 Hi everybody! This is Gatsad. I'm very much looking forward to bringing you this chat that I had earlier this morning with Yaron Brooke, a truly all-encompassing chat. If you do watch it and if you appreciate all of the sizable effort and time commitment that it takes to provide you with such content, I do hope that you'll consider supporting my efforts through my Patreon and or PayPal accounts. Okay guys, a few months ago I appeared on his show and now he's been gracious enough to accept my reciprocal invitation to come on mine. We've got Yaron Brooke on the show. How are you doing Yaron? I'm doing well. How about you, Gatsad? Good, good. Thank you. I'm pronouncing it in the English way. Would it be Yaron if it were in Hebrew or how would you do? Yaron. Yaron, okay. For those of you who don't know this gentleman, he is the Chairman of the Born of the Ein Rand Institute and let me just list for you here his books. Free market revolution. How Ein Rand's idea can end big government. Equal is unfair. America's misguided fight against income inequality and in pursuit of wealth, the moral case for finance. Did I miss any other important ones or are we good? Those are the big three. Those are the big three. The trilogy. So I thought what we talked before coming on the show about how we would like to structure this conversation. I think we both agreed that there's enough stuff keeping our attention on current events that we could probably fill a couple of hours. So we'll just start off with some of the current events and see where it takes us. What do you think? Yeah, that'd be fun. Alright, so let's start with the Pittsburgh attack. For those of you who don't know, it should matter because it's a heinous attack whether you're Jewish or not. But we're both Jewish yet I think you hinted at the fact that what I'm going to ask you next, we might end up having different opinions on it. What do you think about the accusations levied against Donald Trump that his rhetoric is directly responsible for the Pittsburgh attack? Well, obviously, nobody's directly responsible for the Pittsburgh attack except the attacker, right? There's full moral responsibility on the bastard, the evil bastard who did this. I mean, he was trying to do something if you follow his tweets. I mean, he was an anti-Semite who was just ready to go and do something. So he bears full 100% moral responsibility to it. I do, though, believe that the culture that we live in right now, the kind of attitudes, the rhetoric that encourages these people to come out of the woodwork. It encourages them to be bolder than they otherwise would be. And it increases their anger and frustration, the tribalism that exists today in America politically. And I blame Donald Trump partially for that. I blame, of course, the left. I left the primary responsibility primarily because I don't think we'd have a Donald Trump if not for the left. I think Donald Trump is kind of a backlash to identity politics and the vulgarity and the violence of the left. And many Americans going enough is enough. We're going to have our own same type on the way. There are a number of issues that Donald Trump makes a big deal out of that I think are incite people. Again, I don't think it's directly inciting. Again, the moral responsibility is always on the person. But the fact that our culture has become more violent, our political discourse has become more violent, when Donald Trump calls the media the enemy of the people, when he I think creates a hysterical attitude towards a caravan of 7,000 migrants who maybe 1,000 will arrive on the border, which is below what usually arrive every day at the border. But suddenly we have to send troops to the border and there's a kind of a panic around it and there's a national hysteria around it. I think all of this encourages an emotionalism in the culture, a culture that responds emotionally. Our president responds emotionally. Our intellectuals are all emotionalists. The academia is all emotionalists. We see the Kavanaugh, which was all driven by emotion. Forget facts, forget evidence, it's all about emotion. We live in an emotionalist culture to which Donald Trump encourages, supports, throws fuel on a fire. And I think we're going to see a more violent political world out there as a consequence of this kind of rhetoric. See, I mean, it's fine. I buy a lot of what you're saying. I guess my main concern would be what was sort of the first cause of the hysteria. So in other words, Donald Trump to me can engage in some inflammatory rhetoric, a rhetoric that is not quite as presidential and tempered as one would like him to have. But I see it as he is reacting to the zeitgeist of hysteria that already exists. So in a sense, in my view, he is doing the following. He's walking down an alley, not hoping to be violent. But then if somebody accosts him and is violent to him, then he responds violently and then people say, but look at this guy, he's violent, but he's responding to that violence. So I think that if people were maybe a bit more fair to him, if the mainstream media maybe were not quite as hysteric, if our intellectuals were not as quite collective, munch-housen, you know, it's nuclear holocaust because Donald Trump has become president, maybe he would be a bit gentler. Do you think there is merit to this possibility? No, I don't think Donald Trump is gentle and I don't think he was elected to be gentle. You know, he was elected as part of the zeitgeist and the zeitgeist is a combative, you know, the media is what it is. It didn't change with the Donald Trump election. It's always been biased. It's just Donald Trump brings it out more so in them than we've seen in the past. And to some extent, deservingly so. I mean, I do not like anything about Donald Trump. I mean, he's coarse. He's not thoughtful. He's not rational. He's a complete and utter pragmatist. He's short term and he should be criticized. And the media goes overboard. I agree. But it goes overboard by the same proportion given the character of Donald Trump that it has in the past. And I generally think people exaggerate the world of the media today. I mean, if you think about the media, the power of the networks, the power of Fox and CNN and so on is so much less than the power of the three network was when Ronald Reagan was elected, right? When Ronald Reagan was elected, they all hated his guts. They made fun of him constantly. Saturday night would not stop making fun of Ronald Reagan. And it didn't matter. Ronald Reagan stayed a gentleman and Ronald Reagan stayed a powerful force to the good, you know, mostly. And he got reelected. He got elected once and got reelected. Today you have God's God on on on YouTube. You have the Rubin on YouTube. You have Joe Peterson. You have so many voices everywhere that the power of the media is being diminished dramatically. And yet, you know, we still make this huge deal about the media. So no, I think I think there are real problems with Trump and his rhetoric. I think he was elected in order to do this. I don't think he's disappointing his fans. The people who voted for him, he's living up to expectations. But I think he is a symbol of the crudeness with which now the right that the right has adopted in addition to the left. And he's taking it to the next level. And I think that next level is very dangerous because one could only imagine what would happen when it's taken to the next level. Right. I mean, this is a progression. This is indeed a slippery slope. He has authoritarian tendencies, just like Barack Obama had. Just again, he's taking it a little bit to the next level and the next guy will take it a little bit more. And it the whole phenomena scares me particular when, you know, he doesn't tell his supporters to go be violent. But he kind of makes fun when they do and he thinks lightly of it. He talks lightly of body slamming a journalist by a congressman. Now, a lot of people do that, right? But he's the president of the United States. I mean, there is a significance to being president. There's a moral responsibility to being president. And we've never had a president who takes that more responsibility so lightly as Trump. So I do think he deserves criticism. And I think it's important that some of us who are perceived to be on the right. I don't consider myself on the right exactly, but I consider myself on a third dimension. But those of us who are perceived on the right criticize him because otherwise there's no corrective mechanism. Otherwise, he's only criticized on the left and therefore nobody takes him seriously. See, I get the feeling I mentioned this recently. I appeared on Greg Gutfeld's show and I'll be discussing the point that I'm about to make next in my forthcoming book. So in psychology of persuasion and advertising, for example, there is this model called the elaboration likelihood model, which basically says that when you're trying to persuade people, you could engage them through one of two routes of persuasion, either through the central route or the peripheral route. Central route is I give you cognitive justifications as to why you should buy my product. Here are the seven reasons why my mutual fund is superior. Peripheral cues would be you just show a beautiful woman riding on a horse. For example, for a perfume ad, which is a hedonic product, you're not going to say here