 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody, welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Tuesday, 2nd of January, first evening show of 2024, so welcome. All right, let's jump right in. We are talking about Jordan Peterson today and Michael Malice. They sat down and did a kind of an interview to talk about Malice's book about communism. A lot of other topics came up. So I want to focus today on one section of this, where they talk about Iran, just because me, I find Iran interesting. I find other people's understanding or lack of of Iran interesting. So I thought we'd listen to some of this and comment on it and see where we go and go from there. I will let me just say this. It's a long segment. And I'm not sure exactly what to do about it, because they go all over the place. That is, this is not a linear conversation that they have. And it goes in particular directions. I think that's both because of Jordan and because Malice and Michael's particular, I don't know, inclinations, particular way of viewing this. So they take the conversation and it bounces around quite a bit. So I'm going to start where kind of Iran comes up and we'll go from there. And then I'll probably stop and skip ahead, because there are some stuff towards the end that I want to cover. It starts at about an hour into their conversation. So that means there is a context. I could have started 20 minutes earlier and had a lot to say about what they talk about, agreement and disagreement. But I wanted to focus more on Iran, so we're going to start here. You'll also hear about how Jordan Peter's got introduced Iran. So there's some interesting material here. I'm going to let them speak, because there's stuff here that I don't really have anything to comment on. So I'm going to end. Some of it is because Jordan Peterson is long-winded here. And he kind of goes around in circles. And it's hard to stop him, because you have to let him finish the thought, which is a long thought, often a long thought. So we're just going to let him speak. I will, at some point, cut and fast forward, but we'll see how they go. We'll see how far we get. We see how much commentary I have. And then I do want to tell you, I do have a treat. At the end of this, I do have a video of Stephen Fry and John Cleese. Stephen Fry and John Cleese, Monty Python fame. I don't know how many of you are old enough to know who Stephen Fry and John Cleese are. But two comic legends. And there's a video of them sitting down having a conversation. And Iron Man comes up. And I thought that was really cool. Stephen Fry brings it up. No, neither of them are fans, obviously. Or not, obviously, but whatever. But it comes up naturally in a conversation in a way that I think is super interesting, kind of cool. I just find it cool. And so I thought I'd play you that just because, as I said, it's fun. And it's very, very cool to see them talk. Stephen Fry really talk about Iron Man. Stephen Fry was not in Monty Python. Huh. All right. So Stephen Fry was not in Monty Python. I don't know why I thought he was in Monty Python. He was in Black Adam. So for what that's worth, he is a British comedian, a writer, and really, really, I think smart. Clearly, the more intellectual comedian, if you will. So that should be interesting. So that'll be kind of a, I don't know, dessert after we get through Jordan Peterson and Mike and Miles. I was to say this. I mean, Michael is not an objectivist. I think he acknowledged that. He knows a lot about Ryan, particularly about our biography. He knows a lot about the novels. I don't think he has a deep understanding of a philosophy, but that's me. And I think that comes across in certain points here. But that's not his job. So part of my point is he doesn't correct Jordan Peterson, where I think Jordan Peterson needs to be corrected. He doesn't take the conversation in a direction. I think the conversation should have gone in, because that's not his motivation. I mean, his motivation is to talk about his book, and then his motivation is to talk about anarchy. He's an anarchist. That's what interests him. That's kind of what integrates, I think, his thought. And he achieves what he wants in that sense, because they talk a lot about anarchy. And he gets Jordan Peterson to kind of agree with him on certain aspects. So yeah, I don't completely agree with some formulations that Michael does, and I don't agree with the direction it takes. Certainly I don't agree with that. But I completely understand that, given that that's not the direction he wants to go. He has a particular direction he wants to take this. And I think that he achieves that. I have to admit, he achieves it. He gets Jordan Peterson to go where he wants him to go, which is not easy given where Jordan Peterson is heading, which is all over the place. All right. Cleese, not cheese, cleese. Cleese, John Cleese. Did I say John Cheese? Cleese. All right, here we go. Let's see. I've got it there. There they are. That's a nice setting. And they've just had a conversation. I'm going to put you in the middle of it, because this is where I think Jordan Peterson brings Ayn Rand up for the first time, and introduces what he thinks his problem was with Ayn Rand, although it's not that clear. Ian wants me to play it one and a half times. I don't know. Can we really do that? Can we play it one and a half times? I mean, that seems wrong, right? We played it. What should we do? We'll play 1.25. But if it's too fast, please tell me, because I also don't want to be disrespectful here about this. Ali asked what's about Jordan Peterson's suits. He has really strange suits now. Some of them are multicolored and really weird. In England, I saw him, he had a strange suit. So he's experimenting with suit colors and suits, which is interesting, because it so defeats the purpose of wearing a suit to begin with, which is to be, in a sense, conventional. So Valkyrie says 0.5 would be too fast if it was Ben Shapiro. Chris says 1.25 is good. Well, you tell me once I play it if 1.25 is good. OK, so let's do this. Tell me if the volume is appropriate. They volume my volume and all of that. Let me know in the chat. And yeah, and we'll go from there. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about today is I don't know to what degree you would still ally yourself with the anarchist movement. And I want to know to what degree you do. And also, I would like to know what that means. You opened your book with Ayn Rand. I know that's a bit of a tangential intrusion into that question. But she's definitely an arbiter or a spokeswoman for an individualistic stance. So I want to talk to you about Ayn Rand, because I have some. So first, I think the worst thing about this interview, from my perspective, I think again, Malus achieves what he wants. But from my perspective, the worst thing about this interview is that Malus achieves a conflation in Jordan Peterson's mind between Anarchy and Ayn Rand. That is a certain overlap that he achieves between the two. And he manages, and I don't think Jordan Peterson holds those two separate things. I mean, Jordan has a problem with separating, I think, politics and ethics completely, because he's oriented towards hierarchy and organization and subsidiarity, which you'll talk about, and stuff like that, which are all kind of political concepts. But he talks about them in the context of ethics. To begin with, that's a problem for Jordan. And then what happens is that Malus achieves, and I think I don't know that he set out to do this, but it's an achievement for him, the conflation in Jordan Peterson's mind between Ayn Rand's ethics and Anarchy, and anarchism, which I think is completely wrong. I think it's a completely distortion of her worldview, and Malus knows that. Well, he knows that she thought that. He might think that she was wrong. That the logic of reasoning from individualism or from rational egoism is Anarchy. But again, in Jordan Peterson, he keeps referring to this. Anarchy and Ayn Rand, and he keeps going back and forth. And Anarchy and individualism, Anarchy is individualism. That is a unity. And that, unfortunately, is very destructive and very distortative. Ayn Rand's view is not consistent with Anarchy. It not consistent at all with Anarchy. And I don't think that doesn't come across here at all, even though Malus might at some point say something about Ayn Rand not being Anarchist, which I'm not sure he does, but maybe he does. That's not the issue. It's not what she held. What is the logical conclusion from her views about ethics? Do they lead to Anarchy? And clearly, they don't. And here, in Jordan's mind, Malus, we know. But in Jordan's mind, the two are conflated. And that is very, very bad. So that's sad that the two are related. You just saw that in this little exchange where he wants to talk to him about Anarchism. But you bring up Ayn Rand in your book, which she does, in the first page, I think. And I want to talk to you about Ayn Rand. Some ideas about that that I want. But I'm also curious, you obviously regard a focus on the individual as the appropriate medication against this kind of status, intellectual, luciferous, utopianism. And I think that's appropriate. But I want to know what your vision of an alternative to vision, why you adopted that particular vision? Well, I don't know that I have a vision per se, not a central planner. Well, but that's silly, with all due respect to Michael. I mean, that's silly. Of course, he has a vision. His vision is anarchy. His vision is a society in