measure of success is human prosperity, it's human flourishing. Right. And that's a pretty unbelievable stat because even, I think we've all met people in their lives who have made stupid decisions or bad decisions. And once in a while, they'll work out. I mean, socialism literally has a 0% success rate. I mean, it's been tried. There was one point in, I think, what the 1960s, 1970s where the majority of the world was under communism, socialism. Yes. Absolutely. And people talk about the wars that supposed to be Western created. I mean, the communists believed in internationalizations. They brought war to everywhere they touched. They try to occupy as much land as possible. They try to internationalize it. You still have communists today who argue that the only way for communism to succeed is if every single human being on planet earth is enslaved by it and don't mistake it. Being under communism is the equivalent of slavery. Everybody is enslaved to the totalitarian leaders. So yes, in the 60s and 70s, the majority of the world was under communism. A significant majority of the world. Places like India weren't communists, but they were socialists. It's only when India abandoned socialism that it started creating some wealth and people started rising out of socialism. And of course, China, we know the story of China. It's only once Mao Zedong is dead, thank God. You know, it didn't happen earlier, but it's only once he dies does China start reverting to more, to opening up, to creating islands of freedom, islands of some capitalism. And that's when you see the economic boom. And that's when you see people rising up out of poverty in China. Right. So a billion people in what basically last 20, 30 years risen out of poverty largely because of the implementation of capital reforms. 40 years ago, about 30% of the world population was in extreme poverty. That's $2 a day or less. Today it's less than 8%. And that is all the consequence of some opening up some elements of capitalism being introduced into particularly Asian economies, but even in Africa. How do you make a distinction? So socialism and communism were terms that were basically used interchangeably throughout much of its history. Then Lenin came along and he preferred the communist label, I suppose, in order to distinguish what the Bolsheviks were bringing from the other socialist groups, other groups, which were Marxist, like the socialist label more. Obviously, Soviet Union people forget is stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. So they use socialist even in the term. So when we talk about socialism today, when you have people like AOC and Bernie and talk about socialism today, how do you make the, and they'll point to a place like Sweden or Denmark and they'll say, no, no, we don't want Venezuela and Soviet Union and North Korea. We want Sweden and Denmark. What's a rejoinder to that? And the prime minister of Denmark comes out the next day and says, we're not socialists. Don't pretend that we're socialists because we're not. And of course, Denmark, Sweden, Norway are not socialist countries at all. They're not capitalist, unfortunately, but they're not socialist either. They have, yes, they have strong welfare state. But in terms of business, businesses are privately owned. Socialism businesses are publicly owned, owned by the state, owned by the employees. And they are less regulated than the United States of America. On economic freedom index, a place like Sweden and Denmark rank higher than the US. So yeah, I want the United States to be like Denmark, too. I want less regulations. I want less government intervention and economy. I want, how about, I want a balanced budget. I want the government to spend less money, which they do in Sweden and Denmark as a percent of GDP. So Norway has no debts, right? Well, Norway is cheating because Norway, of course, has oil. So Norway has massive, massive surpluses because of, because of the oil. But Sweden and Denmark have very little debt. These are relatively healthy economies. They tax highly, but then they leave people alone. They leave them alone socially, but they also leave them alone economically. So these are free countries. They're not capitalist, but they're not socialist either. So Bernie needs an education and he knows better. He knows what he really wants. It's not Denmark. He knows what he really wants as Venezuela, but he won't, he won't actually admit it. So what is socialism? Socialism is where the state owns the means of production. Now, sometimes it owns it directly. Other times it creates a scenario where unions or employees own the means of production, but the state protects them, protects their ownership of the means of production. So private ownership is basically banned. So socialism is that state in which private ownership of the means of production, private ownership generally is discouraged. Communism is taking that to its logical extreme. Communism is in which all property is owned by the state in which all decisions are centralized to a state authority. So communism tends to be totalitarian. Socialism has a varieties. So communism, I consider one variety of socialism. Nazism, you are mentioning the USSR as socialism, it's title. What is Nazism? It's nationalist socialist. So Nazism is a form of socialism. Fascism is a form of socialism. You could argue that Sweden in the 1960s and 70s was a form of socialism. Many of the industries in Sweden were publicly owned. They redistributed huge amounts of wealth. The government intervened