 Good afternoon, Michael Malis here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour. We have with us Yaron Brooke, former chairman of the Iron Man Institute, author of Free Market Revolution and Freedom. What was the other one? Equal is unfair. Equal is unfair. I have to apologize to Yaron because I just moved here. My stuff is all in boxes. I'm still, and my friend Matthew's house has been so generous as to let me use his machinery. Yaron, I had to- And I am the current chairman and former CEO. Thank you for that correction. And I apologize about that. I had the pleasure of running into you last week while you were here in Austin, the objectives conference with Rucka. Now, something you were telling me was pretty interesting. For people who don't know, Objectivism is the philosophy that was developed by the late Ayn Rand. Rand's biggest books are, of course, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. And after that, she expounded her philosophy in a series of nonfiction books, collections of essays that just capitalist me are no ideal and the virtue of selfishness. The Romantic Manifesto is another one. But you were saying that there is a huge pocket of Objectivists in Austin. And more broadly, you were saying that Objectivism as an organized movement is more popular now than at any time in Rand's lifetimes. Is that correct? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think the movement is only growing both as a movement and in terms of the impact the books have on people. That is the number of people impacted by Rand, influenced by her, inspired by her, that grows from decade to decade. And certainly right now, you're seeing more serious students of Objectivism than probably ever before. And Austin, Texas has become this hub where a number of Objectivist intellectuals have moved to Austin, Texas, but also people just like everybody else, fleeing California, leaving New York, leaving other places. You've got two hubs right now. In Austin, Texas is in Naples, Florida. And the divide is pretty much age-related as you would expect, right? Naples, Florida is significantly older. Austin, Texas is significantly younger. But yeah, there's definitely, you're seeing that demographic movement. You're seeing people leave horrible states, like, I mean, wonderful states, but horrible policies like places like California. One of the, I don't wanna spoil Atlas Shrug. And by the way, for anyone out there, make sure you read this out and head for Atlas Shrug. But one of the climax moments of Atlas Shrug is a train wreck of the international train line, the comet. I have also recently witnessed another Objectivist train wreck when Yaron was on the Jesse Lee Peterson show two years ago, which as I was just this past week. So Yaron, are you a beta male? I don't even know what that means, but no, I don't think so. I don't think so. You can look at my history, but the difference in the trainwrecks is that the trainwreck, which Jesse was man-made clearly, it was not a default. It was his style, it was his method. It's the way he does it, right? But I was surprised because your Objectivism prides itself on being a philosophy of rationality. And Rand always said, Rand basically presaged what Ben Shapiro said. She said, emotions are not tools of cognition. Facts don't care about your feelings. There's a pretty similar sense. Yeah, I mean, Ben has read quite a bit. So of course. But why were you allowing him to get you so agitated? Well, partially because I didn't know what I was getting into. So I had no idea who he was. I had no idea that this was the path that he would go along. And his irrationality was unbelievably agitating. I mean, he was just irrational, obnoxious, stupid. And, you know, I don't have to deal with BS like that. So I could have walked away. I decided to be agitated instead. It makes for better TV. That's true, that's makes for better TV. I went out to dinner with Raqqa and a couple of other Objectivists the other week in Austin, we were discussing criticisms, I ran. And I feel as if there is this concept within Objectivism and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it that when people critique Ayn Rand, it is often done in the sense of, well, you're dismissing her accomplishments and therefore these criticisms shouldn't really be taken seriously because no matter how valid they might be, they still pale in comparison to what she has produced. Do you think that's a fair assessment of the Objectivist perspective? No, I don't think so. I think that, oh, I don't encounter many objections to Ayn Rand that qualify as that. I find most objections to Ayn Rand just being ill-informed and uneducated more than anything else. So they straw man, usually straw manning her arguments and presenting them in ways that just don't represent who she is and what she is. So it's not the case that people, yeah, there's some stuff to criticize but you should really appreciate her greatness. Very few people have that attitude. Usually people throw out all of it and misrepresent most of what she says. I've seen very few criticisms of her that actually take her idea seriously and represent them as they are and say, no, we disagree, right? So egoism, they don't like turn egoism into some fuss of the selfishness being, lying, cheating, and stealing. Take it seriously on its face and then say, oh, but we disagree with one, two, three. No, it's almost always straw manned. Here's one issue I have and I think this is necessarily criticism or rather the criticism of the method in which she produced her ideas. When you're writing a novel, you're dramatizing, especially philosophical novels like Rambo, you're dramatizing ideas. And as a result of this, especially her, you're going to write at a certain level of very high intensity. Things are profound matters of life and death. At the same time, in her nonfiction and in her personal life, Rand often talked a lot about things like kindness, when you're with your friends, the person you love, honor them, you appreciate their values and kind of that camaraderie. But that seems to be lost a bit with the grimness that is the backdrop of all of her novels. And that's necessary that this is the grimness because she's fighting against it in her worldview. Do you think that this kind of causes some young people to get the wrong impression? Yes, but I also think it's overstated. That is, if you read the novels, particularly if you read them a second or third time, the first time they're coming at you full power and maybe you miss the subtleties. And certainly when you're young, you're going to miss the subtleties and get caught up in the excitement of it. But think about Dagny on the train with a guy bumming a ride. And you think, you know, Dagny, she's going to take him by the, and just throw him off the train, right? He's getting something for you. No, she buys him dinner. She sits down with him and talks to him. And not only kindness, but she's curious why he is in the condition that he is, why is this? And she's trying to understand the world around her. And part of that is trying to understand this bum. Think about Rolex finding Mallory, the sculptor, who's destitute, who's