 Hi, I'm Greg Samyari. Welcome to a special edition of Choose Your Issues, a joint edition with my favorite podcast and I think one of the most important programs in the world today, the Iran Brook show. Joining me, Iran Brook. Great to have you here on the 40 Acres. It's great to be here. Thanks, Greg. I really appreciate it. So the title of our show is Choose Your Issues, I mean the general title, and we named that after Ayn Rand's first essay in, where do you have an echo? Yeah, I think you have to mute the computer. I'm running two of these and they're both out of sync and they're both unmuted, but now they're muted. Technical issues in the Iran Brook show, what's new? We called this a beta for a while because we were having all kinds of technical issues. Hopefully people could hear us. People should say in the chat whether they can, by the way. I think they can. That's why there was an echo. Yeah, that's true. We should hear us. So we've named this podcast series after Ayn Rand's first article in the Objectivist newsletter, Choose Your Issues. Figure out what to talk about and why. And you're, I think the person doing that work best today, giving kind of regular commentary on the trends in the culture, the news, and you've been doing it from an Objectivist perspective, and you've been doing it and leaving the effort to do that for so long as president of the Ayn Rand Institute. So I really wanted a chance to talk to you about your approach to filtering out of everything what's going on, like what is worth focusing on, and how do we conceptualize it rightly? Yeah, I mean, it's, I think you're right in a sense that it's a real challenge because particularly in the world in which we live today, there's so much going on. There's always so much going on, but now we know about it instantaneously, constantly. If you live on Twitter, as I sometimes do, you're constantly bombarded with new information, new data, and new news items, and you have to figure out what is essential and what is not, what is worth pursuing and what is not, what is junk and what is not. That's a big part of the day is figuring out what is true, just basic, you know, detective work of what is true because there's so much fake, as everybody knows, there's so much fake news out there and very difficult to find reliable sources, I think, on, doesn't matter what side you are on a particular issue. You know, if we all think and Ayn Rand taught us that ideas shape history, ideas shape the culture, then what really I look for are the issues that reflect what I see as they dominate or the up and coming ideas that are influencing the culture. What are the things that idea laden, that in a sense are reflecting of the different ideologies and different philosophies that we all know, I think, dominate the culture and some stories, some stories just pop out that obvious, right, they're existentially major and they're reflective of ideas, 9-11 and the response to 9-11 and really if I think about my career as a cultural commentator, 9-11 shapes it all because it was that event was the first event where I became, it came into my own in terms of having a voice and, you know, sharing that voice with a lot of the intellectuals at the institute, particularly on-carb, but who influenced that greatly, but, you know, me being at the forefront of expressing those views. So 9-11 really shaped that and 9-11 obviously was an existential, everybody knew it was the central story, but then I think what was unique about objectivism is we immediately went to why did this happen and why are we responding the way we're responding? We immediately went to what are the ideas that drove people to unable into buildings and then what are the ideas that drove, you know, George Bush to invite, I don't know, Muslim Imams to the White House a month later to celebrate Ramadan, that is what is going on here and it's that always looking for what are the philosophical drivers and what are the things that are going on in the world that are driven by ideas. The other thing I'd say, you know, we were talking about the show I did recently on the chip industry, which is one of my favorite shows. I hope people go listen to it because I think I learned a lot preparing for it, a lot of stuff I never knew before. I came up with some new thoughts about foreign policy that I didn't have before, true or not, at least they knew and, you know, they should be debated, but I thought it was an interesting show, but for example there, I think of technology, Silicon Valley chips, all of that as the remnant of the good in our civilization. It's the remnant of the enlightenment. And I think about the world constantly as this battle between enlightenment and anti-enlightenment and pre-enlightenment and that's the battle going on. And so I'm always want to support the enlightenment side, even when that side is not as good as it could be and should be. But I want to support the enlightenment side because that's the fundamental battle. It's enlightenment versus anti-enlightenment and we know the consequences of enlightenment. We're living them in terms of wealth and success and we know the consequences of anti-enlightenment because we know history. And then you look at the ideological picture out there, you look at existential events from that perspective, I think it kind of the things that are important jump out because of that. Yeah, thank you. That division, I mean the enlightenment, anti-enlightenment strikes me as really important and what I notice people do, I mean you've commented on the show about people jumping to dichotomies and wanting to dichotomize everything and not, you know, seeing there are more than two options. At the most fundamental level, there are always going to be two options, but what I find rare is that the things that are conceived as the two options in the culture are the right to and that they map to what I think are the most fundamental ones and what really strikes me about Rand's work is the way she kind of cuts through to what really is the essential issue or at least challenges you to think that what seems to be what's presented as a divide might not be. And I think one of the reasons why I love your program so much is that you're the person in the world today who I think is the most doing that, who's noticing the, you know, it's not right versus left, it's not this versus that, it's not where you might think it is. So how do you, I mean is there anything to say about avoiding being sucked into the false dichotomies and finding where the real dichotomy is? Yes, I mean I think that's a big challenge and it's a big challenge in the world out there and again it's what everybody wants you to fall into and what I think most people do, even most objectivists sadly. But I think Ayn Rand taught us this. I mean she, and you know, I find it wrong to compare anything I do to Ayn Rand because if you look at a cultural commentary in the 60s and 70s, it is such a work of genius and it is so deep and it's philosophical and psychological and every time I read it it's like, oh my god, I learned something new even if I read an essay 20 times, I learned something new from reading it again because of just the way she has a unique way of looking at the world and finding those essentials and disentangling things that look like a mess. But then showing you a perspective on them that you would have never imagined and here I think because she was a novelist she has this psychological dimension that is so unique and I think I don't have it. I think it's very rare to find somebody who has that dimension on top of everything else. So she can say things about the motivation of people that I find very difficult to say. But yes, I think Ayn Rand taught us and Lena they both taught us that it isn't the conventional way of looking at the world is wrong, the conventional way, even though you always have to look at the world fresh and you always have to think about things in terms of fundamentals. And again, I have to give credit to a lot of the intellectuals because I'm kind of the spokesman but there's a sense of spokesman because I don't really speak for them but there's a lot of people like you and like Ankar and like Tara who's here at Texas and others who are doing the philosophical work behind that I then latch on and take the principles and apply them. And you know I spent a lot of time with Ankar so over the years when I was at the institute I learned a lot from him and I think he is very good at catching a lot of these false dichotomies and false options and he's taught me to do that. But yes, I mean I think it all goes down to looking at what is the fundamental behind what is going on. So you know the traditional left versus right. So Democrats, Republicans, once you understand, once you dig a little bit into what they're actually advocating, once you dig it a little bit into what are they, even just a level of policy, what they actually actual policy prescriptions are, once you dig into a little bit of that then you see collectivism on both sides and we know collectivism is opposed to what we are. So if they're both collectivists then are they really opposed to one another? They are in some dimension. It's not, I don't think they're the same. They obviously have, collectivism is not one thing. It's a variety of different applications of collectivism. But the contrast is not each other. The contrast is what we are and that's individualism. So the real political spectrum, the proper political spectrum is individualism versus collectivism and then maybe the collectivism forks into five different types of collectivism. But it's basic and some of them are associated with the right and some of them are associated with the left. But they're all collectivism and they're distinctly different from one another. But they're not individualism. Clearly they're not individualism. So once you can see behind what's going on, once you understand its ideas and its fundamental ideas, I think it's much easier to untangle these kind of issues. And you can come to particular issues, particular debates, whatever's going on in the news with your diagnosis in hand of what the essence of the factions are. So you can have indications of where you'll expect them to go. I want to ask one more sort of question to start off and then I want to open up to if anyone in the room or anyone online wants to ask questions that people might be asking on your own super chat or on our page and we have a microphone here for anyone who wants to. The topic is generally the intellectual landscape today, how to think about current events and particularly how to do so from an objectivist perspective. The question I want to ask is like why think about the news? Why think about current events? Why think about the current cultural issues? You might think, okay, I've got it. It's collectivism all over the place. Apox on everyone's houses. I don't need to follow this stuff. And of course, not everyone needs to follow it in the same amount of depth. But is it enough just to reject everything? Why is there a real value to following the trends, following the news, having some people on that beat and all of us may be having some reasons for it, knowing what's going on in the world. If the major factions in the culture wars are both bad or wrong, can't we just accept that and write it all off and focus on other aspects of our careers or our personal lives? So first, I have to admit that I definitely have the tendency to think that way, to hell with them. Life is too interesting and too much fun and there's too much going on and there's too much things I'd love to do other than that. And that's weird because the amount of cultural commentary and the amount of culture I actually do do. But I remember as a young objectivist here in Austin years and years ago saying publicly in a forum saying, forget about the