 I can see you now. How are you doing? Good. You were told not to let me get away with anything. So I expect no less of you. And I expect out of you. So I watched you do a another conversation about the same subject with our mutual friend Jean Epstein at the Soho forum in New York. And you know, I found it interesting enough that I wanted to invite you on to talk about it today. I think maybe in that conversation, there was more time spent on the semantic issue, right? About how to define some of the terms that I would like, because I think there is something to be said about that, but I think there's also a way that that can be kind of bracketed and we can talk about, okay, like, here's one way of using the term. Here's another way of using the term. That's great. Now, what's actually true about selfishness, selfishness, neither of these senses. I'm hoping we can get into that. So first, do you want to say who you are? Just for a minute. Sure. My name is Iran Brooke. I used to be the CEO of the Ayn Rand Institute. I am now the chairman of the board. I also host the Iran book show on, on YouTube and a podcast. So I don't know that any of your viewers will like anything I say, but if you do come over there and, and subscribe, I cover a lot of different topics from the perspective of objectivism, which is Ayn Rand's, Ayn Rand's philosophy. And let me just say, you'll have to invite me back sometime to debate that video we just saw. Oh, no, I would love that. It was an abhorrent, right? It was dishonest to the core. So I would love to, I would love to debate every aspect of it. I certainly, I certainly don't think so, right? I know you don't. Everything he says in there. But, but yeah, absolutely. There is an invitation to, to come back in the future, to get into anything that's covered in the video that, that we don't talk about today. Maybe if Dave Griscombe would like to talk to you about that, I certainly would. Right. So regardless of whether he does or not, you certainly have that invitation. But the reason I would, as you know, I debate socialist often and, and I think it's a, it's an important debate to have. You guys have a large audience of young people and, and I think, I think exposing them to the real differences and ideas rather than Glenn Beck, who I think is, yeah, you know, not a great defender of individualism or, or freedom for that matter or capitalism. I think this debate is more interesting. Yeah. Look, I mean, I think Beck is worth arguing with because lots of, lots of people are listening to what he's saying. And I'm sure you think that socialists are worth arguing with for similar reasons, if nothing else. But the, the reason that I wanted to introduce this, this topic by talking about that is because that sets up how I would certainly see this issue about selfishness and self assertion and individual greatness, right? That, that it's not these, it's not that pursuit of individual excellence is a bad thing. But, but I do think that there's a real difference about whether all of morality is about pursuit of individual excellence and, and whether, and whether rad's view about this is right. But I don't want to anticipate too much of what you're going to say. So, so why don't we just take the next few minutes, like part of the value of what I'm trying to add here with this show is that I don't just, I don't just want to talk to people I agree with, right? I also want to talk to people who I vehemently disagree with, right? I think, I think you just said everything David Grisken said was important, right? So, so let's, so let's do that, right? So why don't you just take a few minutes to lay out rad's view about selfishness and, and why you think that's right and how you think that's different from how people like me might be getting this wrong. So, and I don't know what you're getting about selfishness or selfishness. I'll present my view and then you can, you can, you can present yours and then we'll have a discussion about it. Look, I think that human beings, and I'm going to go pretty basic and then, and then expand. I'm going to go to the foundation of morality, I think, which is fundamentally a choice that every individual faces about whether he wants to live or not to live. And this goes to the very nature of, of being human. We don't, when I'm born with the knowledge of how to live, how to live well, how to survive even. We don't know how to hunt. We don't know how to do agriculture. I mean agriculture is a massive achievement that took 90,000 years of human beings being alive before they figured it out. Hunting is a massive achievement that took, took figuring out tools and weapons in order to figure out and only then could human beings success. So human survival is an achievement and every one of us has to, in a sense, achieve that in our own lives. And to do that, we need to discover the knowledge necessary in order to survive, to thrive, to achieve, to be somebody, to live with a capital L, to be successful at living. And that I think is what morality should teach us. So in my view is morality should be about, and this is kind of goes back to Aristotle, Aristotle's view morality, morality should be about the values and virtues that we all should adapt the universal values and virtues that apply to every human being that are necessary in order for human beings A to survive and B to thrive, to just be successful at living as a human being. And it's important here to recognize what is me as a human being. What makes human beings unique? What makes human beings different than other animals? Well, one is we have, we have the capacity to choose. We have