suicidal, who's given up on life, given up on society. And he becomes a friend and becomes somebody who helps him raise up and helps him manifest what his potential really is. But people don't focus on that. They focus just on the sides that in their mind are consistent with what egoism or selfishness means. And they ignore the subtleties and the writing, the subtleties and the storyline. So, yeah, I mean, I mean, Ayn Rand is not advocating for individualism or egoism as living on a desert island. Quite the contrary. She values civilization enormously. She values human relationships enormously. She values that values other people produced enormously. And I think you see that in the novels. And of course, without giving it away, the Gulch in the end is this wonderful place of camaraderie, of people who share values and share a particular perspective on life and live happily together in this place. So I think she's often again misinterpreted and part of it is the enthusiasm of youth, reading it for the first time, discovering this new morality, discovering this idea of living for oneself and then misapplying it, misinterpreting it, not completely understanding it. And rushing to convince the rest of the world obnoxiously as obnoxious as one can. And I don't know that there's any way to skip to get around that because when a young person reads a book like this, it has an enormous impact. And they don't have enough experience in the world to know better in a sense or to fully understand what she's talking about. There's a big kind of, I don't want to say controversy but discussion within objective circles or allies of objectivism about what the nature of objectivism is. Is it a closed system? Is it an open system? Is objectivism defined as that which is Iran's novels? Is it defined as? And but then are certain things, such to be in her books, are there certain things that are her books that can be considered not objective? Objectivism is simply her personal preference. Where do you stand on that? So I think I stand where Iran stood on this. It's her philosophy. She got to name it. She got to decide what it was. And she said very clearly that her philosophy is her writings, her philosophical writings comprise her philosophy. That's what objectivism refers to. That doesn't mean that is the truth. That doesn't mean philosophy is a closed system. Philosophy is obviously not a closed system and philosophers in the future might discover flaws in Iran. Certainly, hopefully they will develop her thought in direction she didn't consider or in direction she did consider but never got to it. In terms of the truth of philosophy, that is an open system. But she said, look, I don't want, I mean, this is what Iran's saying, right? I don't want what happened. I always thought it happened to me. I don't want all kinds of people saying, I'm Aristotelian, I'm Aristotelian and distorting and perverting my ideas. I want it clear that my philosophy, objectivism is these books, right? This is what it is. If you do beyond that and you should do beyond that, right? It makes sense, grow. That's you, it's not me, right? Objectivism is Iran's philosophy. So it's only things that Iran said. Now, do all of her writings count? Probably not. You'd have to look writing by writing and think about it and it's not obvious. Some of her writings touch more on things like psychology than they do on philosophy. Maybe some of the historical analysis and I don't know, capitalism not an ideal is wrong. I don't know. But is that philosophy or is that history? So there's some economics writing in some of her books is that economics is that history is that philosophy. So drawing the lines, I think is a project. And of course, one of the books I would include in what is objectivism is a couple of Leonard Peacock's books, Amina's Parallels, which she was alive and edited, so she kind of approved of it. And OPAW, which is Objective and Philosophy of Iron Man which is borderline because she was not alive but it's based on lectures he gave while she was a lion and she gave input on. So objectivism is her philosophy, therefore it's her writings. And then there's, but that doesn't, that's not the end. I mean, it's fine for philosophers to say she was wrong in this or I, hey, I think there's an eighth virtual, a ninth virtual, whatever, that's fine. And then have a debate about that. Just don't call it objectivism because that's fraud. That's placing somebody else's name on your ideas. Say, I'm based my ideas on Iron Man and I think this. Great. Let me ask about one very specific essay. She got in a lot of heat in her life about saying why she would be against the woman president. To be more precise, she didn't say she would be against the woman president per se, but she said that the kind of woman who would want to be president should never be president. Yet towards the end of her life, she also spoke very highly that Margaret Thatcher was being influenced by her ideas. Do you think that it is part and parcel objectivism that a woman should not aspire to be commander chief of the armed forces? I don't. I think that's a psychological observation, not a philosophical one. So I don't think that's part and parcel of objectivism. I think it's a complex issue. You know, I think I get in more hot water than she did around this because nobody did question her about it. She would knock them down. And she had great arguments partially because I think as a novelist, one of the things that as a novelist you have to develop is an acute awareness of psychology, understanding of psychology and an ability to talk about psychology. And of course, for her femininity, masculinity were very, very important concepts. Her heroes and heroines reflect that. Remember, she wrote Adler Shrugged in 1957. The heroine of Adler Shrugged, it's a heroine, it's a woman. And she's running a railroad in 1957. This is way before feminism became a thing. This is way before women were running the corporation. So she was ahead of her time in terms of seeing the potential of a woman to equal that of a man in terms of, for example, running a business. But she had a particular view of what femininity and masculinity was. She viewed masculinity. Qua, you know, not if a man is masculine but qua masculinity is an orientation towards reality. It's conquering reality. That's, it's that the hero that sails out to conquer the new world. And that the essence of femininity, again, not every woman and not everyone completely, but femininity, what femininity was, was hero worship. And that meant the worship of a hero, i.e. a man. So she had a particular psychological view of femininity and masculinity. It's certainly not politically correct today to have it. And I don't have a particular view. I mean, I suspect she's right, but I can't prove it because I don't know enough about it. But I think there's something there. There's definitely difference between men and women, in spite of the attempts of many people to deny the differences, that's definitely differences. And I haven't heard a modern explanation of those differences psychologically that makes more sense to me than Ayn's understanding. Hey guys, today we're welcoming back IPVanish VPN to the show. Now, IPVanish has been a long time sponsor of ours. So it's great to have them back. Let me tell you about IPVanish. If you care about the security of your online activity, the easiest way to protect yourself is with IPVanish VPN. It's rated 4.5 out of five stars in TrustPilot. And IPVanish provides an encrypted connection for all of your net traffic, helping grant websites, Wi-Fi providers, and even hackers from intercepting your data. You can help keep your financial details, personal info and online activities safe from threats with IPVanish. Now, we've got a limited time offer. You could save 50% off of monthly and annual subscriptions by going to IPVanish.com slash welcome. One more time, that's IPVanish.com slash welcome. All lowercase. Let's get back to the show. How do you reconcile the view, which I certainly agree with anything, any rational person agree with that? Many women are profoundly different in many ways with Rand's insistence on the blank slate. Well, because I think the blank slate, it's misunderstood what you meant by it, just like it's misunderstood what lock meant by it, right? The blank slate comes from Locke. John Locke talks about a blank slate. And I can't remember if I ever started or not, but the blank slate doesn't mean there's nothing there. It means there are no ideas there. But clearly, and I mean, it talks about this, clearly we're born as humans with a particular way of conceptualizing the world, right? Our mind works in a particular way to form concepts. The neural networks are structured in a way to facilitate the conversion of perception to conception and create abstractions. It needs our engagement, it needs our focus, but there's certain characteristics of our brain, our brain is structured in particular ways. What we don't have is ideas. We're not born socialists or capitalists. We're not born with particular emotions, with exception, maybe a very, very primal, very, very, and you wouldn't really call them emotions, they're more like sensations, you know, like obviously, we're born with the sensation of pain. We're born with the sensation of pleasure, right? We get those, it's those are, we're not a blank slate when it comes to pleasure or pain. The blank slate refers to, again, ideas. We don't have the concept chair before we're born. And again, think about who she's contrasting this with. She's contrasting with the Play-Doh and many of the idealists who come after. They believe that you have the chair in your mind, you just have to, in a sense, discover it, right? You have ideas in your mind or you have the capacity to, through a revelation, to discover those ideas. And then it says, no, in terms of ideas, there's nothing there, you open your eyes, you start seeing, getting sensations as the brain develops, you get percepts, and then you have this mechanism that allows you to create concepts from integrating and differentiating the different percepts. That is what a conceptual, that's a kind of conceptual being managed. So for example, we have different inclinations, we have different, to some extent, abilities. Some of our minds might be wired better for mathematics or some of us are born with or seem to have developed very young, incredibly memories or incredibly inclination towards music, Mozart, right? So something, he was born differently than me, given my abilities in music. So, but the idea is that there was no symphonies in his mind before he was born. It's just that his brain somehow was structured in a way that facilitated an understanding of music in a way that it doesn't elsewhere. And I think that's true of the differences between men and female. There's some difference there that maybe emphasizes certain aspects of life differently than others. Now, do I understand that fully? No, again, these are more psychological than philosophical and not my area of expertise by long shot. So I'm a finance guy. So, but that's what she meant by blank slate, not blank of anything, but of ideas, of conceptual knowledge. But would you regard something as let's suppose the idea of object permanence, which we developed at a very, very early age before we even lingual, as something that contradicts the idea of the blank slate? No, so tell me what you mean by object permanence. Well, you and children are extremely young, right? And you put, let's suppose you're holding an apple and you put it behind a curtain, the kid will look for where that apple is because it knows things though. At a certain age, you realize things just don't vanish that they exist independently of your vision of them. That's right. So I think that's something learned. That is something that develops as the child understands. First of all, he has to understand object, right? He doesn't understand object. When they're first born, everything's a mush. Everything is, there's no differentiation. So first they have to differentiate. Then they have to differentiate through space and then they have to differentiate through time and then they get the idea of motion that something can be here and then it's being moved somewhere else. But that's all the brain understanding the world. It's not already in the brain beforehand. It's all developed in those first few months and those first few years that a baby evolves. And the particular evolution, there's a certain necessity to it because the child doesn't have yet really free will. The child is not engaging really in reason and in capacity but the way our mind is structured, there is a certain sequence of event that happens to pretty much every child in terms of what they learn when over that first year or so of life. One of the things that I got wrong after reading the found head and I'm curious to hear your perspective on this. When you read it, I read it first year in college. It's the copy of the Bucknell University Library. So whoever reads it, you can be holding the same. I gave a talk at Bucknell University. My condolences, just a nightmare of a place. One of the messages I got and I'm curious to hear your thoughts is the idea that when you're young and talented and kind of precocious that you are going to be destined to this kind of life of loneliness that people are going to kind of shun you. And that's certainly the case frequently. But what I found, and especially now that I'm in my senior citizen years that when I find young people who are talented and precocious and they can happen, I am drawn to them and I'm very encouraging. And I think there's lots of other adults who've accomplished things, who seek out people like that and they're biggest cheerleaders. And you don't get that message from the family. No, because, although again, you could interpret Rook's relationship with Mallory and Rook's relationship with some of the other, like the Bricklayer and some others, as exactly that. Rook finding talent and encouraging it. There's nobody to encourage Rook. Even though when he goes to Cameron, Cameron is an older architect, he's looking for that. And, but Cameron is so disgruntled and given up on the world and on life that he can't really provide that to Rook. So, yes, I think after reading The Fountain Edge, you