which there is no government and in which people organize in a variety of different ways and a variety of different people speculate and what that looks like. But there is a vision. It might not be a vision of the absolute concreets of everything. So I think that's anyway. But what Anarchism means to me, and I do 100% regard myself as an anarchism, is it is an approach to life. It is an approach to treating people peacefully. It is a recognition that political authority is inherently illegitimate, although sometimes it is powerful. And it is regarding our existence as an amazing opportunity and to live life to its fullest. Now, here's where he conflates it, right? So here, he's explicitly conflating anarchism with a morality of living life to the fullest, right? He is complete. Now, I'm not going to critique his anarchism, right? It's not the purpose of what I'm here for right now. We're not talking about malice and anarchy. I've done the anarchy thing. And soon, you'll see an essay that Don Watkins and I wrote about anarchy. It'll be on the guy I debated recently. Anyway, it'll be up on our website sometime in January. I'm not sure exactly when. But I don't want to spend today talking about anarchy. I want to spend it about iron-rended antiques. How he's taken the discussion of anarchy, a political concept, a political Brian Kaplan. Thank you. So it'll be on Brian Kaplan's blog at some point. It's a long essay on objections to anarchy. He's taken this political concept. And he's conflating the political concept with an ethics of living your life to the fullest. And I get it. Malice, to some extent, holds us in his mind like this. But that's really damaging. That's really damaging. Because when I say, live your life to the fullest, the implication of that is not anarchy. The implication of that is the counter. It is a government. It is a strong government that does only one thing. But it is a government. And not all government, as you know, I think, is illegitimate. To realize that to take that away from somebody else is a huge moral outrage. So that is kind of what anarchism means to me. And Rand was asked at one point, she goes, if I had to sum up my worldview or whatever term she used in one word, it would be this, individualism. So yes, that is exact. Yeah, so that's where it's at. So let me delve into that. But it's also just important because, you know, Berkman and Goldman, there's this boomer idea that more government- Yeah, I'm going to skip this. There's Berkman and he goes into this. I'm going to skip this a little bit. We have to skip some stuff. So we're going to skip this. Less interesting for upper purposes. We're going to go here. He read Rand, I read Rand's books, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. I think the third time I read both. And I read them within the last couple of months. Oh, wow. Yeah, so I was, you know, now and then I'm looking for a, I don't know, a romantic read, maybe. That's somewhat intellectually challenging. And now and then I'll pick up one of her books. And she's, and that's pretty good because he recognized her for what she is. And she's obviously inspired him. Otherwise, he wouldn't read it three times. So there's something going on here. There's some appeal that she has that attracts Jordan Peterson to her, but he doesn't get it. He doesn't get it. And he, I think he struggles with himself with the idea that he likes the books. He enjoys the books. They provide him with something. And yet he rejects a philosophy and he's really struggling with how to align all that. Curious figure to me because Ayn Rand had every reason to despise the Soviet Union and was a very good counter voice to their machinations. But, but, well, and you know, I got introduced to her books. It was quite interesting. So I worked for the socialists when I was like 14 till I was 16 before. We don't actually get to the but, but this is interesting. This is how we got introduced Ayn Rand. If through socialism, funnily enough. So he is another guy who started out in the left. I didn't know enough to presume that the way I wanted to arrange the world in a utopian fashion was credible. And I figured that out by the time I was about 17, I thought, well, what do you know? You don't have a job. I had little jobs. You know, you don't have a business. You don't have a family. You don't have any education. It's like, what the hell do you know? Really, right? So, okay. Anyways, the person who gave me Ayn Rand's books was this woman, Sandy Naughtley. She was the mother of one of Alberta's recent premiers, the socialist premier. She was the wife of the only elected socialist official in Alberta when I grew up. And I asked her what she gave me, Social Incident and Huxley in Orwell, like she was an educated woman. And she gave me Ayn Rand's books, which I read when I was like 13. And, you know, I found them compelling. You know, they've got that, they're romantic adventures, fundamentally, with an intellectual bent. And I liked the anti-collective ethos that was embedded in them. And then I've read them, like I said, a couple of times since then. So here's the problem I have. And you can help me sort this out. Like, I certainly agree with you that a society that isn't predicated on something like recognition of the intrinsic and superordinate worth of the individual is doomed to catastrophe, right? And so, but then, but here's the rub, as far as I'm concerned, and this is what I really had a problem with, especially this time when I went through Rand's books. It's like, her gulf, John Gulb, for example, in Francisco to Danconia, her and the, who's the architect? Howard Warke. Warke, Warke, Warke. Her heroic capitalists, essentially. They're not precisely heroic capitalists. They're heroic individualists who compete in the free market. Okay, and that's, and that's fine. And you can see the libertarian side of that. And I'm also a free market advocate. And hardly because I think that distributed decision-making is a much better computational model than centralized planning, obviously. It's not obvious. I mean, that's Hayek. And it's certainly not Rand's argument. And it's not a very deep argument. The much more fundamental argument, even from that perspective, is that only in the individual, only the individual can actually identify his own values and determine how much anything is worth to him. That is, there's no, nobody can figure that out for him because nobody knows him. Only you can make decisions about yourself. It's not a, it's not a computational efficiency issue because if it was, then as some people are suggesting these days, we could appoint a AI dictator, artificial intelligence who solves the computational problem, we could have this massive computer that can solve all the computations in the world. And yet AI could not be a central plan and not because it lacks computational power, not because it lacks computational efficiency, but because the reality is that, well, one, it can't think in any meaningful sense, right? It can't actually think. And that's why it's not a computational issue. It's a thinking issue. But it can't make value choices for individuals because only individuals can make value choices for themselves. And that is really, really fundamental. And that is something that he should have been stopped on right here and it should have been told to him, right? So Haik is right as far as it goes, but making it into a computational problem and I think Michael in a second will reinforce this, making it into a computational problem makes the issue of human ignorance or the issue of limited human ability to compute, the limit of human reason as Haik would state it. And that's not the issue. This is not the limitations. The issue is, the issue is the fact that only individuals can value and therefore only individuals can know what their values are and only individuals can know what worth their values have to them. So every value has to be to whom and for what. And no central planner can answer that question. It doesn't know what my values are for and how much I'm willing, what I'm willing to do for them, how important they are. He doesn't have my value hierarchy. And you probably can't even get that from a questionnaire. And my values change all the time and they change with context, circumstances. And of course, as Bonnie says, we're volitional animals so we change our minds. And no central planner can do that, can get into our mind. I guess if we're all like in the matrix connected, our brains are connected and they can read our minds, okay, so then maybe all our needs can be, all our wants, desires can be satisfied. But, yeah. Well, yeah, it should be, but it should be. It's not obvious to utopian, Luciferian intellects, but it's obvious even if you just think about it from a computational perspective. He has this great one-liners, who was it, Luciferian, utopian, Luciferian, something like that. I mean, you gotta give it, he's a master at one-liners and it wood smithing and putting. Smartest person is ignorant of 99.99% of knowledge. Yes, exactly. The smartest person is ignorant of 99.99% of knowledge. That's not an argument for anything. That's not an argument for anything. So, I mean, that's the problem. It's the Hayekian argument, which is wrong and belittles human reason and human capacity. And if I had, again, an AI who was not ignorant of 99.99% of knowledge, would that be okay then? Would he be able to master plan, essentially plan the universe? Of course not. Do you realize that? Exactly, that's exactly it. Precisely