free will, which other animals don't, they're automatized. They are born with the knowledge of how to live. It's all automatic. They don't get to choose. But what to choose, how to choose? That is, that is the key. And what makes us human is the fact that we have this capacity, our reason, our ability to think rationally, to make choices. So if I am pursuing my life, if I want to live the best life that can live it, if I want to live a great life, if I want to live the best life available to me, then I need to live based on my own nature. And my own nature is, as Aristotle again put it, as a rational being, as a thinking being, as a reasoning being. Therefore, for egoists, for somebody interested in their own life, making the most of it, the most important thing to do is be rational, use reason, think, and choose, use reason to choose the values that are necessary to live a good life. And while there are certain universal values that I think apply to all of us, the specific values are going to differ. We're going to have different approaches to what to do in life in order to achieve our personal greatness or to live that full, complete whole life that is possible to us. You know, other things that I think are necessary, and this goes to some of the political issues that revolve around socialism, one of the necessary things for human beings that I think be successful in life is to be productive. It's to produce something. Whether it's art or whether it's a product or whether it's anything, you have to be able to take care of your material while being yourself. You have to be able to, today in a modern sense, we'd say owner living in a more ancient sense, you know, put the food on the table. You have to be able to do that, to gain the kind of self-esteem that I think allows you to live a whole complete successful life as a human being. So I think that is the foundation, if you will, for the idea of self-interest. We can call it egoism, we can call it selfishness. I really don't want to get caught up on the word. I want a kid caught up in this idea that the purpose of morality should be to provide us with universal principles to live the best damn life we can live, right? You only live, hopefully we agree on this. You only live once, I don't know if you're a Buddhist or not, and there's no afterlife. I don't know if you're Christian or not. So I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe you live more than once. Make the most of the one life that you have and morality should be a tool, a guide for how to do that. And then we can argue about what are the particular virtues and values that are necessary in order to achieve a good life. But that to me is secondary to the first idea that the purpose of living is to live well. I mean, I think that's enough for you to comment and I'm sure we'll have a lot of time. Sure, okay. Yeah, I just do want to cut you off. You're still going. Yeah, look, so I think the part of that that seems right to me is of course, well, okay, first of all, I agree with you about the reincarnation and afterlife issues. I think that we do just have one life to live. We all do, right? Which is why I think that it's important that everybody get a chance to live up to their full potential. And when we talk about selfishness, right? If what we mean by that is having regard for yourself, thinking maybe you could have due to a certain duty to yourself that you're trying to advance your own potential, then no, selfishness isn't bad. And if what we mean by selfishness is that you're promoting your own interests at the expense of the interests of others, then I think that it is bad. And I think that where, that's so far, right? You know, like, maybe on the same page, I think that one place where the divergence happens is that really rad, I'm sure you've read lots more I'd read than I have, right? But really what I've read, right? You often get the impression from her first that she thinks that, like, maybe all of philosophy in between Aristotle and her is denied that you should try to pursue your own talents, that individual potential is good, is say that all you should do all the time is just sacrifice yourself to other people, which clearly isn't right, right? If you're a utilitarian, your own happiness counts as much as anybody else. If you read Immanuel Kant in the sort of thin Kant book that people read in introductory ethics classes, he gives four examples of immoral behavior. Add two of them, two of the four are examples about people failing their duties to themselves. There's the person who commits suicide and the person who fails to develop his talents. And certainly if you read somebody like John Rawls, he puts great emphasis in how everybody should be able to have, there should be room for people to develop their own life plans, live according to their own conception of a good life within the bounds of certain duties to others. So I think where the real distinction happens, and I guess we'll just do this quickly first in terms of abstract theory and then maybe in terms of that political takeaway, in terms of abstract theory, I think the real distinction is whether the difference between just pursuing your own flourishing and pursuing your own flourishing at the expense of other people is a meaningful distinction in the first place, right? So I think what Rand seems to think, what I'm getting from you now and what I got out of your debate with Jane Epstein, I think you think is that that's not really a distinction at all, that like really if you are harming the interests of other people, if you're getting the way of flourishing the other people, you're