 We're continuing our partnership with the Ayn Rand Institute and joining me today is an Objectivist Intellectual and Rubin Report Veteran, you're on Brooke, welcome back to the Rubin Report. Great to be here. We've done this in like a hundred incarnations in about a thousand different studios and I think we've done it in a couple countries maybe and all over the United States, so let's see what happens. You ready? I'm sure good stuff is going to happen. You sure good stuff is going to happen? I'm sure good stuff is going to happen. The power of positive thinking, my friend. So let's focus for this half hour on Ayn Rand specifically. I've done a bunch of these panels and one-on-ones where we've taken a lot of these ideas into the current day or looked at it through a historical perspective. People can watch some of our other interviews to find out how you got interested in these ideas. Give me the two-minute button Ayn Rand, why did these ideas matter? Why was she the one that was able to come up with this cohesive set of ideas that you believe in? I don't have an explanation for why she came up with these ideas. She was a genius and she came up with these ideas. But I think that she revolutionized the way we think about the world. She came up with a philosophy that really turns the world upside down in the way people think about the world out there. Her philosophical ideas are truly revolutionary and they're inspiring because they're focused on the individual. They're focused on the individual's life, the value of that individual's life and what kind of life an individual should live. And they present an ideal, an ideal of what that life can be like. And people, particularly I think when they're young, when we're still idealistic, when we still want to believe that anything's possible, they gravitate towards that. They find that inspiring, they find that exciting. And then she provides a whole philosophical foundation for why it's right. So sometimes I hear people say, oh, I was in time, Rand, or I was into objectivism when I was young, when I thought I could conquer the world, but then sort of reality hit or the real world hit or something to that effect. I'm sure it's a criticism that you've heard. All the time. I mean, all the time you hear this. And there's a truth to it. I mean, there's something when we're young that makes people awakening. We discover, we have a mind. We discover we have some control of our lives. We're looking for what is true. We don't want to trust our parents. We don't want to trust our teachers. And then we read in Rand, and there's a certain clarity, there's a vision, there's an ideal that is projected there. But if we don't, I think, hold on to that. And I think it takes courage, and it takes a lot of thinking, and it takes a lot of integration, integrating into our value system, these new ideas. And I think that we go on and we live a life, and people are throwing ideas that are contradictory to this set of ideas at us, and life might be a little difficult, and it takes constant mental energy to remind of myself, I've got this ideal, I want to strive. And a lot of people just give up. They give up on, not just on who ideas, almost all these people give up on idealism as such. And they become cynics, and you see this most of the time, the people who say this are kind of cynical. They don't really believe in anything. And they like to put stuff down, and they like to make fun of anything that's a principle. Because they gave up on their idealism, nobody should be allowed to be idealistic. Okay, so let's extrapolate some of these ideas. So everyone watching this knows that I believe in the individual. It's become the core of my belief as a human being, as an individual, but also my political belief, it's the start of how you could build any system. Okay, so I think most of the audience is on board when you say that. Let's go from there. What are the other pieces that we need to know about? Well, it's a question of what does it mean to be for the individual? And what is the individual? What are we? What is the essence of being a human being, of being an individual human being? And here I, in Rand, identify as the idea that, you know, we are a rational animal. We are a reasoning being. We need to use our minds in a particular way. There's a method to discovering truth. There's a method to discovering what's right and what's wrong. There's a method to thinking. And that this is crucial to well-being, and that this method, this faculty that we have to identify the world out there and to understand it, is guided. We guide it. So this is the idea of not just being individual entities, but individual entities in control of their own life, having free will, having the capacity to make choices, having the capacity to choose values and to attain those values. And then there's the question of, okay, what should this individual do? And for 2,000 years, we've been taught a marco that says, okay, yes, they're individuals, but the responsibility is to take care of others. The responsibility is to be noble, to be good, to get into heaven. They need to sacrifice, they need to be selfless. So even though we identify individual entities out there, their job is to find the needy and go help the needy. And that's our moral ideal, and that's who we praise, and that's who we love. And I mean, it's just, why? If I'm an individual, my life is mine, why shouldn't I live for myself? So she develops, discovers a whole system of ethics that is centered around rational self-interest, around an egoistic system of ethics. So before we get into some of the specifics of the ethics, I know we've discussed this a bunch of times before, but I think when a certain amount of people hear that, live for yourself, what they go to immediately in their mind is some sort of scorched earth situation that we will all then do whatever the hell we want, all the industrialists will