 Everybody, welcome to the WWDNYK Studios. This is Dr. Jack talking to you live from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest is a constant thinker. It's really apparent that this man's mind never stops analyzing, weighing, comparing, and thinking. He's been living in my head rent-free for about a week and a half, and I've searched for points of disagreement. And to tell you the truth, I can't find money. I ran into him online in a 2015 lecture on the topic of freedom of speech. I really recommend it. He is a consummate objectivist who does not like paying for maternity insurance unless he needs it. He believes coercion is the enemy of reason. I invited him on unbreaking science because, in my opinion, his message is an important message for our times. For the moderates and for the people who are extremists who really need to move to the middle. When I listen to many people speak, they write on social media, they write in the journals, whatever they're writing. They often take positions and they make arguments that make them fall, in my mind, into the objectivist camp, but they don't know it. They may think that they're either left or right, sometimes based on a few deal-breaker issues. I recently published an article saying that we have to disempower those who gain by keeping us apart. And two days later, I heard Yaron Brooke say he doesn't like the left or the right. In fact, he wants a pox on both of their houses. So it's my hope that my immediate and broader community and indeed the public at large can come to know how to think about epistemology, how to think about thinking and metacognition. I keep hitting the microphone. I need to stop doing that. At first, you might think he's fallen off the ladder of reason. It depends on where you are in the political spectrum or something. But once you hear him out, it's very difficult to find points of disagreement. He's host of the podcast, the Yaron Brooke Show, director of the Einrand Institute and author of many books, including Equal is Unfair, co-authored by Don Watkins. So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Yaron Brooks. Thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. Right on. So I've got a couple of questions that we can get started, right? So to be an objectivist, you do a degree. One first has to be a realist, right? Well, I mean, we have to be careful about definitions, right? So what does it mean to be a realist? If you mean adhere to reality, except the independent existence of reality, of the material world out there, then yes, absolutely. You have to be connected to facts, to reality. A is A. Things are what they are. Your wishes don't make it so. There is no metaconsciousness out there manipulating things based on whim and desires. Reality is what it is, and we have the tool to know it, and that tool is our reason. Yeah, we're absolutely in a battle for a reality. I think it's like an existentialist. There's the constructivist that people think you can create realities, and then there's the empiricist who we go out and we discover reality. Certainly you can make your own reality. That's not what I'm saying. But on this metacognition thing, you've said a couple of times, I've heard you say that there is no collective consciousness. And one of the things that I want to get with you on this here is social media has changed everything. There seems to me an emergence of a new, I won't use the word collective consciousness because I don't think we have a vocabulary term for it, but there's a new intelligentsia by which people can become aware through the collective awareness, and I don't mean this in a mystical sense, but the collective perception of facts, trends, figures, you know, things happening, events. Would that be a collective consciousness simply because it's not inside the brain of the human being? Can't we have a physical consciousness that's beyond humans? Well, but then it's our consciousness, right? Only individuals can have consciousness. Consciousness is awareness. It's awareness of reality. It's awareness of what's outside of us and to some extent awareness of our own, you know, our introspection, our own processes. So you can't have a collective consciousness any more than you can have a collective stomach, any more than somebody else can eat for you, nobody else can think for you. And I don't think that social media is completely different than anything else. I think what social media does is it magnifies existing processes and existing realities. We've had matters of crowds, madness of crowds forever. You know, television was blamed for every social ill possible when it was first launched, you know, in late in the 50s and 60s. You remember the movie Network, I don't know if you ever saw the movie Network where television, you know, wild, everybody up this television host. So social media is just a faster, shallower means of communication that creates more hype and creates more manaces of crowds faster and bigger because now we have 8 billion people on the planet connected as compared to in the past when networks were much smaller. But it's not a change in kind, it's a change in magnitude and speed rather than in kind. No, it's still your responsibility as an individual to do your own thinking. It's still your responsibility as an individual to use your senses and your mind to observe reality and to understand what's true or not. And it's still your responsibility as an individual to control your emotions and not get caught up in madnesses of crowd. You know, we've had lynch mobs, we've had all kinds of mobs in human history going back to the killing of Socrates and I'm sure thousands of years before that. And yeah, people get emotional, people do stupid things when they get emotional, they get carried away, they don't think, other people do thinking for them. This is how authoritarians come to power. And of course many authoritarians come to power under the assumption that their consciousness can create reality and it can't. You can't actually create your own reality. What you can do is reshape existing reality in your image. You can take the material that is out there and reshape it, reconstruct it and in that sense change the world. But you're not changing the fundamental essence of the laws of physics and the laws of existence. I think you have me almost convinced because if we ever construct an artificial AI that develops consciousness it won't be human consciousness. So if we talk about consciousness in a way that we've developed something and it's undeniably conscious. The question is can we orient society or does society sometimes self-assemble in a way where all the nodes are in place where there is a general awareness that would not be possible or achievable with the individual nodes. So I think there's some room for debate there, but I love the idea that individuals are still responsible as a desire. That mob madness that you said, it's interesting, right? You said mob madness. So that would mean that there is some kind of an emergence of madness that wouldn't exist with individuals. Well, I'm not saying that groups don't have an impact on the individual. But at the end of the day the madness is the madness of an individual who is part of a mob. But it's of the individual. You choose to be part of a mob and not to be part of a mob. You choose to let your emotions carry you away, but it's your emotions. And it's absolutely true that knowledge builds on other knowledge. That is when we create networks of communication. I can learn from you. You can learn from me. We can all learn from Newton and Aristotle and all these others. And we build knowledge through communication between us. But