really not fulfilling your own potential or you're really not advancing your own interests, that the interests of rational people, I think Rand says, can't conflict. And if that's your view, then I certainly disagree. I think that like to go to Aristotle, I think that Aristotle was able to flourish to a great extent, to spend his time thinking about science and philosophy and developing his intellectual potential and was probably a very happy person, despite the fact that he was freed up to do that by the labor of slaves and I have no particular reason to think given the values in society that he lived in, that he ever lost a single night's sleep in his entire life over his participation in the institution of slavery. So I think it is possible for people's interests to conflict and at that point, you don't have to completely sacrifice yourself, you don't have to negate yourself to the point of this sort of pure altruism that maybe describes some threads of some extreme religious views, certainly doesn't describe much of anything else in the history of philosophy, but you do have to sometimes balance your own interests against the interests of other people and really quickly on the political takeaways, I think that where this matters politically is okay, if we think it's important, it's valuable that everybody gets to live up to their full potential, then I don't want some people to fail to live up to their full potential because for example, they were born into poverty, so they have fewer opportunities than other people do, so they have to work some mind-numbing job where they never get the chance to develop their intellectual or artistic or whatever other kinds of potential they might have had in a different kind of society. I don't want some people to spend all day giving orders and some people to spend all day taking orders. I would prefer that people have democratic rights within a workplace like a worker cooperative and more on a more mundane level in terms of things that might happen in a much more short-term way. I don't want anybody, for example, not writing that novel they've always wanted to write, not starting up that project they always wanted to start up because they couldn't because they have to work all the time to support their family, they're worried that if they lose their job, they're going to lose their private employer health insurance. That seems like a huge problem for human potential, so I think the two differences between us as I read them, you can correct me, are one, whether you can have conflicts between people's flourishing at which point you have to balance your own interests against the interests of other people and two, whether capitalism actually serves everybody's flourishing or whether it's changing that system in both immediate reformist ways like giving everybody healthcare, giving everybody free higher education, so if you need to go back to school so you can start to live up to that potential that you currently can't live up to, you could do that, would actually allow far more people to live up to their full human potential. So the challenge here is, you're taking on here, you're moving us from morality to politics and there's just no time to cover everything that you just covered, but let me try to cover a few things. I mean, first of all, you're saying that you agree with me on individual success or individuals living their own life, but you switch your frame of reference constantly. My frame of reference is the individual, the individual's pursuit of happiness. Now we can talk about other individuals, we can talk about society, we can talk about the world, but that is a different frame of reference. My frame of reference is my life, achieving the best for my life and everybody out there achieving the best for their lives, right? So you start with, what are the premises that are necessary for me to achieve my success in my life and then you generalize, you don't start with a duty to maximize social well-being as a utilitarian, maximize the most happiness to most people or however you want to phrase it. You start with a duty to others and then you say within that duty, it's okay for you to achieve whatever you can achieve once you've achieved a duty to others. I'm rejecting that whole approach to morality, that whole approach to ethics. I'm saying whatever turns out to be my relationship to you and my commitment to you and my obligation to you, I hate the word duty so I'm not going to use it. My commitment to you has to come from my commitment to myself. That is the starting point is what is the life that I live? I've got this one shot at it. Where does this responsibility that I have to other people come from? It doesn't come from God because neither of us, I think, believe in God. It doesn't come from something ingrained in us because clearly some of us don't have that ingrained, categorically imperative. I don't anyway, to as a duty to start with a duty to others and only then. And of course you do this with all the philosophers. They indeed is no philosopher, including Kant, particularly Kant, who advocates for the framework to be what's good for me. He says, yes, you should try to achieve whatever you can within a context of duties to others. But the things you have primary, the things you have obligations to yourself and obligations to others. If you're not developing your talents, you're not always the categorical imperative. The thing that frames it, the categorical imperative is to frame it. Or duties, there's a Christianity. I'm sorry. Let me just finish. I'll let you finish your point. Christianity does the same