get that sense, but it's partially reinforcing. I mean, I've been The Fountain Edge after Atlas Shrug. I read it when I was a teenager. And I was, you know, as a teenager, I felt, you know, in some senses alone. I mean, most teenagers, I think do. Now I had a new philosophy. I definitely felt alone because literally there was nobody. There was no internet. There was no connection. There was nobody. So I think we live in a world, a much better world in that sense. Today, people who feel, who think they're unusual or think they're different or have different ideas can find people who share those ideas on the internet and other places, there's communication. Connection in that sense has grown dramatically. So I think there's less of that as an issue today than ever before. But certainly when, you know, I'm much older than you are and much, much older. Much, much older. And in those days, there was nothing, right? For three years, I thought I was the only person in the world who took Iron Man seriously. I didn't even know she was alive. I was living in Israel, so it was a long way away, but there was just no information. Today, that doesn't exist anymore. So even if you do read the font head and get the wrong idea out of it, today that it's much easier to correct that and fix that and get on the right path than there was in the past. When I was in college, a friend of mine, her roommate was reading at the shrugged and I was just cringing at the idea because at Bucknell, I knew it would be just like, I don't want anyone here. And the message she got was, oh, I love this book. Now no one pushes me around anymore. And I just wanted to pull a bullet in my head. What are some of the worst reactions that you've heard even positive to Rand's works in your career? Oh, wow. I don't know. I mean, I guess at the end of the day, the worst reactions are the ones that ain't different, right? Oh, okay. Go on. All the ones that just, where you go, where they say something, you go, are they reading this book? I mean, I know people, maybe the worst are for the fountain head because the fountain head is more broadly loved. Right? At the shrugged, this is much more narrow, although it was a big hit with the tea party, which had, that was interesting, right? When I used to go and give a lot of talks at the tea party and when they expressed their love of Iron Man and at the same time, their love of Jesus and they saw them completely compatible, they didn't have any clue that there was a difference here. That was pretty bizarre. But then you get the people who love the fountain head who, you know, like Oliver Stone. Oliver Stone is a huge fountain head fan, right? He's a Marxist. He's an explicit Marxist. And his movies, particularly his early movies were very Marxist in their orientation. And he wants to make a movie of the fountain head. He's dreamt of it. And at the end of the fountain head, according to Oliver Stone, Howard Wolk joins a architectural commune where they design buildings not for money and not for profit, just out of the sheer love of designing buildings. So just the ability of people to get what he got out of it is artistic integrity with no standards. That is integrity to whatever you feel like. It's just Iron Man would, you know, would shoot him. I mean, she would go crazy about that. She's clear in the novel that no integrity involves particular values, life enhancing values. She's got a bunch of characters who are anti-conformists and she makes fun of them. But that's exactly what Oliver Stone is taking as the message of the whole thing is to be an anti-conformist conformist. So lots of leftists I found have that attitude. And of course, on the right, you get the religionists who love at a stroke. But there was a period where I'd go around and... Everybody I met loved Iron Man. You know, in the early 20s, I think, there was just this idea that she was in and everybody was supposed to... They didn't have a clue what she said. They didn't have a clue, certainly what she meant. And yeah, I read those books and they were great. No reflection in their ideas or in their lives. Hey guys, I want to take a sec to tell you about Blue Blocks. B-L-U-B-L-O-X. Now, I'm sure a lot of you are getting headaches, trouble sleeping, eye strain, stuff like that. What happens is when you stare at the screens all day, these symptoms tend to happen and Blue Blocks is here to help you stop them. 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Given that I was actually in military intelligence in the Israeli army. So there's some credibility to the idea that I was with the Mossad. But yes, I've been accused of that many, many, many times. One of the other things that I disagree with Rand is she was very insistent that people go out and vote for Nixon in 1972 against McGovern. This was not an endorsement of Nixon at all. This is very much McGovern is giving full-fledged statism and whatever it takes to stop this. She'll call her nose and vote for it. At the same time in 1980, she advocated that people should not vote, don't vote for Reagan because from her perspective, anyone who is a critic of abortions pro-life does not understand the concept of individual rights. Well, it was more than that. It was... That's fine. I mean, that he brought religionism into politics. This is something that she was very opposed to. Do you disagree that Reagan deserves a large amount of credit for ending the Soviet Union, which was one of her big life-long missions? I actually do disagree that Reagan deserves a lot of credit for ending the Soviet Union. I think the Soviet Union was heading by that point into oblivion no matter what. So I think he probably deserves some credit, primarily the more stand he took, more so than the military buildup. I just thought I entered the military buildup. But, and I think it had more to do with people like Lev Valencia, Solidarity in Poland and some of the anti-Soviet in the Czech Republic and Hungary and places like that. I actually, I was at an event in Albania once and the guy who overthrew the communists in Albania, the first president of the post-communist Albania rushed up to me and he said, oh my God, we all read Ain Rand in the 1980s. She inspired us to fight these communes and we love Ain Rand. Of course, the way he governed wouldn't suggest the love of Ain Rand, but that aside. But yeah, I think there's a hidden history of Ain Rand inspiring dissidents in the Soviet Union to rebel against communism in the 80s. And suddenly I think Ronald Reagan, by saying it's an evil empire, by standing up to them, at least on a podium, I don't think he stood up to them in reality that much, but at least giving a speech is important, particularly, one of the, well, the pulpit makes a difference, huge difference. It's one of, if I can pick up a controversy, one of the real evils of last year is that of 2020 is that nobody stood up to the Chinese on Hong Kong. Nobody, you know, here was supposedly Donald Trump tough on China, not a peep, not a word about what they were doing in Hong Kong and that's a real travesty. I mean, we miss Ronald Reagan in that sense. So no, so I think from a more perspective, yes, he made a difference. It would have happened anyway, maybe longer, maybe more bloodshed, hard to tell, but he made a difference. Look, I would have probably voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. I think everything she feared about what would happen under Ronald Reagan has come true, is coming true. I think the fact that he implanted the religious right dead center, the moral majority in those days it was called dead center in the Republican Party and created this, the Republican Party now is associated with the religious right and that's absolutely right. And I think it's destroyed the Republican Party as a cogent opposition party to the left. So I think that's true. On the other hand, from my perspective, right, as somebody who grew up during that period it bought us time, right? Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher shifted the conversation in the world, shifted the attitudes in the world for a period. It's gone, that senses disappeared, right? But it gave us probably 20 years of at least momentum with some economic growth, with some, a changed attitude towards liberty and freedom with a certain positivism about the world and about America that I value. So thank you, Ronald Reagan for doing that. And, but it's dead, she was right. At the end of the day, long term, he was a bad force, not him personally again, but by bringing in and embracing the religious right and giving it such importance and such centrality in the Republican Party. I think there's something very randy in about his glory. He says, let me tell you my strategy for the Cold War. We win, they lose. Yeah, and look, yes, I mean, I love, I love Ronald Reagan quotes, right? I love less what he did. Sure. Quotes are great. He went on Rand and he was a big fan of Rand. So it doesn't surprise me that some of what he says sounds like, like it's coming from who, I mean, in his journals, I think in his journals, he writes about the fact that he was a real fan of Alastair. There seems to be an enormous taboo among objectivist circles. I'm even scared to ask you, discussing Rand's life, specifically the NBI years. Do you think that that is warranted? Well, I mean, I think it was warranted up to a point, right? Because why discuss kind of the... All the personalities when we've got so much work to do to engage with the philosophy and engage with the culture with ideas. Why spend time and focus on people trying to pull her down personally when it's the ideas that are really important. But I don't shy away from speaking about the brand in years, NBI years, however you want to call it. But I don't know much about it. And the reality is I don't care that much that is about her personal life that much. And, but the other aspect I know most of what I know about the NBI days from reading Nathaniel Brandon. And of course, I think he is his worst prosecutor. That is, I think he makes the case for why he was a really, really bad guy in his own book. You don't need, now history will come out over time because we've got the archives. We've got everything she wrote about it. We've got all this stuff. History will come out about those years. I think that it'll shed a lot of light to it. I think there will clarify a lot of the history around it that it'll be interesting and, but it's too early to really delve into that and really spend a lot of time over that. There's a war to be won. The world is falling apart and we're gonna dabble in what exactly happened then and who did what to whom. I don't find that interesting. That's me. Other people, I find it amazingly interesting and all the power to them. It's just not what I'm always focused on the future and not the past. Just the one issue I have with it specifically is her husband, Frank O'Connor, who's loved her life. They're married for I think over 50 years. It was loving for a sight for her, for him, not so much. She tripped in one of the seven movie. He goes home to talk to his brother, says I met this Russian girl who talked my ear off. I couldn't understand what she was saying. Later she ran into him again at a library. They struck up a conversation and they never stopped having that conversation. But she ended up supporting him. She was the breadwinner of that family as he studied art and design. So when she kind of asked him for permission to have an affair with her protege, it's not, yes, they're adults. Yes, it's a voluntary situation, but I just think a lot of people, including myself, find that to be cruel. I mean, maybe my view is she was a genius. She was an exceptional human being. Certainly. She was unconventional about everything. She challenged our views on pretty much every topic out there, philosophically, politically, aesthetically. She challenged everything. Why would it be shocking that she challenged our conceptions of marriage or conceptions of fidelity or monogamy or conceptions of sex? I would be, in a sense, shocked if she wasn't, if she wasn't being too super conservative. Whether how they did it, what the arrangement exactly was, who said what to whom. I don't know. I wasn't there. All we have is the Brandon's and clearly their bias. So it's wait, maybe until all the history comes out. And look, maybe it was. Maybe it'll turn out that it, but the other thing is it turned out badly for her, right? The whole thing turned out badly for her. But part of what she advocated for is we don't know with certainty some things unless we try them. And sometimes you have to take risks in life. Sometimes you do things that polite society views as immoral unjust or whatever. But if you think they're right and if you think your happiness is at stake, don't bend. So I applaud her for being unconventional in this respect and for experimenting. She was a young Russian girl who had very little, from my understanding, experience with sex, experience with relationships, experience with men. She got married fairly young, given all that. Yeah. You know, at least she told her husband it would be in a thousand times worse and against her philosophy if she had gone behind his back. So I respect her for being upfront about it, upfront about her feelings and upfront about her desires. And if it was tough on him, yeah, it's tough. Sometimes relationships are tough. One of the most commendable aspects of objectivism, in my point of view, is this claim that we shouldn't be expected to be God. You don't start from a premise of omniscience. You start with reality living on earth. You're going to have limited information, limited knowledge. And if you're going to fault someone for not having infinite knowledge, your philosophy does not relate to reality. Given Rand Deidt in 82, it's been almost 40 years since then. This is going to be a very difficult question to answer. How do you think her world you would have changed in those 40 years since given so many things that have developed after she has passed? I mean, you never know in a sense that she was a genius, I'm not. And she was a kind of genius that I'm not in. Every time I read her nonfiction essays, I'm blown away by the perspective she has that is different than the way I would have approached it or that anybody I know would have approached it. She