news. Live your life. Just focus on living your life. First of all, it's the best way to change the world in a sense because you'll be a model for other people. And secondly, you've only got one life and why bother with all this really bad stuff that is constantly going on and it's so much negativity and it's going to have an impact on your sense of life and it's hard for it not to have an impact on. So I am tempted by that view and I think any egoist would be. I think if you really selfish, then your initial tendency should be, I don't care. I just want to live my life. I've got a career. I want to find somebody to love. I want to have a family or whatever it is. That's plenty. What do I need to worry about all this stuff? But of course there are a few problems with that. One is that you might want to ignore politics but politics doesn't want to ignore you. That is that the world out there, the culture and the world out there is in your life, whether you want it or not, whether you identify directly it or not, but they are imposing their force directly or indirectly on you and every aspect of your life, really every aspect of your life, whether it's through the culture. And we live, I mean this is one of the things, I don't think we talk about enough, but we live in a pretty bleak culture. I don't think we know that because we don't know what the alternative is. Rand used to talk about the pre-World War and the post-World War culture and how if you didn't experience pre-World War I, if you didn't experience 19th century culture, you have no clue. And I don't think it was an accident. She was born in 1905 and many, so many geniuses were born in the late 19th century, early 20th century. I mean geniuses that we can all, that have to found it back, that the great artists were born back then. There's something in the culture that was so positive and our culture sucks. A lot of it's the art, but it's the people's sense of life. She spoke about having a cultural value deprivation and analogized it to being in a sensory deprivation chamber. Yes, it's definitely sensory deprivation. If you think about how the streets and Athens were and they were lined with art and with sculptures everywhere and all that, and it's interesting. If you go in UT with University of Texas here and there are sculptures, but they're all old. They were all put up decades ago. And there's a beautiful, I think a magnificent fountain here that nobody looks at because they're not used to looking at art, they're not used to paying attention, but there's a beautiful fountain right here in front of, not far from the building that was sitting in, that if you look at the figures there, there's some magnificent figures in the fountain. Nobody looks at it. And it was built, the artist again was born in I think the early part of the century, lived in San Antonio. But it was put up there a long, long time ago. That is the orientation today is not to surround yourself with beauty and to surround yourself with inspiration. It's if anything, they surround yourself with ugliness. That's the kind of quote art that they put around us. So there's the culture that you want to be involved in partially because you want to identify the better parts of it so you can embrace those partially because you want to change it and you want to have better people around you and you want to have more beauty around you and you want to live in an environment that is better and more beautiful. And then of course, there's a politics which is all intrusive all the time and is the things going on are terrifying and are heading in a very wrong direction, very bad direction. No matter who wins any particular election, in that sense, it doesn't really matter. It might matter to the speed, but the direction doesn't change. And one needs to have an impact then one needs to understand it. And look, it's also getting to the point where one wants to be involved, one wants to know what's going on in the world partially because one wants to know where to live. It used to be easy to know where to live and it's not so much because there are real differences. There are real differences between states, there are real differences between countries, there are real differences between regions or projectories in terms of the future. You want to try to have an influence to the extent that you can. And you want to be aware because just as a survival mechanism because they're out there to get you and you want to be able to protect yourself in some capacity or another. On the other hand, one also has to be very careful. And I have to be very careful even as somebody who does this professionally, not to overdo it. And as people who are not professionals, you shouldn't do a lot of politics and a lot of stuff. I mean, I talk about this a lot on the show. Life's too important to spend too much time worrying about this stuff because we want to have some impact but the impact is small. To really have an impact, you'd have to spend a lot of your time doing it and even then it's very uncertain. And there are other more interesting things. Life is finite. The world will probably not end in our lifetime so it might as well live it to the fullest all the way to the end. And if you completely let the state of the world, and particularly the state of politics, dominate you, you'd be very, very depressed. It's very, very depressing. And life's too short for that. There are too many good things in the world and it's really crucial and important to focus on those as well, to focus on those as a primary. And to let, you know, I think this is what people value in my show. It's a large extent is that I can give them a quick snapshot of what's going on. They don't have to, you know, spend a huge amount of time studying themselves to the extent that they trust me. They can get the key points and live their life and not. So there's the vision of labor, which I think is really, really important. But people, I find so many people obsessing about politics, which again, I even have to protect myself from because if I spent all my time doing this, I'd be depressed. It is really, it's depressing. So you know, this is why I do, you know, I talk about surrounding yourself with beauty and focusing on your life and things like that, because I think it's really, really crucial that you not obsess about these things. I have a few thoughts just like to add about what I see as the value of this kind of work and the place in life of it. We are affected by the culture one way or another. And when people try to isolate themselves too much from thinking about what's going on, they're still affected by it. Their taxes go up, crime goes one way or another in the country, the political landscape changes, whatever happens. And they're affected by it. They tend to feel resentment about it and rightfully so. But they often don't know where or how to direct it. They feel a little bit confused and powerless about it. I think it's important to living your life into functioning to have a sense of where you are and what's happening. And you have to have that in kind of essentialized terms, not, you know, every little detail. This is the mayor and that's the third congressman and this guy just won this election or whatever. But like what politically, what culturally kind of world are you in? And to have it in a way that updates over time, what's changing? What happenings are big deals versus small deals? How do they affect the total? Is there something you can do now with your vote in this election? Is this one where the candidates are so similar or doesn't make any difference or is this one that matters? And you're never going to get maybe the ideal candidate, but maybe one of them is enough better that it's worth going out to vote or encouraging them to not feel hopeless and senseless and confused and bewildered by the world. You have to have a sense of at least at the high headline levels what's happening, what kind of society you're in, what you can do about it, how it impacts your other values, and to have it conceptualized from values that are true and make sense. And that's hard to find. And it's hard to find in a world where the dominant values and dominant ideas are irrational, incoherent, wrong. And so I think it's important for holders of radical values, holders of true values, holders of true ideas, and objectivists in particular to be thinking about these things, to have a good source of news and analysis from that perspective. I think that's why it was so important to Rand herself to do this kind of work. And it's why it's important to me that it's going on now and your show is important to me. I also think that for people who are or philosophers in particular, which is only a small subset of the group, there's a way in which you can get to the ideas can become floating abstractions if you're not applying them to the world around you. And I remember, I don't know if you'll remember this interaction, but years and years ago, when I was working on doing my graduate work writing on very esoteric issues in Plato and Aristotle about epistemology, I would occasionally pop on to HBL, the Harry Binswanger email list run by a friend of ours, Harry. And I was in a thread arguing about something about Iraq policy, why we'd already lost the war. And you sent me an email saying, like, it's good to see you philosophers, you know, dealing with these current events from time to time. But I think because of the issue of like, it's not all detached and in the forms, you know. Yeah. And I think that's that that is true of the philosophers. But if for everybody, it's true because it's so hard. It's important for people to take the objectivism and to see it in the world and to see also the negative predictions that it makes applied to it. It's important to see that evil is not efficacious. And you get that when you watch the world, you get a lot of it because there's a lot of evil and a lot of non efficacious stuff going on. And it's good to see when people are rational and when something is done well, that it's successful. And for that, I think it's good for non philosophers, not intellectuals to read some history to know what's going on in the world. So if you live an integrated life, which is at the end of the day, what flourishing life requires is that is that you really integrate it. You know, ideas are integrated with the way you live. And your knowledge is constantly growing. And it helps you integrate further your ideas. Then you can't take a part of the world and say, I'm not going to look over there. Because then you're negating integration. So even if it's painful to look, you've got to look. And then the question is, how long do I look and how do I go and so on? That you know, that's an evaluation we have to make. But but that's the I think what people get out of the show again is somebody like me is, is I make it a little easier for them to look over there when they when they we don't want to look. But you have to integrate all the knowledge that's going on everything that's going on into everything in your life. In the end, it's all connected. And I think I think one of my strengths has always been the ability to integrate. So this is going back to how do you how do you sift through the news? It's to see connections between stories and to see that it's not okay, this is going on over here and that's going over here and complete two different stories. But to see that it's all part of a particular trend or part of a particular movement to see in terms of the world in which we live in, the why is the all right connected to identity politics, right, of the of the left, right, to see the two that are not they're not just two phenomenas, but they're two phenomenas of the same thing. And one is breeding off of each other and one is reinforcing the other to see the 9 11 and the Christian nature of the Bush and the