are the 18 physiological reasons according to Harvard Chemist, right? So depending on the type of product category, you will engage a different, if you like, persuasive system. Well, I argue that much of the hatred toward Trump is because the peripheral cues associated to Trump, his style, his manner of speaking, the way he holds himself is very unattractive. It's what I call an aesthetic injury to the highfalutin, you know, ivory tower intellectual types. It's not so much the content of what he says because it's not as though Barack Obama or George Bush or Bill Clinton ever said something that had me arrested in their brilliance. They all say profoundly idiotic platitudes that really cater to the average eight year old, except that one of them says them with a lot of grace and clasp Barack Obama, while the other one is a bully brawler from Queens or wherever he's from. So could it not be as simple as most of us don't have the time to engage cognitively with all of the points that politicians make. So we use peripheral cues. What do you think about this possibility? I think that's partially true. But again, there's consequences to that. So I think because these peripheral cues generate a particular response. And I think the brutishness with which he often expresses himself brings out some of the brutishness in his followers. And so I think the negative consequences to that. But I also think there is something unique about Trump. He doesn't care in a way he lies purposefully. They all do granted they all do, but he doesn't care that you know he's lying. That is, truth has no relevance in his in the context. He is purely and he said this in the 60 minute interview. He said this about something he said about Ford. But this is this is true of everything he does. He said, what does it make? We want, right? So to him, victory is everything and justifies will justify anything. And even even the crudest kind of. So there's something unique in his willingness to be out there and say, he doesn't say this, but he implies it. I lie. I'll say anything. Right now he's saying we're going to have a tax cut before the midterm election. Nobody, that's impossible. That's purely impossible. But he says it without embarrassment, without any, he's never going to apologize for it in a way that no other politician, whatever that we brought out this, everybody lies, but now the lies are so, you know, it's a new dimension for lying. And he, he is a, he's a pragmatist who's proud of it. I'm willing to do whatever to achieve my goal. Everything goes and I'm not going to apologize for that. That's, that's a new phenomenon in American politics. So he's the alpha consequentialist, basically. Oh yeah. No. Absolutely. In a, in a short term consequentialist, it's not about long term consequences. It's purely about short term consequences. It's about how he, what he defines as wins. Right. That is, that is the consequence that needs to be derived. I would argue that a lot of what he does is quite damaging long term, but short term, he gets his wins and he might do, electorally, he might do much better than people expect as a consequence of the fact that Americans want these short term wins. Maybe I'm putting you on the spot, but any predictions as to the upcoming midterm elections, both in terms of the house and the Senate races? I mean, I'm pretty pathetic at these things. So, you know, I, I mean, clearly the Republicans will keep the Senate. I think it'll be a shock if they don't. They'll probably, I think it would be surprising if they don't pick up a couple of seats in the Senate. You know, this is the year in a, in a normal year, you would think they could come close to 60. Because all the contested races are in Democratic defended seats in, in states, Trump won. So they really, anything less than something like 58, 56 is a bad year in the Senate for a while, because they're never going to have a year like this again. So they could have come close to 60. So that's in the house, you know, I have to go with the odds and odds that the house will, that the Democrats will win the house. But I think it'll be by a small margin. So I don't think it'll be a massive. Now, granted, you know, the last week or so has not been good for Republicans. I think the bomb thing and the, the Pittsburgh thing have just, have just reduced the energy around Republicans going out where the caravan really fed. Him talking about transgender stuff really fed the Republicans going out there. So, you know, these things are so hard to call, but I think that I am pretty sure Democrats will take the house, but by a smaller margin than the Democrats expect. I mean, I think I would agree with this Senate, state Republican House flips to Democrats. I think I'll, I'll sign up with that prediction. Yeah. And I don't think it'll be by such a large margin that the Democrats feel like they have a mandate now to do crazy stuff. So I think I don't think the consequences are going to be as horrific as if they win 60 seats in the Senate and 60 additional seats in the Senate. And then they think, okay, they've got a mandate to go after Trump. And so we'll see what happens, but I think that'll be more moderate than expected. So the next two issues in a sense relate to one another. And I think you mentioned one of them very briefly, the birthright citizenship issue and the immigration. Let's, let's drill down on each. So what's your position on the birthright citizenship? Before you answer, let me just say that I did a very quick search to get a sense of what it is around the world. What's the, and I haven't yet fully confirmed this. I just did a very quick, you know, cursory search. And apparently is a Canada and the U.S. are the only two sort of first world countries that allow birthright citizenship. Did I get that right? Does that sound right? I'm not sure. I think there's some other countries, but it's clearly minority. So it's clearly minority of first world countries that allow it. Again, this is, this is a whole interesting question because it first of all part of the Constitution. So this is going to go to Supreme Court one way or another and the Supreme Court will rule it. And if you want to change it, then I think you should change it through the legislature, not through executive order. This goes back to the whole authoritarian tendencies. This is not something for a president to sign away given how it's been interpreted for, you know, for a long, long time since the 14th Amendment was passed. And it's something that's going to go to Supreme Court one way or another. Look in an ideal world. So this is me projecting my laissez-faire capitalist world. An ideal world, I think citizenship is a little tricky. I think citizenship is something that I would maybe say even Americans, born of Americans might not automatically become citizens, right? So I would say maybe to be a citizen, you have to pass it. In terms of citizenship, granting you the right to vote. And so I don't think voting is a universal right that necessarily everybody has to do it or that it's that important in a truly free society. I think it's important when we live in a world in which you're trying to get my stuff and I'm trying to get your stuff and we're fighting over this common stuff that's in the middle. But in a world where we don't have the ability to steal from one another, I don't think voting is that important. So I would argue that in an ideal world, citizenship or the ability to vote is something one has to achieve through maybe a test that proves that, you know, something about the foundational documents. Under which you are voting, something you know the constitution. I mean, when you pass, when you have to go through your naturalization process. It's a joke. It's way too easy. I mean, you have to memorize a few things and everybody passes. Nobody ever fails it. I want something where you actually have to know what the constitution says in the constitution, not just who your congressman is today. But how does this, what is the principle in which the government and the country is founded? So when you vote, you're voting in that context where today nobody knows, including 90% of Americans. I mean, I'm not white about immigrants. I think immigrants generally know more about the American constitution about American founding than anybody who's gone through public school education in America. I think public school education in America actually perverts any knowledge you might have and distorts it given the leftist tendencies and the ignorance among academics. Of the American founding of the meaning of the constitution. So, and so, you know, I'm, I'm generally of the opinion that in a free society, you know, in my ideal America, it should be very, very easy to come to the United States. Very easy. It should be very hard to become a citizen. That is, if you want to come to work, I have no problem. I believe in free movement of labor and free movement of capital and free movement of goods across the world. But to vote, to participate, to have a say in the political structure that I worry about. And that I would want to have some barriers of entry before I allow you to vote. So I would create those barriers even for Americans born to Americans, not just for, so I'm a radical, right? I was going to ask, how do you reconcile this with admittedly, I'm not a huge