 Welcome to Liberty Unlocked. I'm your host, Don Watkins. There's this famous quote usually attributed to Teddy Roosevelt, though who knows if he actually said it, that people don't care how much you know unless they know how much you care. And it's such a cliche, but there's something really right about it. The way it's usually interpreted is that the audience wants to know you care about them before they're willing to listen to what you have to say. And, like, there's probably some truth to that. But there's another element that I think is probably more important, which is that they want to know how much you care about what you're talking about, which brings me to today's guests. Yaron Brooke is the former executive director of the Einrand Institute and host of the Yaron Brooke Show. He's also my longtime book collaborator on free market revolution and equals unfair and the latest one being in pursuit of wealth. He's also one of the best public speakers I know. We cover a lot of ground in this interview from the state of the Liberty movement to what we can learn from public intellectuals like Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson or Tyler Cowan to our biggest regret about our book, Equal is Unfair. But mainly we talked about how to be an effective public speaker. And Yaron's advice in that area was really excellent, particularly his point about why he believes that harnessing your own passion for your subject is one of the most transformative things you can do as an advocate for liberty. Even now, on to the conversation. Yeah, so thanks for coming on. Sure, happy to. Yeah. Usually I start with kind of people's discovery stories and you have a really interesting one. But before we get that, in general I like to ask questions that I don't know the answer to and I know your story, but we should come back to it. But I'm curious as to your view of where the Liberty movement, if you want to put it that way, is today positive and negative? Oh, the Liberty movement to the extent that there is one. I think it's in deep trouble. I think that it is that what it is fail to do is capture the imagination of young people. And I don't exactly know why and it's something I struggle with to try to figure out what's going on. But I think that what has happened since Trump was elected, what's happened over the last four years, probably happened earlier, but at least I've noticed it over the last four or five years, maybe a year before Trump, was that we've always known the left had a certain appeal to young people and there was a certain appeal to radical, it's weird because I don't think the left is radical, but because it's so conventional, but there was this appeal to young people of being outside the mainstream and crazy and different and motivated into action. I think what's happened over the last five years and certainly over the last four years is that there's now a right wing equivalent to that that's fundamentally anti-liberty. So I think that what appears sexy at universities right now is kind of the identity Marxist left, identity politics Marxist left, and the counter which is kind of an alt-right or nationalist right or even religious right which I think has captured the imagination of people in ways that has surprised me and I did not expect. And I think that the libertarian or broader kind of conservative free market types, they're disappearing and they seem to be disappearing fast. And the intellectual support for these people is also going as the conservative movement is splintering and that the people who tend to be pro-free markets, that group is smaller and smaller and smaller and the dominant voices within the conservative movement are nationalists and xenophobic and just build walls. And then the libertarians just seem to have kind of, I don't know, they doesn't seem to be energy there and I think it's the same thing. I think again what's capturing young people is these ideas about nationalism and these ideas about identity politics like in the left rather than the ideas of liberty and freedom and free markets. I think in many people's heads those seem to be conventional, those seem to be neoliberal, they call it like those are the ideas that we tried in the 80s and 90s and 2000s and they clearly failed and now we need something different. And we have not managed to convey the radical nature of our ideas and how different they are from everything else that's out there and how exciting they are and how it just hasn't caught on. I'm sure we'll get into the reasons for that but it just hasn't caught on. I mean one thing I've noticed, so I noticed this going back six, seven years ago which is just most of what was happening amongst people you would classify as at least generally free market thinkers is it all felt very boring and recycled. There wasn't a lot of new things being said or done and what was happening to the culture and to the economy, there were new issues, new problems, and so kind of repeating what Hayek said 50 years ago didn't seem very relevant to people and the people who were actually commenting on what seemed to be going on today they seemed to be relevant in a way that the free market people weren't being relevant and so people were like let's listen to the people who were speaking to us where we are and so I think that's part of why these ideas just seemed like oh yeah that's kind of old stuff, it's because they were just repeating what arose universal principles but the particular ways in which they were argued for and applied arose during a context that didn't seem as relevant in the 2000s as it did in the 70s. Yeah I think that's definitely the case but I think on top of that they bought into and I saw that when we were doing stuff on inequality so many of the people we would have thought would have been our allies bought into the inequality rhetoric and then tried to explain how you know I think Grand Paul did it in one of the debates he said something like oh but in capitalism we have less inequality and like nobody believes that, that's just who you know and I think so and I noticed that you know I remember I was at a Montpelerin society meeting and you know Montpelerin is this place for those of you listening who might not know of you know really the top minds and the top thinkers in the kind of free market movement both on the conservative and libertarian sides and a lot of economists, primarily economists. Now remember the opening talk was by Pete Becky who I like who is a good guy and he one of the problems he's citing is that exists in the world is inequality and it was like really Pete you know better than that you know that's not true and when I gave my talks I gave a talk and I get on stage and Pete was sitting right in front of me and I basically in front of all these prestigious people I chastised him I said how can you do that because the talk wasn't inequality I said even the president of the society thinks it's a problem and we all know it's not a problem it shouldn't be a problem we shouldn't even buy it and it was like yeah Pete said yes you're right you're on but then they on and they went on it was like there's a resistance well there's a resistance to the iron rand which I think is a big part of why they're losing why the liberty movement is losing I think the more they resisted the more they will lose but there's a there's a resistance to being radical to being really challenging not just in the economic too many of the people in liberty movement are too enamored by their own cleverness and this you know by their own oh we know how to you know you see this in almost all of them and they're not really addressing okay what is it going to take to actually change the world that's not what they're thinking about they're too involved in the internal of what's going on among them and