pollute the rivers, people will steal from others and all of these things. Now this obviously is a segue to the ethics part of this. So can you explain why that isn't the case? Sure, and I want to state that this is how we've been trained to think. So the altruists, those who, the moral teachings that have taught us that our responsibilities as individuals to serve others, have also taught us that the only alternative to serving others is to be a lying, stealing SOB. Those are the two alternatives. And Iron Man says, well wait a minute, didn't I just say that essentially we are the rational animal, that reason is our means of survival. And if you look out into the world, isn't every human value, everything, anything useful for human life, isn't it a product of reason? Don't we get our clothes and our food and the electricity and everything? Aren't those all products of reason? Maybe reason should be important here before we get to the scorched earth. Let's talk about, so for Rand to be self-interested, to be egoistic means to be a thinker, to be somebody who uses reason to guide their life. Okay, well let's think, is being dishonest to other people, is being a liar, is that good? Well, what is lying? Lying is faking reality, it's faking the facts to yourself and to other people. Well, is that rational? Well, no, reason like math, like science requires evidence, facts, the truth. If you, there's a term in computer science often used, garbage in, garbage out. If our minds are this amazing, I hate to use the term machine, but in a sense, this machine that is guided, if I put junk in it, the product is gonna be junk. And if the product is junk, I can't live for myself because my tool for survival, my tool for achieving anything is broken. So lying just doesn't make sense. Stealing good for me, right? Well, let's think about what does it mean to be good? Part of what makes us happy, part of what makes us able to function in the world, to achieve our goals, is that we have a certain self-esteem, we have this confidence, we can survive in this world, we can take care of ourselves in this world, we can produce, we can create, we can put food on the table to put it in simplistic terms. I can put food for my family on the table. That makes me feel like I belong, like I can take care. Well, if I'm stealing, then somebody else is creating the food, somebody else is creating the product, and I'm using muscle. I'm using physical force to take it from them. I'm completely dependent on these other people. Where's my self-esteem gonna be if that's the case? Can I be happy knowing that I live off of other people, that I'm completely dependent on them? And there's also sort of a time limit on how long you can get away with it, right? And I don't even mean that in terms of being caught specifically, although most likely you will be caught, that internally, the internal inconsistency of lying and stealing and all of those things. Exactly, it wrecks the machinery. It wrecks your ability to have the self-esteem. It wrecks your self-confidence. It wrecks your self-estimation of who you are and what you are. It undercuts those. And at the end of the day, I truly believe that bad people, lying, stealing, cheating, SOBs, are miserable people, you know, the only, I often joke that the only profession, the only profession, if you can call it a profession, we're lying works, in quotes, is politics. Because if you talk to business people, or if you talk to people in any other profession, and we know that that guy constantly lies, nobody who hires him, nobody wants to do business with him, nobody wants to deal with him, you fail. The only place in which it seems to work, in a sense, is politics. And I've never met a politician, and I've met, unfortunately, quite a few of them, who I think of as happy, as satisfied, as having that self-esteem. They always come across as kind of, you know, mousy characters who were not. They don't live the kind of life I think, I think that when we talk about being self-interested, living the full life, I can't think of a politician. I mean, Bill Clinton looks miserable. He looks pathetic. Yeah, he looks banged up now. And he would be, right? Because he's lived that kind of life. He's lived a horrible life. So that's really disturbing, the one profession, that doing the worst thing that you can do, and lying, right, lying and cheating, whatever else you gotta do, that that seems to be the system that we live under. I mean, we live under a political system. Well, unfortunately, politics is about power, and it's become about power over other people's lives. And the only way to really justify having power over other people's lives, being in a position of authority over other people, managing their lives, telling what they can and cannot do, is by lying, because I think that kind of system couldn't survive in the light of truth. And of course, one of the reasons, you know, going back to Ayn Rand, one of the reasons Ayn Rand is for capitalism, is to not allow politics to control our lives. Capitalism is a system that leaves us as individuals, free to pursue our morality, free to pursue our good life, free to pursue our happiness, free to pursue these values without anybody telling us how to live, what to do, what to choose, how, you know, what to eat, what to drink. But it says, no, you're free to do that. And of course, the people then that want power over other people don't have a profession anymore to go into, they either have to change, or they are the people who are losers within a society. Right, so in a way, it's like we're dealing a lot of our own personal autonomy to people who gladly would love to control us. We rarely do it to people who want to give us back some of that autonomy. Absolutely, and this is why The Founding Fathers is such a rare phenomena in really human history, is that he was a group of political intellectuals, but also politicians who went into