expert on all of Iran's positions. But of course, the main lines, I get them. So as sort of someone who wishes to pursue, you know, selfish interest, egotism, you know, egoist, as we say in French, to be egoist. What's wrong with the country saying, look, if when you come in here, you don't provide us a clear when we do the accounting. If we do the accounting of your value to your country, the net benefits that you bring in have to outweigh the net costs. And if that calculus is not met, you don't come in. So for example, if you pass the test, the very difficult test that you'd like to impose. But yet I know that you're bringing in cultural and religious values that are perfectly antithetical to the ones that are foundational to our society. I don't give a damn you're not coming in. So isn't that the more sort of objectivist position to take? No, because because inherently that is a kind of collectivist position. I don't believe that the government or the state should have any opinion about ideology. It's got a constitution, follow the constitution. It should not be capitalist, socialist. It should not have a position about anything, religion, any ideology. It should be neutral ideologically. Indeed, I interpret the separation of state and church in the Constitution is much broader than that. I would like to see a separation of state from ideas. I think the role of the state is to protect individual rights. It should have a complete understanding of what that means and how to do it. Other than that, it should have no involvement. So what scares me is when you give the state the power to say those ideas are antithetical to what we are and who we are. Well, I mean, I'm the first one who's going to be excluded today, right? Why? If the state had that view, they would exclude my ideas because my ideas are antithetical to the ideas of those in power today. I don't believe the state should ever have that power. I also don't like the calculus. I don't like the calculus of how much you benefit society. Well, who is society? So as an egoist, I want to be able to employ anybody I want to employ. As long as that employee that I bring in, let's say I want to drive my truck down to Mexico, load it up with a bunch of employees, and bring them over to work in my manufacturing plant. As long as my employees are not infringing on your rights, and the only way they can infringe on your rights is by using violence against you or by committing fraud against you. Why is it any of your business that they're here now? I agree that they should be screened, make sure they're not terrorists, make sure they're not criminals, make sure they're not carrying infectious diseases or whatever. But as long as they're not a threat in that sense, then they should not be controlled. Ironman was very clear that the state should not have any role in determining ideology of those in the country of those coming in. Let me push back a bit against this. Sure. If the foundational thing that we both agree on is the protection and integrity of individual rights, if I allow people in in sufficient numbers who are fully committed to, if they were ever in power, remove my individual rights, surely that seems to me to be within the purview of the government to protect against. And let me push, let me draw an analogy. When you come from certain countries and you have, let's say, we screen you for diseases, right? And I mean, what I'm about to talk next is very much the central premise of my book. I talk about, instead of biological brain parasites, I talk about idea parasites, idea pathogens, right? So we can quarantine you or send you back because you have Ebola. We don't say, but who are we to judge whether one virus is better than the other? It's not for us to judge whether tuberculosis, right? We say, no, you come in with. So there are ideas that are fundamentally cancerous. They are cancers of the human spirit. And it's not a slippery slope argument. It's not, but who are we to judge because that's postmodernism, right? You're not allowed to push an idea that removes my individual right to live with full dignity. If you believe in such idea that that's sort of the old tolerance paradox of Karl Popper, right? So how could one say, but it's not for the government to judge which ideology is right or wrong? It is for the government. You're not allowed to come in here and have a seditious ideology that tries to put me under a burka. No, I mean, you are allowed to do that in my view. And I do think there's an element of slippery slope here. That is, we're not going to agree completely. We're going to agree on the burka. That will agree. We'll agree on certain ideologies. Clearly we'll agree those are bad. But I would argue that most university professors, probably 90% of them today hold ideologies that are clearly enemies of freedom, enemies of dignity, enemies of individual rights. And here I'm much more concerned with American citizens than I am with immigrants. I don't think you could bring enough Muslims into the country to do. Well, I mean, I'm exaggerating, but you could, but not enough Muslims would come into the country to do as much damage as university professors are doing right now. And yes, I sort of agree. Let me just interject because when I use my model of the mind viruses, I actually take an epidemiological approach where I look for where patient zero comes from. And of course, patient zero comes from the universities. So all these bad ideas are all from the universities. So I'm fully on board with you. And patient zero, if you really have to think about patient zero, patient zero is Play-Doh in my book. And a modern patient zero is a model of cons. Now, we might not agree with that. I know a lot of good people, decent people who admire Play-Doh, who think Play-Doh was wonderful. Ideologically, I think they're part of the disease and they're destroying the country. But I don't want to go into bureaucrat making that call. I want to be able to engage with them using reason. I want to be able to try to convince them. I want to, and I believe, I truly believe, that a culture that is grounded in the positive viruses, if you want to, it's a bad phrasing. But the Aristotle virus that is thread through Western civilization, which I think was responsible for the good, I believe that in the long run, we win that debate. And to the extent that we use force against the Platonists, we use force against the Contians, we use force against the Hegelians, the Marxists, and the ideological Muslims, put aside the practice itself, but the ideas of Islam, then we're violating one of the principles we believe in, which is freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. So, you know, you've got to allow people to hold bad ideas because once the government... I mean, think about Galileo and the Catholic Church. Think about any time in Western civilization we have tried to determine this is the truth. This is the right ideology. Now, if within a community you discover that women are forced to war with bookers, then that practice needs to be shut down because force is unacceptable. If, you see, I mean, the obvious one is grooming gangs, you know, which is just mind boggling that people would just sit... You know, you need to shut it down. You need to shut it out quickly, violently and equivocally. You need to declare it as a barbaric practice and put the people in jail forever so that you send a clear message about you are protecting individuals. I think the failure of the West is one we don't combat ideologically. We don't actually declare. Our ideas are better. We reject these viruses. We're going to fight them. I think we did that. That would solve a big problem. And then we don't prosecute actual crimes. We don't prosecute when the viruses manifest and actual acts of rights violations. We don't even... So we don't stand up our own beliefs. That to me is a big problem. If we did, I believe good ideas, Trump bad ideas. One other quick example. When people came to America in the late 19th century, they brought with them a lot of bad ideas, particularly those German immigrants. They brought a lot of Khan, Hegel, Schopenhauer Marx with them. And you could argue they founded a progressive movement and that's led to everything bad that exists today in America. So if we banned German immigrants in the 19th century, maybe America would be a better place to live today. But that's a scary idea for me. Very scary that the government would be in a position to stop saying these ideas are good, these ideas are bad. And so I would rather have the confidence that we, the good guys, can beat the bad guys and that maybe the first generation, you can't. But if we had a proper educational system, if we abandoned multiculturalism, we can certainly get the second generation on our side. I mean, I guess I would say that I fully agree with you. I'm a free speech absolutist and let all ideas enter the arena and let the best ones win, except, and here's the slight paradox, I guess, if demographically you get enough people who hold bad ideas that are intent on removing the capacity for us to engage in free debate of ideas. So as long as that tipping point is not ever reached, that removes our ability to both support free ideas or the free debate of ideas, then I think I'm fine. Does that make sense? Yeah, the challenge is that the tipping