why you want it distributed. Okay, so that's partly what I wanted to go into. So, now they ran. It's not exactly to say distributed. You want it individualized. You want individuals making decisions for themselves because only individuals know what they want. Only individuals know what their values are. Only individuals know what their life acquires. So, it's not an issue of distributed. It's an issue of individuated. Indian heroes identify themselves as fervent individualists and they, you stop me as soon as I get any of this wrong and go in some way, you don't disagree with, they're pursuing their own selfish ethos. Okay, so that's the rub to me because, and I would think, I'm gonna think about this psychologically and neurophysiologically. So, just to make it complicated. Okay, so the first question would be, well, what exactly do you mean by the individual and the self? Okay. And here there's another video of him going into the fact that there is no such thing as a self or individual because what you are right now is not the same as what you're gonna be in a year. And so it's two individuals. It's not exactly an individual. I mean, which is nonsense and completely wrong in terms of how you frame it. But here he takes it in a different direction, which is a little all over the place. So be patient. Okay, so when a child develops, let's say when a child first emerges into the world, they're essentially a system of somewhat disconnected primary instinctual sub-personalities, right? And so with the nascent possibility of a uniting ego, identity, personality, something like a continuity of memory across time. But that has to emerge. Now it seems to emerge as a consequence of neurophysiological development and experiential maturation. So the child comes equipped into the world, say with the sucking reflex because its mouth and tongue are very wired up. So that's where the child is most conscious. That's why kids when they can't put everything in their mouth because they can feel it and investigate it. Far before they have control over their eyes or their arms because their arms sort of float around. So what happens is they're born as a set of somewhat independent systems. And then the independent systems partly under the influence of social demand integrate themselves. Now, so, and then like by the time a child is two, that child is still mostly disintegrated emotional systems. And so if you watch a two year old and I use two for a specific reason, what you see is that they cycle through basic motivational states. One of the challenges of being interviewed by Jordan Peterson as he goes on in these rants and you have to follow it and you have to figure out on the spot, sitting there, how you're gonna respond. And that is really, really, really hard to do. Because what's he talking about? Now, somebody's saying makes kind of sense. I've heard it now three times. But imagine hearing it just once as you are. I mean, how many of you know what he's talking about? And it's, what's the question? Where's he going with this? Very difficult. So a child is often like a child whose demand oriented motivational states are satiated will play and play and explore. But then they get tired and they'll cry or they'll get hungry and they'll cry or they'll get angry and they'll have a tantrum or they're burst into tears. Well, I said they'll cry or they'll get anxious. And so they're cycling through these primary motivational states. Now, we understand that to some degree, neurophysiologically because the older, the brain system, the more likely it is to be operative in infancy, right? So like the rage system or the system that mediates anxiety or the system that mediates pain, those come into being pretty early, but it's hard for them to get integrated. Okay, now, here's the problem. And I don't know how to distinguish individualism from hedonism. And I don't know how to distinguish hedonism from possession by one of these lower order motivational states. So when we ran. So that's a really good question, right? And he doesn't, he doesn't know how to distinguish egoism or selfishness or self-interest from hedonism or from one of these lower states, the perceptual level or the emotional states. And what, of course, what he's missing here and what malice doesn't bring up and won't bring up and is as a standard, human survival, human flourishing, human happiness, the standard. And the integrating virtue, rationality. That is, so what is differentiated selfishness from hedonism or one is the standard is this necessary for human survival? Is it necessary for human flourishing? Is it necessary for human survival qua human being, i.e. qua conceptual being? And how do we know whether something is necessary or not? How do we know whether or not something is hedonistic, maybe even self-destructive versus something that is productive and building and virtuous? Well, we know by the standard of human life, by the standard of human flourishing. And we know that through the use of reason, the application of reason, by rationally figuring out, by looking at reality, by looking at what kind of animal human beings are, what their nature is, what kind of action will lead to positive outcomes, what kind of actions lead to negative outcomes. And that is the only way we can figure out what is in our self-interest, what selfishness means. But that's what needs to be explained to Jordan. I mean, and this sort of being such a perfect place to do it because he's raising the right questions. He's thinking about the right issues. Now, I don't know if he could accept it. I don't know if he could integrate it because his mind is all over the place. But what an opportunity you have here to actually discuss what it is about selfishness so selfishness that makes it not hedonism. And what it is that selfishness is and what it even means. In other words, what he really means in the sense of, again, human survival, human flourishing. And that just doesn't happen. So it's a massive blown opportunity to actually articulate what needs to be articulated in this context. And of course, reason, right? The whole idea of reason, the whole idea of rationality as the integrator is so crucial and the means by which you survive. Reason as a means of survival, a basic means of survival is the only thing he puts it. That needs to be said here. That needs to be here, right? And again, missed opportunity. It doesn't come up. There's none of it there. Again, I give credit to Jordan. He's asking the right questions. He's conflicted here between those ingrained, almost animalistic tendencies that we may be born with and hedonism and this concept of selfishness and how do they relate? And what's, yes, that's a good question but he needs an answer and he doesn't get one. He says we should be able to pursue our own selfish needs. She's kind of taking a class with us. She says selfish needs, she says self-interest. Okay, okay, so fine. Okay, okay, so that, no. Well, no, I would say she moves between those two because there are. Harvard says needs, I'm positive. Yeah, she never says needs, which is true. But that's not the point. It's not, the point here is not the needs. The point here is not the needs. The point is here, what does selfishness mean? What does it mean? Where does it come from? And what is the measure by which we can say something is selfish and something is not? What is the objective standard for determining what is hedonistic? What is animalistic, if you will? And what is selfish? That's what needs, that's the point that needs to be made here. And now they go into this complete sidetrack on needs, which is not essential. Not that important. I mean, it's good to point out that she doesn't talk about selfish needs, but it's not, again, blown opportunity. Okay, she may never say needs. She attacks that word all the time. Okay, okay, right, right, fair enough. Okay, okay, so I'll back off on the needs side. That was the old chosen. And she does, she makes absolutely bloody sure. Well, wait a second. She says your needs are not a blank check in my life. I know, I know, but does she say simultaneously that I have no right to pursue my needs? She doesn't use that word. She says you pursue your self-interest to the best of your abilities. Okay, but she also uses the word selfish. Yes, okay, okay, so fine. Fair use in a static way. Right, okay, right, absolutely, absolutely. I would just want to make sure that we're... But this is a great opportunity to explain what selfish is. And more importantly, when it comes to what the context is and what the standard is, the standard of all value, your life as a conceptual being. And that's... We're sitting on grounds that we both regard as appropriate. So the liberal types, the Scottish liberals believe that if people were encouraged to pursue their self-interest that that would produce a self-regulating system. Now, Rancy... See, now he goes to politics. So he's going from selfishness quite individual to selfishness as a system, Adam Smith and so on. And again, here's another opportunity differentiating Rant from the Scottish. Adam Smith and the Scots would say, if everybody, Adam Smith and the Scots say, if everybody pursues their self-interest, while that in and of itself is not good, it actually produces a better society. But Rant rejects that whole formulation. Rant's view is self-interest is the good. It is the good. There's nothing else in terms of good other than to pursue your self-interest. And yes, if every individual pursues his self-interest, a social group is better