in everything. They got very poor in Sweden, or they didn't get very, it wasn't very successful in Sweden. That's why they abandoned that. So in the 90s and 2000s, Sweden has gone through massive deregulation and a reduction in government spending. Nobody talks about that, certainly not Bernie Sanders. But the experiment even Sweden had with a little bit of more socialism failed. They almost went bankrupt in 1994 as a consequence of government spending. So yeah, I go back to the fact that socialism, there are all kinds of varieties. Now popular is democratic socialism. Socialism can be democratic for a while, but socialism almost always leads to more authoritarianism or the abandonment of socialism. There's no socialist democratic equilibrium. They always tilt in one direction or the other. You bring up a couple of interesting points that they're never talked about. So fascism is a sort of derivative of socialism as well. Mussolini, who basically created fascism, was a socialist, a writer of a socialist magazine. Yeah, and he believed that the socialist were incompetent and couldn't achieve their goals. And he basically created his own political party and created the term fascism. Because as a more practical form of socialism, as something, a socialism that could be achieved. And the way he did that is he fused socialism with statism, with nationalism. He fused statism with nationalism to create fascism. So fascism is just socialism plus nationalism. And in fascism, what the state does is it doesn't take control of businesses. It doesn't try to own the businesses. But what it does is it controls them. So it doesn't own the means of production. But it 100% controls the means of production. It basically tells business owners what they can or cannot do. And you could argue that the United States today is in some sense a mixture of fascism and socialism. So it's much more fascist than socialist. So what you have today is massive regulations in the United States, massive dictates on businesses what they can or cannot do, who they can or cannot hire, how much they cannot charge, what they can or cannot produce. And in that sense, the US government is much more fascist than socialist. The US does not own the means of production for the most part. But it does control them. You think Antifa realizes that? Because they claim to be anti-fascist. You think they know what fascism means? They don't know what fascism is. And of course, they're fascists or they're socialists, which is the same. I mean, there's this notion that some of socialism is good and fascism is bad. Fascism is bad, but so is socialism. There is no difference between a Nazi and a communist. They are both evil ideologies that have resulted in death, slaughter, destruction. So I don't consider there to be any significant differences between communists and Nazis. I agree. I think what's worth noting also in passing, because this is never really discussed either, is after Hitler bailed Mussolini out when he was almost overthrown the first time, he then set up the Socialist Italian Republic, essentially, was what they called it. So it looks like he never really gave up on those on those socialist sympathies. And this is the creator of fascism. People love to forget. I mean, people like Marxist will blame World War II on capitalism, right? But people forget the World War II started with an alliance between Hitler and Stalin to divide Poland. And World War II started with Hitler invading Poland from the west and Stalin invading Poland from the east. To say that World War II was started by Hitler in a sense is wrong because it was started by Hitler and Stalin. And the communists are just as responsible for World War II as Hitler is now. Hitler then turned against Stalin. Strategic mistake for him to open a second front like that before finishing up the British. But the idea that communism is peaceful is one of the most bizarre ideas in all of human history. Absolutely. There could be little facts left out. With objectivist philosophy or your view, are taxes ever acceptable? No, because coercion is never acceptable. So force is never acceptable. For me to come to you and force you to do something, put a gun against your head or drag you off to jail if you don't comply with what I tell you is unacceptable. The only reason to use force is in self-defense. The only reason for the government to use force is to prevent you from violating somebody else's rights, to prevent you from using force or to retaliate against you once you have already used force. Taxes to the extent that the government needs revenue. And in my world, ideal world, the government would be a lot smaller, probably 90% smaller than it is today. So it wouldn't need that much revenue. But the extent to which it needs revenue would have to find ways to generate that revenue that are not coercive, that do not involve force, that do not are not mandatory. So there would have to be some kind of fee for services or some kind of voluntary taxation. Interesting. I want to turn to the, we talked about Marxism. We have, obviously, as you're familiar, we have this sort of new philosophy, which is what we can call maybe wokeism, CRT, the intersexuality movement. Do you see is how did this sort of come about? It's obviously taken over major industries. It's all the time in the media and the press. It's ubiquitous among college campuses, this kind of racialist ideology. Is this a form of Marxism? Is it neo-Marxist? Is it semi-Marxist? How do you make sense of this? And where do you think it came from? And do you think it's attached to the Marxism? Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's particularly useful to think of it as Marxist. I think it's from the same intellectual tradition as Marx. It's definitely influenced by Marx. It's definitely picked up certain Marxism's attitudes and terminology. But look, Marxism has failed. It failed intellectually. It failed philosophically. There was, in a sense, an attempt to revive Marxism and to reorient it that ultimately resulted in postmodernism, which I think is far more the source of this stuff than directly Marxism. Marx was very, very concerned about economic classes. He was very, very concerned about creating this utopia that had everything to do with the dictatorship of the proletarian, ultimately. And he also envisioned the utopian, which people were rich and people did well and people pursued happiness. It's a bizarre utopian. It's detached from any kind of real reality. But he had certain goals and he was striving towards achievement of something that was very, I think, different than what CRT is and what intersectionality is and what all these things are. Marx himself was a racist and didn't particularly like Jews. Certainly he didn't like Jews, even though he was from a Jewish family. He didn't like Slavs. He didn't like Africans. I mean, he didn't like a lot of people. He wanted, I guess, white blonde proletarian. That was his ideal. But his concern was economic. What people call cultural Marxism is not really Marxism because it doesn't really relate to the economic class system. It's egalitarian in a way that even makes Marx looks good. I think the philosophy that dominates today's intellectuals is far worse than Marxism. It has no positive goals. Its main thrust is destruction and tearing stuff down and putting people down and basically destroying. There's no utopia. There's no goal that we're heading towards. There's no some wonderful place. There's no recognition of the values that capitalism created, which Marx had. Marx wrote some of the best defenses of capitalism as an economic system and said, but it plays itself out and what will replace it is socialism. But he has a whole thing about how, yes, only capitalism people had a property. Capitalism was inevitable as the thing that replaces feudalism. CRT, all these things are basically built on hate, not on anything more than that. We talked earlier about morality. I think CRT certainly intersectionality are the culmination of a reverse morality. If you think about Christian morality, then Christian morality is about its core. It's about the need to sacrifice for others. The highest moral action that you can commit, the one that will make you a saint, is to die or to achieve extreme poverty or to suffer some horrible outcome while serving other people. Your purpose in life is to live for others, take Mother Teresa, take every saint in every museum in a painting, arrows sticking through them. They're all about dying in the service of other people. Which other people? What's the standard by which we should determine whether you should sacrifice for them or not? Well, how oppressed are they? How poor are they? How miserable are they? How suffering are they? The more suffering, the more you should sacrifice to them. Now, what does intersectionality do? Well, it creates a pyramid of suffering. It ranks us based on how oppressed supposedly we are. Then it demands from everybody at the upper regions of the pyramid to sacrifice for people at the other regions of the other pyramid. Of course, it blames us. It has original sin. That's another thing that intersectionality takes from Christianity. We're all sinners, particularly if you're born with white skin. I guess I'm Jewish, I have a little bit of an intersectionality before I get some credit because Jews are being oppressed. Basically, the whole idea is the more seemingly oppressed you are, the more miserable you are, the more you failed, the more poor you are, the more suffering you are, the more virtuous you are, the more you deserve my sacrifice. The more successful I am, the more sinful I must have been, the more of an oppressor I obviously am. If you're the wrong color though, right? Because if you're a black, transsexual, non-able-bodied and you're worth a billion dollars and you're still okay, it doesn't matter how successful you are. Well, you're somewhat okay. You're not quite as okay as if you are black, transsexual, what did you call it? Non-able-bodied. Non-able-bodied and you're poor, then you're definitely more okay on this intersectionality criteria. So intersectionality does have a wealth parameter, like Marx, but it doesn't have, that is the dominant parameter. So what we have today is altruism taken to the extreme. Altruism is the philosophy philosophical term coined by Augustine Comte, the French philosopher. It is about the purpose of life is to live for the sake of others and the more miserable the other is, the more you owe them, the more successful you are, the more you should be put down. It is a combination of that with racism, the identification of people based on the color of their skin and on their race, with a heavy dose of nihilism and that is basically nihilism, what characterizes nihilism is hatred of success, hatred of good, hatred of the world, really, hatred of life and desire to see everything good in the world destroyed. So when you combine all those, what you get is the modern left. And I would argue a little bit of the modern right as well. So I don't