it's still absolutely true that only I can be aware of something. A group is not aware of anything. I can be aware of something. You can be aware of something. We can both be maybe aware of the same thing or think we're aware of the same thing. That doesn't make us aware. It makes each one of us as an individual aware and we're sharing and communication in that awareness. And I can point something out to you. I can say, look over there. And then you look and now you're aware of what I'm aware. But you have to be aware of it. That is, it's still true that you can't, you know, we're not the ball. If you go back to what is a Star Trek, right? We don't have a collective consciousness. We only have individual content that can be directed to a particular direction. But we have to accept that direction. Otherwise it doesn't happen. So I don't get caught up in mobs by choice. This is what makes us human, right? We have a choice. But this is also true of animals. I mean, every lion has its own consciousness, right? And there's no group consciousness in lions. There's no group consciousness in any animal. Each animal has to observe reality and in a sense make decisions. Now we know they don't have free wills. They don't make decisions in the same way. Decisions are made for them, but by the organism itself. Are you saying you know that animals don't have free will? I suspect that animals do not have free will. I suspect that human beings, the great evolutionary leap that all human beings is our capacity to reason, which means our capacity to think, which means free will. I don't think you're going to think without free will. So evolution basically, evolution, I mean basically said, but evolution doesn't say. But evolution of the leap was instead of having to program us with the data for every single occurrence, the programming is leaving us free to self-program. That is what evolution allows us to do as self-program. Given a certain base of biology, we get to make choices we get to think for ourselves. I don't think other animals can do that. And if they can, they can only do it in a very, very, very narrow scope. Whereas for human beings, that scope is wide, very wide. Okay, so the people that study the pack hunting behavior of wolves have noticed that there seems to be decision making that is about, you know, this part of these three wolves will go that way, those seven wolves will go this way. And we have no idea how they make that decision. Social animals who hunt tend to be far more along the lines of appearing to exhibit symptoms of free will, if you will. I totally believe in free will. I just want to let you know where I come from as an evolutionary biologist. And it's not through evolution that I believe in free will. It's simply through empirical observation. The end game test, the ultimate empirical test of free will to me is if somebody is challenging me to do something to prove that free will does not exist, all I have to do is the opposite. So whatever the scenario is, to prove if you truly have free will, there's no human being on the planet that can put me in any scenario. And I have a funny story where I was challenged when I was an undergraduate as a psychology course I was taking. And this professor was trying to teach me and the rest of the class about operant conditioning. And he said, you know, I can motivate any student in this class to do something right now. There's not anyone who can challenge me that tells me that you don't have free will, or that you have free will. And I said, okay, I've raised my hand, of course. And he said, if you leave this class right now, I'll give you an A on the next test. So, all right, I got up, I walked out of the classroom, I stood out there for about two minutes and then I went back in the classroom and sat down. Right, so this to me, you know, he didn't give me the A, but this to me was, and that's a demerit on his part. This to me was kind of in your face test of free will. There's another example of a neighbor of mine who was actually in a cave prison in Nazi Germany. It was dark, I call it a cave because it was cold and damp and dark. And she described it as having so many layers of paint on the walls, different colors, that she, to brighten up the room, she told me that she licked the paint away to make patterns and murals. And there was a young German Nazi soldier who was about, what, 20, 21 or something, guarding her and she stood in front of this, came to the front of the cell and started crying and weeping. And he turned around and he said, you know, shut up old lady, you're right where we want you, you're not going to get out of here, it's over for you. There's no point in crying for yourself and she said, I'm not crying for me, I'm crying for you. You're a 21 year old kid and you have to stand here guarding a cell of a little old lady like me. She was probably under 30s or whatever. She was probably young in those days. Yeah, the lesson there is that he thought he had control. They thought that they had constructed a reality, but her perception overruled and that is where the free will comes from. We can overrule our base. Is that what you're saying? Well, I mean, I think that fundamentally the will is the choice to engage or not. The choice to focus or not. The choice to think or not. To be or not to be really is to think or not to think and to think or not to think is to engage, to actually do the thinking, to focus your mind, to bring it into focus. We all know you wake up, you're kind of grudgy and you're kind of unfocused and some people stay that way the whole day. They never actually focus on anything and the challenge as human beings is how to stay in focus and how to use our mind consistently and consciously. And I think the proof of free will is ultimately the same as the proof of anything. I mean, the proof in the end of it is of anything as you point at it. This is a bottle of water. How do we know? Because I can see it. I can touch it. I can do the chemistry of it. I can do the physics of it. My senses provide me the evidence. Well, introspection is how we know we have free will. You know that you could have stayed in that class. You know, I mean, one test of the professor is, no, I'm not going to leave the class because I don't want to get an unmoved aid. That's why I smile. That's why I laugh about it because if I had chosen, whatever I chose, it was my choice, of course. So you can be perfect and know that any one of those options are available to you and that you chose it. And that is the fundamental proof. In that sense, it's a foundation for all knowledge and it's an axiomatic concept. We start with the premise that it's directly observable that we engage in choices among options and that we engage in it, that it's not just done automatically. Yeah, totally. It's a choice, including structuring our economy, structuring our society. All can be done consciously and awareness and it can be done collectively or it can be done by powerful individuals. So I wanted to talk with you and ask you about inequality and economics. So I've heard you define and talk about the mixed economy. So can you talk about inequality, economics, the mixed economy and why are you persevering on those concepts? Well, that's like a seven hour talk. So what is a mixed economy? A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and coercion. So I view the spectrum, if you will, as on one side freedom and the other side coercion. That is, you will, the economic spectrum, the political spectrum, the social spectrum with which we live. Freedom means no coercion, no force, no authority, authority telling me what to do. And as long as I don't use coercion against you, as