people surrounding Bush and the Christian morality to see connection between all that. That I think is the is the the advantage we as objectors have in approaching these things is we know it's all connected that they're not disparate separate things. Maybe one integration to then seeing the positive to this that I can bring out and then let's if anybody again from the room wants to talk or raise an issue with question, please come to the mic and then we'll go to the for you because I used to ask you me questions. All right, well, we can riff on them together. But there's a scene in Atlas Shrug that's really significant to me that I think about sometimes when I'm down and call other people's attention to Dachne Taggart sat one of her lowest ebbs. Her project on the rail line that she's proudest of has finally been totally destroyed. She's breaking down and Francisco Dan Conia shows up and takes her out for a drink. And she I forget exactly how he puts it but she's kind of feeling as though there's no good in the world as though nothing comes to anything as though the people as though the world is made up of the kind of people who were in the meeting that she was just people who can't hold firm conviction about anything people who just suck or irrational and but worse than that they're just dreary nothing. And he says like look at the skyscrapers. Those are there and they're proof that another kind of men exists that those people aren't the bottom line on reality. Those people aren't what life's about that there is something better that the irrationality that can overwhelm us when we look at the news or current events or or are disappointed in people isn't the you know the verdict we should reach on the world. And you can see that the other kind of men exist and she asks you know where are they and he says and this will become significant to people who understand the plot of the book when they're wanted you'll be able to find them or when you really want them you'll be able to find them. But what she's lacking there is a kind of perspective on the world that she'll learn over the course of the novel. The perspective of objectivism gives you but it's work. What that perspective does is to see there is real greatness good rationality fantastic things in the world all over the place but it's diluted inundated mixed up in all kinds of awful junk. And if you don't understand what's awful about the awful junk what the alternatives to it is you're not going to be able to see the good that's out there that's being undercut by it and you're not going to be able to see how to direct your life towards that good. And I think you need that perspective you need you know you need it at the right level of abstraction and not in all the details all the time but you need to know that it can be done in the details all the time. And so that's part of what I think. Yeah I know I think that's right and that's part of this part of you have to integrate all this into your life and it has real application that is let's say you let's say the world out there decides inspired by Elon Musk that Apple is an evil company right and it's really evil then you might abandon it you might decide not to buy Apple products anymore I mean that's a bit to do that you have to know whether they're really evil and you have to be engaged at least to some extent in that conversation about what it means to be a company like that to be evil are they what's going on so there's no the real decisions in the world should I boycott everything made in China should I travel to ex-country should I there are a lot of decisions that these politically relevant issues apply to that affected should I go to work for a particular company and also that relate to there are a lot of issues that come out of culture and politics that relate to the good so again I'll pitch my chip chip really good show because because the thing I enjoyed most about the book I read about the chip was to learn about chips and when you learn about chips there's semiconductor chips it's mind-blowing I mean I still don't quite get it right they fit I don't know a hundred million transistors into a little silicon what the hell is a hundred million I mean can you even contemplate the size of a hundred million how small they would have to be to fit on this little thing and how do you do that how do you I mean it's mind-boggling to me I don't know how they do it I say during the show multiple times extreme UV light technology I have no idea what that means right but it's cool because it has this application that changes the world that I do know about because I you know those chips are going to power all the stuff that I do they're probably powering our ability to some extent to communicate with you live by video and they will certainly power all the stuff in the future so it's I could raise the iPhone for you yes there you go my iPhone stuck um but it's it's stunning that people can come up with this stuff and it's beyond my comprehension in terms of just what they do and how they do it and and and and that it is done I was I was describing this mirror that the the size of the flaw would be the equivalent I think of a millimeter millimeter if the if the mirror was the size of Germany I mean that's precision and people say there's nothing there's no such thing as perfection right I mean that's perfect and that's the kind of mirror you have to have in order to do this extreme UV light and in that that kind of perfection um so it's it's to discover that people even today with all the ugliness in the world are creating these beautiful things these amazing things that do have any big and part of what motivates me and I think part of what should motivate everybody is I don't want to see that destroyed I don't want to see that go away you know I you know I'd rather live in a mixed world in which we live where there seems at some beauty being produced some amazing things being produced than the alternative which is which is nothing right so and so even maintaining the status quo is a big deal so we know the status quo cannot be maintained it has to go one way or the other but ultimately uh even if I'll never see um you know the the the perfect state the perfect state of the world the perfect culture an objective is culture you know I'd rather fight to to see a better culture than I would otherwise uh because there's so much good that actually exists in the world and also I mean people are really down on the present world yeah um pining for some ideal that hasn't ever been and when do they wish they had been born it's not like you know our birthright is a perfect society and you got screwed up because you were born this year rather than you know 10 years ago what everything would have been ideal there was no 10 years ago when everything was everything's always been the bad the default is irrationality primitiveness savagery every step towards a better society is a real achievement we're not owed it it was achieved by people who came before us and we have to do our best to improve it keep it going um to really value something is to be you know willing to work for it to appreciate it and to recognize that you can't expect it to be given to you yes and part of part of what frustrates is the number of people out there who are angry because they don't have their perfect objective this world yet right it's like where was it supposed to come from yeah if not from there's no god and you and it doesn't all right so we've got uh speaking of uh the world in silicon valley we were talking from a relatively recent transplant familiar to here uh uh giving our first question and then we'll go to super chat after that yeah we had a bunch of super chat already so chat hey yeah hello uh so i guess um when you think about like i understand why the focus on politics how it affects everybody um i really like your shows about chips and container ships and all that stuff i find them really exciting um but uh like someone i'm particularly inspired by in that area is like lex freedman he seems to like take three hours just dive deep into someone who's really passionate and making some small progress in the world that maybe doesn't warrant a biography but it kind of gets those stories out but it's kind of limited to ai and physics which is great for me but it's not like i'm wondering if there's like some missed opportunity within objectivism or some not missed but like some opportunity um to focus on the things in the world that matter in general to uh objectivism and getting good ideas out there but that's spotlighting uh i don't know just like the passion and excitement uh like lex does i mean i i think there is i mean uh there's a lot to be done um and somebody who would focus their attention on all the good that's being produced being an entrepreneur being scientists who are doing really exciting and good work that are not objectivists that are just just good people or good people in this particular narrow scope um i think i think could have real cultural impact out there and could inspire people i mean uh there is a massive value in showing that there's their heroes out there in the world and they are they are um you know colorado in atlas shrugged is is real and and it's it's every day it's it's it's right here among us and we should be celebrating that fact and i yeah i mean i wish i wish somebody would do that Gina Gorlin has the building the builders uh podcast she's on which he's been talking to a lot of founders um of companies about uh their process and what they've done and um you get some of that is uh it's in there but i mean i agree with you there could be more we need uh a part of it someone there's a kind of work in finding the right people right and attracting them to the interviews and so forth and and knowing how to do it i mean what's amazing about lex and i'm a i'm a fan so you know of lexus uh is his ability to um to take on i think difficult interesting questions and to have and to do it in a dead pan way and but to be interesting at the same time right and to really ask good questions and probing questions and let you speak that's the other thing right i i would be wanting to jump in i would not be good at that right because i'd want to jump in and finish people sentences and lexus very good at letting people speak and letting it all hang out and pushing back sometimes you know on on on certain issues but yes uh a hero show where we just brought out great achievers would be would be something worth while doing all right so we've got so we've got a few super chats you can ask michael asks if he can ask deep philosophical questions given that because i always say don't ask me the deep philosophical question wait until greg is on so yes you can ask the philosophical questions if you want to greg is here uh to answer them let's so the first one is a $50 question thank you from calib griffin calib says why is this not working all right the button's not working all right calib said sci-fi fan bases sci-fi fan bases have been foxholes for romantics so it's heartbreaking to see them so crushed over the destruction of the characters and stories they value diehard fans are labeled toxic for being upset and are turned into conservative cynics okay so i don't know that i know exactly what you're referring to but i i think i know the phenomena you're relating to and that is i do think that sci-fi over the last 50 years has probably been the one area in literature where you've seen some romantic stories um maybe it's a great literature probably is not but at least it it's had stories with plots with heroes with interesting projections about the future agree or disagree with a tempster and and i think it's really been a a place where a lot of people seeking the hero in literature seeking romantic kind of stories have aggregated and it is true that i think to a large extent that even