want to come across it just anti-left because I have a lot of criticism of the right as well. I want to explore that in a second, but I'm so glad that you mentioned that you almost sympathize more with pure Marxism than the CRT stuff because I made this argument to a friend of mine, a left-wing friend of mine, and I was like, I can't believe I'm saying this because as we just spoke about, Communism is one of the most evil philosophies ever implemented and promulgate them on humanity and responsible for tens of millions of deaths. And I was saying, I actually have more sympathy for the Chinese CCP who basically, as evil as they are, and I don't want to whitewash anything like that, but they have an goal in mind. They want what's best for China and the Han Chinese people and they do want to incorporate everyone into this culture. And with the CRT post-modern stuff, it's like, well, no, if you're born a certain way, you have no chance. It's not going to work out for you, at least with pure economic philosophy like Marxism, you can always come on board with this. You're irredeemable. Real Marxism is irredeemable as well because real Marxism, you're born into a class, you have no free will, you're determined, history is determined, you're determined. Indeed, what Marx doesn't tell you, but is obvious, is that in order to achieve his utopia, anybody born a bourgeoisie will have to be killed because you can't change. It's not like you could change or you have to go to reeducation camps. So look, I don't want to whitewash anything about communism. It's evil through and through. There's only one thing more evil than communism. That is modern nihilistic egalitarianism. And egalitarianism is the idea that we should all be equal in outcome. Even the Marxists didn't pretend that that was possible. So, you know, the best example of egalitarianism and the ultimate place to which CRT and all these other intersectionality and the rest of them are going is what the Cameroons did in Cambodia. The Cameroons in Cambodia were less communists than they were committed egalitarians. What they wanted is equality of outcome. They didn't care about means of production, all of that, that didn't matter. They just wanted everybody to be equal. So if you had an education and somebody else didn't have an education, how do we make you equal? Well, we can. So we kill everybody who has an education. If you're smarter than everybody else, how do we make you equal? Well, we can't. So we just kill everybody who's smart. If you're a hard worker and everybody else is lazy, how do we make you equal? Well, we kill everybody who's a hard worker. The Cameroons killed 40% of their own population, 2 million, 5 million people in Cambodia, all in the name of equality, of outcome, or to use a modern phrase, which I think is distorted, but a modern phrase, all in the name of equity. They killed 40% of their own people in the name of equity, in the name of equality of outcome, in the name of equity, the way the left today uses it. And nobody cares. Why not look at what equality of outcome actually leads to? It leads to death and destruction. Nothing else. No good comes of it. This is not about leveling the playing field, which I don't think you can. This is about equality of outcome. And equality of outcome, only death can result of that. And that's why the modern egalitarians are much worse even than communists. And that's saying a lot because communism is about the lowest you can get in life. That is saying something. And I remember reading a passage about the Cameroons. They even killed people with glasses because they were they were a sign of the intellectual class. Yeah, you could read. Usually glasses meant you could read or you went to school, you studied or something. They killed anybody with glasses was shot. This is the killing fields of Cambodia. You can read about it. Interestingly, not basically never talked about in schools. I never even learned about until Long Paso was done with school. I learned a lot about Marx in college. I probably read I probably had seven classes that approached Marxism and his theories, but never about that kind of stuff. I want to talk to you about the the going into the whole woke capitalism stuff and what your view on that is. So basically, and I saw you discuss it in one of your previous podcasts about I think Black Rock is kind of one of the most emblematic institutions about this. So Black Rock, basically even Bloomberg called them the fourth branch of government. So they are the largest asset manager in the world, I think seven trillion assets. They are the principal shareholder of, you know, hundreds, thousands of companies, a significant portion of S&P 500. They were even given were even put in charge of the response to the most the most recent pandemic, the coronavirus pandemic. And they are pushing this whole ESG thing, environmental, social governance, basically almost compelling these other private companies to be what they call stakeholders rather than pursue profits rather than being shareholder focused. And because they're an enormous wealth, they're enormous power. They're the largest shareholder in so many companies. They're the fourth branch of government. As Bloomberg said, they get lent money at a much less interest rate than any of us can get. And they can do all sorts of things with that. So how do we make sense of this? And obviously, we can go into like the whole Disney and Nike and all these institutions pushing this sort of woke agenda. What can we do from a policy