point is being reached by the domestic citizenship. It's not being reached by immigrants. I mean, the fact is that if you look in campuses, Antifa is not immigrants. Antifa is, you know, I was attacked by Antifa in England and they were nice Brits. They were all, you know, I once spoke at Exeter University in England and all these kids showed up with these t-shirts with Nazi symbols in Israel, and I was talking about free speech and they attacked me for being Israeli and they were pro-Palestinian, not one of the most Palestinian, not one of the most Arab, they were all Brits with nice posh accents. So my worry, I'm not worried about immigration, I think immigration, except in mass immigration like in Europe, that certainly is a problem. But the immigration that comes into America doesn't trouble me one bit. I worry about Americans. I worry about what happens in kindergarten and in preschool and in high school and in college. I worry about the perversion that's happening with Americans and the well-educated Americans, you know, the better educated, the more perverse they get. Well, I think there was a recent survey, or maybe it was sort of a non-scientific survey that some guys were walking around campus and something like 50% of the interviewed students supported socialism, or I can't remember the exact details. So I think that speaks exactly to your point, right? The viruses are spreading from inside. They're not necessarily coming from outside. So I'm with you. It's something like 60% of all democratic, self-identified democratic young people associated with socialism. Exactly. But even among Republican young people, it was something like 20% of them thought socialism was a good thing. I mean, it was just mind-boggling. Even among Republicans. And it's truly impervious to empirical attack, right? Because every generation, a new group of idiots comes out that says, well, if only we implemented true socialism, as opposed to the 180,000 other field experiments that failed. Is there ever a way to slay the dragon permanently? Or is it just that the phoenix always rises again? The stupid idea is immortal. It's up to us every generation to fight the same bad ideas over and over again. No, I think we can slay it. I mean, slay it as a dominant feature. Maybe it'll always come up as a minority. But I think we can slay it. And that's really the theme of my first book. And that is, I think that the issue is a moral issue. It's an ethical issue. I really think that as long as we teach our kids that what makes one moral, that what makes one ethical is to be selfless. It's to sacrifice oneself for others. It's to make others your focal point in terms of your actions and your thoughts in life. As long as we teach that as a moral ideal, we never teach that as a practical thing. Nobody actually lives that way. But we teach it as a moral ideal. As long as we teach that socialism is, by definition, the most appealing system morally, maybe not practically, but morally, because it is the system of sharing. It's the system of sacrifice. It's very good at sacrificing whole groups of people for the sake of other people. It's a system of suffering. It's a system of suffering for cause or something noble or something greater, which is called equality. So I guess both my books deal with this. So I think unless we're willing to challenge the fundamental ethical premises underneath socialism, then socialism will keep coming back. And this is why I believe we have to advocate for moral individualism. An Aristotelian kind of view of Orin Rand, which I think is a development of Aristotle's view and a better foundation than Aristotle. A moral individualism that says, no, I mean, there's nothing wrong with helping other people if it's consistent with your own values, if it's not a sacrifice, if it doesn't entail something, at least with regard to strangers. If it doesn't entail sacrifice, there's nothing wrong with it. But your central purpose in life, the central focus in life ethically should be on how to make yourself the best human being you can be. How to live the best life you can be and make the most of that life. So under that system, who wants to be a socialist? I want to be left alone so I can make the best life that I can. So capitalism is the only system that allows that. So I think the revolution is not political or economic. We don't have to prove those things. Those have been proven already. I mean, God, we've proven socialism wrong economically a thousand times. It's moral. And unless we engage in a moral battle, if you will, we're not going to win this. The best one-liner dismantling of socialism slash communism that I've ever read was from E. O. Wilson, the evolutionary biologist who was an entomologist who studies social ants. He said socialism slash communism, wonderful system, wrong species. Yeah, it's good finance. Once you have free will and reason, once you think for yourself. Don't say free will. You're going to trigger some harris. Don't do it. I have to. I think free will is fundamental to all our political debates. I think we lose if we don't defend free will. I mean, this goes back to our discussion last time in the Sam House. I think we lose if we don't recognize that people are moral agents, that they have responsibility for their own life. They make choices, choices. You can't have choices without free will. Somebody is making a choice. But yeah, I mean, as long as we are independent beings and independent minds that can make independent choices about our own lives, socialism is a disaster. And it's morally a disaster, again, because our moral responsibility should be self-perfection, if you will. It should be our own happiness. And that doesn't exclude others, because so much of our happiness depends on others. It means having the right kind of healthy kind of relationship with others that is non-sacrificial, that is ultimately win-win, that is, you know, a trader principle where both parties win as a consequence of the trade. Let me see if I can reconcile some of the stuff that you support, certainly from an INRAN perspective with my scientific interests in evolutionary psychology. And I don't think we touched on this the first time we chatted. So one of the things that I do in several of my books is I argue that much of consumer behavior could be mapped onto one of four key Darwinian modules or drives, survival, which comes, you know, through natural selection, mating or reproduction, sexual selection, and then kin selection, which explains kin-based altruism. That's the term altruism because it relates to, of course, INRAN stuff, and then reciprocal altruism. So kin-based altruism explains why I jump into the river and say three of my brothers, because on average they share half their genes with me, therefore jumping and killing myself is still from an evolutionary calculus worthwhile. But reciprocal altruism explains why I engage in altruism to those who are not my king. It could be my very close friend, or it could be a random stranger. Now, from your view, would it be correct to say that the way you would integrate what I just said about these basic evolutionary principles is that you would say, and tell me if this is right, that kin selection and kin-based altruism and reciprocal altruism are altruistic in a selfish interest calculus, and therefore that's how you reconcile them, and hence that's why, you know, what's his name? Richard Dawkins called it the selfish gene in that sense. Is that how you reconcile the whole thing? No, partially because I'm going to question some of this, right? So, I'm not going to jump into a river to save my brother, necessarily. But a lot of people do, a lot of animals do. Yeah, a lot of animals do. So this is a difference, right? And a lot of people do, and a lot of people do automatically. But this is my challenge to humanity, if you will, right? Let's get over the automatic, right? We have the capacity to choose. We have the capacity to think. We have the capacity to create a hierarchy of values, and decide what is more important and what isn't. Some brothers are worth jumping into the river to save, because I love them and life without them would be meaningless to me, or life without attempting to save them would be meaningless to me, and I make that choice. Other brothers are bastard. Some parents are not worth loving, and some people don't love their parents justifiably because they don't deserve it. Some parents don't love their children because their children don't deserve their love. It's not automatic. The inclination is automatic, but it's overridden by choices that we make about the values we pursue in life. So the first point I would make is, none of that to me, well, some people do it, but that's because they don't engage their reason. So if we take a step back, to me, survival, if we think about human survival, what it takes to survive. Fundamentally, what it takes for human beings to survive is to engage our reason. We don't know how to hunt. We don't have the gene to dictate how we should build a weapon. We have to discover how to build a weapon, and you can see it in the evolutionary of weapons, how we make reason-based scientific methodology in figuring out, so what the genes, what we're, in a sense, programmed to do is if we choose to engage our rational capacity, we can build weapons. But there's no