there you're seeing naturalism creep in you're seeing infimalism you're seeing a lot of these ideas come in that are turning that are undermining the heroism and it reminds me of that essay in the romantic manifesto um oh god what's the name of it the one about mall treason bootleg oh or philosophy and more treason philosophy and mall treason where she talks about uh this man that she talks about the man that she knows who when he was a child always sought the heroic he sought it primarily in comic books and things like that but he sought the heroic and was always crushed was always told oh life is not like that don't do that and the kind of psychological damage that did to him and i think it's done to our culture and it's done to our world and done to some extent i believe it's in all of us it's really really hard to root out that kind of attitude which is in our culture that cynicism that skepticism that putting the hero down um and and that is it is tragic and it is uh i think uh the idea of heroism has been viewed as toxic and and uh unrealistic and not of this world and uh don't waste your time on it that has real psychological damage to people and it it it's soul crushing i think that's the right term soul crushing so i think that's what you're talking about correct me if i'm wrong the knot of this world point two relates to um the original romanticism and it it's um as a you know as an artistic movement in literature and there's a connection to science fiction that is romantic stories or why are they called romantic i mean what does it have to do with romand it they're they they're at least initially set in far gone periods that are remote from actual life uh used to be the past or the gothic period or whatever a medieval time thing of Ivanhoe or something to kind of make it somehow other than our everyday other than our life because there's the idea that values and grandeur can't be lived out in day-to-day life um the way that we see that nowadays as you put it in space or some place far off um the i mean part of what Rand was doing in being a romantic realist and but i think some of the other better romantic writers did deeper romantic writers is try not to have them be in such remote from life locations um Hugo is not so remote from life right as as scott for example um and uh uh say that this world can be like that values and profundity could be ours and um so it it's not a surprise that the remnants of it uh exist in enclaves that are set in ways that remove them from actual life yeah it's it's safer for them to do it there it's i think for the writer and for his audience it's safer to say okay well now we're the heroes this world yeah we know it's horrible and you see the same thing i think in fantasy uh i think you see the same tendency there heroes there you know again it might not be great literature but it certainly is uh hero worshiping but he had something that i didn't quite follow about the toxicity in the fan base and the fan bases uh is disappointed about something and it drives their politics and i i suspect he's talking about something specific in some franchise that neither of us follow i don't know but i don't know what i don't know says a conservative cynics they turn into conservative cynics why conservative why not others but um they turn into cynics there's no question about that and i do i understand what the toxic is because the values are being crushed the values are being put down and that turns them into this cynics which is sad all right we ask um okay the start button doesn't work okay um it seems as if a small number of social paths have dominated all of human history hitler starlin etc is this true of uh would some other person do the same thing what can we do to expose current and future bad actors so i mean i don't think that can't be true first of all uh if that were true then we wouldn't be here right we wouldn't we'd be we'd still be in caves or whatever histories be dominated ultimately by good now too little too rarely but uh what moves the world and what dominates the world is good otherwise again human life would be short miserable pathetic everything hop started was um and i also don't like calling these people sociopaths because they are guided by they you know they might be but why bring in psychology into this they are guided by particular ideas um these ideas have consequences they are fulfilling those consequences and um and and i think it diminishes the world of ideas in what they do but just say yeah there's a bunch of crazy people out there doing horrible things and somehow they attain power somehow they're successful once in a while or dominantly as as you might say no i mean for every hitler and starlin there was an america and a at a britain that stood up to them and defeated them and there were good people on that side not ideal people church was not ideal if you know church but he was good when he came to world war two and even fdr was good when he came to world war two at least once the war was declared um and and uh uh you know even though he was terrible before uh and so there is good in the world and good constantly is defeating evil notice the good constantly now too little too late but it does defeat it again otherwise you wouldn't be here so it's the way to look at the world is not unfortunately we learn history by focusing on all the horrible things that have happened we don't learn history by focusing on the great things that happened but again there's a politic for every hitler in starlin there is a um there's a newton and uh and there's uh there's a an invent of the steam engine and there's an invent of of a chip technology and and 99.999 of all the people who've done great things in the world you don't you've never heard of and they've done phenomenal things i mean the story of history is not a story of monsters it's a story of what's good and humankind think of it as a you know a giant or a hero uh you know making progress and being stung and set back by gnats and then occasionally the gnats warm together you know into some giant horror thing and then he beats it down but he never gets rid of the gnats and the question is why where are these gnats coming from why can't he you know get further and there are constant predestines and there are problem but what they are is something that's impeding the the good um not some of them are and also i i really second the why sociopath i mean if you're not a licensed clinician forget the license license if you're not a like professional clinician i think you should in general strike words like sociopath and anything that has like a diagnostic flavor from your vocabulary it's almost everybody uses these words as like fancy ways of saying jerk but if it's a fancy way of saying jerk just say jerk if it's more than jerk or you know something a little spicier than that um it's because you have some specific scientific theory about what's causing this and how it worked it functions very likely that series false but if it's true fine but you've got to know it and that's the commitment in using that term and i have no idea if hitler had this or that diagnosis or even if the diagnoses are valid um and then in any case what hitler was not of particular um impact historically what was of in there are always bozos like that around vicious evil people like that with whatever kind of personality issues he had what's significant about germany uh in that period is not hitler but what it was that there let one of those guys come to power as head of the country whereas usually those guys aren't running a whole country right it's the other germans that are the problem not hitler and what's the cause of the other germany if you want to look for your grand evil figures in history it's the people who are propagating the worst ideas so cunt not hitler but it's it's how they came to power and even about cunt you want to know like why was that influential um why do these bad ideas if you know cunt is the source and we're not arguing for that now but of the source of some of the ideas that led to to the modern problems it's not just he came out of nowhere like why were those ideas influential you want to think about like what is it that people are doing uh in their thinking that that makes them susceptible to wrong and what is it more importantly that they're doing when they're being right and how can we double down on that and excise the wrong uh hi there's a case right now before the supreme court i'm not sure what stage it's at about whether harvard university should be allowed to use race and determining um what students they accept to the college and you see uh chapel hill also okay um and i think it's uh an evil policy but they're a private university shouldn't they be allowed to make their own dumb decisions they'll the other ones are going to suffer for it but by the same token an argument that's all all we always made is they're accepting public money also so the feds get to tell them what to do uh so i've got mixed feelings about that case and how it should be decided i have no idea how they're going to decide what do you have any thoughts on that either of you and this is the problem of the site of reviewing supreme court cases in the context of existing law and a context of existing legal system in a in a free market in a in a true free market you would say none of my business i mean harvard and them can decide i think it's an evil practice but legally there's no issue but here it's of course much more complicated it's much more complicated by existing law which says that the universities are not allowed to discriminate so they're not allowed to discriminate now it turns out they are discriminating but they're discriminating against a group that nobody thought you know nobody considered when they passed anti-discrimination laws so they were trying to prevent them from discriminating against admitting blacks or you know oppressed quote oppressed minorities they're discriminating against a non oppressed minority so how does that how does that fit in so that's so the question before the supreme court is not what is right the question before the supreme court is what is legal which is a big difference so you know the supreme court could decide that they can't do it they can't discriminate against the asians not on the basis of that is right that is the ideal or we degree that that's it but on the basis that if you don't allow them to discriminate against blacks let's say well you can't then allow them to discriminate against asians you have to be consistent you have to apply the law equally i mean my sense is is both of the court will and that it should given the where the law is um site against harvard and u n c and that it's more clear that they'll side against harvard than u n c but probably against both um it was a case brought by a group of asian students and we can say that the asians are the non discriminated against minority but um historically that's not true there was a chinese exclusion act in the country and if you look particularly at the stuff that came out of harvard how they're like demoting these chinese students it's with these personality tests that are every stereotype you could imagine um it's really that i think is evil um is the policy of racial preferences and admissions evil there i think you have to think about there's something else that i think is weird and shaping or thinking about universities we think of them all as like public utilities as though like there is harvard our university which our america's university which grants entry into our america's elite and so forth and harvard is ours and so it's up to us who they they you know whatever and so they should take the best students or they should take whatever students we think they should take but like you don't think that about minikey right like you don't think like the best cars