thing, right? It says, oh no, you should live the best life that you can live after you use Jesus Christ as a model for your life, right? So you set up altruism, you set up self-sacrifice, you sell up the negation of self as the standard. And of course, all it seems Kant is the only one who's honest enough to actually say it. When he says, if you even think about how you're going to benefit from helping somebody else, the joy, the emotional satisfaction, then it doesn't count as morality. He is the one that's actually honest about it, but philosophers generally, but look, I don't want to get into debate because I'm not going to win that debate because, you know, I'm not a philosopher, I'm not a student of philosophy about what other philosophers said. I'm here to say what I meant to represent a positive view, not a negative view. I think you're wrong about Kant, but I'm not going to quote you. The reason that the Kant thing is important, and I agree, I don't want to get too hung up on that, but the reason this is more than just like an esoteric footnote about the history of philosophy, that Kant's view is that you have both kinds of obligations. This is not, this is not, this is not switching frameworks from caring about yourself and caring about others. Where does the second obligation come from? I've explained where your obligation to yourself comes from. Where does the second obligation come from? Where does it come from? Is that both kinds of obligations come from the same place, which is the categorical imperative, and that entails both duties to yourself to develop your own talents and duties to help other people. And again, the reason that's not just an esoteric footnote about what Kant thinks is that this is the view that actually people who disagree with Rand have. Not Rand's strawman of perfect altruism. I agree with you. I agree with you. The point is this. Who think that you should always sacrifice yourself and only act for the sake of others. But the actual view that people who disagree with Rand have is that sure, you should care about developing your own talents. You should care about yourself. That's important. It's also important that you care about other people and helping them develop to their full potential at the risk for both. That is complete. That's completed. If we think that human flourishing, human potential is valuable. It's valuable in myself that I'm going to promote that and try to live up to my potential. It's also valuable in others, which is why I want to create a society where everybody has the best shot of living up to their potential. I haven't got the society yet. I am all for a society where everybody has a shot to maximize their potential. Absolutely. We disagree on what that society looks like. I've lived in a society like yours. I've experienced it. I know what kind of... Are you calling Israel the society like mine? I'm calling it Israel in pre-1977. And I'm calling the Kibbutz very much the society that you would have loved, that you advocate for. And I would consider it a horrible life. It's one of the reasons I left. One of the many reasons I left. And one of the reasons when I experienced the Kibbutz, I knew firsthand the extent to which socialism didn't do what you claim it does. It does exact opposite. But I don't want to get there yet. I'm happy to go on and debate socialism at some point. I'm much more interested in this debate. The point is, everybody says we want both. We want you to sacrifice other people and we want you to live a good flourishing life. But in any decision where the two are in competition, we know what is elevated above the other. We know what we... We know what we as a society, we know what we as a culture view as important. What we as a culture and view as a society view as important is how we act, is the sacrifice we do to other people, the saints that we have. And saints include secular saints. The people we elevate as moral heroes are always, always the people who have a horrible life but have lived for the sake of other people. Happy people, happy people, flourishing people, successful people, people who've lived well that have experienced life to the fullest, have experienced life to the most. Never make it to moral sainthood, not in your socialist mythology and not in Christian mythology and not in popular culture mythology. Now, let me get back a second. Let me get back to the conflict of truth. I'm not interested in sainthood, right? But if you want to ask... The sainthood is the standard for what we consider them all ideal. It's a standard for what we consider them all ideal and for what we're striving towards. There's certainly somebody who I admire. Who do you admire? Would be Paul Robeson who's an example of somebody... Paul Robeson, you admire him because he suffered. You admire him because he struggled, not because he was happy and successful. I admire Paul Robeson because he had a great voice. Paul Robeson is admired is precisely his development of his individual talents as a musician and in other ways. No. But also, yes, of course, absolutely we admire that. But if he was just that, if he was just that, you wouldn't admire him. Also, we admire the fact that he's not just doing that, that he's also trying to create a society where other people can live up to their potential because they matter just as much. It's not true that every time there's a conflict between yourself and others. Paul Robeson says you always have to sacrifice yourself. I don't know any leftist or socialist who thinks that we should have involuntary distribution of kidneys, that you're a bad person if you don't do organ donation. Nobody on the left says that. What they do say reflects a reasonable balance between your own interests and the interests of everybody else. In other words, everybody could live a good life, but you also have to pay some taxes that support things like healthcare and education so everybody else could have their basic needs met and have a meaningful opportunity to pursue their dreams. Yes, if you work in a worker cooperative or one of those converts that you hate so much, you have a vote and a voice, but so does everybody else. It's not a binary choice between letting yourself live a good life and a full life and live up to your potential and letting other people. The question, rather, is how can you live a good life and also help everybody else too? So I am relieved that you are not after my kidney, but I also know that you would love to come into my house and take my stuff. My stuff. I also know that you would love to get into my bank account. I'd love to take a little bit of your back account. No, no, no. There's no limit. The only reason I have stuff is... No, let me... Let's be clear. The only reason I have stuff is because I have a bank account and I have money in the bank account. And the more you take, and look, they already take 50% of my bank... what I have in my bank account, you would like to take 90%. You would, ultimately, if you're a real socialist and you believe in a keyboard, you would like to take 100%. You would like to tell me exactly what I would have in my house. I lived in a keyboard. I know a keyboard. So you don't have a television bigger than mine. Everybody has the same television. Everybody has the same kitchen. Actually, nobody has a kitchen because we all eat in a communal dining space. So let's be honest about what socialism is. You want to come into my house. You want to take my stuff. You want to take everything in my bank account, or at least the significant majority of what I have in my bank account. Nobody wants to take anything from the house. I let you finish. And of course you do. I mean, that's exactly what socialism is. You want, let me ask you this in the socialist society. In my society, in a free market society, you can start a commune. You can start a keyboard. You can do your thing. You can share each according to his, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. You can do all that and live pathetic, miserable lives. But if I wanted to start a business in your society, I would go to jail. If somebody wanted to be my employee and create a product and sell it based on the standards of employee-employee relationship, I would go to jail. So don't tell me for one second that you are for freedom and for people exercising your own potential. Or you don't want to come into my house and take my stuff. Of course you do. You should admit it because that is exactly what is involved. The keyboards. When you joined the keyboards, you didn't keep your stuff. You put all your stuff into communal bank account and they took all of your stuff. You don't want a voluntary keyboard. You want the entire country to be a keyboard. That's what socialism is. And you want all of us to put our money into a joint account. Now, but let me, let me, I want to address the first topic of the point that you made. You just said a lot there, Yara. I did. But that's because you're drifting to politics when I still have an ethical point. They're the same question. The question of whether we only have an obligation to ourselves. I think we have an obligation to other people. I think you have an obligation, obligation to other people is the same question as the question of whether I should have my political rights. Let me ask you one question and then I'll shut up. Sure. Can I ask you one question and then I'll be quiet. Ask what you like. I mean, I, I claim that the obligation to yourself comes from the fact that you have one life, that you are you and that you have this fundamental choice in life between living and dying and that living requires certain actions use certain of your mind requires a certain focus, requires certain thinking. It requires something. That's where the obligation to you comes from. I believe that the obligation to other people comes from that obligation. So you have an obligation to other people, but the primary obligation is to you because you are the living entity and you have this one life and it's your choices that have a meaning. I'd like to ask you, you seem to think that these two obligations are the same. I think you actually think the obligation to other people is higher than the obligation to yourself. I just want to know where they come from. Philosophically. And don't say category imperatives because that is the biggest cop out in the world. That's like saying God, right? I want to know in logic where does it come from because for Kant's category imperatives are God. We know that, right? He was very religious, very Christian and at the end of the day that's what he meant. Where do these category imperatives where does this duty to others come from that places it above your responsibilities and obligations to yourself or at the same level as it. Yeah. So first of all, Kant's view is not actually a religious view at all. There is an argument that he makes for the existence of God at the end because I think in Prussia at the time who's doing it you kind of had to do that but the moral system itself is completely secular and completely detachable from that. But look, the reason that we have moral obligations to others is the same reason we have moral obligations to ourselves that because the fact that I only have one life to