necessity. There's no determinism in terms of us building weapons. So I think the default is evolutionary, in a sense that we have certain things that we'll do by default, but we can override the default. Boy, do we disagree here. Everything is evolutionary. Nothing is outside. Your capacity to reason does not exist outside of evolutionary barriers. So some things you're absolutely right. Some things are instinctual. For example, the ethologist Conrad Lawrence, who won the Nobel Prize in 1973, demonstrated something called imprinting, which is the chick comes out of the egg, and it has a Darwinian imprinting mechanism that says the first thing that I see moving must be mommy. Now if he replaces mommy with a golden retriever, it will follow the golden retriever. So some things are what's called fixed action patterns. That's what you would call sort of imperatives. But the things that you are calling, oh, we override them, those are simply higher order cognition that are also evolutionary based. So there is nothing that exists outside our biological reality. What do you think of that? Well, it depends what you mean by biological reality. So I think there's something completely different between human beings and other animals. I think this evolution has created something amazing and unique when human beings came out. For the first time, we have the capacity to write the software. A chick can't write the software, can't override anything. It is, in a sense, determined to react to everything in a particular way from the moment it's born. First thing moving, that's mommy, can't override it. You know, you can redo it. Human beings, and this is, I think, a massive leap evolutionarily, human beings have this ability to self-program. And this is what free will, I think, essentially is. Free will is the ability to engage this faculty that evolution gave us. It's not God-given, it's not from somewhere else. Evolution created this. But it functions differently than any other mechanism in any other animal. Because no other animal can do what human consciousness can do, which is to override those instincts, if you will, or those inclinations that we're born with. And what human beings can do, which no other species can do, is we can create abstract concepts. And that ability to create abstract concept, there's a methodology to it. You're not born with the abstract concepts. So the abstract concepts are not quoted in your genes. The ability to create the abstract concept is coded in your genes. So there's no concept of chair coded in your genes when you were born. What you have is the capability to observe different chairs and to abstract that into a chair, or the ability to build weapons, but the weapon, the design of the weapon is not in your gene. So you have the capacity to have an abstract concept like peace. But you're not born with that coded in. You have the capacity to create it, to discover it, if you will. So that's what I think makes us human, is that capacity to use a reason in a way that no other animal has. So the way that I would reframe everything that you just said in evolutionary language is as follows. And tell me if that then kind of joins with you. So you have different types of adaptations. Some adaptations are absolutely fixed. So for example, it is a fixed trait that we should be born with 10 fingers and 10 toes. Other traits have greater variance. For example, our personality types have not been fixed because there is no one optimal personality type that evolution can select. Other types of adaptations are contingent based adaptations, meaning an ecosystem A release Darwinian mechanism X and an ecosystem B release Darwinian module Y. So for example, the immune system is exactly built that way. The immune system did not evolve with zero degrees of freedom to only kill three pathogens because if that were the case, if one of the pathogens mutates, then we're dead. Therefore it has to evolve the capacity of evolvability. Behavioral plasticity is part of the human condition. So that which you're calling ability to reason and build. I would say those are just facultative adaptations that have to be so because they have to allow for us to adapt to different environments. Does that fit with what you're saying? Yes, well, no, it doesn't really. Because and we go back to free world. We go back to because not all human beings are going to engage in it. So there's no deterministic factor that says you're going to come up with this abstract concept. That's why I think there's a new there's a the original thinkers and 90% of people are followers and they don't ever engage in that spark in that ability to really engage with reality fully. And I don't think that's determined. I think there's something that for whatever reason and I don't have a reason for it. And I don't think that necessarily is a reason for it. Some people engage in that capacity to create abstract knowledge to reason to think and other people just mimic mimic other people's and they're very dependent on the exact evolutionary. I can't remember how you described it, but but but iteration, but I think if you actually engage in your capacity to reason in your capacity to create abstract knowledge, you are actually creating new paths, new evolutionary past, you are actually influencing. So I believe that your self made soul, your self made being if you choose to be not necessarily, but if you choose to be, you can actually shake who you are and what you are. So I give a huge role to this ability to choose and this ability to make decisions based on based on you, based on your willingness to reason to face up to reality. Is there anything and actually I have to give a shout out to whomever suggested this as a topic for me to ask you. I thought it was a really good one. I don't remember who it is. I received many supplies, but if they're watching, thank you. Is there anything in your reading of Ein Rand that you originally read, bought into, but in retrospect today, because of new incoming evidence, you say, oh, no, that's that's bullshit. Sure. Well, nothing I say that bullshit at too much respect for her, but I mean, there's certain things I would, I would disagree. I'm not a philosopher. So when I look at her philosophical system, when I read through a philosophical system, do I understand everything? Do I agree exactly with how she formulates everything? Not always, but, but I'm cautious in challenging it because, you know, it's not that I'm a philosophical thinker, right? When it comes to application of the philosophy, sure, the particular things that I might disagree with on how to apply the philosophy and convince, I'm pretty sure that she wouldn't agree with everything I do in terms of how to apply the philosophy to common events or the way I, you know, I respond to certain things. I'm sure she would do it differently. I'm not trying to mimic her, but the framework, the philosophical framework that she introduced, no, I have no, I've seen nothing of the world that would tell me, no, that's not how it works. But it doesn't really surprise me that I don't see that because again, I don't spend my time really delving deep into the philosophical issues. I'm much more concerned about how to apply them. And so far, when I apply them, it works kind of, you know, it makes sense to me. I think that, you know, the understanding of evolution would have, I think she would have had some interesting, I think she didn't know that much about evolution. I think her understanding of evolution would have enriched her theory because she thinks it's very consistent with the ideas of evolution. Now, whether it's consistent with the way evolution of psychology is understood today, I'm not sure, but I think there's more philosophy to apply to evolution of psychology before it's a definitive done deal science. I mean, I think the relationship between science and philosophy is interesting. How we interpret scientific knowledge is basically dictated by the philosophy you bring with you. So I think it would have enriched the system. There's no question of mine. And there's still a huge amount of work to do. For example, she wrote a book called Introduction to Objective Epistemology. It's an introduction, right? Which means there's a massive amount of work to do to figure out a full theory of epistemology based on a few principles that she laid out. So it's not to say that her system is complete, or to say, and I never say this, Einstein's ideas, Einstein's philosophy is not the truth. It's Einstein's philosophy. It's quite reasonable that somebody will discover a flaw or something wrong with it. And new evidence, as you suggest, might come about that rejects something in it. And I'm completely open to that. But it's not for me to do that philosophically. And I haven't done it and, you know, I haven't found that flaw. The reason why I ask is because one of the things that I'll certainly be talking about in my next book is this notion of epistemic humility. The idea that, look, as scientists, we're always talking about provisional knowledge, right? I'm the first to say that, look, if some principle and evolutionary theory were to be falsified, then we're back to the drawing board. Now the fact that many of these things are unfalsified is not because epistemologically they're non-falsifiable. It's because they're true. And people have