off. But that's not the reason, that's the consequence. And it's, again, frustrating that he doesn't get accounted to that. That is, he's pitching softballs here. You don't need to be answered. And every time he does this, there's a great opportunity to make an interesting point about Rant. Now, again, as I said in the beginning, it's not Malice's job. He's not here to defend Rant. He's here to defend Anarchy and defend his book on communism. I get it, in that sense, I'm not criticizing Malice. It's just, ugh, it's unfortunate. It's just unfortunate he's not talking. Jordan Peterson's not talking to an objectivist and asking these exact questions to an objectivist. Andrew says, you're on these only softballs to serious objectivists. Yes, I agree. But it's too bad he's not talking to a serious objectivist. That would be cool. If you accept that as a proposition, yes. So if people are freely able to pursue their self-interest, then a system of free exchange will emerge out of that that has the appropriate qualities of governance. And what we would say is, what a serious objectivist somebody says, is yes only, and that system emerges, that system emerges when and if individual rights are protected. That is, as long as I'm protected from the goon, the thief, the bad guy who is going to violate people's rights. Ali says, why blame Malice JP doesn't let him talk and keep projecting his wrong ideas and getting short answers? Not a big fan of you. No, I mean, Malice can talk, as you'll see in a little bit. He talks, he has no problem talking, and Jordan Peterson will let him speak when Malice talks. And Malice is fine with interjecting, like when he said needs, she doesn't talk about needs. He can interject and he can keep going. So I don't think this is because of JP. I think Malice is missing opportunities here, partially because I don't think he knows the material deeply, partially because he's not motivated. Because when he gets an anarchy, which I'm not gonna play here, but when he gets to the issue of anarchy, he's very articulate and goes on and on and on as long as he wants to. So I don't think this is about Malice being too shy or too differential or JP Morgan, JP, Jordan Peterson being too, you know, too, I don't know, not letting him speak. I think this is more about, you know, what his priorities are. What he wants to talk about, what he wants to emphasize. All right. All right, let's see. We're gonna go on a little bit and then I'm gonna skip ahead. Let me just see what one, yeah, there's another 30 minutes of this. So let me just go. She says this explicitly in Donahue. She was saying that if people pursue their own self-interest, there wouldn't be any oppression, there wouldn't be more, there wouldn't be any headless, because there would, should they be less and she goes, there wouldn't be anything? Yeah, well, look, when I'm negotiating with someone. But it's also the case, whoops. I just, I just wiped that out. What did I do? All right, it's also the case that, you know, she believed that they need to be, that governance needs to exist. Government needs to exist. Protecting individual rights needs to happen. But of course, Malice doesn't believe in that, doesn't agree with that. All right, let's see, what do I wanna take us? One, let's go to 128. I mean, there's so many, there's other stuff here, but I'm just gonna skip this. 127, 128, subsidiarity, no, I wanna go to 133 once in. I mean, I think, well, anyway, Malice brings up the alignment a couple of times and he's undermining the alignment constantly, which again, is so wrong and it's just a misrepresentation of the alignment. But it undermines Rand's key idea about morality and about life, which is the value of reason, the value of rational thought. And Malice is undermining that. And I think that's purposefully because, you know, he obviously disagrees. He says at some point, he disagrees with Iron Man. He says something about, Iron Man thinks that if we all got together and we had exactly the same facts, we don't come to exactly this inclusion, which is just not true because again, we have different values. We'd all come to the same conclusion until it was right or wrong. We'd all come to the same conclusion until it was a science. Does he disagree about science? So what exactly is it that we wouldn't come to the same conclusion around? Time preference into it. You're starting to work in the domain that implicitly assumes that there is a higher order integration. So these initial systems, these initial motivational systems, they're very short term. So, and they want short term gratification. So when a baby wails, when it cries, it wants to be satisfied now. But can I say one thing? This is the distinction Rand draws between hedonism and her philosophy because she thinks that the more moral person, the more long range is thought. Whereas hedonism is very much a pleasure at the moment. And I'm gonna defend hedonism a little bit. Yeah, and I think that's right. But again, he never explains what the context is. That is, you know, long range for what? Long range in what? He talks about, Malus brings up integrity, which I think is good. He brings up the importance of integrity. But again, without life, without life, without flourishing survival as the standard, you can't really get what integrity is for. He brings up a lot, and Jordan Peterson likes this, this idea of, what do you call it? Of, you know, after you make a choice, thinking back and being proud of that and not being proud of it, or, you know, about the road less taken, the road you took or didn't take, and not being embarrassed by what you've done in the past. But by what standard? Again, you need a standard for all these things. And the standard is in Rand's morality and the standard is ultimately life, rational of a rational being. The life of a rational being. That is the standard. You can't undermine reason and rationality and still hold that standard. But it has to be made clear. It has to be made explicit. Because the term gets a bad rap? Hedonism isn't coke orgies. Hedonism is Martha Stewart, where you're having coffee and a book club with your friends and having the pleasure. That's not right. Hedonism is, you know, the OG. The Martha Stewart and having a nice drinking, drinking something nice and reading a book, that's pleasure. Pleasure and hedonism are not the same thing. Hedonism is an ism. It is the elevation of momentary pleasure above all else. So again, there's a, he's wrong. What can I say? That's more of this. Okay, but I would put, you can actually separate those technically. Sure, but the point is, yeah. Because that kind of hedonism would be more of an aesthetic end. Sure. Right, and it's more sophisticated. Pleasure per se isn't bad. Right, with these Epicurean ideas of hedonism, how it was pitched, you know, thousands of years ago, it wasn't at all this maximizing pleasure into the life of life. In the moment. Right, right, right. Okay, so we'll just define the kind of hedonism that we're objecting to as blinkered by that short term. But I also hate this kind of wasp suspicion of hedonism, this pure talent. Like, if you're having pleasure, you're doing something wrong. And it's like, pleasure is wonderful. People should do it more in the sense of, I'm reading a nice book. I'm enjoying a fire. I'm having it walk with my friends. Yeah, well everything in this place is the proper notion for that, right? So the demand for hedonic gratification shouldn't be put forward in a manner that sacrifices the overall integrity. It's the reward. I've worked hard and now I get to watch a stupid TV show and not feel any guilt about it because I did my work for today. Right, right. Well, it's nice. I have no shame about it. Well, the psychologists know if they're wise that you want to have all the forms of motivation that are available to you working. If you've got an alternative of watching a stupid TV show or a clever TV show, that's entertaining. It doesn't require a lot. It doesn't require any effort, but it's just bad. Why would you go with a stupid one? And why shouldn't you feel a little embarrassed about listening to a stupid one? It just doesn't, none of this is really that, it's not right. It's just, everything here is loose. There's very little, it doesn't, there's very little accuracy here because again, there's no standard. To push you forward. Yeah. And certainly the draw. So technically the source of reward that people work hardest for isn't satiation reward. They would if they were starving. Like you can put animals and human beings into a situation where they work with single-mindedly for satiation. Like if you haven't had anything to drink for two weeks, you're going to be pretty motivated. That aside. And this is something the Soviets understood very well. System that mediates voluntary exploratory activity. So it's a very ancient system. It emerges, it's hypothalamic. The hypothalamus is a part of the brain that sits right on top of this spinal cord. It's absolutely ancient system. And the pleasure that we generally are most motivated by does activate these systems. And if you want people to be actively engaged in a meaningful way in their old life and in their social pursuits, then you want to make sure that that system is operating in the direction of those pursuits. So then one of the things that happens when people make an agreement is that they set up a shared aim. So our aim today was to have an interesting conversation that we could share with people. Okay, so that sets up our nervous system. So as long as