really was an original mind in ways that I don't think people appreciate unless they read some of her political cultural analysis. She weaves culture and psychology and philosophy and politics all into one beautifully seamlessly and comes up to conclusions that often are surprising. On the other hand, from my perspective, I think everything that's happened over the last 40 years is basically affirmed what she thought. History has played out a large extent to the way I think she would have expected maybe with one exception. And that is that the world is better off and I think she would have predicted it 40 years. So if she was sitting in 82 and I told her then who the next few presidents were going to be, right? And what generally broadly the policy she would have predicted collapse of a, you know, I think, right, I think, yeah. And what has happened? And I give some credit to her. I give some credit to somebody she wouldn't have liked me giving credit to but somebody like Milton Friedman, Von Mises and Von Mises. I think something changed in the 60s and 70s. There was a capitalism stop being a three-letter word. It stopped being an ugly word that people condemned. It became a word that was acceptable. I think that's why Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher could get elected. It's because of Atlas Shrugged and Frida Chewes and some of the work that Milton Friedman and his students did to make markets acceptable. Also the failure of socialism, which is they were living it right then, particularly in England. And so, and then there was this revolution that was global. I mean, that's what's surprising, right? What's surprising is what happened in China. Now, I think it's reversing, unfortunately, for the last five years and tragically, I mean, truly tragic because I know a lot of people in China, I've been there many times and it's just hard wrenching what's happening over there. But also just generally South Korea, Taiwan, you never would have sat in 1982 and said, the Asian Tigers are gonna be this rich and the successful. And, but they adopted markets. So where did they get that from? They didn't get it directly from Ryan Rand, but they got it indirectly from Rand Friedman Mises and the people influenced by them. So I don't think she saw that. And then, of course, the just boom in technology, just the computer revolution, the internet. I mean, what the internet has done, the impact that it's had, the fact that all who works accessible now like this anytime, any place, anywhere, but also all of human knowledge. The entire scope of human knowledge is available to anybody at just any time. It's an amazing time to be alive in that respect, right? And so the whole development of tech, the development of freedom, economic freedom in other countries, the rise of Asia, even the fact that Europe has survived as much as it has in spite of having these horrible mixed economies, they still managed to do okay and not collapse on themselves. I think that would have been the only thing that would surprise her. And we as objectivists, and I think many others, we always look at the situation today and all we see is doom and gloom and the world is gonna collapse tomorrow. It didn't collapse yesterday, but it's gonna collapse tomorrow. And I think the last 40 years should teach us to be a little bit more thoughtful about that, look at all the things that are going on in the world. They are positive trends, part of them are technological business are re-entered. They are parts of the world that we never look at that are developing and getting better. And yes, even if America is doomed, the world is not doomed because this is not Rome. In a sense that in Rome, all the knowledge was concentrated. It all was in one place. Yeah, there was a little bit in Constantinople later, but basically it was Rome. And when Rome fell, engineering knowledge was lost. Philosophical knowledge was lost, political knowledge, it was gone. Today, we live in a world where knowledge information is dispersed in a way that it has never been before. You're not gonna lose the works of Aristotle again, right? Unless we wipe out all the computers in the world. Which could have happened, but it's even more far-fetched than most people imagine. The same is true of Rand or all these others. So the knowledge is out there some way all over the place. Even if one country collapses or even a region collapses, good ideas will still live on and the renaissance would happen a lot faster, I think, than it did after the collapse of Rome. Yeah, one of the things I hate is the concept of fiscal conservatism because it seems to me it's just an excuse where people wanna cut government, but they don't have the courage to say why it should be cut or what should be cut, but just basically to outsource, it should be cut across the board. And there's that quote, there's a great deal of ruin in a nation. So when conservatives say that the national debt is too much, well, conceptually 1 trillion and 100 trillion and 50 trillion, it's all just numbers on the screen. That person speaking doesn't have any idea of what the tipping point is going to be, other than just having some sense that more is bad, but you don't know what that point is until it's too late. So I think there's a kind of disingenuous there among fiscal conservatism. Well, but it's worse than that because as soon as they get into power, it's been like everybody else, right? So they talk, you know, conservatives at their best are good opposition party, but in power, they're pathetic. They're terrible. They do exactly everything they criticize the Democrats for doing they do. And in a sense, worse because they used to stand for something. So yeah, if physical conservatives, oh, conservatives in general is hopeless. 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Don't wait, call them now. The number is 866-599-5502. 866-599-5502 or text Michael to 655-32. Again, 866-599-5502 or text Michael to 655-32, the gold standard. It's pretty solid standard. Let's get back to the show. One of the things I criticized William F. Buckley for in my books in your writing, he's pretty much the villain of that book, is his two-facedness and his tastelessness. Even though he has that very rarefied manner and rarefied accent, he's very kind of declassé to use a term he would probably like in his behaviors. I'm specifically thinking of when Rand died in 1982, the very first line of his essay, the Catholic William F. Buckley is, I ran his debt and so is the philosophy she birthed. It was in fact stillborn, which is a very kind of dark and horrible metaphor about someone whose body was still warm in the ground. What did you think of the Rand-Buckley relationship? Well, first, I actually like that quote from Buckley because here we are, I forget when he died exactly, but so many decades later, and who's still relevant and who's still alive? Who's being read? How many people read Buckley books these days? Almost none. So the stillborn philosophy is only growing. Her books are being read by the hundreds of thousands every year and the memory of William F. Buckley is slowly going away and people won't remember much in the future