appearing to be really really smart within their own movement yeah I mean my one I don't know that I'd call it a regret but I think there was a lost opportunity so I have a very positive opinion of our book Equals Unfair and I think I mean we were the first ones with a free market view to come along and challenge bigotty but what I didn't see and I think became clear about a year or two after the book came out was you know we delimited to focus on the economic side of it but what has become clear is that so many of the cultural elements of the kind of left versus right debate are really at the forefront of people's thinking and their understanding of where is the world and where is it going and who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and so we bring in the wider context of this as part of egalitarianism and you know it's hard to write a book even as it's delimited as you know to delimit our book was a pain but I do wish that we had brought the wider context because in part what it does is it shows you can't deal with these issues without philosophy it's not just economics and we do that but I think you know we could if you think about how the inequality debate came and played out it became much more focused on you know the cultural egalitarianism the identity politics you know race, sex, class, just being one element of it and the way that the way that the right has responded I think the right is the real enemy so I read a lot of these new right kind of types and one of the ways they've responded to the inequality debate is saying no no we're for inequality but they think of it not the way we think of it in terms of freedom but they think of it no people at different levels are IQ so the smart people should be you know better than the dumb people or you know in every respect they want to create hierarchies and the hierarchies are not based on anything real or anything or anything and the hierarchies are based on a rejection of freedom, fundamental rejection of freedom and so they're attacking even the political equality so they're even attacking the quality of the Declaration of Independence and so what you have now is a group on the left who claims egalitarianism but really you know they want to suppress everybody except for themselves they want to hold anybody a virtue down, they want to destroy the good and then you've got on the right people who want to destroy the good in the name of their own superiority which comes from non-essential characteristics and it's it really is becoming quite sickening and we have this nuance and this is what I'm also discovering I think in the last few years I've discovered you know nuance doesn't play well right and we have a nuanced view we're saying no there is such a thing as political equality and that's a virtue but there's these other ways in which people use equality that's bogus and like people can't hold that either it's good or it's bad right you know we can't have any kind of you know Rand it always surprised me that Rand makes this big deal that Leonard and I make of you know everybody thinks that twos and our position is something different than the two that they have it's like okay but why do people think in twos that can't be right but it is people cannot think beyond two possibilities there's no like nuance to the thinking or there's no possibility of a third real alternative and that's that's been a real shock and again it's it's part of how we frame the debate that I don't the more we know about the opposition the more we can frame the debate to counter it but yeah inequality I think we would do it differently today because you would have to take into account these other issues these cultural issues and both the attacks on the left and on the right on them well one point I don't think we made it in the book but I ran made this point in passing once that I thought oh that's kind of interesting but I never really pause in it which is she is adamant in rejecting the concept of meritocracy which I think would would shock people like well isn't her whole argument but she takes it as like no theocracy is a meaning and it's rule by merit so the idea that you're gonna line up people by IQ and they should be at the that that's the complete wrong way to think about it is that you have ruled by a principle of individual rights and then there's going to be hierarchies some of which are based on merit some are going to based on whatever the legitimate you know criteria is in a certain area some of them will be illegitimate hierarchies but that like you we're not arguing for rule by merit and if you're talking about kind of merit rising to the top in a free market that's not rule that's you know and and so you need to keep separate those two things and the whole concept of rule is I mean is is is it is a perverted car it's a dangerous concept I mean you know the rule of individual rights it's not exactly rule in a sense of people understand it because rule is power but the individual rights is also another one of these concepts that I'd always assumed okay so there's certain people they might not quite get the concept of individual rights but they're generally on the individual right side and now I'm a lot more skeptical about whether anybody's on the individual right side right that there is this body I more and more I see people walking away from the idea of individual rights rejecting it more people on the right are criticizing the funny fathers or rejecting the funny fathers oh that was good for the 18th century but it's not good for the 21st and and and those people are getting are getting attention among the young the whole social media and memes and and all of that you know has changed the intellectual debate and has made it superficial and shallow so that a concept like individual rights where you actually have to explain what it means because nobody knows it's hard to convey and it's hard to it's hard to really get across to people and people just they turn off from sophisticated complex philosophical arguments they want they want to sound bite that's definitely true I mean it used to be when I started out you could get a lot of mileage by appealing to the founders like you know you could connect with most audiences that way today I don't feel like that at all often you're guaranteeing that you're going to get a backlash from both sides and a blank stare from the people who aren't outright hostile which I think is really tragic but I also think you know the the right way to employ rights not your thinking I think in your thinking it should be central to thinking about political issues but the way that you use it in persuasion I think people often get wrong and it's tricky to do because it's sort of the way that most people argue I call it logical brute force this is particularly bad amongst objectivists but it's wider than there which is like I'm going to start out with a starting point that I'm pretty sure my audience will agree with and then I'm going to like create an argument that nobody could object to and and that doesn't work at all and then if they're a little bit more sophisticated they're go well no first I'm going to give an argument for individual rights and then I'm going to use that to drag people to the conclusion that we have to reject social security and if you notice Ayn Rand does not operate that way you're never kind of being dragged from a principle to a conclusion it's she the the feeling I get from reading her and this is where it became like my central idea of what is the ideal persuasive piece of content whether a speech or an article is that the end you feel like the conclusion is overwhelmingly obvious so like you start out reading her take on the draft and by the end it's not like well individual rights say we can't have the draft by the end of it you're