long as I don't commit fraud against you, it's nobody's business. You leave me alone. Yeah, but you don't mean anarchy. You don't mean anarchy. I don't mean anarchy because you need a government to arbitrate to figure out whether I used force against you or not, right? And to mitigate that force if I do use force. A government that's limited to protecting us from the use of force. That to me is freedom. Coercion is communism, fascism, you know, Nazism, all of those. Where basically you live by permission. Everything is cursed. Everything is dictated by authority. We live in a society that's in the middle. That is. Much of what we do on a day-to-day basis, we think we do freely without being cursed. I mean, but the fact is there's coercion all around us. Whether it's the fact that when we go and open a bank account, the million and one forms that we have to fill are dictated by government regulation, by government force. The bank is not free to engage with us on our terms, but based on government terms. When you go, you know, right now with COVID, if you want a vaccine, you can't get a vaccine. It doesn't matter how much money you have. You can't get a vaccine unless you abide by the authoritarian dictates, by the course dictates of some mindless bureaucrats in Washington DC who are basically, you know, I would argue responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans at this point because of how they are regulating, controlling coercion vis-à-vis the vaccine, let's say, or testing or a whole variety of other things. You can't get, for example, there's a company in Boston that will sell me a kit where I can test myself every day at home with saliva, whether I've got a load of COVID virus that is infectious or not. I can't buy it from that company. I will go and offer them a million dollars. They cannot sell it to me because there's coercion, there's force, there's regulation, there's controls of the FDA saying you can't sell that no matter who wants to buy it. And it goes the both ways as well. So I just want to jump in here because it was April or February or April, I was calling for private in-home testing. Yeah. The technology was available and there is no private in-home testing. Still, it's cheap and truly in-home because a government, because an authority, because somebody who uses a gun prevented it from happening. If that Boston company sells me their in-home kit, they would go to jail and potentially I would go to jail. There was force here. So this is a mixed economy. Yeah, I can do a lot of things without asking for permission, but it turns out that there's a lot of things, that somebody engaging with me and I need to ask permission for in order to execute. So that's a mixed economy. A mixed economy is the economy where we're taxed, regulated, controlled by a government, but we still have the semblance at least of some freedom. And you could move along the mixed economy more towards freedom or more towards authoritarianism. And my ideal is that we move to a position where we're 100% free. We're free of all government controls, regulations and all the dictates of government and dictates of our neighbors. Everybody says to me, but government, we are the government. No, we're not a government. If you didn't vote for the party in the majority, it's not your government necessarily. They're not doing what you want. When I do vote, they don't ask me what to do. They go on and do whatever they want to do. So it's not our government. And even if it was, it's a government where the majority is dictating to the minority. The majority is violating the rights of the minority. So capitalism is the system. Capitalism is freedom. Capitalism is the system where the government's job is to protect individual rights, period. Protect our freedom, period. And everything else is different forms of statism. We're on the way to authoritarianism in some kind of mixed economy, but authoritarianism is right there around the corner. So that was one question you asked. I think this is crucial, right? Why do I talk about all of that? Because it's about freedom. If we're going to talk about politics, it's the only important question to ask. Are we less free? Are we more free? Bill that they're proposing going to lead to more freedom or less freedom? Is this action of the president going to lead us to more freedom or less freedom? What else is there? Everything else is nonsense. And the problem is nobody talks about freedom anymore. Not on the right and not on the left. And that's why, by the way, you started out with me rejecting both right and left. Because I view today both right and left as being either mixed or authoritarian. I'm neither one of those. I'm not mixed. I'm not in the center because I don't know what the center is between these two authoritarian posts. I'm in a completely different dimension. I'm in a dimension of capitalism, individualism, in a dimension of freedom. And until we start thinking of politics in terms of individualism over here, collectivism over here. In other words, authoritarianism. Yeah, you nailed it. That was my next question. Because people on the left always think that Ayn Rand was far right. They describe her as far right because they think everybody that's not liberal must be far right. They only see one dimension. As I read her, she's far more about individual rights versus collectivism rather than liberal versus conservative. So I'm glad that you nailed that. That was fantastic. She denounced the conservatives and she denounced the left. She denounced both right and left in her time. There's an old sense in which right meant individual rights, freedom. But that's gone. Trump laid that one to rest. There is no relationship between the right and individual rights. And conservatives have laid that to rest because they're not advocate of individual rights, certainly not on social issues, for example. But so the spectrum is different. The spectrum is statists and collectivists over there, individualists over here. And I'm on an individual side. So I have enemies, vast numbers of enemies who are both leftists and on the right. That's not liberal. You want to accuse me of being on the other side. That's exactly where I am, right? And so, you know, people tend to forget. You mentioned that Trump proved that there's no individual rights that are protected by the right. Well, he came in as a Democrat running for president and then switched parties. So if he's not, he is not the right. I mean, people are going to hate me for this because I know there are people that love what he said, not said that he stood up for. Yeah. Go ahead. He's not for individualism, but he turns out that he is the right. If the right is associated with Republican Party, is the right associated with religion and Americans who stand for particular ideas, they say they're for the Constitution, even though they have no idea what it means, then he is, he is the right. He had 75 million people who self-identify as being on the right, voted for Donald Trump. So he is the right. That's why I reject both right and left because I reject both Joe Biden and Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and George Bush and all of them going back about 100 years. I mean, the last president I liked was Calvin Coolidge. That's amazing. That's amazing. So they both want, both sides now want big government. Neither one of them is like, okay, you know what we need is less government. And people that say, like in California, they want more powerful, increasing more power in the government. We need to be governed as opposed to, you know, perhaps government should be a public service and a public good, not a power regulation control