and mostly as a negative force out there. Well, I mean, Buckley made sure to exclude, I ran from what was developing as this conservative coalition, right? There was a coalition established in the 1950s and 60s of physical conservatives, free market type-ish kind of things, people who generally believed in free market, sometimes called the libertarians within the Republican party. The foreign policy conservatives, the Taffan, the Soviet Union and everything else and then the religious right, the socially conservative. And I ran fit into two of those, but she was a radical in both, right? She wasn't a physical conservative. She was a laissez-faire separation of state from economics. And in foreign policy, she was against the one Vietnam even though she was probably the biggest anti-communist around, but she didn't believe we had to go to the other side of the planet to fight wars and die for this, let the people over there fight for it, wait until they land here and they won't because she believed that communists was impotent and would self-implode. And of course she was completely opposed to the religious right and the whole social conservative agenda and program. So, Buckley had the opportunity to somehow create even a bigger tent to include her, but I think he was politically astute enough to understand that that probably for his purposes was not tenable, that there would be too many conflicts and why create those conflicts. So he made sure to kick her out of this big tent, which I think in the long run, she probably would have kicked herself out, would be my guess, but so it wouldn't have happened anyway. So he probably did her favor. There is, let me put it this way because I don't know the details, but there's gonna be interesting stuff written in the future about the relationship of Buckley and Rand and his let's call it obsession with her. We have some letters he wrote, postcard he wrote, which are kind of interesting after he kicked her out. So he was a little obsessed with her and I think he was intelligent enough to know that she was a real intellectual force and that if he believed in the ideas he believed in, he needed to crush her, but he wasn't completely whole with that because he knew there was a real something there. Yeah, he's a piece of work. Do you think that objectivism has a bit of a marketing problem? I don't know, it's a question of what you mean by marketing at the end of the day. Objectivism's main problem, I think, is that it opposes pretty much all the ideas out there and it stands for a particular view in an uncompromising way. So for example, I've lost quite a few subscribers over the last few days over the Texas abortion bill, which I am opposed to vehemently. I position myself as basically pro-abortion or pro-choice or I have a people one. I mean, that is terrifying to so many people. It's horrifying to them and they just run for it. The same people who might be attracted to objectivism's views on laissez-faire or might be attracted to views on morality, they find one issue and they point, I had a hard time with people over Trump. The main issue, I think, is that we really do challenge people thoroughly over their ideas and I think, so you might agree with us 60% so vehement about the other 40% that it gets in a way. But that's the nature of philosophy. This is the difference between us and let's say libertarianism is a broad tent. It doesn't have strong positions on a lot of things. It doesn't go there. I think it's its weakness, but it's also what makes it allows it to be bigger because it doesn't have a particular view of morality or a particular view of epistemology or metaphysics or religion, for example, objectivism does. But that's a nature of philosophy. Philosophy by its nature is particularly a system that has positions about everything in a way because it encompasses all of human knowledge is going to be a challenge for people. And I don't see how you, I don't think marketing is the right word. It is something more fundamental than marketing, although, yeah, we could always use better marketing. Rand said that the three great philosophers with three to study are the three A's, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Irene. Given Aquinas was a very, very strong theist and a lot of his work, which was just all over the place, not in a bad way, just profoundly comprehensive. It wasn't about proving the existence of God in rational terms. What do you think she admired so much about Aquinas? Well, what she admired about Aquinas is that in spite of being in the midst of Middle Ages, Europe at the heart of the Catholic Church committed to that Catholic Church and everything that was going on in the world around him in the midst of a kind of a Neoplatonist place. Here is this guy who discovered Red Aristotle and was inspired by Aristotle to rethink what he believed. He allowed Aristotle to challenge him and ultimately to challenge much of the Church's teaching. I mean, Aquinas brings happiness into the conversation, whereas Christianity before that was all about Augustinian suffering and that's the essence of life. Maybe Jordan Peterson inspired by that, but it's all about suffering and pain and so on. Aquinas suddenly discovers in Aristotle a view of life that's about happiness, about virtues that lead to individual happiness. Yes, he keeps God and the reason he's struggling, I think the reason he spent so much time trying to prove God is that he's trying to prove God to himself. He's trying to struggle between this idea of faith and reason and how do I articulate them? How do I combine them? And he's constantly fight, that is a fight that he's fighting inside of himself. And that's why he has to keep proving more proofs of God, more proofs of God because he needs to convince himself more than anybody else. But he gets, first of all, he's a systematic thinker. So he does have a universal view based on Aristotle and the church and trying to combine them, not very well, but trying to combine them. And then he brings Aristotle back into civilization. So she credited, and I think many historians and historians of philosophical thought, credited with shifting Western civilization away from Plato towards Aristotle, bringing about ultimately the Renaissance and everything that that results in that, or whether it's a scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, America, capitalism, all of that, is basically on the shoulders of Aquinas. So she admired him enormously in spite of his religiosity. She admired him immensely as a thinker and as somebody who within the context of his knowledge, the context of his time, did the best that he could to bring reason and logic and Aristotle into Western civilization and anchor him there. And I think to this day, we benefit from that, because who else is there? When I was in college at the aforementioned the curse at Bucknell, there was a business professor and he wrote on the board, fair and unfair. And he asked people to give examples of each. This was a fair thing, this unfair thing. And then after everyone was done, just above those two terms, he wrote, I like it and I don't like it. So let's focus on your work. Why is