like oh my god how could I've ever been confused about how monstrous this is and so like if you're if the more that you're using rights as kind of like well you can't just you don't want to abandon the concept of rights first is you're using rights to illuminate how destructive a given policy is and how liberating an alternative policy is then like that's the cash money if you can do it but rights by itself doesn't hold a lot of power for people today unfortunately well and I think of any abstraction like that you have to lead people to it you can't you can't prove it and then assume it because the proof is far too complex and it requires too many integrations and too much induction for anybody in the audience to get it so you're not proving one of the things you're not proving anything in a talk you don't prove anything in a talk you indicate you give a suggestion you point people in the right direction right maybe in an article you can really prove a point but an article is much better in that sense because because people can read and think about it and re-read it and but in a talk you cannot do that you're not you're not even going to do what you can in a in an article I remember being criticized for doing a talk on capitalism and never mentioning the concept of individual rights right how can you do that that's and it's what's the point of the talk the point is not to cover the checkbox every one of the you know the hierarchy with an objective is the leads one to capitalism the point is to draw people into thinking about this in a different way and to go and do their own thinking and go do their own research because you're not going to give them the answer right there and then in the talk but people have a dogmatic way of thinking about these things and they have checkboxes that they need to check off in the way they present I definitely wanted to talk to you about speaking because I mean this is obviously I think it's your strongest ability although most people don't know like you are not always really great on the stage I mean you know like people can go up and look online at the talks you're giving in like 2006 2007 and first of all they're all written out and you still come across as you know a likeable person everything like that but a lot of your personality is suppressed because it's tied to it comes on the Q&A the Q&A was like a thousand times better than the speech so I want to get to that evolution but I definitely agree that I mean my own version my own view about what a talk is supposed to do it's supposed to make people interested in you the speaker enough to pay attention to you over a longer span of time where you can start to build an argument because I've I mean I've seen a lot of people who have said they came to objectivism from you know hearing you paying attention to you but it's almost never that they said it was one talk or one of it it was always I started listening you know watching your stuff on YouTube it's maybe they would I ran and you know so it's this combination of things and that's absolutely the case you can't you're not you know I always say it's for them to follow me and for them to read Iron Man that's my goal it's not to convince them of X it's not to prove X and I don't think you're going to talk thinking that you've got it it talks are I mean in some sense I mean they're educational see hopefully you're saying stuff that's going to interest them and otherwise you don't get the second the other effect but talks are really marketing tools in some sense right the ways to get the marketing of yourself and broadly your ideas so in my case marketing Iron Man and if if if 10% of the audience and goes and reads Iron Man or starts following me on YouTube or something like that then it's been a success right but I these polls where how many people walked in thinking X and how many people walked out thinking Y no I mean if anybody changed their mind what I'd like is that somebody walked in with the opposite view that they left confused that would be huge success right that I challenged enough of their existing beliefs for them to be not confused but if I actually convince somebody then I'm suspicious of them right of their thinking so you have to set your sites and part of their evolution in speaking style is to get to figure out your purpose why you speaking what what's what's the goal of the of the talk and I and I think there's been a lot of confusion among intellectuals broadly and among objectives intellectuals in terms of what is the purpose of the talk well it's interesting because I mean I ran was adamant that she was not did not view herself as a speaker she was her job her goal was always just to promote Atlas shrugged which is why she would even do talks but they were essentially articles that she would read and I mean incredible articles and then you know letter can you imagine sitting in an audience and hearing her talk giving doing the talk what is capitalism I mean I read that talk every few months of a couple of years or something and I'm blown away every time by how much I didn't get last time and how much I need to read certain paragraph twice three times I still don't get certain parts of that article completely and if that was just the livid orally I would she would have lost me completely you know I might have stayed intrigued because there's so much content then it's so interesting but I wouldn't got anything out of it and generally I you know I commit this heresy but I don't think she was a good public speaker she I don't think she gave one great talk and that was philosophy who needs it that is the one article she wrote that is actually a good talk but everything else are not good talks the greatest articles may be ever written but they're not good talks or if she delivered the objectives to ethics as a talk which she did you know you have hard enough time reading it you know so it's it's a it's a different skill set and different purpose than I think an article well so yeah and so part of what's interesting to me is so you know she was not viewing herself as a speaker and then Leonard Peekoff who was you know her her best student he's an incredible teacher what I mean probably the best teacher I've had in any subject but I don't think but I don't think he's a speaker in the sense that we mean going out to a cold audience and trying to win them over I don't think he would consider himself that and so we have these two models that if to go to your point if you're not clear and what is the purpose of speaking you can model people who are not they're doing something very different and and so it was I don't think really until I mean I think you were the first objective as I know who was really doing what I think you should be doing in a talk which is just trying to connect with the audience make some intriguing points and start you know spark some of them to go in that journey so I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about because I don't know the details of it what what was the evolution like for you internally like what when did you realize I need to do something different and and how did it go from you know zero to a hundred so yeah so so when I started doing I mean I was a teacher first so teaching is but I viewed public speaking is different and much more intimidating than teaching teaching I could go in cold and and and cover material I knew well without a lot of notes and without but when I started when I started speaking on you know on topics related to objectivism I used to write out and people would help me write out whole talks and they would be long you know 20,000 words or something I mean and we'd have to figure out my pace and sometimes I would have to read them really fast because we only had an hour but you had to get out the content right you can cut anything