standpoint? If anything, how do you make sense of that? Well, it's not clear that you can't do much of a policy perspective. I think the best thing you can do is a policy perspective shrink the size of government. Remember, BlackRock is as big as it is not because it has competed in a capitalist market and been the winner and grown this big. It is this big because it is politically connected. The reason it's so big is that it manages many of the pension plans of public employees. Public employees shouldn't have pension plans. They should have 401Ks like the rest of the private sector, like the private sector. And the problem with these pension plans is that they're politically motivated. That is, take the culpers, which is the pension plan of state workers in California. On that board, on the board that decides the investment policies of culpers, sits the governor of the state of California. It is a political entity. It is not a financial entity. And as a consequence, politics and finance now intersect and as government grows, more employees have bigger and bigger pensions. Their role in putting pressure on these companies grows and you get more capitalism. It's a political agenda circumventing politics, going around politics. Now, if I had my money managed by BlackRock, which luckily I don't, but if I had it, I would sue them. And I think people should sue them. This is how you fix this problem. I would sue them because their job is not to promote a social agenda. Their job is to make me as much money as they can. That's why I hired them. That's why they're managing my money. They're fiduciaries. They have a fiduciary responsibility to the people who have invested in their 401ks to maximize their wealth, not pursue some social agenda. I think shareholders should sue Disney. I think shareholders should sue Exxon. I think shareholders should sue all these companies under the guise that management is no longer exercising its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. And instead, I think shareholders should organize and try to replace the board, try to fire the CEO. That's the only way to fight this. If you fight it through government, you are going to give government way too much power, power that will be used against capitalism ultimately. So don't go using government in order to solve your problem, solve it through the marketplace. And we have a court system for that. And we can fire CEOs. It's actually doable. And BlackRock, we should organize the fire of the CEO of BlackRock. We have to do as investors. We should sue them. What would you do in reference to the big tech companies who have this insane moat, probably the most valuable, not probably the most valuable data of all time, so the most powerful entities of all time, more powerful than most world governments. They can confuse the power that anybody has, the power in a free market to the power that government has. Power has a government. This is the difference between really important philosophical point. It difference between political power and economic power. Governments have political power. Political power is the power of a gun. Political power, you don't do what I say. I put you in jail. Economic power is the power associated with voluntary interaction. I don't want to deal with you. I walk away. You can't force me to deal with you. I can't force you to deal with me. I can't pull out a gun. I can't send you to jail. I can't send you to prison. I either deal with you or I don't. Anybody out there, and I know this is a shock, and I know this will come as a surprise, anybody out there can go to the Facebook app on their iPhone and delete it. You should try it sometime. Your life will probably improve, and you'll suddenly discover that Facebook has no power over you. Zero, zilch. You can delete it anytime you want. Now, you can't delete. You can't not pay your taxes. Somebody will show up and take you, drag you off to jail. You can't not abide by the laws as the government has passed them, no matter what the law is. You'll get a fine. If you don't pay the fine, you'll get dragged to jail. But you can decide to disassociate yourself with Facebook. Can I make a response to that point? I don't want to see your thought on that. So with regards to something like Facebook or Google, we know that they can actually shift significantly public opinion, and there's been a slice by this about elections and all sorts of things around the world, particularly, you know, they can they can have all your all the horrible bad coverage of you posted to the top and then push everything else out or center everything else out. So and this kind of gets back to the point of the sort of fusing of the financial world and the political world. Does that not worry you or change your opinion that I don't like Facebook. I don't like a lot of these companies. I don't like what they do, but I don't view that as the threat. You know, the threat is the response. The threat is trying to regulate big tech. The threat is because then you get the government involved in what's going to appear on your stream. You're going to get the government involved in what is considered hate speech and what is not. And, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if I was deemed a hate speaker by the government. No, I mean, I'd rather be banned by Facebook a million times and give the power to the government because the government can put me in jail. There's a big difference between denying access to Facebook and putting me in jail. You know, if I