we're uttering words in a manner that moves us towards that aim, then we're going to stay engaged and enthusiastic because the system that produces enthusiasm and engagement is now on board in relationship to that aim. Okay, so imagine this then. So that your aim becomes the participation in the social system that's optimally balanced when people are pursuing their enlightened self-interest in a manner that's of maximal social utility that stretches across the longest possible time span. But you see, he can't really hold it, right? So it has to be in late self-interest. Can't just be self-interest. So he has to be enlightened and self-interest because that is a way to make it less self-interested in some way. It's a little soft, it's such a feeling, it's good. And then he has to be in the social utility. He has to be in this whole thing. And Malice says, I don't have any use for social utility. I don't have any use. I don't like social utility, which is great, absolutely good for him. Again, why, what's the purpose, what's wrong with social utility? There's not a lot of getting into that really in great depth. But let me just skip a little bit of a head because we're going late here. Someone that your family can admire and rely on and knowing that when this shit hits the fan, they'll be in a position to reciprocate. Do you want to be that provider? Or that source of strength? Again, this is your opportunity to do that person. Or do you want to be the guy who's not there for his kids? You have that opportunity too. And at the end of the day, you're going to have to look yourself in the mirror or avoiding our contact in the mirror and face. We're waking up at three in the morning being tormented by your conscience. Yeah, but where does this conscience come from? Right, this conscience is, you have to have a standard of value to have a conscience. But what is the standard of value? What is the value system that you've adopted? And does Rand have a value system that causes you to have this conscience? All of that is floating. None of it has been defined. None of it has been explained. And it's floating. So the conversation is going nowhere and it doesn't really integrate into anything. Do you still have one? Or deadening it with alcohol or whatever the situation might be? So yeah. Right, okay, so then that was what I was trying to portray as a social good. But the social good is the consequence, not the goal. How about the good is the harmony between the social manifestation and the individual manifestation? That's, by the way, one of the better things he said, social good is the consequence, not the goal. I agree with that. That's the Adam Smith thing, right? Society's somehow better off, however you want to measure it, but that's not the goal of the action. And he's absolutely right. He brings it in too little, too late in some ways. It's, explain, articulate. What do you mean? So look, part of the reason I've been thinking this through is because I think that the modern definition of mental health as subjective is totally wrong. Because I think that mental health is actually the harmony in that hierarchy of being and not something that you have in your head. That is, it is the harmony. The harmony, it's exactly right. I mean, Jordan Peterson is completely in the right direction here. It's a philosophy of objectivism, so I completely agree with you. I think anytime you're introducing subjectivism to a large extent, you're treading on thin ice. Okay, so then let's go to the objective in relationship to what? Like, where's the objective reality that Rand's pattern of behavior is aiming to, to what would you say, to adapt to? And what's the answer there? What is the, I mean, this is a great question. Another one of these great questions Jordan is asking. What is the objective reality that Rand's pattern of behavior is aiming towards? In other words, what is the objective reality that her morality is aiming towards? And this is where the answer, sorry, Michael, but the answer has to be life. The objective standards by which life, what life requires, what nature requires of us as a particular animal to do in order to achieve life, to achieve flourishing, what particular being with a particular nature, with a particular biology, with a particular kind of brain, mind, whatever you wanna call it. And nature requires, reality requires that we pursue certain values using certain virtues to achieve life. That's the particular reality. That's the answer to what Jordan is asking. Not what malice is. Everywhere, where you live in it, there's nowhere else to go. Okay, so that seems... So it's true, this is reality, but Jordan is asking something very particular and he's frustrated and I'm frustrated because he's not getting the answer. But that's not good enough in the context of morality. What is, what are we striving towards? We need to be the same notion as the subsidiary structure. And now he's going to politics again. So you've got your wife, let's say. Well, he's my goat. And your narrow individuality is integrated into the broader dyad of that fruit. We're all then diagrams. Okay, okay. Then you do that with your family. There's you and your coworkers, there's you and your employees, there's you and your friends, there's you and your... I mean, all of them diagrams, kind of, all right? Daughter, your new city, your new town. Right, okay. You and your new peers. Right, so we agree on that. Okay, of course. But again, all of them diagrams, oriented towards what? Right, so my Venn diagram with my coworkers is oriented towards what? Each one of them has an orientation, but they're all consistent with my self-interest because they're all oriented towards my life. So that is so missing. All right, we've got a minute and a half. That's the polity that I'm thinking about. So how do you fluid? It's not what, it changes all the... Right, but there's... Right, right, right. Get divorced. Right, but there's principles. It's not entirely fluid because... No, it's not entirely fluid. Hopefully, it's optimally fluid. Sure, because it's principles. Jordan is saying, what are they? Right, okay, so that's fine. And that optimal, I would say, part of the marker of its optimality is fluidity. Yes. Right, that's why the dow is water, right? It's not stone. It has this capacity to adapt. And it just... Sometimes you have to cut your losses, and that's fine. Just because you've been in a relationship for 10 years does not mean, well, you should continue in perpetuity. Right, well... At least any relationship, I don't mean marriage. It could be just your contract or your work with your lawyers. Right, well, so your point seems to me to be that your alliance in any of those subsidiary organizations shouldn't be a prison. Correct, right. That's something that thrives and needs maintenance and is reborn every single day. But again, the standard is life, life, happiness, flourishing, success. That's how you measure whether you should invest in it or not. Now, you guys are talking about Jordan getting overexcited and emotional and whatever. Remember, this is 1.25 speed, so this is not his normal speed. So it's not fair to judge him. Like every single day, anyone has the option to get divorced or to not talk to their kids or to fire whoever or to talk. So if you accept the necessity of these embedded relationships, yes, multiple embedded relationships. Okay, so why do you conceptualize that? Why exactly... I'm not trying to catch you out here. I'm curious. Well, why do you conceptualize that as anarchy? Because it's voluntary. Yeah, you see, this is where Jordan, this is where this conflation of anarchy and selfishness, it makes me mad. I mean, I was hoping he would say, why do you conceptualize that as selfishness or self-interest? But he goes to the political, he goes to the anarchy, and I think it goes off track at that point. So I mean, the rest is about anarchy and about stuff. So I'll let you guys watch it if you want. My interest was in the more... Jordan was actually asking good questions, getting deep into some important issues related to self-interest or related to selfishness. There was an opportunity here to actually articulate a case for Rand's morality while moral code based on human life, based on the survival, based on flourishing. Why such a moral code is needed? Why that is the measure of all things? That is the measure of human behavior? Why that is what creates this conscience? And if you have the wrong values, you can have a conscience that's no good. That is, you don't have implicit in you in your consciousness, in your conscience, the right morality. You have to first adopt the right morality to have the right conscience. But anyway, that's a whole other story. All right, that is this video. Let me just see if there are questions around this before I show you the video with Stephen Frey, which I think is enjoyable. Jeffrey says, why is Jordan Peterson so obsessed with hierarchy and it looks like he's the liberty misunderstands I ran over and over? I don't think it's deliberate. I think it's more of a... I think she's challenging, and I think this is why it keeps coming back to her, because it really is challenging some of his fundamental beliefs. And to some extent, he knows that, and he feels uncomfortable about it, because he doesn't really have an answer. And he doesn't completely understand what's so challenging about I ran. He thinks there's something in him that thinks he can just dismiss her, but he can't and he knows he can't. So it's a real quandary for him, and