right God forbid because it was so it it was it was so I try to do the best that I could at that and I was decent at it I'm certainly you know the master at reading a talk is Leonard you know and he's brilliant at it and and he makes you feel like you know he's he's he's extra peraneous but it's all written out there and he you know and and there's some other people like Terry Smith is pretty good at it is really good at reading a talk while keeping you engaged and really interacting with the audience um but from the beginning I mean so from the beginning I was I enjoyed the Q&A is much but the thing that kept me writing it was this I mean basically fear I mean I was intimidated into thinking that here I was I was the CEO of the Ironman Institute I was speaking on her behalf in some way and God forbid I say something wrong right that I that I that I articulate you know in Q&A everybody accepts that that's a different category right so but in a talk you had it had to be right and of course Leonard was the model and and and you know everything was clearly defined and clear articulated and every sentence was true so the standard was not am I communicating with the audience am I getting anything through to the audience the standard was is this true and am I doing a decent job delivering this truth to the audience and it never quite felt right and and over the years first of all this idea that I enjoyed the Q&A is more the audience enjoyed the Q&A is the audience would always come up to me afterwards say I love that answer I love the Q&A whatever they never compliment the talk and I thought the talks were good in terms of the content but but but they couldn't retain it nobody retained it anyway the way this involved I was already thinking about this so why can't I do it like I'm teaching but then I would it would scare me right so I would I would be too intimidated to do it and and you know but what if I say something wrong basically this was the was the idea and and you know how many rounds of editing those talks you know went through I mean hours and hours spent on every word on every paragraph and some of them became articles so that's great right so but some of them didn't some of them just wasted in a sense that we spent all this time delivered once some of them are not even on video or something delivered once and they're gone and yet hours and hours and hours were spent on and so I was doing we were doing media training and I don't know if you I don't remember if it was a PJ JP something like that PJ Walker just a quick aside I got in this news program where they had me like debate a guest about something and it got really heated I mean the guy was just like saying these outrageous things and being really cruel and afterwards when I saw it go on YouTube it was TJ like he turned out to be a radical progressive and was being like the worst like the most dishonest debater ever and I was like hey that's the guy who taught me how to do media exactly so yes years later I discovered how much of a leftist he was and here he was hearing all this objective of stuff being delivered it must have freaked him out so he did a media training first for television if others I mean I participated but a bunch of people from the Institute participated and at some point I think he said you know I also do public speaking training I said well you know I'm a pretty good speaker you know I don't know anything he said well let me let me see a video and so I sent him a video and said yeah you we need to talk and he said and he asked me a question and it's the question turned everything on he said why do you give speeches what's the focus and by then I'd already was questioning what I was doing and everything but that basically said yeah why am I giving speeches and I said well I want to communicate certain ideas to people and he said nobody's getting the ideas you're trying to communicate I said now that can't you know you're just exaggerating that's not true and he said okay let's do an experiment and he got so you got you got a random staff member in the studio then he said okay take take your standard thing and do 20 minutes and then but and then we'll ask him what he what he learned so he did that and we asked him what he learned and whatever it was it was completely different than what I delivered it was not what I wanted him to learn so he said you can't do this right you're too much content you're condensing it they know they don't know what to focus on they don't know what's important what's not important they don't they don't know what you're what you're trying to convey and we went through this you know you can't you can't present more than X amount of content you can't present more than one overarching point and maybe three points in the middle you can't do more than that and if you try then you just lose the audience and then he also said and if you so we got to the point where my point was what I'm trying to do is communicate with the audience I'm trying to make a creative relationship with the audience you said and you think by sticking your head in a piece of paper you're doing that and I said no I know I'm not but but but he said forget the butts who cares if you're exactly right who cares about the formulation so basically with TJ who he didn't I didn't do much I didn't need much training at that so once he said that it clicked and once I tried it I was good at it and once I tried it it made complete sense to me and he would say things like the most you should ever take on stage with you is a sheet of paper with three bullet points just in case you forget one of them right and I literally used to do that in the so I think this was on 2008 so literally used to take a piece of paper three bullet points big type and is to put it on the floor he taught me that you put it on the floor so as you're walking on the stage you it's right there in front of you you don't have to go to podium to look at your notes they're right in front of you on the floor nobody knows it on the floor nobody can see them and you're not squinting because it's a big type and it's only three points and that's how I started and of course you know within a few months I stopped needing that piece of paper and and got the confidence not to need that anymore but it changed everything because suddenly suddenly now the question becomes well am I communicating so my goal is communicated with the audience okay so I'm looking at them now oh well now I can actually measure whether they're responding are they responding to what I'm saying is is there a connection is there any kind of interaction going on and then you start okay that joke worked that story worked that one didn't that went flat completely this closing didn't work that opening you actually getting feedback which is you don't have when you're reading a talk and usually when you read a talk you give it once I mean you don't give it many times well if you notice feedback and you have a written talk it's the worst thing on earth because you can't do anything about it and do it right now and I need to remember and then I have to do all the editing and all the changes and it's too difficult it's too hard but here I can just remember that this work that didn't work and next time I do it I can I can try something different and when you get really good at it then you view every time you give a talk is a little experiment and you're willing to even try something new and you're willing to fail because you know that that'll help you do it better next time so your whole the whole attitude the whole way you think about giving a talk changes and and of course the more you do it the more comfortable you become and the more you can play with it and so that today particularly when I give a talk I'm really have given a lot of times every aspect of