live and my life, my flourishing has value similarly everybody else only has one life to live and their life, their flourishing has value so I shouldn't be trampling on it for the sake of mine. This is not a binary choice between living only for yourself and dying. You can live but also while pursuing your own dreams help create a society and participate in a society where everybody else can pursue their dreams. So for example, nobody yarn, nobody. I really hope you get this because then you'll be able to sleep much easier knowing this. No one wants to come into your house and take your personal possessions. In fact, Of course you do this. No, we don't. In fact, if you read even Karl Marx, even the Communist manifesto, there is a distinction there between personal property and private property in the means of production. Like, you know, it's very quick, right? You read it after. I'm a finance guy. My means of production are right here. My means of production is my computer. You can differentiate between the means of production and private property and personal property. That is the zone and the idea. I've got to finish the point here that they have that private property in the external means of production. Nobody says means of production and means that, you know, your muscle, your brain, they're talking about the external, the social means of production and there is a distinction there between that and personal property. No one wants to take your personal property. You don't want to take the 200 billion away from. You got to finish here. Talk for a while. The point is that now we do want to take some of what is in your bank account in order. So for example, if someone else's dream, someone else's flourishing, is to go to medical school and become a doctor, someone else's dream is that they're going to become a great artist, et cetera, that they're not blocked from it because they can't afford to pursue an education. They're not blocked from it because they can't quit the job they hate because they'll lose their employer health insurance. They're not blocked from it because they have to work constantly at a mind-numbing job just to survive. So it's not that either we can, we can care about ourselves, we can flourish, we can live good lives, we can develop our talents, or we can care about other people. In fact, a reasonable approach to life involves absolutely nurturing your own talents, but also doing what's necessary to contribute to society where everybody else can nurture their talents too. So I have no problem with the fact that part of life is helping people out there achieve their own success. Indeed, you know, what do I do with my life? I do this kind of stuff, not just because I enjoy it, but because I'm hoping that some of your listeners might discover a philosophy that'll make their life better. So I care about other people as because it's part of my life and in your right, my own flourishing, my own success, part of that is other people's flourishing and success. But this is the point. You want to handcuff me. You want to decide, you want to decide, or the majority want to decide what dreams I should have, what dreams are worthy and what dreams are unworthy. I'll give you a quick example. Jeff Bezos has a dream of building a spaceship to go to Mars. Now, you might think that's funny, or you might think that's ridiculous, or you might think that, how dare he, which is, I expect what you think. He needs $100 billion to do that. You're not going to allow him to do that. Clearly, you say the most important dreams are the dreams of those people who don't have health insurance or whatever, whatever you come up with. As you decide what dreams are worthy and what dreams are not worthy and you're going to sacrifice the dreams of some people by definition, because you believe in a zero sum world. I do not. See, I believe that the way for individuals to prosper is by leaving them alone, by helping them when it's in my interest to help them, by assisting them when I want to assist them. You believe in organized coercion, organized force, organized command and control that determines the hierarchy of people's dreams, takes dreams from some and gives them to others. And thus, I believe, destroy everybody's dreams, because the other thing you assume, and the video you showed earlier on assumes, you seem that wealth is a given, that money is just there. Oh, no, I don't. Yes, you do. The production just happens. Labor doesn't produce the gold it is. Labor produces what they have a red set. Not for the people who work in his warehouses. And of course, that needs to be thrown out with physical capital. And that could be done in a worker cooperative. That could be done in a publicly owned firm. That could be done in a number of different situations. No, it can't. No, it can't. None of that could be done in a worker cooperative. None of it has been done in a worker cooperative and cannot be done in a worker cooperative. They have a fantastic research and development arm. Who does? Madrigan. Every debate I hear about Madrigan. You should actually do your research about Madrigan. Research and development arm. There's lots of innovation going on there. But here's the point. I use Zoom developed by Madrigan. I use many apps on my iPhone developed by Madrigan. Madrigan is so innovative and productive that its apps and its applications and technologies are known worldwide. The one co-op that still exists and one wonders why it exists partially because it has spun off a number of its businesses that actually run like normal businesses and the ones who produce money and it treats its employees