I think he keeps misunderstanding it, because what partially, I mean, I was gonna say it hasn't really been explained to him, but he's read out the shrug three times. I don't know how you can miss it once you've read out the shrug three times, and the phone hit three times. So somebody needs to make an effort at least to try to explain it and see what happens, but why is J.P. so obsessed with hierarchy? I think that comes from kind of an evolutionary psychology kind of perspective. Hierarchy exists out there in nature. The whole idea of of lobsters, right, of what do you call it? Survival of the fittest, that you can observe hierarchy out there in nature. There's some points in the video we didn't get to it, unfortunately, where John Peterson kind of talks about Peter Keating, and he asks, he asks Mike Amalice, well, yeah, Peter Keating chooses social status as the most important thing. Why is that bad? Why is that not selfish? And Amalice says something about what he does not have a self because he standards other people, and that's true, but again, another opportunity to talk about what it means to act for yourself, and what that requires for conceptual being, and why being a second hander undermines that, not just he doesn't have a self, he now can't act in any way that can be described as selfish because he doesn't have a self, he doesn't have values, he's in a sense chosen social hierarchy, but social hierarchy doesn't really fulfill any values he has because he doesn't have any. So that was an interesting conversation, I was in the middle there. Again, it was hard to chop this up in a reasonable way without spending three hours on it. The concept of self-esteem, no thanks to self-esteem, the concept of self-esteem is important there, and he has that. So I think Jim Peterson engages in hierarchy because I think it comes out of kind of the animal world, it comes out of evolutionary psychology, it comes out of observing the world in which people have different statuses, and that is important for them. Well, Dave's $100, remaining $100, I owe you for the department review of you. Thanks, David, I appreciate it. Ali says, why Michael doesn't go live in Somalia or some part of it is full Anarchy or any African country? I mean, if I don't like communism, I would go to a capitalist country. Yeah, I don't know why they don't go to, why the Anarchists don't all move to Somalia, I mean, because I have no idea how they would explain their lack of movement, but yes, they should. And you're right, Somalia is the perfect example of Anarchy and Anarchy is a disaster. Indeed, civilization is to a large extent the process of moving from Anarchy away from Anarchy. We start in Anarchy and we're slowly, I think through the Enlightenment, we'll be moving away from it. And life is much better even with statism today than it is in Anarchy, much better. Richard says, John Peterson looks like a character from Alison Wonderland and Michael Malish looks like and Upa Lumpa from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and they deserve to be played at 1.25 faster. Okay, Richard, let's see, what is James' question? All right, we'll get to that a little later. Yuan, is there a platform for you to have a similar conversation with Jordan this year? He brings up Brand a lot, but never with someone who understands how converting JP would be huge for promoting objectivism. So a few things. One, I don't think you could convert JP. I just don't think somebody is committed to his ideology, somebody is mature ideologically, somebody is old, that old is about my age as Jordan is convertible. I just don't think that's possible. What I think the goal should be is have an opportunity to sit down with him and present objectivism to his audience and maybe get him to have more respect for Iron Man, although he seems to have some respect for already, but have more respect for Iron Man so he brings in more positive context. Your audience is not JP, the audience is his audience. And is there a platform? Yeah, I mean, his podcast, that's the platform. And he's too expensive to pay to do it, but the idea is to get invited onto his platform. I don't even think I'm the right person to do it, that is to engage with him. I think he needs somebody like Ankar Ghatay to really engage with him. Because he can go all over the place and a lot of Jordan Peterson's errors are epistemological, even metaphysical. And you need somebody who can move from, if it was just gonna be ethics and politics, I think I can handle Jordan. But if he's gonna jump into politics, if he's gonna go from politics to ethics to epistemology to metaphysics in a jumbled kind of way, you need a philosopher to do it. So I'd rather a philosopher do it, somebody like Ankar, but if, but I'm willing to do it, I just don't think I'm ideal to do it. And let's say, put it this way, approaches are being made, that is somebody who has Jordan Peterson's ear is talking to him about bringing on a real objectivist to talk about objectivism and explicitly. And to talk about Ayn Rand explicitly and whoever that is is gonna be somebody good because the person whispering in his ear knows who the good guys are and who the not good guys are. And I think we all hope it's Ankar, but if it's not Ankar, maybe it's me. So we'll see where it goes, but there's a good chance that sometime this year that conversation will happen. On Jordan Peterson's platform, which would be fantastic because that opens up the world to a whole new audience. All right, Philippa 999, JP dismisses Rand before even trying to understand her. He desperately tries to find flaws rather than to understand her. I say that because of his constant bad arguments, it is willful evasion and desire to deny it or ignorance. I think it's his inability to grasp her ideas given where he's coming from. Given his intellectual context, given the ideas that he already holds, he's trying to figure Ayn Rand out from the context of this platonic, Kantian epistemology and metaphysics. And it's a real problem to do that, right? And notice that he almost never engages with Rand on epistemology or on metaphysics. He engages with Rand's on ethics. But you can't do that. And still hold on to a bad epistemology or metaphysics, which is what he's trying to do. And I think that's the fundamental problem. All right, let me take a few more on Malice and JP and then we'll go to this other video. Hopper Campbell says, why didn't Malice even bring up your names in the discussion? What an insult he should have referred Peterson to youth on the subject. No, I don't think so. I mean, I don't think Malice would ever do that. I think Malice considers himself an expert. He certainly wouldn't refer somebody to me, particularly when he's on and it's there to talk about his book and his goal is to talk about Anarchy. Yeah, I'm not offended. I'm not surprised. Yeah, I would have been shocked, shocked if he had brought up my name. No reason for him to do it. Saul says, you mentioned after ARC, that's Jordan Peterson's conference. That Jordan Peterson breaks every public speaker rule but is an amazing public speaker. Please give an example of broken rules and explain why it works despite departure from norm. God. Well, one rule I think is always look at your audience, look them in the eye. I mean, you're looking at an audience and not literally looking at anybody in the eye, but you're looking at them as if you're looking in them in the eye. And I think that's a really, really important part of public speaking. Good public speakers make the audience feel like you're talking to them as an individual. Jordan has this ability to look as the shoelaces. Half the time when he's on stage, he's looking at the floor. And yet, and I don't know how he pulls us off, but he does, he creates, because he creates a certain intimacy we're doing that. By looking at the, he's kind of almost, he's talking to you by muttering to himself. And it's the way, he comes across as super authentic. He comes across as himself. He's not putting on a show. He's not putting on an act when he's on stage. You get a sense that you have an inside look into the workings of his mind. And he comes across to most people as super interesting. So they feel, in a sense, privileged to be able to look into his mind of such an interesting person. And so the fact that he's looking at shoelaces doesn't bother them. In a sense, it makes them feel more intimate with him because you get a sense that that way would look, even if he was talking one-on-one with you. That's my sense, right? That's my sense. So that's one example of it, of it. He doesn't, I mean, he does it more better when he's in the interview, but often on stage, his voice doesn't alternate much. He doesn't use his voice. As much as he can. And again, I think he manages to create this intimate space between him and the audience that the audience appreciates. I haven't seen anybody do it quite like him and get away with it. Philippa 999, if he was honest at this point, he should know Rand is not a libertarian or anarchist. He invites anarchists to build, storm in and beat her. I don't think he invited Michael Malus because he wanted to beat up Ayn Rand. He invited Michael Malus because Michael Malus is a big deal. And he's got a huge following. And he wrote this book on communism, which I think really interested Jordan Peterson. So I think, and Malus has a publicist for the book who contacted him and tried to get him on the show. And why not? Why wouldn't Jordan Peterson have him? He's a big name. He's got a lot