the talk I'm in control of so you know one of the things when you when you do you know I know you did it I was terrible at it some other people we know do it is you pace right you don't have notes but you're pacing as you're delivering a talk and that's terrible the audience doesn't like it it's it's unless you do it and and but it's hard to know what to do with your body there's a little bit of nerves it's a little bit of the ideal is to get to the point where every movement you make on stage has a purpose and and you can get this so when I give a talk that a good like my morality of capitalism talk pretty much every move I make like I I've said this in other other places but like my left hand whenever I raise my left hand that's egosm like Bill Gates is over here capitalism is over here production creation building you know and this is this is altruism and everything related to altruism from other to races everything else is this hand right and and if I want to emphasize the point I walk towards the audience and I've wanted to relax a little bit I walk away from the audience I walk backwards and if I'm pacing I pace in a way as to look at this portion of the audience and that portion of the other but not monotonically and that's that's communication you're actually getting feedback from the audience and you're communicating with them now you've got them in your hand you're kind of playing with them because you you know how they'll react to different things after you do it for a while so that's where you want to get to in that form of communication yeah I mean that's very similar to like the best stand-up comedians I know it's that you know you're you have your kind of worked-out material that you've really honed and then you're going to introduce a new piece of it you play around with where it is you play around with the wording so you just have this constant experiment and stage and and they also have this presence on stage they really good really good stand-up comedians they know when to sit on a stool went to stand went to walk went to pace went to look directly in the audience and went and went to pause pauses is huge in comedy it's crucial in comedy with such a crucial in communication that's my number one speaking tip to people like all right if I'm going to give you one thing and I can only have 10 seconds it's just pause more than you think you should longer than you think you should and you'll instantly be a better speaker particularly when you ask a question one of the most frustrating things to hear a speaker ask the audience a question and immediately go into the reply the answer or into whatever he wants to go but the whole point of asking a question in a talk is to cause people to think you know why is capitalism viewed as a model you know whatever right you want them to get them thinking about it and then you want to that now becomes a context for what you're going to say but if they don't have time to think about it then it's useless to ask the question so whether it's a rhetorical question or real question doesn't matter you always want to pause and give people time to think after you ask a question but yes pausing is a slowing down generally people speak too fast is really important one thing I learned from you that you do really well is that so you talked about having the three points but I think a big focus of you is like you have very engaging ways of making each point so it's not like I say this abstract point it's some kind of story analogy anecdote how do you think first of all do you have a way that you come up with that or is that just sort of stuff that pops into your mind accidentally and then how do you go about using them effectively because that's my favorite thing to do is when I can come up with a really good one so it's very so if it's a brand new talk I have to think about it and I don't know that I have a methodology I read a lot about the topic and around the topic and then I think about it and then I but a lot of it I let my subconscious I let you know it's one of those things where often it'll come to me in the morning or it'll come to me late at night when I'm thinking about it just pop into my head oh that's a good example I hear a story and I'll go oh that would fit in there so when I'm consciously trying to get at it when I'm writing a new talk or when I'm figuring out a new talk but and the more time I have the better so if I stay and it's not so much that I have to work on it but the more time I think okay I'm gonna give a talk on X if I have like three months to just just have it in the background so that the subconscious really can work on it that's helpful but what I like is I've got an existing talk and you know it's boring to give exact the same talk over and over again but I don't mind it but what I like is that I'll encounter something and something oh that's a good example of I could stick it in there and what happens with these talks is they become modular and the examples are modular and so what I try to do now is think so now you could basically tell me that I have to give a talk in 10 minutes about a topic within a range of topics from font policy to a variety of different topics in capitalism and I can pretty much in 10 minutes come up with the three points that I want to make and not even think about the content the content will just come because the content in us categorized in my subconscious into these modules if I have the three points then there's certain concretes that fit into each one of those points that I can get up you know so I use the Bow Gates example in a variety of different talks in a variety of different contexts because I can just spin the story a little bit differently right and it'll fit and I have a bunch of those and I keep trying to accumulate more so when I read something when I see something interesting I file it away as okay that falls under altruism or that good example of altruism or that falls under a good example of you know businessman feeling guilty or things like that so there's so I try to think in those not in terms of talk A, talk B, talk C, talks D I try to think of topic A, topic B, topic C, topic D and you know point the three points those are what's important because you can use those three points in a variety of different talks this is the other thing and you know this from writing right there's no one right outline there's no one right way of the living content so you can change the order I could take any talk I give and change the order and make it work and you can do the same thing by taking points I make in a talk on capitalism into a talk on equality and I have like three inequality talks that I can play around with the points and sometimes I don't even know which inequality talk I'm going to give until I'm actually in the middle of it and I decide am I going to do the pie because I have a talk on the pies or am I going to do you know kameroosh or am I going to do you know so I've got it and again so it's you've got to create these really great examples analogies that are organized in your subconscious and then rely on your subconscious to feed them to you when the time is right context so one of the things that is one of the challenges I think is so I have this general view of that people aren't persuaded by ideas they're persuaded by people now it's possible to take that the wrong way because I think ultimately it's your processing ideas and you're looking at reality and trying to assess if it's true but even to get a foothold where somebody's going to consider what you have to say you want to see a person that particularly if you're talking about giving people philosophic or moral guidance if you come across as a weird dude who nobody would want to be like then to say alright here's my plan for how you should live like you're killing it