politics and did the political stuff that needed to be done all in the name of liberty and freedom, all in the name of taking power away from themselves. You know, the act of George Washington resigning after his second term is such an important political act of saying, I am not your king, I am not your master, you know, I've done a job and now I'm gonna leave and now somebody else is gonna do it, but I'm your servant and I'm not here for life and I'm not here to control you. That idea, those kind of giants, intellectual giants and political giants, just don't exist anymore. The more power you give the politicians, the more power they take, the more it attracts the kind of people who want that power, and of course the kind of people who want that power, the last creative people you wanna give that power to. So then how do you unfurl that? Is that purely done at the individual watching this level or how do you inject some of these ideas? So a guy like Paul Ryan, for example, I remember originally, he would talk about Iron Rand every now and again and talk about free market capitalism and all that. He was as sort of close maybe as you get. He got punished for it. And he was right, he was mocked for it. He was never consistent about it, but to the extent that he had some good proposals and I thought sometimes he said some really good things. He was crucified for it, he was really attacked for it. Political change, we get the politicians we deserve. We get the politicians the culture deserves. And so the change has to happen at the individual level. It has to happen at the viewer level. We have to change the culture in which we live. And when we change the culture in which we live, we will demand different politicians. And this is a process. It won't happen all the time. So though there might be a revolution down the road, they might have to be kind of no, we need to radically change it all at once, but that's a very painful, painful way to do it. We're gonna have to get people first and foremost to go back to the ethics, to go back to this idea of individual, to value the individual, to value their own life primarily, to want to live for themselves, to want control over their lives, to want control over their minds, to want control over what they eat and what they drink and what businesses they do and how much they pay their employees and what benefits they give them, what they don't. All the things that the government now controls, people have to want to own that. They have to want to take back all of that responsibility, all of that freedom. And when they want to do that, then they'll be ready to elect the kind of politicians that will give it. So there's a little bit of a scary picture here, which is, oh, the founders were able to do it because they had to leave the king and we may be heading in that place where it, because I sort of what you're saying there is, it almost has to get worse before it can get better because we haven't hit a breaking point, let's say. So history suggests that when it gets worse, it only gets worse. That it doesn't necessarily, so you get hyperinflation of Weimar Germany, you get Hitler's. So there's always something even worse than what you think is bad. So I don't think it has to get worse, but it probably will get worse because I think the process of this kind of cultural change is long. It's hard and it requires a lot from people and we have a lot going against us. The educational system against us, obviously the political system is against us. I don't think there are a lot of intellectuals who really buy into the agenda that I am proposing, right? That buy into the idea of people taking control of their life and really having the ability to make these choices and really owning it and the idea of complete political freedom and complete economic freedom. So we don't have enough intellectuals advocating for this. The educational system is against us. This is gonna take a long time and the more time passes, the worse potentially things can get and we could get to a position where it's so bad, the only way to deal with it is through a revolution but let's hope we can avoid that. Right, so all right, let's not go that full route there but that is an interesting segue to something that we've talked about before that I always find fascinating. You've often told me that when you're traveling to Eastern Europe where they've gone through a little bit of what you're talking about here, they've gone through more totalitarian regimes and more socialist style governments that these ideas are spreading there because people are now desperate for them. There's definitely more opening in places that have gone through bad times and where young people feel like there's a promise out there that they can't achieve somehow and they still look to America. As funny as it might seem to us in America fighting the battles within America, they still look to America as a model and they look to America and they say, we wanna be like that and we've tried and the building wall came down and we still tried for 25 years we'd be trying and everybody's betrayed us. Maybe we need to think a little out of the box, maybe we need to be a little bit radical, maybe we need to embrace some ideas that are different, that are completely different than anything else and I think they have the courage and or maybe it's a desperation but they are motivated to think outside of the box but even there it's hard, right? So these ideas are spreading but there's also counterforces there that you've seen the rise of nationalism and the rise of pseudo-fascism and the rise of communists even in these places. So there's constantly this battle of ideas going on and to me it's sad and often surprising that hey, what are we advocating for? Freedom, what are we advocating for? The individual really taking control of your own life and the pursuit of happiness, what could be better? That these ideas, this