tried endlessly to falsify these principles and they stood the test of time. So in that sense, that's why I thought that was a really good question. Because I think we can all potentially suffer from sort of ideological inertia where, you know, la, la, la, there's no way. And to the extent that she sort of revered almost as a sort of philosophical guru, I just wondered if you might have succumbed to that. No, and surely people would look at me and say, I have. And, you know, test me as, I guess, what I say makes sense, doesn't it? And that's the standard. But I think this is the challenge that I think that scientists have, right? Clearly, you know, you do scientific observation and that's either true or false, right? But how we interpret this, and this goes to physics, this goes to any abstract field within science. How we interpret it is often guided by a philosophical point of view. When you study the different interpretations of quantum mechanics, a lot of that is not physics. A lot of that is philosophy. Not the phenomenon itself. The phenomenon itself is what it is. But how we explain it, how we understand it and what paths it leads us towards is dictated by philosophy. So in my view, to have at the end of the day a healthy science, one has to have a healthy view, a philosophical view, a healthy epistemology, in order to be able to properly interpret the science. And I fear that we don't. That is, if you look at philosophy departments in the world today, philosophy is in bad shape. I don't think it's in good shape. I don't think it is, I don't think it is healthy. And I think that's infecting the sciences. I think some of the, and I don't want to get into it, but some of the interpretations of quantum mechanics, I think suffer from that. Some of the interpretations of other things suffer from that. I think some of the way physics is gone. And I think that so of all sciences have gone is a consequence of bad philosophy. So I think as if we can make philosophy healthy, I think we will discover not that the facts about the science have changed, but how we look at them, how we interpret them, how we understand them will change as well. You know, I was going to ask you, when did the Ein Rand pass away? 1982. So you would have been too young to have met, did you ever meet it? I never met her. I was when she died. I was actually, I remember the day because they announced it on Israeli radio. And I had already read her book. So I was already pretty committed. And I was ironing my uniform, getting ready. You're a firefight Nazi uniform. That's right. My apartheid Nazi uniform, getting ready to go and oppress the Palestinians or Lebanese as the case was 1982. Oh, right. I mean, I was, this was March, I think of 1982. So I was on my way, it was a Sunday morning to go hitchhike to base. So I remember that and got together with some friends that evening to kind of celebrate the life. So I was part of the objectivist world back then in Israel in the little capacity that it was. I came close. Well, no, not so let me rephrase it. I think this was Carl Popper. I have to go back and double check. I was when we lived in California when I was at UC Irvine, my wife and I would often go to use bookstores to try to find out. Mainly I would drag her reluctantly to go to these bookstores. One day I had asked her to go and ask. I was reading a book and she had gone to find out about a Carl Popper biography or so on. And she goes away for a very long time. I hope I'm getting the story right. It's the first time I'm thinking about it's maybe 15, 16 years ago. And she returns with a gentleman, a very sort of distinguished professorial looking gentleman. No, it wasn't Carl Popper, but almost was. And she says, oh, I hear you're looking for what? And I say, yes. And it turns out that that gentleman was the guy who was handling sort of the Popper archives. Oh, wow. And he has since, this was many years ago, he sent me sort of photocopies of correspondences and so on. And I thought that was such a brilliant story. So that's what led me to think of whether you had met her or not. Yeah. No, I hadn't. I mean, I wouldn't have, because I was in the U.S. in 1979. And it never occurred to me to go and meet her because, you know, I was a young person. I was nothing and nobody, why would she want to meet me? So it never crossed my mind now. I didn't realize at that point there was a movement, there was a publication. I mean, there was no, people don't have this context. There was no internet. There was, I was in Israel, finding a book was hard. There was no connection in the sense that there is today. I mean, it's so beautiful that we have this connectivity on a global scale today. It's such a beautiful thing. You know, so there was no, you know, for some reason it never crossed my mind to look up, what's she giving a talk maybe, maybe I could go see her. You know, I just did my thing. And then, yeah, today I regret it. I wish I'd be more arrogant and more confident and gone to see her. But so be it. Yeah. You know, I mean, speaking of connectedness, I mean, every day I wake up with the excitement of a young child because any, I mean, when you talk about the small world, right, we're all connected unless it's a close society by six degrees or less. I mean, that's even more so today. I mean, I've literally connected with people. I mean, your Ayn Rand is my, and I'll explain who it is, is my Russell Tompkins Jr., who is the lead singer of a group called the Stylistics, who was one of the top Philly soul groups of the 1970s where we've become friends. This is a guy who sang in my ear when I was seven and eight years old in Lebanon. He's come on my show. I went and hung out with him in Philadelphia. And in what world would I, an academic 20 years younger than this musical hero of mine, ever have a chance to connect with him? And so I'm always amazed that, you know, there are so few people that, certainly so few academics that take advantage of these incredible toys that we have at our disposal today. Here's his Yaron and Gad talking as if we're sitting in the same room. Why do you think people are reticent? Or certainly professors? Well, people, I think, take it for granted. So that's, I think, young people just are born with this, and they, you know, we lived in a generation with no internet. I mean, things have changed so fast. So we had no PCs. I mean, I don't remember what it would be. I mean, I'm the first, I think I was the last class at my university. We programmed with punch cards. Oh, yeah. I had it in high school, and high school, I did that. Yeah. I mean, it's inconceivable today. Nobody even knows what they are. So, so we, I think our generation probably appreciates because we've seen the change. We've seen the evolution. But I think academics don't take advantage of it because I mean, most academics, I know are very close minded in a, in a, which is so bizarre, right? So sad, so tragic. Yes. And it should be the opposite, right? Academics used to be renaissance, man. They used to know their field, and then they, they would, you know, branch out and they'd want to, they were people who loved knowledge, right? That's what, that's what a doctorate was about. You know, it was about philosophy as a love of knowledge. And today, there's so, you know, going back to ants. They're so interested in the little ants that they have specialized in, that that's all they care about. And maybe they use Skype to talk to somebody else who's interested in ants across the world. But they have no interest beyond that. Or if they do have an interest beyond that, it's so corrupted by modern philosophy, modern political correctness, modern ideology that they use it for ill. But most of them, I mean, the fact is most academics don't do politics. So don't do ideology because they're so interested. There's over-specialization in, you know, in economics, that's a good thing. But in intellectual pursuits, it's a, it's advice. Over-specialization, intellectual pursuits, even in science is a vice. One has to have perspective. One has to have context. And to do that, one has to know a lot of things in order to specialize. Well, and I think it actually, and I, it came up recently in a chat. I can't remember with which guest I had on where we were talking about. So my mind works in a very conciliant driven way, right? Conciliance to go back to E.O. Wilson. Conciliance is the idea of unity of knowledge. My brain is constantly looking for ways to navigate through different landscapes and connect them synthetically. This is why, as I was, even if you remember my earlier question to you, when I said, okay, let me hit you with some evolutionary psychology and see how I can reconcile it with your iron rancid stuff. But now to be someone who is conciliant driven, you have to know what it is that you want to unify. Therefore, you have to navigate through 35 different landscapes to try to create synthesis. I think you're exactly right. Most academics are not trained to think that way. They hyper-specialized. They know about the endocrine system of this particular leaf cutting ant, and it ends there. Don't ask me to deviate Epsilon from that. I'm not willing to speak about it. Why do we get them to change this? Is it just pedagogy? We have to teach people how to be better conciliant thinkers? Well, this is a great point. It links to