from the get go and certainly one of the things that I hear about you very often is even people who wildly disagree with you find you to be appealing a person that is fun to listen to you go have a conversation with for hours and so to what extent how do you think about I mean with you I think it's mostly just like you said being on stage being very in the moment and just letting your true self come out versus being kind of tied to I must get this material out there that's in front of me but I know you also really helping other people develop how do you think about the role of helping somebody become a more likeable or more relatable version of themselves when they're on a stage I think what's important is that people see that you care I think that's a big part of it sometimes I'm up there and I'm yelling at people and you think they hate me for it but they don't take it as I'm yelling at them this guy really cares he really is passionate about this they can see the value that the value orientation that I have and I think that that can be learned because we're objectivist I mean all value is at least the better ones the real objective you know we care about stuff and they need to see that it's not just an academic exercise and if going back to the previous topic I think a lot of libertarians come across this as an academic exercise this is kind of cool look at me how smart I am look at me how cool this stuff is and it is and I love listening to them because I can get what's cool about them but the new person I think struggles with that and I think the most successful speakers the most successful and this is why so you say it's people I don't know it's people because you know I was convinced by Outlaw Shrugged but there's something the same there because Outlaw Shrugged is its ideas embodied in people people and it's values it's values right there and it's passion and it's a story so that is I think what works so I think what they have to know is that you care and this is your life and it's not just a mental exercise and there's something very value driven around everything that you do right this is really this is important to you you care then maybe they should care right if you if you don't care why the hell should they care right so you have to convince them then I think that's how your personality comes out because if people see what you care about then they see who you are right and some people will never get it so some people clearly offended by me getting a little bit you know passionate about stuff but the better people see it for what it is and they find very attractive and interesting and you know sometimes when I go after talk and talk to people for hours you know I'm surprised sometimes on the kind of stuff that you know I mean I can be pretty insulting to them but it's always done in a way as no these ideas are important to me and if you take ideas that I find offensive you're going to hear from me and they take it as you know he's challenging me they don't take it as he's insulting me and I think it's because it's always about no no this is really important to me don't make fun of this don't belittle this don't ridicule this because this is these important things and I think that creates that cognitive dissonance that causes them to think that causes them to want to hear more that causes them to be willing to read you know a good page book which is ultimately my goal what are some of the weaknesses that you still struggle with that you're working to improve on yeah my biggest weakness I think is that I agreed to do talks that I shouldn't be doing yeah I just a quick so I think it was October of 2008 and I somehow got the chance to do a radio interview on you know the cause of the financial crisis and I didn't really start studying economics until the financial crisis I had no business giving this interview and so of course you know I give my opening spiel which I'm sure was just a very unclear version of what I heard you know you and some other free market people say and you know the guy asked a just totally legitimate follow-up question and I'm talking and answering and I know I'm bullshitting he knows I'm bullshitting the audience knows I'm bullshitting and we're just waiting for this nightmare to end all of us and like if I had just said you know honestly I that's not an area where I have expertise but the one thing I can say is that it shouldn't be blamed on a free market because the one thing we know for sure is there wasn't like if it had just been an honest answer but the biggest thing is don't get into those situations in the first place so yeah so my most difficult is when I'm trying to do something that I'm not really that comfortable doing so if it's a philosophical topic and I'm finding myself days before I'm supposed to give the talk leaving through OPPA and reading everything about the topic to try to and in my subconscious is like screaming you don't know this you know you haven't got it or you know it but not in a way that you can deliver not in a way that you can concretize not in a way that you're playing to your strengths I can do it because I'm not a philosopher and I don't have it integrated well enough I can wing it but I don't like wing I don't like that and you know if I spend enough time I could probably find an angle an interesting angle on but typically I don't give it enough time partially because I'm resisting and you know going there because I know it's hard so I find the more philosophical the more difficult and then once in a while like I was asked to do something in the American Philosophical Association for the Iron Man Society there years ago and I was asked to do something in the reality of capitalism and I could have just done what I do for the world but I thought oh my god this is a philosophical thing my thing is not philosophy so I basically gave a 11th grade book review of quality thing of what is capitalism and it was horrible it was terrible it was exactly moving away from what I'm good at so it's that's where I struggle well I hope so one of the best things I've seen you do on the stage in the last couple years was the two kind of Q&A style or discussion style things on art at Ocon and I know that's in a certain way it's new material because you don't speak on that a lot but I mean you're a huge fan of art and that was an area where even more than your capitalism stuff like your genuine enthusiasm came through and I just remember I thought a lot of the speakers Lisa stuff on cars contribution I found those to be some of the best events and part of what it convinced me of is that this point we made about you know objectivism has this value of we can come at things from a much richer perspective than just politics even when we're talking about political issues because there's such a value moral perspective and I like I wanted to see more of that like I think you know if we were doing more stuff like that about you know enriching your life with art and like that just becomes a winning message or winning content for us it is although it's hard to get an audience for the audience that's the challenge I find but you know so that it's interesting how that evolved right so I was preparing talk a talk on art and uncle was preparing a talk on art and we were both just like with Opa we were shuffling through the manifesto and reading as much as we could before the conference and trying to figure out and then we met like two days before the conference and I looked at uncle and I said do you have a talk because I don't I don't know what I'm going to say and he said I don't know what I'm going to say and because it was it was too intimidating it was like I had to give a talk on something that I ran wrote which is unbelievably deep and it's it's psychological philosophical and aesthetic components right