of following. And he's written an interesting book. So it makes complete sense. So I have less of a negative view of this interaction than some of you guys, obviously. Fenn Harper says, JP is a professional co-breaker these days. I think to some extent he always was. But Andrew says, if JP read the font had Atlas Short three times each is clearly intrigued. He knows he could get you on. I think he fears the clarity you would bring. You guys overestimate what they think of us. I'm not convinced of that at all. Ed says, any thoughts on how the two would respond to you bringing up Ein's ultimate reason, life flourishing? Yeah, I don't know. I think that ultimately Malus would say he agrees, at least with most of it. I don't think he would disagree. And Jordan would be intrigued and ask questions. And Hum and Ha, I don't know if he would buy it. But I don't know exactly what his disagreements would be, what his challenges would be. He'd have some. It would be an interesting exchange, I think. But I don't know exactly. If I were on, one of the things I would bring up is Jordan Peterson's great, his best thing I think Jordan Peterson has ever done. The best speech segment I've ever seen Jordan Peterson do is the class he did years ago on Pinocchio, where he talks about why lying is self-destructive. And that is perfect because that's exactly the point. Lying is a vice because it is self-destructive, because it destroys self, which is exactly the point Jordan Peterson makes in the talk where he talks about lying, where he talks about Pinocchio. And it's really, really good. And now think about that in the context of, and he does it right. That is the kind of issues he brings up are the right issues to bring up in that talk that he gives. Now, so why is lying not selfish? Jordan, you've already proved it. You've already shown it. You give the best non-objective explanation for that that I've ever seen. Now, you could say the same thing about if you don't have integrity, why is that bad for you? Use the same kind of reasoning that you used on lying. I would bring that up with him, because I think he did such a good job on the lying thing. I would actually review his talk on that so that I have it fresh when I went on stage with him. But it's that, you've got to, there's a chance he would at least get a sense of what it was like. A happy avocado says maybe it's simply too late for Peterson. If he would really understand, he would be too costly for him. He is too invested into religion and conservatism. I think that's probably true. I think that's probably true. And that's why it's hard to expect for him to get the morality when he rejects the epistemology and the metaphysics. Adam says, Peterson often brings up psychological concepts that philosophers seldom study. Gina would do much better. Yeah, but I don't think Gina, well, I like Gina. I love Gina, but I don't think Gina would be better than Ankar in terms of going to his philosophical. All the psychological issues he brings up are laden with philosophy. And you have to go for the juggernaut. You have to go for the philosophical. It's not about questioning your psychological issues. It's not about questioning your psychological issues that he brings up. It's about challenging the philosophy. And you saw that in the interview. The psychological stuff he brought out was OK. It didn't contradict anything at any point you would have made philosophically. Indeed, he was looking for philosophical integration of some psychological issues he brought up, which I think Ankar would have done like that. And I don't know if on the spot I could have done it, but looking back on it, I could have done it. So no, I'm not sure what he needs as a psychologist. What he needs. And the other thing is about psychologists is he's not interested about questioning his psychological knowledge. He needs to be challenged in his philosophical ideas. Liam says, thanks Plato and Kant for making everyone an idiot. Now we have to pick up the pieces. Yep, that's the reality. OK, we'll do James Taylor's question. He put $50 into it. And then I'll play this other video and you'll have a chance to ask more questions. I recently heard an interesting case for an outline. That whenever you lie or break character in some capacity, you end up with an energy leak. Your energy can't fully be in focus on the task you're engaging in because, say, you cheat on a spouse. Whenever the phone rings, you're worried it's because she found out. Energy is being leaked because you've taken yourself out of harmony with reality. I mean, I don't know that I would put it as energy leaked. I do like the idea of focus. There's a break in the focus. And I think that's absolutely right. And there's a break of integrity. And there's a break in your ability to live in harmony. So I think this harmony with reality is the essential. The essential is harmony with reality, which means harmony with facts, which means harmony with truth. And you can't live with harmony with facts, reality, truth when you're lying. So when you lie, you're elevating non-reality. You're elevating falsehood. When you lie, you're creating a situation where reality, what is true, is in conflict with the lie you did. And now, yes, you're constantly worried. Harmony is gone. You're stressed. You're concerned in places where you shouldn't be. So I wouldn't conceptualize it as an energy leak. I would conceptualize it as harmony and lack of harmony, lack of integrity. And I like this idea of harmony with reality. It's exactly the point. And you are putting garbage into a machine that can't afford to have garbage, reason, rationality, logic. You're destroying your capacity to deal with reality in a harmonious way. Thanks, James. Larry says Michael Malus seems to be appropriately named. I don't know. You guys want to be nasty to Michael for some reason, maybe because he's an anarchist. I don't know. Eduardo says, would anyone in A.R.I. be willing to debate an Alcacapulist on objective morality and law, specifically one that also identifies as an objectivist? Who identifies as an objectivist and also an anarchist? I don't know anybody. I don't know that any of them do. And yeah, I think a debate like that depends on anarchists. Depends on how dishonest we think the anarchist is. So there might be somebody. And I just debated Brian Kaplan. And we could expand a debate with Brian Kaplan to these topics. But he doesn't think of himself as an objectivist. And I don't think there are anarchists out there who consider themselves objectivists who I would debate with because that is such a leap. And I don't think it's that important. That is not the important debate to be having right now. Jordan Peterson is much more important. He has much more reach. He has much more scope. All right. Let me play this. So this is Steve Fye and John Cleese having a conversation. And Steve Fye is going to make a point about philosophy. And then he's going to bring up Iron Man. So I thought you'd find this interesting. It's about two minutes long, I think. You talk about AJ Air is very interesting because in philosophy, he and his fellow Vienna school, you know, the scientist types, basically felt that ethics as a branch of philosophy had died. It was no longer particularly interesting. It was, you'd teach it in universities, you know, and things, you know. But then technology... This is, by the way, exactly... I mean, this is true that the IO was, I think, a logical positivist. And there's this point in which, yeah, ethics can be boring, all the problems have been solved. Ethics is done. But partially because ethics is an academic pursuit was not that relevant to life, right? I mean, for objectivism, ethics is always relevant because it's relevant to every human decision, to everything we do. It's about ethics. And it's not just about Charlie problems. If ethics is just about Charlie problems, you know, the Charlie problem, you're writing in a trolley and it's out of control and you can switch tracks. But if you stand on the track, you're gonna kill three people and if you switch tracks, you're gonna kill five people. Should, you know, should you switch tracks and not switch tracks and all kinds of spins on that. That's not what ethics for objectivism is. Ethics for objectivism is about day-to-day living, about the choices you make in your life to guide your life. So that's why Stephen Frey saying they thought ethics is irrelevant and why he thinks what he's gonna say now about why ethics is coming and made a comeback is because with biotech and technology and AI and all these things, now suddenly you have more Charlie problems, so now you need ethics. Biotechnology as well as the internet and other things have meant now that people can leave university with a master's or a doctorate in ethics and they'll get a six-figure opening salary at big corporations because ethics is at the heart of the problems that we're talking about. In other words, Charlie problems are the problems we're talking about. That is AI will it destroy the world? But this is such a bad conception of ethics. It's such a wrong conception of ethics, such a perverse conception of ethics. That it's sad, ethics is every day and corporations should always be interested in ethics and individuals should always be interested in ethics. How do you decide what is an ethical artificial intelligence? How do you decide what is an ethical way to lay people off work and to keep them happy? So the corporations... And if a car, if a self-driving car is gonna get into an accident and it's