are whatever um ferrari's or something and minikey doesn't serve us they're my mufflers so uh they should really not be doing affirmative action for chief cars um event if you think of what education is doing as a service you would think that different educational institutions would have specializations in different ways of performing that service maybe for different populations and so forth and some of them their view would be like we want to graduate the people who are going to be able to be the most competent at this the quickest and so the way to do that is to get the people who are the best off going in and that's what we call merit and that's how we do it and maybe that's what harvard's mission is or should be or would be a good mission for them but if we didn't think of harvard as ours we would think you know if we thought of it as harvard's we think they've got to figure out what hill they want to climb what project they want to solve what their mission is and uh it's so as long as it's a rational mission it's fine for them to do it and if part of their mission has to do with um helping give shots to people they think didn't have shots of ancestral problems or whatever that could be a rational mission uh so I think the whole there's something a little bit too collectivist about thinking about what a given school's admissions policy should be apart from the idea that each school is a separate thing with its own mission but that's all baked into how we think about schools because the government gives all this money to schools it's just a lot collectivistic assumes that everything about higher education and it's more than that as soon as you put in discrimination laws and as soon as you make talking about these things difficult because uh because of uh issues of race or because of issues other issues like that then then you limit the scope of experimentation you limit the scope so schools can't imagine what kind of missions they might have under different circumstances because now they have to follow these rules both from a legal perspective and from a cultural perspective there are expectations about what rules they should follow and there's no open debate about these things okay you know blacks tend to be poorer in our world so we're gonna accept more blacks because part of our mission is to help the the the poor parts of society whatever right I don't know but that you can't that is not something they can even discuss in debate because there's so many taboos around these issues around discrimination and it I think a lot of it comes from the the the civil rights act and the way it was interpreted later on affirmative action and and the whole cultural interpretation of of that phenomenon and we're planning to do some where I am anyway some programming on that act uh next year in the year to come it's um I remember her famous article on racism in 1963 so we're coming up on the anniversary of that and we're gonna have some programming connected to it in the in the spring I'm not sure just what exactly um all right we've got I want to um well yeah do one of the super chats okay um we've got like five oh uh let's see and then I was gonna call on someone but she's coming up on her own accord so oh there she is no no not well there are two people coming oh okay cool okay how do you answer how do you answer quantum scientists like Feynman who claim that they have proved nothing is certain is this a case of a specialist in properly applying broad knowledge well maybe but I mean to prove something is to have established it is certain so I don't even know very contradictory right there a contradiction in terms but I I don't know that Feynman said that so the things I've seen or read by him have been often intelligent witty and that is when they deal with matters I can understand and then sometimes about matters I don't understand uh so that's all I have to say about that so I was going to say we should talk a little bit about China because I had a really interesting message uh from someone asking for some commentary on it and here she is yeah so I was a little hesitant to ask the question because there are just so many things going on right now about China and I just struggle to frame a question well so basically what's happening is that there are a lot of protests about ccp and about Xi Jinping happening around the world and also inside China which is very surprising a lot of young people are sort of mobilizing doing these protests in universities in China and my question is surprisingly I did not feel hope after seeing all these protests I think I don't think it's a fight that has a chance to succeed maybe it's maybe I'm wrong I'm willing to be proven wrong but I think the majority of Chinese people are only disagreeing with the degree of the lockdown instead of we don't want lockdown at all it's more like oh we want to be let out of our house but the rest of no area you know we understand if first public safety we can't go out so I see these people young people who are actually brave and actually idealistic going now risking their lives for a fight that I'm not sure if it's worth fighting for and I just want to know your thoughts on that yeah I mean you have to separate whether it's worth fighting for and whether they'll be successful they're not the same thing because they might fail and it might still be worth fighting for because there's always a potential of success so I don't know because I mean I haven't been to China in three years four years and things were changing significantly China was becoming a lot more authoritarian towards when it when I was the last time I was there so things have gotten worse I think and COVID has brought out the worst in the authoritarian regime I've also been surprised at the extent of the demonstrations and pleasantly surprised excited by it although I like you I don't think this will be it but I still think it's a good thing and I think it's a good sign there were demonstrations at 50 different universities over over the weekend I think there were 80 now it's up to 80 now and and on Monday there weren't any demonstrations Shanghai and Beijing because the police were out in force but there were lots of demonstrations in other cities around China so this is this is major and I said I think on my show if it goes in a positive direction this will be the biggest story of the decade the century I don't know I mean it'll be huge right because China is such an important country today and what happens there is so important to all of our lives and and I think it's it's it's it's huge and important I think in authoritarian regimes people generally learn to live with the most people learn to live with the authoritarianism they have a certain rhythm in their lives they don't break out of the rhythm it's not like they eager to say something that the regime is going to shut them down they separate themselves from it and they support the lockdowns a little bit they support Xi because everybody else supports Xi and so on but they're not engaged they're just living their lives but then what happens and can happen is that people who care people go out and demonstrate suddenly make a big deal out of something and suddenly it wakes people up and they say wait a minute there is something wrong here I should you know I like the white papers that they're holding up right they're holding up these black sheets of paper we have no free speech we can't write anything down which I think is is is powerful I think this might wake up the new middle class in China so there's a new middle class in China that is first generation has made money is living a life where they have choices right previous generations had no choices and maybe they're starting to think maybe should more even more choices like politics and other things and maybe this will wake them up maybe don't encourage them to do more maybe not but maybe it's worth a shot I mean look what's happening in Iran right there's a certain parallel there some girls went out and they started protesting because this girl was killed because of the hijab hijab's been in Iran mandated since 1979 right I'm sure they've been women who've been upset about that and I'm sure there are lots of people who've been upset about it but now suddenly it's snowballing it's it's not just a hijab they're shooting people who are demonstrating that's wrong so we will protest that and then something else happened and that's wrong we'll protest and it's just snowballs now I don't know if you want or make a difference but it's a step in that direction so China's good at China's looking now she is looking now and he's seeing demonstrations all over China I think he's a little worried he could crush these demonstrations that would cost him a lot within China because I think people Tiananmen Square one of the things that happened in Tiananmen Square when all those kids were murdered is we didn't have video of it we didn't see it happen we didn't see it in the world and the Chinese people didn't see it they know they know people who disappeared but it wasn't visible this will be broadcast if he shuts these people down if he starts shooting in the streets this will be broadcast and that'll wake more people up so I don't know that I'm as negative now this might not result in it but this might be a first step where people start saying within China huh there is a significant number opposed and I'm happy that they're not saying anti-lockdowns they're saying we have no free speech they're saying we want she gone they're saying we want the communist party gone wow that's a big step in China to say stuff like that even in Tiananmen Square Tiananmen Square started out as we want a little bit more economic liberty we want a little bit more they want for democracy or or they certainly not individual rights or anything like that but as that grew it they became more bold and that's what got so this is an inevitable step towards the collapse of dictatorship now is is it going to lead to collapse I don't know but you're not going to have collapse unless this happens and so you should this should fill you with admiration for them for doing it and fill you with some level of hope that even in China where we thought everybody was kind of sleepy and accepting they're coming out into the streets and they're demonstrating and and and with the surveillance state now the government knows who's demonstrating they're going after them so this takes a lot of courage to go out into the street right now in China good for them and did two further thoughts I mean either it's suppressed in a really brutal way which is then going to have effects on waking more people up or it's not and if it's not that pushes the envelope of what's acceptable to say or what people think it's going to say I think so either way I think there's a loss here once it's reached this level for the regime the other thing is is maybe behind the the question or some of the pessimism is a premise about what it's like to have a goal or a cause that is like there's some fundamental idea that you're fighting for and that's the idea you're fighting for and you're either fighting for the right one or the wrong one you're either fighting for freedom or just a little less lockdown but there should be some lockdown but not the um but I actually don't think people's goals are as determinant as that um people are aggrieved something's wrong in their lives they don't quite know what it is and they're looking for a way to conceptualize it I think and they're and they're feeling something has to be done about it I think that's how all kind of resistance movements or change movement start it's not that they have in their back pocket a philosophy how things should be and a conceptualization about precisely what's wrong they have some things wrong here something off your right I can say some of what it is but I'm