some discussion earlier. I can't even pronounce the word, but I would call it an integrated mind, an integrative mind. We're integrating, and I've noticed that that's how my mind works. I'm constantly trying to integrate new knowledge into existing knowledge and figure out whether it's consistent, whether the problems, whether the issues, how do I resolve those issues constantly trying to create unity? To me, that is a healthy mind. That is what reason is all about. It's part of an important feature of reason. It's to constantly integrate mind into unity of knowledge, into unity of truth at the end of the day. I think we at some point in our lives made a choice to do that where other people have not, because I know people smarter than me who can't see connections between things that, to me, are obvious, but they have a much higher IQ than I have, but they can't see because their mind doesn't work that way. They're very good at analyzing X, and that's all they're good at. How do you do that? I don't know. I wish I knew because it's hard to, in a sense, rewire people's conceptual habits. I think we have to get them when they're young. We have to teach them to make those integrations. You know, Iron Man used to play a game in Iron Man's Paula, right? It used to be called Concepts in a Hat, and they used to put all these abstract concepts, pieces of paper, abstract concepts in a hat, and used to draw too randomly, and then you would have to show how they're connected. Wow. Yeah. So, for example, you could say that in Atlas Shrugged, one of the things Iron Man is trying to show is how economics and sex are connected. Now, and it's true because she would argue that the same philosophical orientation towards economics would drive a particular view of sex, that they're integrated through philosophy, so your attitude towards sex and your attitude towards economics are going to be driven by certain fundamental ideas. And there's a speech in Atlas Shrugged about sex, and there's a speech about money given by the same character, Francisco D'Amconia, and there's a relationship there. So that kind of game, that kind of idea about connecting things I think is something we don't do in school. We teach subjects as completely separate, unrelated. We need to teach kids to think conceptually and to integrate across their knowledge. And I think there is a real downstream benefit to teaching people how to think synthetically because some of the most important scientific problems simply cannot be solved by one discipline. So most of the great scientific breakthroughs have really come at the intersection of interdisciplinarity. So it's not just that philosophically or epistemologically it's nice for people to think synthetically. It's that good science fundamentally requires that. Now, you could still do stuff in your little silo, but it's inconsequential science. Big stuff, mapping the human genome could not have been done if you had one group of experts. And the way I try to teach people this, at least certainly within the purview of my influence as a professor, is I try to navigate through sort of the tight rope balance of to specialize versus to be broad. So I tell them, look, of course you have to plant your flag in some field to be known as an expert in this area, but always retain your intellectual curiosity. And the argument that I gave or the analogy is I say, look, there are so many beautiful islands in the Caribbean that I'd like to visit. I could always return to Turks and Caicos because it's a beautiful island. Or in 50 years I could say I've been to every single one of them and I've been richer for it. So seek to visit many intellectual landscapes. Don't return to the same island. Absolutely. And part of my struggle within kind of my objectivist world is to tell people, don't just read objectivist literature. That would be crazy and it would be ignorant. Go out there and read people you hate because you need to know because they're influential. Mox is influential. If you don't know what Mox said, how can you combat him? How can you know why is it affecting so many minds? You have to understand Mox in order to really deal with it. You don't know that you hate Mox until you read him, right? Until you encounter the ideas explicitly. So it really is important for people to broaden their scope, broaden their mind into other fields as well. And it's not just about science. I mean, you obviously in science says it's important in your field, but I think if we get better thinkers in the world then ideology, you know, ideologically we'd be better, politically we'd be better and every realm of our lives we'd be better. And I think just spiritually we'd be better. I mean, I like lots of different types of music. I listen to a lot of them. There are some I hate, but I've heard enough to know I don't like that and I don't want it. I'm not just fixated on one thing and do one thing. I love to go to museums. I love to, you know, go through and see the different eras because I want to experience different things and see what I like and what I don't like. And until I encounter it, it's hard to in advance decide these things. You have to actually study it. Do you regret, since we're talking about the state of academia, do you ever today regret that you left academia or is every day a confirmation that you made the right choice? No, I don't regret it. I mean, I've had so much fun doing what I'm doing that I don't. I mean, not that I hated academia. I enjoyed academia, but I do remember sitting with my colleague. We were hired at the same time and, you know, did our research together and we became really good friends and business partners, ultimately. Sitting one day, you know, watching all the students who keep getting younger every year, it's terrible. And watching them and saying, you know, can you imagine sitting here in 30 years teaching the same thing to the same students? I've never, you know, so even then, even in my first few years, it was hard for me to imagine myself being an academic in the long run. Again, not that I didn't like it. I enjoyed it, particularly I love teaching. Teaching is my passion. The research I found, I wasn't that interested in, primarily because I felt like I was captured by what the journals expected me to publish and it wasn't that interesting and it wasn't, I was interested in more abstract knowledge, which is hard to publish in journals. You know, the theory of finance, people were less interested in challenging and that's where I was, would have won if I'd stayed in academia, that's where I would have wanted to go, kind of. You know, we know, my sense of behavior of finance is interesting but not completely true. The kind of the absolute efficiency market theory of Eugene Farmer is interesting but not completely true. There's something about both of these things that needs an integration. You need to be able to integrate the way a market works to make itself efficient and the cognitive issues and the way people behave, the behavioral aspects of all of this and there has to be a way to integrate that into an objective theory of how markets work and how financial markets work, which I don't think anybody's done, it still hasn't done, which I would have loved to have worked on but no, I mean, I've had too much fun. I mean, I've loved everything that I've done. You know, now I'm, my wife claims I'm semi-retired and I traveled around the world speaking. I mean, what could be better than that? I mean, in two weeks I'll be in seven or eight different countries giving talks and engaging. I engage with thousands of students every year so a lot of fun. Nice. Speaking of behavioral finance, as you mentioned earlier, did you know that the last, well, now two Nobel Prizes ago, Richard Taylor was my professor? Yes, you told me that last time. Okay, yeah. Did you know him? I met Richard Taylor, but two of his, two of the leaders of the, early leaders in the behavioral behavioral finance were in my department as Senator Clara was known at the time. Behavioral finance was still kind of marginal, very marginal. Taylor was the only one really with a big name. A host chef friend who wrote a book on behavioral finance and Mayor Satman. Both of them were, in a Department of 5. God, John, Jews everywhere. are everywhere. Well you know it was a problem with hiring me at Santa Clara because he was a Jesuit university who had one Israeli already who was the chairman of the department another Jew right a Korean an Indian and they had no Americans they know kind of white guys right and supposedly it was a real issue in my hiring the fact that I here was another Jew coming in the Jesuit university and the Jesuits were really not happy with this and they hired the guy who became my business partner luckily he was the token white you know American white guy from the Midwest he was perfect for them say hi at him and then they could justify hiring me another Jew into the department so they could kind of dilute the Junus yeah that's right very nice well and the foreigners they were Jews and then there were Asians right the finest of them were Jews and Asians I mean this was mind-boggling to the poor the poor Jesuits and then of course they regretted hiring me not quite from day one but but a couple of years in so the mistake that Jesuits did is this was in 1993 and it was just after all