equal unfair and what does fair even mean? Well, fair means just, fair means justice. So fairness is people getting what they quote deserve, deserve in a particular context, right? So unfair is when you do something where you deserve X and you don't get X, you get Y, you get Z, you get something you don't deserve, that's unfair. And I think people have a sense that that's generally historically what fairness meant and what justice meant. Over the last 100 years or so, the fairness and justice have shifted partially due to Catholic philosophers, partially due to Marx and even worse philosophers that came later, egalitarians and so on. And the whole concept of fairness and justice became what's fair is equal, what's just is equal. Everybody being treated equal is fair is just. But is that true, right? Is it fair and just that two students get the same grade even though one knows the stuff and one doesn't? I mean, most people say, no, it's not fair. We still have that old sense of fairness and justice. But today, whether it's the postmodernism, the critical race theory, the egalitarians who dominate the world today, the intellectual would say, no, no, it's unfair. They should be equal in outcome. That's, and if they're not, then we have to do something about it. Either knock the good guy down or knock the bad guy up, the one who doesn't have the knowledge up or both, which is what they're constantly trying to do is knock the people who have knowledge down and knock the people who don't have it up some way and usually by force. So is it fair that Le Bon James is better at basketball than I am? Now my answer to that is clearly, yes. He's got to build for it, but he's also practiced, he's worked hard at it. I have not, you know, I have not. I know objective isn't better than Le Bon James. Is that fair? Yes. And is the fact that Le Bon James is a better basketball than me fair? Absolutely. And is it fair to break his legs so that I can play one-on-one with him and have a chance? No, most people would say no. So now let's extrapolate that to economics. Is it fair that Bill Gates made gazillions of dollars? Yeah, he changed the world. He sold people products that they wanted and were willing to give up a hundred bucks that say for a software program because that software program was worth more than a hundred to them. And he did it on such a scale that it became a gazillion in. That's fair. In the context of economics, fair is getting rewarded based on the value you create, the economic value you create. Now it doesn't mean that a teacher teaching is not created in almost value in spite of the fact that she gets a poor salary. It's just that it's on a small scale. It's just she's impacting fewer students. Indeed, one of the trends of the future will probably be super teachers, teachers who use the internet to teach millions of students and now become gazillionaires, right? Because they bring the value to scale. So fairness does not mean equality. Justice does not mean equality. We should not, we should fight the left. We should fight the egalitarians with everything that we have because if justice becomes equality, we're finished. The world is dead. In her Playboy interview, Rand made the offhand comment that she wasn't sure that she wanted to attract as many people as religion does. And I took that to be kind of an elitist statement. Do you think it's accurate to describe rejectivism as elitist? And that's not even to say that elitism is a bad thing. Yeah, I was just gonna say, I'm not sure elitism is a bad thing. What Rand recognized and what I think, again, it's playing out in front of our eyes and it's always played out in history. It's that the minority of intellectuals shape the world. They have the influence. At every level, it's the stories that the economists, the philosophers, the intellectuals are telling us that we buy into and then shape our behaviors. And you can see it all around, right? Now you can see it on the left with critical waste and so on. I mean, nobody thinks of that, right? Yeah, now I have each other unless you're an elit. And then they filter it down and then a bunch of people get excited about it and they go and act. But without these ideas, nothing happens. I mean, even the kind of rise of the working-class Trumpism, if you will, these dissatisfied working-class people, why are they so dissatisfied, right? They're incredibly dissatisfied because they've been told by a certain group of elitists that their jobs are guaranteed, they'll always have their jobs and yet the jobs disappeared. The jobs will come back, not to worry, everything's fine, they don't. Don't worry, we'll take care of you. The government will take care of you. We'll send you checks. Don't worry, just the last thing you wanna do is actually move to where the jobs are or actually change or retrain yourself. And they are being abandoned by the elites. They are being rejected by the elite. And this is a response to that rejection, that, you know, okay, you haven't done anything for us, we're gonna go with somebody who represents the exact opposite of you or doesn't really represent the exact opposite, but in our mind, represent the exact opposite with you and we're gonna go with that and let's see, maybe that'll be the solution. So it's always the elites that are telling, in a sense, teaching us the history, telling. For example, in the inequality book, we talk about the fact that everybody today accepts that the working class and lower middle class over the last 40 years have stagnated. They make no more income than they did in the past. Now that is blatantly wrong. But there's no way that's true if you look at the economics correctly, if you look at the actual numbers, if you adjust for changes and so on for inflation, all this stuff. And yet, if you say it enough times, if the elite buys into this and every time I debated a leftist, he tells the same story, exactly the same story. Ronald Reagan destroyed the economy by doing XYZ. The 70s were this wonderful time. It was fantastic. I mean, they all tell, it's out of the same playbook, but they've said it so many times now, they believe it. And most people believe it. And so in that sense, elites, intellectual elites, not just, not financial elites, intellectual elites, shape the world. They determine history. They determine. You're running out of time. What has been your favorite part of this interview? Oh, what has been the favorite part of this interview? Yeah, talking about some of this stuff about Ayn Rand that maybe I don't get to talk about often. So you pushing a little bit on some of the issues around objectivism. It's always good to get it out there because in a sense that there's bad marketing out there, or in a sense that there is, people think wrongly about Rand. Even the issue of the blank state, I think is really valuable talking about because people think wrongly about Rand. People don't think of it properly. They don't think about who relationships properly. They don't think about the history properly. So giving me an opportunity to talk about that stuff is valuable to correct some of the misconceptions out there is value. So that is always fun. You are welcome.