thing. So I get all that. But what happens, you know, I know you're all for deregulation, corporations should be free to expand regulatory agencies. Don't proliferate them. You know, you don't want to, you want to limit the government's ability to control business. But you don't want to just limit it. You want to abolish it. You think that there shouldn't be just a limit. So I'm happy to hear, I was very happy to hear you call for the end to the Department of Health and Human Services. All right. But what about right now? How do we talk about it, Yaron, when there's deregulation to the point where there's regulatory capture when the corporations become so powerful and they figured out and they game the system that they send their people in with, you know, the EPA, CDC, et cetera, et cetera. And I have a very specific, very point pointed question, which is, think of, I think about it this way. The income of government is limited by taxation. Or it should be, right? Some of these regulatory agencies have not for profits like the NIH and the CDC. And the government can print money. Remember, it's not taxation in the conventional sense. Well, let's think about the big bowl of money that's printed. So the government's access to that, right, is theoretically limited by taxation in contrast to the income of corporations, which is theoretically limited by market availability of revenue demand. So when they capture a regulatory agency, the risk then becomes that they can do coerced consumption. Yeah, I agree. So isn't the solution to that get rid of the regulatory agency and there's nothing to capture? I mean, that's the solution. So as long as government intervenes in business, business will intervene in government. Because government is a gun forcing business to behave in a particular way. So I'll give you an example. There's a number of them, but I'll give you one example. Government for the last five years has been making noises about Facebook. They want to regulate Facebook. They want to control Facebook. They don't like what Facebook's doing. On privacy, on speech, on the way it runs its business, the monopoly, it's whatever. So they bring Zuckerberg in time after time in these ignorant buffoons who we call senators and congressmen. I apologize, but it's infuriating. Sit there and shake their finger at one of the great entrepreneurs in American history who's created billions and billions of dollars of wealth and has improved most of our lives, those of us who use Facebook rationally. Let's put it that way. And they accuse him of all kinds of stuff. What's he supposed to do? Is he supposed to just sit on his hands and wait for the government to come and tell him how he should run his business, which is going to happen? They've already filed an antitrust lawsuit against him, right? Or what he is doing is he's saying, okay, if they're going to come after me anyway, if they're going to try to dictate my speech codes and all of that, why don't I come up with some regulatory ideas and try to get them to adopt mine because it's good for my shareholders and it's good for mine? Well, of course he will. But the only way to stop that, and I don't blame him one second for that because he's acting in self-defense, but the only way to stop that is basically, I mean, I don't know why Congress should ever invite a businessman in front of them unless there's an accusation of fraud on the table, which for some bizarre reason, the FBI or the authorities can't deal with. But why should Congress ever have a businessman in front of them? What is it that Congress can add to our understanding of business, to our knowledge of business? Nothing. So I would like to see government separated from economics. I'd like to see government have no economic policy, no regulations, no antitrust. And then business has no interest in dealing with government. And there's a famous case, I'll tell you this story. I've told it in many of my lectures. In the mid-1990s, Microsoft was the largest corporation in the world. It was incredibly productive, incredibly innovative, and it had the largest market cap of any company in the world. And it basically spent every year on lobbying in Washington, D.C. $0, literally zero. No lawyers, no lobbyists, no building in D.C., no presence in the nation's capital. None, largest company in the world. And Arun Hatch, who is still a Senator, Republican, by the way, from Utah, brought them in in front of some committee and he brought the Microsoft executives. And they were accused of all kinds of things, being a monopoly, being all kinds of things. And at some point, Arun Hatch stood up and he yelled at them and he said, You guys need to have a presence in Washington, D.C. You guys need to lobby. You need to be here, right? In other words, you need to bribe me. That's what he was saying. Microsoft said, literally the executives said, We see no reason to do it. You leave us alone. We promise to leave you alone. And they went back home to, I forget the name, outside of Seattle. Six months later, Justice Department comes knocking on their door. We're here to sue you for antitrust violations. By the way, what was the antitrust infringement that they committed? They were offering a product for free, Internet Explorer. And that is a massive, you know, competitive. How can we offer a product for free? And, you know, they bundled it and it went on. And then basically the government destroyed Microsoft. And for well over 10 years, Microsoft was a shell of itself. It's only in the last few years as the government left have they resurrected Microsoft. That is what happens when government intervenes and business has no choice. What are you supposed to do when somebody with a gun tells you to behave? Well, I'm going to try to capture you. I'm going to try to get you to do what I say. The harm that this does is truly, you know, truly unbelievable. And again, I think the vaccines right now are a great example of this. If you want, I can tell you a story about vaccines. Well, we'll get to that. I'll bring that back up. But I wanted to explore the following thought that we talked earlier about controlling ourselves, controlling our base instincts, right? This cognition. And the, at least the justification that was given for regulation was that people were selling snake oil, FDA, people were putting fillers and foods and this kind of thing. And in a free market economy, there's going to be people that cheat. There's going to be people that load the system and game it in their favor. And so I think that there's a natural, I'm not defending regulation by any means, but I think that to avoid coerced consumption such as near-universality of GMO crops, which leads to pesticide, universal pesticide consumption, you're forced to eat pesticides because the GMO actually grows better. I mean, this is, this is to me a form of coercion. I don't have a choice and I don't know that I don't have a choice. You know, I don't know that I don't have a choice to eat this type of corn or that kind of Mexico just outlawed GMO. So Mexican corn is going to go huge in the United States. It's going to be a real commodity. It's going to be a specialty. So you see cheating in the market and it spikes, you know, there's regulation against in medicine and all the rest. But when corporates take over government and they do things like make a liability free vaccine program where you can't sue them for any damages to vaccines, they have no incentive to fix their product. They've short circuited that natural cycle. Reinforces my point. I mean, if you don't, why is the government involved with vaccines? If the government has two or more involved in vaccines, it wouldn't give them a liability free and then you'd have a free market in vaccines and I'll get to that in a minute. But I mean, what you're saying about GMO is just untrue. First of all, I'm a huge fan of GMO. I love GMOs. I love genetic engineering of all kinds. I think it's the future and I can't wait until they are able to actually improve us, not just the food, the weed. But beyond that, let's imagine a free market. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You said they can improve us. Who's they? Well, whoever innovates and discovers the ways to modify the human genome. I mean, and they will offer it as a product and we will make choices about what we want to do with that. But the point is that and if they can eradicate diseases that way and they can eradicate our inclination to cancer that way and if you eradicate all kinds of things that way, I think that's phenomenal. But take GMO, so assume that Monsanto is doing this GMO stuff. Now, is there anybody who has an incentive to educate you about, let's say GMO is bad, which I don't buy the premise, but let's say it is. It's not the GMO, it's the pesticides, but go ahead. Okay, it's the pesticides. Let's assume the pesticides are bad. And who has an incentive to educate you about the, and there's no FDA as if the FDA educate you about anything, but there's no FDA, there's no government. Who then has an incentive to educate you about non-pesticide grown food? Well, the organic farmers. And organic farmers might want to create a union so they can leverage size in order to do a marketing campaign and they might go to John Mackey and say, you own Whole Foods, how about we do seminars at Whole Foods about the value of, and would you fund maybe a journal or maybe a newspaper article once a month where we tell the people about the beauty of organic. I mean, that's a free market. A free market is where we let ideas out there. I am less concerned about pesticides, let's say, than maybe you are. And maybe I'm wrong, maybe you're right. You know, that's a scientific discussion, right? I am less concerned about pesticides before the cheap pesticide-filled food, you are willing to pay a premium for organic food, and the market segments like that, based on information that's provided by the different vendors who are trying to... Now, is there going to be fraud in the market? Of course. Is there fraud today? Of course. The difference is this. The fraud today is done on a much grander scale because the primary fraud that is committed today is committed by the government. So, I don't know if I'll familiar you all with the food pyramid. There's a food pyramid that the government releases, telling us what food is healthy and what food is not. And for the last 40 years, they've told us that saturated fat from meat is like poison and a disaster. So, avoid fat and eat lots of grains. Grains are great, fat is bad. Which has caused potentially... I mean, this is again a scientific question, one side would argue that it has caused the obesity crisis that we have today in America. That actually, if you eat good saturated fat, it's good for you. It fills you up. You eat less. You know, carbohydrates turn into sugar and cause diabetes, which leads to all kinds of problems. But that's fraud on a huge scale, in a sense. I couldn't get it wrong. You have competition. You have different dieticians presenting different offerings, and we as individuals would be using our minds, rather than letting somebody else, some bureaucrat, use his mind in replacing ours. And we'd each make decisions about what we think appropriate diet is. Some of us would be mistaken. So, there's always fraud. I'll give you one other example from Mark that I'm familiar with, finance, right? Bernie Madoff, you remember Bernie Madoff? Of course, yeah. The largest pyramid scheme in history? Yep. Bernie Madoff did it under the nose of the SEC. Under the nose of probably a dozen different regulatory agencies. The SEC was told about Bernie Madoff's pyramid scheme by another hedge fund who sent them a thick report about what Bernie Madoff was doing or not doing. Three times. They actually sent investigators into Bernie Madoff's offices. And they thought he was clean. And yet, so the market, this hedge fund, had identified the fraud that Bernie Madoff had committed. SEC couldn't. And it took one of his sons to actually go to SEC and tell them before the SEC brought him to justice. So, I think the markets are far better at catching fraudsters, but if the SEC has any job, it should be to catch fraudsters. So, I'm fine with the government devoting resources to catching people who commit fraud, who sell snake oil, who sell tests that don't actually test or sell vaccines that don't actually vaccinate. So, that's incredible. So, I've actually found a spot where you said that some regulation is... No, but this is not a regulation. This is fraud. Laws against fraud have existed since the beginning of common law, certainly for a thousand years. You don't need massive government systems for that. It's not a preemptive law. It doesn't say you can't distribute a vaccine. It says once you distribute a vaccine, if we discover that you have lied in its distribution, then we could sue you for fraud. That's a completely different system than what we have today. And it's not regulation. It's not intervention. This is basic law to protect individual rights. You don't have a right to default on other human being. And again, that has always existed. But, again, I believe that there's a lot less fraud, a lot fewer mistakes, a lot fewer errors in a free market than there are in a government regulated environment. But one more example. If you're a food producer, who do you fear more in terms of inspections? The FDA or the supermarket? Because you know supermarkets send their own private inspectors into food processing plants and into farms. If you're a big food producer, you're not going to be afraid of the FDA because you own the FDA. That's the problem. And you could always bribe the FDA guy. I mean, how much does he make? And if he gets it wrong, would he lose his job? No. But if the private inspector gets it wrong, will he lose his job? Absolutely. And probably be liable and probably be sued. And he's got huge capital involved. So imagine if the FDA was private and had, there were multiple FDA's and they competed with one another to provide information and guidance to the marketplace. Imagine if those regulatory agencies that are needed in order to provide information to inspectors were private. You know why when you plug an electronic into the wall it doesn't blow up and kill you? Well, partially because it turns out that manufacturers have figured out that it's not a good idea to kill their own customers. That's part of it. So that's one strong incentive. But second, there is a private entity that actually certifies all electric products, not a government private entity. So we don't need government to do this. And indeed what government does when it does this is it kills people. And that's what the FDA does. You know, hundreds of thousands of people die every year, maybe millions because of the fact that they don't allow the use of drugs because they've made drug discovery so expensive and because they prohibit us from getting a vaccine that was developed months and months and months ago and we could have been over this whole thing a long time ago. So assuming the vaccine actually could do this for this particular type of virus. So I agree with all of that. And let the virus evolve then it won't be able to stop it. But if we done it in the summer, it'll be over right now. Yeah, that's an arguable point. I think I would hope to think that that would