don't use Facebook for the rest of my life, my life will not be any worse for right. But what about what about the connection between so obviously I'll give you an example. So Congress has pressured Facebook and Google to do certain things and they've done those things, right? And there's also, you know, a sharing of let's say there's a sharing of sense of data that they've I agree. So there's a real problem. But the problem is government. The problem is government. So the solution is not to attack Facebook. The solution is not to regulate Facebook and give government even more power. The solution is to get government out of the business of business. The solution is to advocate for government to leave Facebook alone. I mean, I've done many shows on my podcast. Lamblasting, Senator, the Democrats and the Republicans for even bringing tech companies in front of Congress. It's not a Congress's business. Why are they? I mean, who are these people interrogating the CEOs of some of the most productive companies in the world? A bunch of political leeches, you know, senators that have nothing else to do in life but to try to destroy business and try to destroy stuff. Who have they ever employed? What have they ever created? What have they ever built? And they set up their questioning business practices. If I was CEO, and I know I'll never be one partially because of this, of a big company, I would refuse to go. And if I was subpoenaed and had to go there and they asked me a question, I would ask them, why is that any of your business? Why is it the business of Washington? How my company is managed or how my company is run or how much I pay my employees or what I do? It's none of your business. And to the extent that you make it your business, you're the ones in violation of the Constitution. You're the ones in violation of the principle of individual rights. But you don't know even what you're talking about. I would ask them a few technical questions about how Facebook is run and just watch the ignorant faces of those senators. You notice that whenever they question CEOs, they never let them finish your sentence. They never let them actually answer a question because they're not interested. This is just show trials. This is like the witch hunts of the Salem witch hunts. It's no different. I give it zero credibility. If we care that politics is interfering with big tech, we should be on full on attack against the politics. Not against big tech. Yeah. I mean, just a quick point on that. I remember seeing them brought before Congress and one of the Republican congressmen was asking the Google CEO. So you have the Google CEO before you and he's like, well, how come all my campaign newsletters go to people's spam folders? These are the kinds of questions they ask. And yes, the questions of an idiot, which is what most politicians, I mean, I've met a lot of politicians. I met senators. I met congressmen. I used to go to their offices in DC when I'd visit DC and stuff. And at some point I told my staff, never again, please don't get me meetings with any politicians. It just is the most depressing thing in the world. They're not smart. There's nothing special about them. They are sleazy. All they want is to know what they can do for you or in other words, what you can do for them. They're selling favors. They're intellectual zeros. And I don't want to have anything to do with them. I think there might be a handful of exceptions, both on the left and the right. But most politicians are not worth Iota of my time anyway. And I don't think any of our time. They will do what we want in the end. So if you want to change the world, forget about politicians. Change the electorate. If you change the electorate, the politicians will change because I want to suck up to the electorate. So the people we have today are just it's beyond pathetic. I mean, we are the Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's of the world, not in Washington DC, running big tech, maybe that's the caliber of people running big tech, but not the caliber of people running Washington. That's for sure. There are not people who are actually willing to do the bold things that are required. They're not thinkers, is my point. They can't use your mind. At least in Silicon Valley, people are creating and building and producing stuff. Maybe not the CEOs of the big tech companies, maybe not all of them, but they're changing the world. What do politicians in Washington do? Try to figure out how to tax me and how to regulate me, how to control me, how to destroy what I've built. With respect to just following up on the on the Google point, would it ever worry you? Could it ever get so large and affect public opinion so much that you'd ever be worried about the influence Google has on, let's say, on elections, on people's opinions, because they have such an immense amount of power in being able to curate the kinds of news, the kinds of stories that are shown to people. Would there ever be something that would ever get too far in that direction, or do you just believe that eventually new neutral services that command the respect that people are going to replace them? You know, people always say, oh, today all the news is the same. It's like, you guys have no clue what you're talking about. So I grew up in the 70s, the 60s and 70s, and in the 1970s in the United States, so basically what? Five major newspapers, three networks, three news networks, no Fox, no CNN, just three basic news, no talk radio. That's it. All there was was about