inevitable, who does the car choose to kill? The driver of the other car, a bystander, the person sitting next to you, in the driver's seat or the person in the driver's seat or the person in the back, depending on how it swore if somebody else might be killed, how does it make those choices? Those are Charlie problems and they consider that their sense of ethics. The studying this really serious. They're trying to. There has been a wave of firing in Silicon Valley lately and some ethicists have gone. I remember seeing a Berkeley university. You have to say that. Obviously, the pronunciation is Berkeley. You know what a graduate is called. Berkeley, absolutely. But there was a philosophical quarterly from Berkeley magazine and it just said at the top, philosophy, no longer just a stylish route to poverty, question mark, suddenly it was becoming the hottest discipline in universities. That's wonderful. And it is exciting because there is so much to think about and all of us are free to do that. You notice the nuns in the background, that's a weird juxtaposition. Bill Gates is thinking about it. He is a thoughtful man, I think, isn't he? But the ones who really spend all this money trying to get into space on their own rocket. Well, they follow a branch of philosophy that is not very academically fashionable or admired, which is objectivism. Which is objectivism. He said objectivism. Pretty cool. He just said that these businessmen flying rockets to Mars, I mean, I wish they were following a philosophy, the philosophy of objectivism. But he says objectivism like you're supposed to know what it is, which is really, really cool. And he says these businessmen are following objectivism. And then he goes on. That's the philosophy of Ein Rand, you know? Oh, yeah. The sort of libertarian philosophy of the fountain head and the amputation. A little bit too in again. More popular now than in her own time. Peter Thiel, for example, who's a very powerful investor in all kinds of things. He's a great admirer of Ein Rand. There's a new philosophy called longtermism. So then he goes on to the longtermism and the nonsense of longtermism, which is, he's good, but you know, it is nonsense. So that's good. Anyway, I thought you'd enjoy that. You know, it's, I don't think he's pro-objectivism. But is a bill, and certainly the billionaires, he's talking about a not-objectivist. But his ability to identify the philosophy with objectivism, the name, and with Ein Rand, that's pretty cool. So that's good. I mean, hopefully people have listened to that and going, ooh, all the billionaires, the Ein Rand fans, who's Ein Rand? Let me go read Ein Rand. That's the value. All right, so that's what I have. Let's see, Adam. So I'm still available for questions. We're still about $200 short of our goal. We want to keep on track, guys, just because we had a great New Year's Eve. Doesn't mean we shouldn't be on track. And I do want to, before I get to Adam, I want to remind you that Ein Rand Institute is a sponsor of the show. I'm hoping to get more sponsors during the year. As I've said, I have to find ways to increase revenue for the show over 2024. Sponsorships will be one way to do it. Another way is to get more subscribers. And it's clear that we'll drive subscriptions on short videos. And as I said, we've got this AI now creating short videos for us. So watch out for a lot of one-minute videos, lots of one-minute videos. I hope, also, to be posting those on what do you call it, TikTok and Instagram. Please share those videos, particularly the one-minute ones or the five-minute ones, 10-minute ones. Those are the ones that can really go viral. Those are the ones that can really bring hundreds of new subscribers. That's the way we will grow the show. So please consider sharing those and seeing what we can do to get the word out and to grow what we do. Remind you, I'm going to introduce a sponsor right now that's taking applications for not applications, sign-ups for OKON, Objectives Conferences, the big Objectives Conference, which will be in Anaheim in the summer of this year, 2024. It'll be in June, actually, in middle of June. And lots of great talks. There'll be a kind of model classes at Iron End University classes. It'll be a fantastic event. Socially, it's a great opportunity to hang out with like 500 other Objectivists. The speakers are all Objectivists. You get Objectivism. You don't get watered-down stuff. You don't get irrelevant stuff. You get Objectivism. And if you're on the path to studying Objectivism, it's the place to be. You'll get a hang out with faculty. I'll be there. Lots of other faculty will be there. I think everybody's pretty friendly. And it's a great time at the conference. Where was it? Larry said, yeah, Larry, I got the $500. Thank you. And I have downloaded Fox in the Road to my iPad. And I will read it. It might take me a while, but I will read it. So it's on my to-do list. Thank you for the support. Really, really appreciate it. All right, let's see. Adam, $50. Thank you, Adam. Your prior talks with Malice, panels with JP, Dave Rubin, Shapiro, I think will be hugely impactful to introduce Rand to new listeners. I am one such convert who was blown away by you explaining Objectivism. And I don't think I'm an outlier. Thank you, Adam. I mean, you are an outlier. You're one of the unique few that are thinking and are willing to consider completing new ideas and are blown away by new ideas and take them then seriously. So I mean, that is a huge achievement in and of itself. Most people who listen don't have that effect. But there are more. I need to do more of those. I don't know exactly how. I don't know that Lex is going to have me on again. I've been on three times after all, or Shapiro. If JP will have me on, that'll be fantastic. And I think JP having me on his show is best, because then he's on the mode of asking questions rather than on debating, which I think is ideal. I'd love to be on other people's shows. And I need to do more debates. I need to be more debates with all kinds of people. I think live debates are better than online debates. And I've gotten better responses for live debates. I'm looking for people to organize debates, particularly universities, like that organize a debate between me and Yom Khazoni or the debate between me and Wolf. It would be great to have other debates organized on campuses at universities. I think they will attract huge audiences. And that's how we'll grow this show. It's difficult, because it's outside of my control. I can't. People have to do the work to put on a debate. And they have to approach me. So if you know people, if you're interested in putting on a debate, if you can facilitate something like that, please go ahead and do it. Let's get it done. I think it'll be exciting and fun. And that's one way to get the word out there. But thank you, Adam. I think that doing those talks and engaging with these people is important. All right. Happy Avocado. What's your favorite Faulty Towers episode? Oh, by far, my favorite Faulty Towers episode is the Germans. The Germans. The Germans come to visit Faulty Towers, the bed and breakfast. And there's the whole thing about don't mention the war. And it's really funny. It's really, really funny. So that's my favorite that I can remember. But Faulty Towers is great comedy. All of it is funny. It's truly hysterical. If you haven't seen Faulty Towers, go see Faulty Towers. And since Peter Thiel was sponsoring your show, you find out if he is interested in spreading objectives, and after all, he likes Iron Man. I've met Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel has, on occasion, over the years given a lot of money to the Iron Man Institute. I've spent time with Peter Thiel. I've known Peter Thiel since, I don't know, 15 years, I think. It was the first time I met him 15 years ago. But it's very difficult to stay in contact with him. He's kind of cold, hot, cold, hot, and he doesn't stink. And it's very hard to get in touch with him. But I keep trying, and I will keep trying. Richard, happy new year, your aunt. Thank you, Richard. I have seen and enjoyed a most violent year. Great. And all is lost, both written by director, by JC Chandler. I have not yet seen his first film, Margin Call. Have you seen him? I have not, although I should, because it's a finance, and I haven't seen all is lost. I'll have to look for that. So I'm happy you enjoyed that. But I'll check out all is lost. But yes, a most violent year. Yeah, one of my favorite modern movies, if you will, from the last 20, 30 years. All right, I think that's it. Thank you, everybody. Next show will be tomorrow. It will be the news roundup. Don't forget that on Thursday, I'm interviewing a economist from Argentina, an economist from Argentina about Millet and his plans and kind of the state of Argentinian economy, the context for Millet's election, what this economist thinks about Millet's plans so far, what he thinks Millet can actually do or not do. So I'm excited about having an interview. I hope you are too. Please invite your friends, share whatever. Let's get as many people around this as possible. And yeah, I'll see you all tomorrow, tomorrow morning. Probably to 1 o'clock Eastern time, I think, would be a reasonable place. Oh, Silvanus just came in. He says, just missed you. Look forward to listening. Thank you, Silvanus. $50. Really, really appreciate it. Silvanus often gets us across the goalpost in terms of getting us to where we need to be. So thank you. And have a great night, everybody. Bye.