not always able to articulate it and there are different competing articulations of it and in the process of the movement forming it never forms with a fully articulate thing already there in the back pocket the articulation comes about as the movement develops and matures and so I don't think we know yet what this is going to be about um the the fact that it's already connected to free speech and so forth is a very promising sign um if it was like they came out with a manifesto of we should have exactly New Zealand's policy rather than China's like that would be pretty depressing but I don't think that's what it is it's people like resenting what's been done to them and um resenting the people who are doing it and then trying to understand that and look for an alternative and I think most movements for good or bad start that way and then there's an issue of then how do people conceptualize it how do they come to understand it and that's the point at which um an influx of really good ideas is needed and I mean one thing that would be great to be happening in the world today is infusions of the best ideas on this into people who are influential in this movement in China and this is something for you know people with connections and Chinese speakers to do I know maybe they're reading out the short but you know which is available but you know it just occurred to me this is one of the best times right now in the last decade like all the trends six months ago or nine months ago whatever which was authoritarianism every trend in the world suggested that authoritarianism was in the Vogue American conservatives wanted nationalism and they wanted authoritarianism in Europe authoritarian political parties were winning Putin looked like a genius Xi looked like a genius Iran was standing up to the United States and doing whatever the hell it wanted the third turns in the world were and the the model was all born in Hungary or whatever and six months or nine months or whatever gone by Putin's like the biggest idiot in the world right now complete and out of failure the Iranian regime they're massive protests in the street they have no idea what to do it for do with the same reason I think the Chinese don't because if they go out in the streets really start shooting everybody which they've done in the past this time there'll be video of it this time it might result in something bigger and now we've got demonstration I'm super excited right now because like the authoritarians are folding I can tell the the wind going out of all the western authoritarians because then their role models are all collapsing and everybody's making fun of Donald Trump what could be better I mean life is good so but but yeah there seems to be a shift because we're seeing the impotence of authoritarians and and just nine months ago everybody in the cultural world out there was saying no no they get stuff done right the old kind of phrase and and now we're seeing how weak they are and I think this the fact that it's around COVID uh zero COVID policy is is really good because this is like a top-down government policy and it's completely screwed up and it's completely messed up and look at the consequences and and and they didn't want good they didn't want western vaccines they they they shun works and vaccines okay the the consequences even there so it's um yeah and it's also a policy on which the rest of the world yeah well I um aped an emically authoritarian China I mean the policies that the rest of the world adapted on COVID were like light versions of Beijing's policies which was a disgrace and a horror and you know and it's it's ironic and amazing that the rebellion against these policies is in China not here right we never went out and demonstrated against lockdowns but they are which I think is such a perfect closing of a circle and uh you know I don't know I I see it all in the positive not to say that it's going to result in the fall of Xi I hope it does or the fall of even better the fall of the communist party in China but the the Chinese have this spirit in them right now says a lot and if even if it's just young people okay young people are going to be around for a while and and hopefully they can hold on to that I mean the the 89 generation the gentleman's great generation was crushed by the brutality of what they saw and they went in a sense it depressed them and they just put their head down and went on living let's hope that doesn't happen to this generation of protesters while we're on China and while you didn't get a news wrap-up today uh any quick thoughts on the other big news that I'm trying to today that jung's past oh I can never pronounce Chinese names yeah I can't remember his name um yeah I mean yet I'm in and uh and opening what's that that is a leader that did the crush that's the enemy writers and he's the leader that did and also who opened up a lot of yeah so that's how not how they led the story they led the story with his opening up well the person who really made the decision to crush the demonstrating gentleman square was dung cha pang um dung cha pang was the unofficial leader of china throughout that period he was in the background always he was the guy who made the decisions uh there were premiers you know there were there were other people who filled the top spots but it was clear throughout that period the dung cha pang was the guy in charge and running things um he termed himself out because he he's the guy who really instituted this term limit kind of system that she is undone um so I think dang in my book gets the blame for china mud square and and it fits dang I mean dang was dang cha pang was uh Mao's right-hand man for much of the much of the period uh Mao was ruler but then he was penalized by in the cultural revolution he was sent out in his in his his family um I think his son died or his son fell and I can't remember the exact story but bad things happen um but what happened in the period of the 80s and 90s and there's no question about this is a massive opening up of china and and that has benefited chinese lives enormously it as it obviously wasn't done consistently and obviously there was that there was Tiananmen Square which is such a horrific evil but in total for the people who weren't crushed in in in 89 um it is one of the most amazing uh stories in human history I mean in terms of the number of people coming out of poverty the the creation of the maybe the largest middle class in the world the the prosperity the wealth the everything that's happened over there and again you know you see this interaction between evil that is that is clearly there but but the good you know succeeding and and all the chinese people needed was a little bit freedom it's a little bit got a pseudo property rights and and the you know this is I'm a huge fan of china because of this a little bit of freedom how much they did with them how much they achieved how much success they do how much wealth and prosperity they generated for themselves and um and how quickly and how quickly was is just stunning and amazing now a lot of that has to do with investment from overseas and the fact that they could benefit from the capital that that came from overseas the knowledge the funding and the the equipment that came from overseas but still it's just a stunning story and it's a story that I think we don't even yet have a full understanding of there's still people out there who think i'll trade with china had a negative impact in the united states which is completely not complete nonsense but this full story of what happened over the last uh since 1979 to today as a result of globalization has not really been told yet and will one day in china is a big big part of that um so I don't know you know what do you say about somebody who was responsible for the deaths of many people good riddance um on the other hand they did open up china which was a good thing so I mean this is the complication in history they're not just so sociopaths that would be too simple to just call them sociopaths they are they are motivated by complex motivations that generates you know generate these horrifically mixed results and this goes to our um one of the themes that we started with that you can't just go through history and put white hats and black hats on people who are the heroes and who are the villains uh some people are consistent heroes and some people are consistent villains uh and black and white really does matter you have to resolve shades of gray into black and white but it's not by finding the particular people or groups or agencies all the time it's what ideas or principles were there and and understanding the complicated ways in which those are either indifferent people or influencing their actions if not through their own characters the fact that they have to uh you know deal with other people in the world or other forces in the world that are operating on them and and what's and again it's interesting why why do we have these people who can do both good and evil at the same time and and i think this china with dang dang at least because i i've read about dang so i know a little bit about him dang is a great example of what happens when you're a pragmatist so what dang what happened to dang is he gave up on the principles of communism once he saw how backward china was relative to the rest of the world says principles are his support of communism was grounded in some bizarre belief that communism really would achieve would be an achievement with and then when he when he when he went to japan and he went elsewhere and he saw how primitive china was relative to this to the world he came back and said well this can't be right right so it now it's not that he adopted good principles then he kept his collectivistic principles but he became a pragmatist about them i mean he kept his his collectivistic kind of worldview but he became a pragmatist in terms of how to apply them there was no long term thinking there were no principles we'll try this we'll try that you know a few people die here okay that didn't work we'll try something else he didn't care about individuals he cared about china being successful and he opened up a little bit and that was huge success from the perspective of china being successful so he opened up more but then when that was threatened by jenom and squay said okay so we'll kill a few thousand people and then we'll get back to opening up because that is good for china but this shows kind of how how you know when you've got a bad goal whether you guided by principles about pragmatism doesn't matter bad things are going to happen but at least when you're not consistently bad on principles some good things can happen as well yeah part of what you have to think about when you're judging pragmatists is i mean pragmatism is about compromising and tearing down principles and are you tearing down good principles or bad principles if you're a pragmatic um communist what you're saying is i'm not taking my communism too seriously if you're a pragmatic president of america what you're saying is i'm not taking rights too seriously what's on this yeah do we have a cap we can at least go till three and we can go a bit after okay well let's try to finish the super chats let me go back to andy's because he did put some money on this question about fame and not so much about fame but do you have an answer to the quantum mechanic type interpretation of there is no such thing as certainty in the world because because look quantum mechanics it's that's not what any kind of physics that's not a kind of things physics can show and it's not the sort of thing any kind of physics i know about does show it's it's just you can a lot of what passes for popular analysis of science is just regular stuff people have always thought put in scientific language wrongly so so it's like what we said about