if you read the romantic manifesto and it's one of these books every time you read it you discover completely new things about it so I hadn't read it in a few years and I read it again and I get oh my god I can't talk about this I don't know anything here in many ways I think it's her hardest book yeah even more than introduction to objective epistemology because it spans epistemology psychology aesthetic it's and she is the expert in this remember she is an artist right I am not so she talks about it from the perspective of being an artist so she can say thing about what art is that comes from her deep introspection about what she had to go through to create art that it's hard or even when it comes to concept like sense of life which I think is an artist you have a different view of than you do as just somebody experiencing art right and I mean not just any artist but an artist who's a philosopher who can really inspect it and knows this and then I have to talk about this I mean this is this is ridiculous so basically we decided since neither of us could really give a talk on it the best thing would be for us to kind of have kind of this kind of not really Q&A but for us to feed off of other and to talk about this and not to make it overly theoretical because the theoretical is in the book but to make it more how we use this and I think it did it really I think it worked well I think it just was at the right level philosophical enough but that a lot of really passion and examples and but that's a good example where the talk would be terrible and this was a way to do it but I do you know I do I try to do once in a while a show right on my podcast on art and I just did one recently and I showed some painting and I showed some sculpture and I talked about them and I loved it and a lot of people loved it and it was fun but you know I don't know it got X number of views and if I'd done that day if I'd done something on Trump or coronavirus or China or something like that it would have been 4X views right so it's Leonard was asked once about his radio show why don't you do more positive stuff and he says when I do nobody listens exactly nobody listens so but I do find so I did a talk I think one of the last public talks I did before this coronavirus thing I was invited to Dartmouth up in New Hampshire I think in February yeah it was February and it was snowing it was but I gave a talk and then after the talk I can't even remember what the talk was about I think it was the morality of capitalism, and then after the talk I went with like a dozen students to a restaurant and we just talked and that's some of the funnest stuff time I've had and they had a blast because one of the things I can do and I think a lot of us can do but we don't do enough of it is I can talk about so many different things I can talk about history and we've got a very unique perspective on history that students never hear right and talk economics, talk politics but we can talk about art, we can talk about sex, about relationships and you say something about sex that most of these kids turned out to be quite religious which was I didn't think Dartmouth I had not said the things that I'd said if I'd known in advance but given their responses and I'm saying stuff like over this then I'm saying stuff like if you don't have sex before you think it's immoral not to have sex before marriage and which I do and they're like oh my god this guy's you know but they were so intrigued because now nobody has ever said that to them they've never heard anybody say it's not moral not to have sex before marriage there that if morality plays into it then morality has to say no you have to wait until after marriage they can't think otherwise right but just to say that you could see the real spinning the objections coming out they were thinking in ways that they've never thought in their lives and I got more satisfaction out of that than anything and I got a number of emails afterwards saying oh the talk was great but the dinner that was really cool you really had a good time on that and I think it's the older you get the more you can do this because the more experiences you have the more opinions you have and more things but we are as objectivist intellectuals we're truly unique in the world in terms of the kind of views that we have the scope of them and we're radical on everything really on everything and that makes that makes us interesting and I you're right and you're right I mean I wish then you had a capitalized on that more so you know who capitalizes on this who is but he's eclectic and you know he's not it's Tyler Cowan right yeah religiously yeah so Tyler is really good at this right so he has this website marginal revolution and on this website he talks about restaurants he talks about history he's obviously an economist he talks about economics he talks about politics he talks about art he talks about everything and he has no problem just letting loose and talking about all these things and I often disagree with him but it's really interesting you know he's got an interesting perspective he's always looking at this in ways that you don't hear anywhere else and it causes you to think and even if you disagree with him it's interesting to figure out why you disagree with him so I don't know how to I mean my show in a sense capitalizes on that because I cover everything but I do tend to gravitate to the comfort zone which is politics and economics but I think actually if I was more eclectic like Tyler maybe I could actually broaden the audience over time and I'm still struggling with this I don't have enough confidence to do a show on something that I'm not 100% convinced I'm an expert. Well that's very long so this goes to my point about people are persuaded by people so you can think about it two stages one is oh this is a person worth listening to and once you're interested if you think about the Jordan Peterson phenomenon it's possible to take too much away from that but what people get grabbed they initially got grabbed by this idea oh he's taking a brave stand saying interesting things about political correctness on campus but then it was he has interesting things to say about everything and then I'm interested in him and want to hear what he has to say about everything and I think the same thing happened to Ayn Rand oh she wrote these really powerful books but then you would go to Ford Hall Forum and she would give a talk like what is capitalism and all the questions would it be about everything under the sun almost never about anything in the talk and so the real thought leaders that you see who really make an impact on people they come across as uniquely interesting people like Tyler who think about everything in a very surprising and original way and that becomes like a gravitational pull and I think you can have the other model which is very much like I'm the guy on this issue but what happens is most people start out as the guy on this issue and then they grow into kind of a broader here's how I look at life so you can think about somebody like you know Tim Ferriss started out as like I'm the productivity guy I'm gonna help you you know liberate yourself from work so you can go off and do other things and then it became basically here's a guy who takes this really interesting measure and test everything approach to everything in life and I want to know what kind of knives he uses to cook with and I want to know you know how he deals with sleep so I think there's like that is how the journey should go if you're going to be influential but it's there's not a clear roadmap of how to do it no and I think I'm struggling I think I'm at the point right now so like you know so I've got the biggest whatever following an objectivism whatever but that's a small world and there's a lot