should be easy, but it's not, it turns out that it's really, really hard but yes, I think in America what I see with young people is life's good. iPhone, next iPhone's coming out. I don't know where the iPhone comes from, I don't know what it takes to build an iPhone, I don't appreciate the genius of the person who creates this, actually I wanna tax the hell out of him but there's gonna be another iPhone and life's pretty good and I can debate between Democrats and Republicans even though the differences between them sometimes fade away but why be radical? Why engage in these sophisticated ideas? It's there's a sort of laziness and there's a certain sense in which they're spoiled and there's no existence, they don't feel an existential threat even though I think it's right there. Right. Which really is the double-edged sword of all of our freedoms, right? It has given us now so many freedoms and so much prosperity that we can become fat on it and then not realize as the barbarians are at the gate. I think that's right but I wouldn't blame the prosperity completely, right? But it doesn't allow that. It's a function of it or something, yeah. It allows us to not suffer the full consequences of our ideas. So when we're closer to nature, if you will, to survival, that if we have bad ideas, we suffer immediately. When our parents are wealthy and when life's pretty good and we get bailed out by the state or by our parents or by whatever, then we can make a lot of mistakes and never feel the consequences of those mistakes. We don't feel the consequences of bad ideas we have taken on and I think American society to a large extent is still kind of cruising on the ideas of the enlightenment, the success of the founding fathers, the industrialists of the 19th century, the geniuses of Silicon Valley and the rest of us can in a sense kind of cruise. We can't fully succeed in life. We're not going to. We're not gonna live a full life by cruising but we don't quite suffer the full consequences either at least not materialistically, maybe spiritually and maybe that's why in some court the suicide rates up and the opioid epidemic and things like that. So spiritually I think we're suffering but spiritually to diagnose the cure is again a lot harder in our culture. Yeah, so let's say that some of the ideas of objectivism really started catching fire and started breaking through the political madness. What would our political system look like? Wow, I mean there would be a political party that actually represented the individual and individual freedom and individual liberty that they would be and they would have a voice and they would have a chance politically. Maybe they wouldn't dominate. The political map would be starting to tilt away. I think over the last 100 years the political map has shifted left constantly towards socialism and statism of very forms and today I think the right is just as statist and I think basically the whole political map now is solidly on the status premise with variations within but basically the state is there to control our lives. These want to do it in this way and those want to do it in that way but it's the same thing. A little slower for these guys maybe. Maybe a little slower but maybe in different ways. Maybe faster in some areas and slower in other areas but they both want to have control of our lives. There would be some people out there speaking about individual freedom, about individual liberty, about individuals taking responsibility for their own lives, about stop complaining, go stand up straight, make up your room but go find a job, right? Get in your car and drive somewhere where jobs exist. We don't owe people because they're needy. We don't owe people because they lost a job. We don't owe people because they demand something. Your responsibility is to live your life. My responsibility as a politician is to protect your ability to live your life that way, protect you from force and coercion. You'd have people talking that language and it'll take a while before they win. It'll take a while before they dominate but they'd at least be a voice and today there isn't even a voice that represents that and you'd see a breaking up I think, a break up of a lot of the old ways of thinking about the world. I think so much of our politics has been captured on the right in particular by religion. I think that would have to start fading away and you'd actually hear secular voices. I mean, Thomas Jefferson was accused of being an atheist and he still won the presidency. If you accuse somebody today of being an atheist, forget it particularly in the Republican Party. He can't even win a primary. So the whole way in which we think about freedom and about liberty and about politics was slowly start crumbling and a new vision for what life could be like, I think would emerge. Right, so there's a risk there because things are still pretty good but you basically would say that's a risk worth taking. In what sense? Well, there's a risk in that if you start instituting new ideas, even if they're the right ideas that we've got something pretty good here. Right now it's something pretty good. Maybe we're holding it together with tape but it's something pretty good but you think that the risk of doing something better is worth taking. Yes, but also the risk of not doing anything is massive. Not only, yes, things are pretty good but things could be amazing. Things could be fabulous. Things could be a thousand times better. And it's true, I don't have a parallel universe to show you, oh, freedom, this is what results. I'm not, I don't have a science fiction mind to tell you about the flying cars and the things that we would have under circumstances but also the just a sense people would have about life and the benevolence and the happiness and the spiritual prosperity that would happen if we were free. So things are pretty good but they're only pretty good and