at least in portions of it business like every business owner treats its employees. It's a very, very mixed case that you bring up. But it's the one example you have. Every innovation that you are using right now, every innovation that all of you all of you listen to the users every single day in every single aspect was a product of some individual's mind. Some entrepreneur had to think of the idea. Some scientist. That's not at all how innovation works. Of course it is. Of course it is. It's not a product that one entrepreneur is buying. Of course it is. You always need, often need an entrepreneur. It doesn't happen. It is an R&D department. This is my point. This is my point about you thinking well, just there. Wealth is an achievement. Wealth requires the focused effort of certain individuals. Not everybody can achieve that. Whereas manual labor is not an achievement. Manual labor is something human beings have been able to do from the beginning of time. Manual labor is interchangeable. It doesn't matter if Joe or Janet does the manual labor. But it certainly matters whether Joe or Janet was the head of Apple at the beginning. But Joe and Janet couldn't have done what Steve did. Didn't do what Steve did. And nobody has done what Steve did other than Steve. So the differences, the fundamental differences. This is what wealth leads to. This is what comes from the mind of Steve. Because I do not want to let this get lost in a couple of minutes we have left. That you talked about organized force. You talked about some people's dreams made sacrifice to other people's dreams. Now, any society where you enforce any rules very much included on no trespass inside is going to involve some element of coercion. The question is which rules that you're coercively enforcing are justified. And do I want Jeff Bezos to be able to have $100 million generated by the labor physical and mental of people who work for him in his warehouses, people who work for him in his R&D department. Do I want him to have those to spend on a spaceship to go to Mars? Well, I think spaceships to go to Mars are nice. But somehow I'm a little bit more concerned about giving a basic, decent minimum to the people who work in those warehouses and make them rich. So they can achieve their full potential in life. Now, obviously there have been a lot of strands of what we talked about today. Can I just say something about property? It's a huge discussion. I'm going to give you the last word before we go. But I do want to make sure because obviously in the last 40 minutes or whatever it's been, we've just scratched the surface. I think that's inevitable. So I do want you to come back to pursue some of these other strands to talk about some of the political takeaways of all this. But before we go to David Grisken from the last segment, I'm going to give you the last word. Sure, thank you. So let me just say something about property. This idea that property rights do not trespass is some optional thing. And that defending property rights is just as coercive as taking money from our bank account, which is truly coercive. You're stealing it. That is ludicrous. Human life requires human life, individual human life, requires that, and this goes back to the foundations of what I talked about. If I produce something, I produced it. Whether I grow vegetables in my garden, that is mine. I produce it. And then I can exchange it. If there is no trespassing sign, if that no trespassing sign on my garden doesn't exist, then what you have is anarchy. What you have is the only means by which human beings can negotiate with one another, can live with one another, is through force. This is feudalism. This is every pre-capitalist system of government. This is the kind of government where the force, the gun, was what pervaded in human interaction. Capitalism is an achievement because it takes away the idea of using coercion in order to gain values. I create my garden. You don't trespass on it. That should be pretty simple to understand. And then if I negotiate in a voluntary manner with other people to have them come and help cultivate the garden, and I pay them a salary for that, it's voluntary. Nobody is being forced to do it. That is the essence of what freedom means. Now you're saying, no, they should be able to take my food. They should be able to do whatever they want with my land, with my, what I have cultivated. That is a recipe for human disaster. That is a recipe for violence and destruction. And it's a recipe for the destruction of civilization. Property rights are a massive achievement and of what have led to the, I'll finish on this, that what have led to the creation of wealth that you now want to expropriate today, that over the last 250 years that have led to the, in the West at least, the annihilation of real poverty in the West, and to a standard of living that was unimaginable. That is a product of property rights, which is just one aspect of individual rights more broadly. There's a lot to talk about, as you said. Yeah, there is. I agree with you that capitalism is better than feudalism. Maybe you can come back to talk with me more about whether we could do better than capitalism and also whether the individual... We could have it for one. We've never had it, so it would be great. The individual gardener who's negotiating with other people at the same level as him is a good model for how capitalism actually works, but that is going to have to be a future discussion. Thank you so much for coming on, Yaron. We are definitely going to have to do this again. I appreciate it. Thanks, Ben. Thanks for having me on. Thank you.