the Wall Street stuff that was happening and they came to the finance department said look guys we want you to teach a class in ethics finance and ethics and all my finance guys were like we don't want to teach ethics for finance guys and I said I'll do it I'll do it because I was always interested in philosophy so I said they said oh wow you're on that's great somebody you'll teach finance and ethics and then they discovered what I was teaching and all helpful clues I mean and not only that it was the students loved it it one teaching I want teaching awards for it and it was exact opposite of what they wanted me to teach I was teaching the nobility of finance nobility of making money why the profit motive was a good thing and a noble thing and and why finance was an ethical endeavor in and of itself and that's not what they want to talk right they wanted what capitalism is evil and greedy yeah they wanted they were left as Jesuits these were liberation theology Jesuits they wanted and Catholics right generally they wanted you should feel guilty for making money but you know we need you so you you know so you have to do what you do but you should feel guilty while doing it and you should behave ethically you should always have that altruism in the back of your mind which brings me to the other point about altruism I just wanted to make this point it just reminded me altruism is a philosophical word that has a particular meaning right so again in philosophy it's a term coined by Augustine Combs the French philosopher of the 19th century and the way he turned altruism means it doesn't mean behaving nicely towards somebody else or doing something kind to somebody else it means living for the sake of others so for Combs the purpose of life was to sacrifice your life for others every single day all the time so to the extent that you thought about yourself think about this from an evolutionary perspective the extent that you thought about yourself and your own survival and your own well-being that was out morally any thought so if you said I'm going to help this person because they'll make me feel good not moral right because you bought yourself into the decision-making right it's a complete negation of self so philosophically altruism means the selfless nefs the negation of self it doesn't mean what I consider what you think of reciprocal altruism is often in my book just the trader principle right every trade you could think of you know when I buy an iPhone it's reciprocal altruism I you know I'm I'm giving something to apple and I'm getting except sorry the that's the exchange is happening immediately whereas in reciprocal altruism I jump into a river today hoping that in the future if I'm going to drown you will reciprocate unkind so it's a bit different yeah so people do that but I don't really think anybody you know I don't jump into rivers unless I thought about it before so I give myself two seconds to think about do I want to jump into this river what's my probability of survival do I know this person are they nice or not right so I don't jump into the river for anybody and what's his names um do you know um oh my god the the ethicist who has this and out this thing about the rivers um so so he gives this he gives this example uh peter singer peter singer the famous ethicist right you mean peter singer who was on my show no I never heard of him probably peter singer who was on your show everybody's been on your show so peter singer has this thing about you're walking down along a river and there's a kid drowning in the river and you're wearing an expensive suit and and it doesn't cost you anything you can go in the suit or you're not risking your life do you go in and save the kid and everybody would go well of course and his response is well there's a kid drowning in a river every single day and all we would cost you is a couple of hundred dollars to save him by sending it to Africa now that's a logical twist there right if there was a river where if I walked by every day there was a kid drowning first of all I wouldn't wear the expensive suit every day and secondly at some point I would take a different route home my purpose in life is not to save kids in drowning rivers I feel no guilt for sending zero dollars to Africa I think by changing the ideology I would probably save more kids in Africa than anything else but it doesn't inflict any guilt the fact that I know I know with certainty that some kid is dying I could send money and save him and yet I choose not to I feel no guilt about that my focus in my life is on me I'm willing to save a kid in a river if it's an emergency if it's a once in a while if it happens but if it becomes a regular habit I ain't doing it so my whole approach to helping other people is not that'll help me back if I do help them my approach to helping other people is other people are valued to me I benefit from the existence of other people in all kinds of ways not because they'll save me in a river but because they produce stuff that I benefit from one of them might be the next Einstein who creates something that is going to change the world but just by the fact that they're basically good people I am better off for other people's existence I love plants I you know you have you have pets I don't but you have animals you love human beings even better than animals right so I love in a sense I love human beings right now if I know that you're bad I don't love you but if I don't know anything about you I give you a huge benefit of the doubt and and that's why I would save somebody it's because of that benefit of the doubt the assumption that you're a good person and I will benefit from you not by you saving me but by the very fact that you exist produce create and do the things that you do in your life so do you think since you mentioned Peter Singer do you think that his recent participation in a movement called effective altruism are you familiar with that idea I am do you think that that is something that you could get more behind because it seems to be a bit better targeted in its intentions versus sort of the random that's let's help some child somewhere in Africa or or not are both things that no so there's a question I think I think that it's an improvement and I think that it's I mean Peter Singer is a clever altruist I mean he's brilliant and he's very smart and effective altruism is a nice innovation um no because Peter Singer views it as a model duty and I don't and that's a huge difference I view Peter as the enemy I mean literally philosophically as and this goes back to your viruses and bad ideologies I mean if I could exclude Peter Peter Singer would be on the list of people I would not want to get citizenship right so I don't want him voting I don't want him teaching my kids I don't want him anywhere near a podium but but I believe free speech I'm of course I'm gonna let him do it so um no I I think the whole Peter is is all about and it takes seriously and I respect him for taking it seriously it all about this idea of the purpose of life is to serve others and we're going to make it efficient to serve others I don't want serving others to be efficient I want people to focus on their own well-being and as a part of that well-being is to help others and I think in many cases it is but not always then then go for it then do it as effectively and rationally and and the best that you can but make sure first and foremost that it's consistent with what it means for you to be a good human being and of course I I believe you know in different stages of life you should be more or less charitable I think it's ridiculous if you're young to be charitable you're way too busy there's way too much things for you to do for you to engage in charity and you get old days you have some excess cash capital you know cash in and you have a little bit of time maybe then maybe you know that becomes a bigger focus in life but certainly when you're young I don't believe you should even think about charity before the age of 50 or community service or any of these things right nice uh I looking at my list there's probably still another half of the things that I wanted to talk to you about I've not been covered which simply means there's good news we're gonna have to hold a third conversation soon uh horrible horrible anything that you would like to use this platform to promote that people might not otherwise be familiar with well I I have a YouTube channel like all of us do and and and we encourage people to check it out and those of you who find some of these ideas interesting uh iingrad.org or uranbrookshow.com I think that's the URL I mean there's there's there's endless amounts of material if you want to go and investigate it's it's there's a lot of interesting stuff and of course I think everybody should be out of shrugged uh agree or disagree I think it's it's kind of one of those required islands one half's the visit very nice thank you for using the uh the GATT analogy or metaphor uh thank you so much it was so nice talking to you likewise we'll do it again very soon stay on the line thanks guys and if you love these types of conversations people if you sat through this almost 90 minutes consider supporting both Yaron and myself on our uh you have a patreon account correct I do I do so support either both of us or one of us thank you cheers