be true. So let me just say everything that you just talked about, Yaron, I totally agree with you to the point where I actually published a peer-reviewed article called Plan B that takes HHS and it makes HHS irrelevant because now it is funded by the government but it's funded by the government in a manner that is not touchable by corporations. So the corporatism to me is 10,000 times worse than having an FDA because if every industry, I'm not arguing that FDA is good. I'm saying it's horrible. I'm saying that the regulation is horrible. But corporations getting into these regulatory agencies and owning them games the system so bad that they start persecuting people for fraud that's not fraud, then we have a problem, right? I agree with you. You're using the term corporatism, which is the wrong term, it's cronyism. But the corporatism plays the corporation. It places the blame on the corporation. The blame is on the regulatory agency. I think if corporations were left alone, then they would leave the regulations. Yeah, we're a total agreement. There would be no regulations. That's my point. And the only way to end cronyism is to get rid of the regulations. As long as there are regulations, there will always be people trying to influence them. And by the way, it's not just corporations. It's unions. I mean, look at teachers. Look at the teachers' unions. They're completely corrupted and destroyed education. It's all kinds of pressure groups that gang up together to go to Washington to try to influence because Washington is in their lives. Now, if Washington got out of education, if the government got out of education, then you would have far better education, far cheaper education. And you wouldn't have this, the unions involved in education because there would be no teachers union, not in the scale of it. Your comments bring to mind a book called The Drug Story by Morris Allison Beale. Have you read The Drug Story? No, I haven't. That's a definite recommendation. What we see here is a history where corporations banded together to say, all right, we're going to have regulation. It's coming. What are we going to do about it? And what we need to do is we need to own this from stem to stern. So we're going to run this government. That's what I mean by corporatism. If you said it earlier, when you said the left, the left appreciates a form of economics that's a type of fascism. That's exactly what we're talking about. So if you have corporate interest and government interest working together, they need to be kept totally apart. They need to be separate. I don't mind them working together. I have no problem with collusion between corporations. Corporations and government get together. It's what's scary. And again, I can't emphasize this enough because it's so crucial. The origin of the problem is always government. I mean the same thing. Why do we have a federal reserve today? And why are banks so involved in the federal reserve? In 1913, it was clear to the big bankers in New York that the government was going to take over their business, that the government was going to establish a central bank that was going to dominate bank. People don't know, before 1914, we had no central bank and things were fine in terms of finance. Indeed, I would argue much better in terms of finance without a central bank. But they knew it was coming. So what did they do? Well, they said, if it's going to come, we want to have a part in writing the laws that make it a reality. And they got together with politicians and they tried to influence them. Now, I have to admit, I prefer the corporations run regulatory agencies than politicians running regulatory agencies. Now, I prefer that nobody run regulatory agencies that they just don't exist. But if I had to choose between Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, AOC, Joe Biden, Donald Trump running a regulatory agency, or CEOs of corporations, I'll take the CEOs of corporations that's smarter, they're more productive. They know how markets actually work. They know something about the world. But I don't want either one of them. I want regulatory agencies into the trash bin of history where they belong. Thank you for that. So I heard you compliment a politician. I can't remember her name on her argument that we can't really justify massive spending, not spending and prioritizing education, prioritizing healthcare for the poor, Obamacare, because we can afford it. What was that politician's name? I can't remember who you're talking about. Wait, AOC? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't remember her name for some reason. So... Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Oh, thank you. Thank you. But here's the thing. You said that that was a winning argument. You said, listen, she's won the argument on moral grounds. I'm not saying you agree with her. I'm not saying you agree with her. I'm not saying you agree with her. But you said she had the winning argument in the public square, where most people are going to believe it. But don't we have to factor in the externalized costs of healthcare, the insurance scam, the expenses of... We have the sickest generation ever with over 54% of people under 20 have chronic lifelong illnesses that require pharmaceutical products after we've invested so much in healthcare. How is that really a winning argument? What about externalizing costs? And I want to go there with respect to what I call good money versus bad money. Well, I'd say we've been externalizing costs for the last 50 years, certainly since Medicare and Medicaid. We've nationalized healthcare, at least 51% before Obamacare, maybe close to 60% today. We regulate insurance companies. I mean, this idea of insurance fraud is absurd. There's no insurance fraud, because there's no insurance. What we have are products created by the state. This is fascism. What we pretend that insurance companies are selling them. But in the state of California, what is included in a policy, and this is Obamacare as well, what's included in a health insurance policy is not determined by the insurance company. It's not determined by me negotiating with the insurance company. It's determined by the state who then tells the insurance company this is what you could sell. So I want to get rid of the externalities. And the only way to get rid of the externalities is to privatize them. The way to privatize them is to make individuals bear the cost of their own behavior. So a lot of Americans are sick because of their own behavior. Well, they should pay higher health care costs than I do. I try to take care of myself. Why should I pay exactly the same on health insurance as they do? Shouldn't there be a premium for being healthy? Shouldn't they be able to adjust, for example? I don't want to pay for other people's health care. Through the government and through subsidies and through controls. I don't want to pay for things that I don't want to use. For example, when I buy a health insurance policy in California, I pay for maternity, but I'm not going to have any more kids. I've done that. I can't even if I wanted to. I pay for acupuncture. I don't want acupuncture. I've tried it. It doesn't work for me. I don't want to have to pay for that service. Mental illness, all these things. I don't want them. Maybe I should have them, but that's my problem. I shouldn't be able to socialize that to other people. So the solution to health care is not to keep loading it up in terms of externalities, to keep creating more and more externalities, but to eliminate the externalities by privatizing. The only way to do that is to get rid of Medicaid, phase it out, to get Medicaid, phase it out, and to allow