five major newspapers and three networks. What do you think the politics of the television networks were? No, there's such a left. They were all left. What do you think the politics of the five top newspapers were? Maybe the Washington Journal was a little center-right, but the other four were center-left, some very left, right? And what was the alternative media? It didn't exist. Maybe some, you know, yellow journalism here in New York Post, maybe some other things, but nobody read them, right? Today, yeah, Google's massive. But so is Twitter. And you can find all kinds of voices on Twitter. So is YouTube. You can find all kinds of voices on YouTube. You can create your own voice. If you wanted to start a newspaper in 1975, yeah, right. And nobody's going to listen to you. If you wanted to get your voice published, you'd have to get an op-ed into the New York Times. Yeah. Good luck with that, right? Today, you want to, you know, you can start a sub-stack. I subscribed to like 20 different sub-stacks of different voices with different views. You've got Facebook, you've got Twitter, you've got Google, but then you've got all kinds of little alternatives, whether it's Apollo and I don't know, Mind and all kinds of others, marginal. But then you've got sub-stack. And then you've got, I don't know, 10 news outlets, including some wacky Republican ones that are supposedly, you know, far right ones, all the way to wacky, you know, Russia today. You've got, you've got the Russians broadcasting into the United States, right? And everything in between CNN, Fox, all the, everything in between. You've got, maybe you've got three main newspapers, but then you've got all these other alternative platforms online. There's more sources of information available to people today than ever before. And the fact is that if you don't want to use Google, you can use other servers. You can even use ones that are completely anonymous, like, what is it, DuckDuckGo or something like that? I don't know, something like that. I'm sorry for using that more often, because I've noticed, I mean, I would, I'll search for exact bylines of articles, exact house articles, and they won't show up if it doesn't fit a certain political agenda on Google anymore. And this is, this is a thing last couple years. It was not like this before. Now you go to DuckDuckGo, you talk in the same thing, and it pops up immediately. Yeah. And you can use Bing and you can use other things. So, no, what worries me is what we talked about earlier. What worries me is the connection between politics and these companies. It's the pressure the politicians put on them. It's the government getting more involved with big tech. Imagine a regulator that decides what, you know, bad speeches, what hate speech is. That's what scares me. The more government gets involved, if it was just the marketplace, we have more alternatives than ever in terms of the voices we can listen to. And I mean, you couldn't have done a, or what do you call the conspiracy theory out there? The Trump supporter's conspiracy theory, the January 6th thing? Yeah, QAnon. The QAnon. Yeah. You couldn't have done QAnon 30 years ago. Now, because of the Internet, you can do it in spite of the fact that Google controls everything. You can still do QAnon. So, you know, let's not pretend. We always have a tendency to think it's never been worse than today. And when it comes to communication, it's never been better than today. What's one thing or the thing that you're most hopeful about going forward, particularly in United States, but could be in the global scales while going forward? What's something that gives you a lot of hope for the future? The Internet does. And I know this is like counterintuitive to most people, but the Internet today allows you to be able to express an opinion, have it leverage over gazillions of people. The challenge, of course, is to stand out. The challenge is to differentiate because you're competing against a lot of other messages. But good ideas, I believe, went out in the long run. If 10 years ago, I wanted to broadcast my ideas to the world 20 years ago, it was very difficult. I had to use conventional media to do it, very expensive, very hard. Today, at a marginal cost of zero, I can put up as many videos as I want on YouTube. They haven't banned me yet. And I can access people all over the world, and I do. You know, and with social media, I can leverage that. I can use it to advertise my videos. I can use it to let the world know. I think it's technology is the fact that the world is more connected today than it's ever been before. Good ideas will ultimately rise to the top. They will dominate bad ideas. They would crush the bad ideas, and that's how we win. That's why I'm so concerned about government control over the Internet. It's because government has no incentive to allow good ideas to rise to soaps. Yaron Brook, thank you so much. It's a fascinating discussion. Really appreciate you having it coming on. Following you on Twitter, it's Yaron Brook. If you're on Brook, just go to YouTube, Yaron Brook, and my website, Yaronbrookshow.com. And yeah, just Google me. I'm the only Yaron Brook in the world. So if you Google me, Google still has to present my stuff, because there's nothing else that comes up under Yaron Brook. That's it. So there's a ton of content out there. Don't believe everything you read about me, but only the good stuff. Only the good stuff. Yeah. All right. Well, really appreciate you coming on. Absolutely. My pleasure. This was fun.