of people and objectives to follow me but it's still it's still small and I've got I don't know it's a lot for some 18,500 or something followers on YouTube or whatever but it's a small fight you know compared to Jordan Peterson's millions and even a lot of other people who have 100,000 or 500,000 I mean numbers are big and I'm trying to figure out okay what does it take to get from where I am now because I've been growing at a low rate of growth for over a year now what does it take to go to the next level and it's not marketing I mean some extent it could be marketing but I'd get more subscribers but it's not it's something about the content has to grow has to become viral in some way and I don't know I still haven't figured out how to do it or what exactly it is and I think and I I alternate between wanting to specialize you know become the guy who attacks the right because it's much more attractive to me than attacking the left but that's too limiting and boring and I don't find it interesting enough to do it all the time but I still but I don't know what the right balance is in order to get to the point where it really does take off but that's the challenge the challenge is how do you broaden the audience in a significant way because I think I'm maxed out on what I do right now I don't you know what I do right now is not going to grow dramatically right so I have to do something different and what is that something I'm still not sure but in business there's just this general principle of you'll hit ceilings of growth and each ceiling then requires a real transformation if you're going to keep scaling and that is really scary because you're in effect going blind like you're going back to zero like you're throwing out a bunch of stuff that you know works in order to get to this new level and you don't know if that's going to work and it'll be really interesting but I think being aware that that's where you're at is a really good starting point and because I agree with you it's not like man if we could just get like you're on a really good like Facebook ads guy the world would change like studio or different background I mean they're all valuable but that's not the breakthrough that's not the thing those are optimizations rather than transformations yeah I'm at the stage where I'm trying to figure out what would what would be a game changer or at least a real accelerator and I'm not sure what that is so we'll see yeah I mean that's basically part of my inception for doing this podcast was the that you know I always had these very well laid plans for I'm going to do this and it will achieve this result in terms of growing an audience everything and that never works when I said why don't I just do like the podcast that I would have the most fun possible doing and get the most personal reward out of and the worst case scenario is that I get to spend time doing things I really enjoy so that's kind of my way of approaching the same issue which is like I want it to get an audience and be influential but I'm optimizing for personal satisfaction and then just kind of like seeing what happens from there no I think that's right and I mean you you got to enjoy whatever you do anyway that is otherwise you shouldn't do it but if you're not sure it's going to be successful if you're not sure exactly what the model is you know do what you enjoy doing and see that's that's at least you'll get a you'll get a data point for any changes you want to make you'll get a data point okay this succeeds or didn't and then you'll be able to go on so but yeah I know I think I think we have technological tools now that make communicating unbelievably easy and or easier and to an audience that we couldn't even imagine we could have just a few years ago so it's the world has changed in profound ways because of YouTube and because of Zoom and because of all these things and I think people are still trying to figure out how to use them and also figure out what the secret is behind a Jordan Peterson I don't think it's clear right it's it's what what actually allowed him to become as big as he as he became yeah and contrasting it with other people who have done it I think it's important because you want to think like how Tyler got because he's you know not quite as famous but he's widely known outside of economics and and so that you know finding those sort of data points and calling through them well it's interesting because you know most of the people I know who got into that stage or at least got into some stage like that basically became well known within a field and then or became established within a field and then took that and broaden it dramatically so Tyler I've known about Tyler for 20 years right he was this economist at George Mason as a good economist and he wrote and he did good stuff and then yeah and he did some restaurant reviews at some point and but then like over the last five six seven years he's just become much bigger as he took that restaurant review stuff and expanded it to be this eclectic thinker in economics who thinks about everything from that perspective with no marketing effort just a good website just a good kind of a certain and he's not very I mean differentiates Tyler for example from a lot of the other examples he has no charisma he's not a charismatic person he has no stage presence person to person he's kind of awkward he's shy you know he's not he doesn't have the Jordan Peterson thing he's just created a great website you know and he's created a great identity through that website well that's why I always thought Sam Harris is in many ways another good model because you want to pick people who aren't uniquely like charismatic or something like that unless you yourself are uniquely charismatic to model from well you're on this has been Sam is really fascinating because he's and I don't know again it's hard to tell what differentiates him from other kind of laid back calm well-spoken people what makes Sam different from all those others but there's something about him something about the way he expresses himself and again I think there's something about the fact that you get a sense that he cares there's something very value driven about Sam Harris even though he's so mellow he's still you know it's important to him you know what's important to him with him I think it's that he has a very definite brand which is that I care about nothing more than the rigorous pursuit of the truth and part of the dispassionate nature of the way that he'll approach things is conveying you know I'm going to really be methodical in thinking this through and you know giving the best arguments to my opposition and so in a certain way he's made that work in his favor but and so it's you do get the deep passion for the not passion less what's the word I'm looking for the passion for reason in a sense yeah the importance reason plays in his life but also happiness because you know I love it when he's talking about being in the moment and being happy and you know and he really does have that he conveys authenticity that he really cares about this and he cares about the audience caring about this and it's again it's not some removed theoretical I mean he gets a little theoretical sometimes and that's when he loses people but but I think when he's when he's talking about living and he's talking about applying these ideas to life then I think that's when he's best and you know and it's interesting to look at all of them one by one and see what makes them unique but also what makes them so popular yeah something to strive towards awesome well thanks you're on hopefully you can do this again at some point if you want to support the show the best way you can do it is sign up for our email list at donswriting.com where 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