sociopath earlier it just means jerk the way most people use it and they should just use the word jerk they don't freaking know what it means and likewise i can't be sure of anything and then something something quantum quantum you say after it it's not that's not the kind of thing the physics says if you want to know what quantum physics says read a book that's actually about quantum physics not a kind of um you know deep prom uh d-pack chopra ask um a thing of it and the actual things that that physicists say that are anti-certainty that that have some teeth to them come from people like popper and so forth and aren't based on and ultimately from hume and aren't based on anything specific to quantum uh quantum physics so i mean there are a bunch of things that are startling and strange about the quantum world things that you know knowing one thing puts you in a situation where you can't know something else there are levels of details and specificity of things you can't know i don't know or understand very much of that but that's not the kind of thing that could possibly say you can't be certain of anything um resources on quantum mechanics um i i hesitate to give because i know so little about the field but there's a a book by travis norsen something foundations of quantum mechanics or something like that that um attempts to teach quantum mechanics from an evidence-based uh this experiment was observed here's you know the mathematical formulas of it here are the questions that it raises and that leave it open and i can only get a little bit into it before the mass gets too heavy weather for me but if if people want a kind of you know interesting kind of sense of what does this show and what doesn't it that might be a place to look i know i've learned a lot from conversations with him over the years about it um if you have a particular thing though that you're interested in a particular video or something you know send it to one of us we did that thing a few years ago on what's the name of that guy who thinks there's no reality because some beetle sleeps with a coke bottle yeah i'll show him again because he's he's he's very very popular um or hofman hofman yeah hofman uh from university of california ovine yeah i mean i'd say one thing about quantum mechanics um one thing that i find just interesting there's a lot of disagreement among scientists about what it means so they all agree about the phenomena they agree about the equations they agree that it works we see quantum phenomena in computers and chip making they have to deal with quantum phenomena there's no question quantum phenomena exist what it means how you interpret it how you turn that into english right in if i still understand it this vast disagreements among scientists so to take one interpretation which vaguely says we can't be certain about anything is is just unscientific because you haven't really researched it you haven't really looked at it and i'm not even sure anybody actually says that yeah although arguably some of the physicists did say that but but it's it's not important that they said it there's when they say it they're not talking about quantum mechanics yeah you can't be certain of anything you you can't be certain that you know twice six is twelve is that quantum mechanics it's not like if you make that interpretation it's some philosophical leap vaguely inspired by something you're misunderstanding about some science yeah all right we've just got added questions okay uh to greg are you aware of any objectives philosophers who have taken on the concept of gender through objectives epistemology no i mean ben and maybe on card did a um did a podcast where they kind of thought a bit about a castley and stocks book uh there was in a clubhouse session where we talked a little about it there but it was all kind of informal i'm a little more skeptical of some of what stock says than than they are um i mean some of us have had informal discussions about but no one's uh no one's really written on it to my knowledge yeah i i recommend the book uh stocks book whether you agree with all of it or not i think it's very thoughtfully written and interesting um and covers the debates greg are we living through an intellectual inquisition of moral authoritarianism it's talking about equity and social justice i mean the inquisition killed people and so i think that you know it's a little we should be careful about too quickly um likening things to it um there are a lot of very sensurious people with bad ideas uh some of whom are noisier now than they used to be they're certainly prominent in universities they've always been prominent in universities i think they're worse now than they were 10 or 20 years ago but not maybe so much worse now with people uh in the general public tend to imagine i think the bigger issues now are in um corporate hr department so what kind of influence is there there and i'm not close enough to that world to to know but i think the my sense is that we're past the peak of that stuff i think that stuff peaked about a year or two ago it's still going to be around and around with us it's been around and around with us for a long time but i think we're at the peak of this wave it's already crested those of us who are you know even a little uh they have have a little bit of time under our belt what's the what's the idiom there i've been around a few times you know remembered that there was a kind of period of like you know things are a lot more pc in the 90s and they got less so in the 2000s and then uh so these things rise and fall i don't mean that there's not an overall trajectory to them but um i i don't think we're cascading to an inquisition anytime soon i agree with that there are things to be concerned about and to fight and push back against but it's not at the level of inquisition and i think it's gonna recede a little bit gonna get a little better before it gets much worse uh john thanks for the support let's see we got simon uh hey greg uh try try and catch you on clubhouse keep up the great rooms just wanted to know if objectivism holds that prostitution is immoral and why i think we're rushing out of no way ran certainly thought it was immoral um i think i do it's i can't i'm not sort of on the barricades of fighting it's fighting against it's illegal and it shouldn't be i i've not known any prostitutes or people who patronized them so it's a little bit kind of floating to me it seems very hard to imagine a a healthy and good um reason to avail yourself of that surface or uh that it can be a healthy career to be in uh that anyone would do it for anything other than desperation but i've not thought very much about it yeah i mean i think that's right i think it's it's uh it's hard to imagine somebody being able to earn self-esteem in a profession like that it's hard to imagine them having a healthy relationship with sex um choosing a career like that um could you imagine somebody in a particular life circumstance where that was their only out and therefore they they did it is that horrific no i don't think it is so i'm not i you know we're not uh christian malik who says who uh anti prostitution because uh it violates some we just think it's bad for you right the immorality here is not towards other people the immorality is is what you're doing with your own life and how it affects you as a human being and how it affects your ability to to have a future uh yeah this this is what gave me pause about saying i mean when people think of a prostitution as immoral or bad there tends to be a focus on the prostitute the fallen woman there's a stain on her she's awful we wouldn't she's disgusting and that's i mean to me it's like gross you want to go to a price that's the service you want that's how you want to have sex and then when i think about her what an awful job and why would you want to have and like you know so it's um i would think of it as any other in the way that i would think about any other destructive if we're right that it is service someone's you know whatever a heroine dealer or something yeah and and you could i could imagine circumstances of life where you would do it because you had to and it was is your way out uh in some way and i wouldn't condemn a person for doing that uh and and certainly it should be legal yeah it's not discussed at cassette that's motivating uh simon asked hey greg oh we just did that let's see greg what is your evaluation of jordan peterson today compared to when you guys debated in five years ago i think he's gone completely insane since then i mean he was pretty bad back then in lots of ways uh one of the things i was sad about about that panel is i didn't think we got to uh most of the differences i had a lot of things i wanted to say on it and we just didn't get around to the topics and we were like focused on whether a stump in the woods is a chair or a seat if you sit on it um which was fine but like if we had had four hours and we didn't um he said and i haven't really dug that much into it a lot of crazy awful stuff about russia i had the sense that the guys really changed or shifted or gone off the deep end then i saw him at a conference a few weeks ago the uh academic freedom conference i was at in stampford um i didn't talk to him one on one because there were a bunch of people around him but i saw him and he seemed to me like the same guy he actually made some really good points in his talk on it as there as well as some bad points and i think he's essentially the same person he was then um i think it's kind of a there are good things in our conversation but i think it's a shame that it didn't get to the heart of what we disagreed about and we couldn't moralize over this agreement and um so it was a little too friendly for that reason yeah i agree i agree i do think though he seems angrier now maybe not in person but at least on his videos he's projecting an angry of vision uh he seemed much more benevolent in the past uh and now he's some of his videos he just looks like an angry prophet i mean any any profit sizes this is what's going to happen to the world you know he was i think on one of the videos i showed he was predicting the price of oil right i mean why would you do that i mean i wouldn't do that i know more than jord peterson does about prices so but but he you know doing things like that which is like it's almost biblica and he had this almost biblical attitude of the doom and gloom and the world is going to end if this continues and um that i don't remember having as much in the past i think he got away from being a teacher and and now he's become more uh you know a prophet and and that is it's a different tone i thought he was a very engaging teacher whether the content was good or not it's a question but he was very engaging particularly i like i like this vid the videos if you saw the the early videos of him just in the classroom teaching his class he did a thing on pinocchio we did i mean they were fascinating even when you disagreed with him today i find less of what he says fascinating it's more yeah he's in this the shtick that he has yeah so i expected that when i saw him and he was more like the old jordan peterson but again the old jordan peterson was not no great he was a guy who was mostly for bad things with some good things mixed in with them which is how uh but you know interesting a kind of you know uh in his delivery of it thoughtful um you know just often bad wrong all right daniel says um greg are you as cautiously optimistic about recent developments as uran expressed ps you should do more guest appearances on uran shows we'll talk about that um about the specific um i hadn't thought about it the i i put together china and uh and i ran as two places we were having at the same time you know really welcome opposition to to long-standing authoritarian longer and standing in iran um well