particularly spiritually I think they're only pretty good. And what's possible for human beings? What's possible for the human mind for both materially and spiritually is I think pretty unimaginable to most people and that's kind of a vision we need to be able to project to people and inspire them to do that. So I think the risks are insignificant particularly as compared to the rewards and I do know what will happen if we do nothing and that is the band-aids will fall apart and this will crumble and again might not crumble exactly in the way we expect in a sense of the material world but I think people just become darker and more cynical and more depressed and I don't think it's an accident that there's more mental illness issues and people are more depressed. Some of it's just we're recognizing it but some of it is the world is becoming darker and darker and I'd like to, that's not necessary. None of that is necessary. Did Rand ever think about going into politics? No, no, I mean it was, I don't think she ever entertained that. I mean, what she wanted to do from when she was very young was she wanted to write and she had a vision for what kind of writing she wanted. She wanted to portray the ideal man. She wanted to portray a hero. What was possible for human life and if you think about her novels, if you think about Ruck and the Fountain Inn, if you think about Riden and Dagny but ultimately John Galt and the Atlas Shrug, that's what she wanted. She wanted to show what was possible for a human being and what we should strive towards and she wanted to provide that inspiration that she gave so many of us who read those novels and so what we could achieve with our own lives. That was what important and the politics, even the political theory is secondary to that. She ultimately is about, it's ultimately it's about the ethics, it's about living, it's about making the most of your life, it's about enjoying life, it's about the passion that comes from life, living the best life that you can be, that you can live and you need a particular political system to achieve that. That's the reason she's a capitalist. She doesn't start with that and then go to, okay, this is how people, and this is what makes us different than let's say libertarians who all they care about is the politics and the better ones, let's say free markets and stuff like that and what you do when you get that freedom, they don't care about. And to me, it's all about what you do. You don't see that as a cohesive set of idea or a complete set of ideas. It's not a complete set of ideas and when they try to complete it and when they go the anarchist route, I think it completely falls apart and it becomes a very destructive set of ideas. But I think that what Rand provides is a more vision for life. And that's unique. And then the politics is what makes that possible politically. But it's not the goal. The goal is to live your life fully. And that's what inspired me. I mean, it's easy to get caught up in the politics and the politics are kind of interesting in how do you phase out social security and all that. But what's really important is how to live the best life that you can live. How to achieve happiness. How to find a great romantic partner. How to enjoy good arts. How to have great friends. How to pursue a great career. How to live a full, complete whole life. That's what a philosophy is all about. And I wish that the discussion out there about how Rand was focused on that and let's debate what is a complete, good, successful life look like. So I wouldn't mind oppositions and say, no, no, no, you overemphasize productiveness and really it should be these other virtues. That would be an interesting discussion with the realm of how to succeed in being a human being rather than the caricatures that are made of her and the caricatures of self-interest that are made of her. Yeah. Well, look, that's why we're doing this partnership and that's why I like talking about these ideas with you and going out there. Especially when we go to universities and we talk about these ideas and, you know, we did an event with Eric Weinstein and he was critical of some of these ideas and you guys had a good battle and the audience afterward that was mostly objectiveist, they were thrilled that someone came in there for a battle of ideas. And I thought, and he even said to me, after, and I'm sure he said it to you, well, how wonderful that was that people disagreed on some fundamental stuff but were happy to do it. That's pretty solid. Absolutely. This is what you have done over the last few years is you've really brought people together to have those conversations in a respectful, in an intellectually open environment and facilitate those conversations. So, you know, I'm looking forward to particularly with young people, to getting these ideas. I think ideas that are exciting for young people because I want to inspire people to be idealistic and to stick with your idealism and to find, because we still live in a pretty cool world, a pretty decent world, but you can be depressed in this pretty cool world or you could thrive in this pretty cool world. I want people to thrive in this pretty cool world and I think if we have enough people thriving, if we have enough people focused on living the best life that they can live, then the politics will take care of themselves because those people will not want a authoritarian telling them what they can and cannot do. Over time, that group will expand and dominate the political and ideological landscape. So, to the extent that we can get these ideas out there to young people, that's what gets me excited. You did it again, man. You know how to end an interview. This is just one in a series of many videos that I'm doing right here on the INRAN Institute YouTube channel and you can check out the playlist right down below for more of the one-on-ones and some of the group chats that we've had.