insurance companies to offer all kinds of products, including products that are customized to poor people, and maybe have insurance against pre-existing conditions, which is an interesting concept, but which I think would evolve in a marketplace. And you could create a lot of, if you're creative enough, and the markets are amazingly creative, we could create products that would ensure everybody in the United States would privatize the cost, would reduce the cost of health care dramatically, because that's what markets do, increase quality and reduce cost. Instead, we've got a bloated bureaucratic, ineffectual, inefficient health care system in which doctors have become bureaucrats. They have checklists. You come in with a particular disease. They say, okay, I have to give you this. Let's see how you respond. Okay, then this, they don't try to customize the health care to you. The whole dream, you remember the dream of personalized medicine? I would say that. You customize your genetics to everything. That's out the window that doesn't exist anymore. We now have collectivized medicine, group medicine, unthinking medicine, and that's because we try to copy Europeans who've had that for decades now. So no, health care is a disaster, and it's going to become a bigger disaster the more we emphasize the collectives the more that we emphasize that part. This is what I love about you, Yaron, because you're so self-consistent, because the same people that are looking at the free market for the medicine that's right for them would then also be free of the perception disruptions, the distorted perception of what's healthy for them and their food in terms of their diet because the FDA has kicked out all of it. So this is why I wanted you here. We've got more to talk about, but I really appreciate your position on the difference between globalists and, you know, global... There is a globalist. Globalist is what I mean by called an anti-concept. Exactly. This is what I'm saying, that the concept of globalism versus, look, we live in a world, there has to be global economics, there has to be trade. But nevertheless, a lot of people are concerned in the United States about the Great Reset, especially people on the right. They don't like the idea, I think, that the idea out there, that somebody out there that doesn't answer to us, that doesn't answer to us, they're not our representatives, they don't answer to us because they're not our neighbor, they're beyond our borders, that they're basically going to broker a shitty deal for Americans. And, you know, is that your take? That, you know, is it feasible? Is it even feasible to do what Klaus is talking about, you know, a future where we own nothing and everybody's happy about that? Is that... No, of course not. I mean, if we own nothing, then everybody's miserable and poor and the population of the world shrinks to probably half a billion. So 90% of us disappear off the face of the earth. We all die. So Klaus is delusional. He's a fascist in his inclinations. I mean, it's deep down real fascism. He's dangerous. But my problem with the Great Reset is not that it comes from Europe. My problem with the Great Reset are the ideas that they're presenting. I don't care if the authoritarian who's going to implement these ideas is American. I'm not a patriot when it comes to bad ideas. I mean, bad ideas are bad ideas are evil ideas. I don't care what the origin, color, skin, sexual orientation. It doesn't matter. Bad ideas are bad ideas. So Klaus's bad ideas come packaged with the German accent, which makes them worse, sound worse, right? But that's good, because maybe when people hear it, they associate it with the kind of Germans who fear. But it's not the fact that it's coming from Europe. It's the fact that there are many people in America who support the Great Reset, who believe that the Great Reset is legitimate. I mean, the entire American left is today dedicated to many of the propositions of the Great Reset. So I oppose them wherever they come from. And I think the right, instead of focusing on the content, is creating some conspiracy theory about Klaus wants to control the world. Klaus is 70-something years old. Maybe 80-something years old. He's not going to control the world. He's not going to be global dictator. Who cares about what Klaus thinks? What I care about is the fact that intellectually, because what drives the world are ideas, intellectually Klaus is having an impact on intellectuals in America. What I worry about are the Harvard, Yale, Princeton professors who agree with Klaus influencing policy in Washington every single day. And we see that in the first days of the Biden administration you're already seeing. They're going to talk nonstop about inequality. They're going to talk nonstop about climate change. And they're going to engage in policies that are destructive to individual liberty and individual freedom. They're going to engage in policies that are destructive to prosperity and to economic growth. And that's what's upsetting. I mean, most of people in America don't know this. But most of the ideas that the founders had when they created America were, God forbid, don't tell anybody this, were European ideas. Because, hey, they were all, they all came from you, but they were reading John Locke and they were reading Montesquieu. And a lot of the ideas, God forbid, were French, right? Montesquieu, Voltaire, the French, the Perperius, the Enlightenment, and Scottish, French and Scottish. I mean, God, this country was created on French. I'm going to get banned from YouTube because you're celebrating Western culture. How dare you? Western culture. The only culture that's ever been really created. It just happens to be, it has nothing to do with skin color or genes. It just happens to be the geography where people came up with good ideas and any way in the world that embraces these ideas of reason and individualism, prosperous in those parts of the world that don't, including the West. They went through that process. That's the thing. Western culture came through a process of considered debate. And they wrote it down. And it's very straightforward. I mean, the closest... Well, they got lucky. They got lucky. Well, maybe we'll see. The origins of good ideas are Greece. And who knows who the Greeks were, but the Greeks. I mean, they invented discovered philosophy. They started debating. They had these debates, ideological debates. And those ideas, both philosophical, aesthetic, were the cornerstone of civilization. You had civilization like Mesopotamia and Egypt, but those were all dead-end civilizations. They went nowhere. They were, in the end, death-worshipping civilization. The first civilization to worship man, to worship life, to worship human beings was the Greek civilization. There's no accident that Greek gods are like human beings with all the same tendencies as human beings. And the two main thinkers in Greek were Plato and Aristotle. And that influenced Rome, and it allowed Rome to thrive. And when Rome fell, I would argue primarily because they abandoned many of the Greek ideas, embraced hedonism and Christianity. When Rome fell, those ideas disappeared. And we went into a dark ages, which was dark, until those ideas were rediscovered by Thomas Aquinas and others that brought them into the Catholic Church and resurrected. And that's why we have something called the Renaissance. The Renaissance is the rebirth of civilization. The rebirth of which civilization? Renaissance of what? Of Greece. That's what they discovered. They discovered Greek art and Greek writings and Greek philosophy. And that led to the scientific revolution to the enlightenment of the