depending on how you where you count what you counted your theory um i hadn't thought of it as connected to the pushback um in the american elections but i think that is a real connection it is a cause for optimism um i don't think we're on a straight line trajectory pass for the good or bad history is jagged there are ups and downs and you have to zoom out a lot historically and every little adjustment down seems like the bottom's falling out and every uh adjustment up can seem to people like well now we have salvation i don't think you know the change between the last six months and now is a kind of salvation but it's a welcome change it's things are headed a bit up and what i see it as is there was a sense in which i do think the bottom had fallen out of for the world the world was in a kind of stable state roughly since the fall of communism to 9 11 then 9 11 messed things up and had us go in downhill for a while but it kind of got into a and the financial crisis but it kind of got into a somewhat stable trajectory and i think the um a bunch of events around the 2015 through recently uh of which the trump presidency was a big part uh had the bottom falling out of of um the things that were sustaining values in the world i think we're really deteriorating a lot more quickly and a lot of that damage has been done i don't think we're going to rebound from it i think the republican party which was never a good party uh well it was in you know the 1840s but 1860s um but in my lifetime was never a good party is a a you know orders of magnitude worse than it was before um and uh therefore much less attractive as an alternative to the democrats but it could have kept on going into the subterranean i think we're seeing signs that the the you know we're we're reaching a new bottom and we can start to grow up a bit from it rather than that we're falling through the floor um and um i think the democratic the left has been relatively say it's got worse and then it's yeah it's also stabilized in a sense that it's at least somewhat rejecting it's it's um it's crazy left and that's part of the thinking that past peak woke so to speak at least for this iteration i think so i i think so as well um and the you know and the other thing that i mentioned i think is relevant is prudent i do think the failure of russia and ukraine is resonating in the world i i don't think it's a not it's a real event it's and it's it's and people are trying to see the connection between that and authoritarianism they you're starting to see people talk about that and that's i think important hopefully it'll have the kind of effect on the right that the failure of socialism had on the left it's not going to turn them don't want 80 but it's going to um slow them make something gonna slow them down and if if if it continues like this i mean they're still i mean jordan peterson is still out there telling us oh you know you know we have to accommodate putin um because he's he's so dangerous but if if if it continues like this in this trajectory uh then i think they'll have to rethink uh or at least reframe the way they present this vision uh okay two last questions um was altruism designed by and for sociopaths uh it's a code of ethics when implemented always propels them to the top and direct resources towards them although evil is impotent it can be clever altruism is designed by and for the worst in us by and for evasion by and for anti-effort not by and for some specific psychological diagnosis that was come up however many decades ago that may or may not be good as a psychological diagnosis but is not a synonym for evil stop using sociopaths where you mean wicked bad evil jerk in general don't use scientific vocabulary for things that aren't special topics within that science bad people are not in general sociopaths they're bad people some of them might have whatever specific disorder sociopathy is which i don't even claim to understand um maybe it's a valid concept if it is a valid concept it's a valid concept for a particular science not for um to be taken over to mean crummy person and we have this kind of treadmill where you know a concept gets introduced in a science then people take it over to mean some kind of you know um uh common parlance thing that they're already perfectly good words for then the science can't use it anymore because everybody has these other associations they have to come up with some other term just like we don't need that we have perfectly good words for bad people without taking over diagnostic category terms yeah and and i also don't like the idea of calling them clever uh even if it's true that uh you know altruism uh was just designed for the worst in us but design was used by people in order to attain control of us which i think it was it has been installed is being used for that purpose to call them clever is is to demean the idea of cleverness uh it's they're not clever they're miserable pathetic human beings who are so insecure that they have to control other people um you know of of the people who are like that some of them are shrewder at it than others and so those people end up you know and shrewd is a much better word because it doesn't have the positive connotation of clever of smart of intelligence of of uh they manipulate and i mean else with two is all to a clever that's not the word i would use i mean i hear clever with these greek philosophy resonances of it it's often used as a translation of the word denos but that doesn't matter but anyway there's a word that Plato and Aristotle used to mean smart but not necessarily good you're good at figuring out the means to your end but maybe you've got the worst end and that clever tends to be the word that's used to translate and so in that sense i guess clever is fine but it's not for the needs of the clever people it's for what's bad in people and then when you're in a situation where the worst is you know worst aspects of people are given every advantage then the people who are shrewder clever or smarter and evil you know tend to do better than the the maybe stupid or evil people but what does they're doing better at achieving their immediate aims get them it gets them just more misery so now they're dictator rather than a mere mafia boss and it's a lot worse for you to be a dictator than a mafia boss both of them are awful better off just you know being a mugger or a petty criminal but all of these are horrible ways to live and uh hitler would have been better off if he was just you know some awful artist trainer you know starving in his artist garret then if he you know was also a slob butcher of a continent yeah even even even though he ruled the continent you know don't use their standards for what is good don't accept their standards uh of good it's uh and and the more you study history the more you realize how pathetic they are all right last question how would you respond to someone well maybe not a last question how would you respond to someone that said objectivism was closer to hum then Aristotle well i asked them what they meant i mean they're you know what what in particular about hume uh how do they understand hume and how do they understand Aristotle and what is it in hume that they think um object is closer to objectivism et cetera et cetera and i think that's not true i think of the two objectivism's a lot closer to Aristotle but there are significant points in which it disagrees with Aristotle there are some commonalities you can find between any two things and there are some commonalities with hume um so i think there's a chance that somebody who's thinking that is noticing some interesting points that he's on about something but missing the essentials um but you know or maybe not so i'd want to know to make it not just a you know what where where's the meat of this point what's what's he noticing about hume and Aristotle all right does Greg get any positive feedback from his students or fellow faculty members for his objective views that's a weird a weird would be a weird thing to happen i don't know of anybody who gets feedback under brand name for like i like i like i couldn't imagine someone like oh you're such a continent or something uh giving feedback to their professor or a humean or whatever um i get sometimes positive feedback from people on particular points that i've made or lessons i've taught um from students well i'll give you one um since we talked about china before uh one bit of feedback i got from a student that really meant a lot to me um it feels too much like writing there was a a student back when i was teaching at ruckers who um was uh from china um and uh had parents who had very specific expectations of her um apparently i got the impression from her that this is how it was in china i don't know that's true but it's been whatever you know niche of the culture her family comes from you send your daughter to get a good education so that she'll be an accountant and she'll marry a man and he'll start a business and she'll keep the books and this is what her parents uh sought for her and she didn't want to be an accountant she'd like literature and philosophy and other things and she was like talking about different ways to try to get a little bit of this into her accounting life and she didn't want to um and she kept on coming and talking to me in office hours which started to be about the play that we were reading but ended up being about all these other things and at some point i said something like well this is your life and you only get one and you have to decide what you want to do with it and you know these are all like points right out of the fountain head right it um so they're objective points if anything is and um she's gone on to be in in film school now and uh she writes me uh occasionally sharing a script or a little short that she's done and talks about that as having had an influence on her so that's one case of really positive feedback and there are others um you know in little ways good i think that's so uh super chat all right then then we're wrapping up we're at about time we said we had finished um thanks everyone for coming i think this will probably be our last episode certainly our last in person here for the semester since the semester is over maybe we'll do some over zoom or something um of check your premises but the check your premises podcasts have now been uploaded so you should be able to find them on a podcast catcher and here are some of the conversations we've had in past weeks uh Gina and I were having a discussion last week of unconditional love uh Ben Bayer and I and Mike Mazza have done things over the past few weeks and we'll be back uh with regular programming in the spring semester you guys should tune in tonight for people online or come here uh to the university if you can for Iran Brook and Mika Watson talking about uh Ayn Rand versus CS Lewis on the specter of authoritarianism and uh what's coming up on the Iran Brook show in future days I have no idea um maybe i'll do the show tomorrow morning I don't know um but suddenly over the weekend we'll do some shows over the weekend I'm looking forward to it I've been really liking the news briefings okay good good so uh next week every day next week we'll see if I can tolerate that we'll see if you can tolerate it and uh we'll be doing those and then uh we'll see it's a new year soon I like this time of year I've talked about this in the past but I like this time of year things seem to slow down in December the holidays just just just I don't know there's just a thoughtfulness to this time of year so it's a good time to plan and to think about the future and to think about what changes to make so we're gonna spend this I'm gonna spend December trying to figure out how to boost your on book show take it to the next level we'll see thank you everyone and good afternoon thank you Greg