creation of America. But the Arabs, for example, just as an aside, the Arabs discovered Greece before the Christians did. They discovered Greece in around 980. And they had a thriving civilization for 200, 300 years. They were into medicine and science, and they did amazing things. And then they decided to abandon Greece. And literally the brightest philosopher, a guy named Al-Ghazali went to the desert. They were struggling with this idea of reason versus faith. And he comes back from the desert and he says, I've got the solution to the problem of reason versus faith. How to integrate them. He says, you can't. And therefore we must abandon faith, reason, and embrace faith. And within 100 years, the libraries are gone. And that's where the representation is indicated. And the Muslim world is where it is today because they chose faith over reason. So it's a good luck. That's a beautiful representation of actual history. What I love about what you do is you're not advocating for adoption. You're just saying, this is the facts. This is subjectivism. I want to take you down a small journey here for the American public if you would. In the 1960s, for instance, if you're born, you grew up in a family. You have mom and a dad, some siblings. You know, you go to school. Around that time, you actually learn as an individual developmentally. I can leave home. I can actually go associate with people outside of my family. So then, while you're at school, you basically learn, you can associate with anybody you want. You have some people you can't. You don't associate with. You know, you get cliques and all the rest. You might play team sports, you can learn compliance. This is where all this comes from, how we socialize our kids. And you grow up, you leave home and college. You actually can choose which groups to, you want to join and this kind of thing. But then you graduate and you get married, and then you say, all right, I'm going to marry this corporation. That's if you're born in the 1960s. I'm going to get a job. This is my career. I have it for the rest of my life. But nowadays, the social ties are so fluid. They're less permanent. There's no assurances. There's no contracts. What do you think the effects of this lockdown culture is going to be on personal social development? Where is the American culture going to be by all this isolation and the resulting sociological dynamics of society? What's that going to do to people? Well, first, I think we're lucky that it happened now versus happened in the 1950s because now, because of technology and other things, we can actually work at home and we can actually do stuff and stay productive. Now, I don't think we would have had lockdowns in the 1950s because the American people wouldn't have tolerated it back then. It says a lot about the American culture that we tolerate lockdowns and we're willing to accept them. The government tells us to stay home even though we're healthy. I mean, how authoritarian can you get? You can't get much more authoritarian than that. So lockdowns are something Americans wouldn't have tolerated 50 years ago. But given that we have lockdowns, at least we have technology and we have the ability to communicate. We have the ability to engage in productive careers and to advance. You know, I don't know sociologically where we'll be. I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem of the lockdowns is much more political than the lessons we learn from it. I think we are gravitating towards more authoritarianism, more mindlessness, more being willing to be told what to do kind of culture. I actually like the fact that people don't have one career in their life. They might have several. I've had four or five that were much more fluid. They were much more flexible. Life is more interesting. The man in the gray flannel suit is a famous movie about kind of the corporate man. And I'm glad there aren't many of those. I'm glad that at IBM you still don't have to wear a particular suit with a particular tie with a particular shirt. The codes are a little looser. I actually think in those senses, in the sense of how we've evolved in terms of careers, things are a lot better. Think about employees today in Silicon Valley who changed jobs every three years. Not because they're forced to, but because hey, they find something even better. They're experimenting. I mean, it's beautiful. I view it as beautiful. So I think sociologically, I think the problems I have more to do with are people willing to think for themselves? Are people willing to take responsibility for their own lives? And I think throughout our society, we're seeing people saying no, that they want to be taken care of, that they want somebody else to take care of. I mean, you're seeing that with the stimulus package, after stimulus package, after stimulus package, and checks written, and just massive amounts of government spending to give people stuff rather than to leave people free to create their own stuff, which is what America has always been about. So that is what I worry about. I worry about this increased dependency that we see among Americans. Yeah, with the dependency comes compliance, right? So oh my gosh, I have to have my monthly minimum income. If I don't have my monthly minimum income, how am I gonna live? Well, you don't realize you could live on your own resources and smarts? Just being alive. Yeah. Just being alive. Just go for it. Yeah. We used to think you had to produce a note to get a check, but now that's gone. The government could print the money and give it to me. Yeah, that's true. That is the real damage of this coronavirus. Never mind the 100,000 lives that the government said were lost, but beyond that, it's going to be this idea that we don't have to work in order to get stuff, and we're compliant. The government tells us to wear a mask when we're at the beach. We wear a mask at the beach. The government tells us to wear a mask while we're running outdoors. We wear a mask while we're running outdoors. The government says just stay home. Don't go anywhere. We just stay home. We don't go anywhere. Americans used to be the people that don't tread on me of compliance, of individualism. That is what we've lost during COVID. I couldn't agree. The gift from the government is your compliance. You know, looking at kids and young adults today with what's happening politically, I was shocked at how quickly things got so bad because people are so pent up. They have all this pent up rage about loss of control of their life because of coronavirus, and they're just scapegoating the other party. I think that's really happening. What people are learning is that power affords you a double standard. If you're in power, you're right. Might makes right. But it's all about power, and of course that is a consequence of government controlling so many aspects of our life because they are power. So everything is politicized now. Everything is about political power, and the battle is not about creating products. It's not about producing. It's not about building. It's about controlling. I, unfortunately... No, no, it's all good. I wanted to give you time if you had to get to your vaccine story, then we're out. Well, I'll do this quick because I have another meeting that you started. I'll just say, you know, I don't know how many of the listeners know this, but the vaccine, the Moderna vaccine for COVID was worked out in mid-January of last year. Two days after the Chinese released the genome of the virus, released it unofficially because the guy who released it was then barred from his own lab because the Chinese government didn't want to do it. So, but that's a whole other story about China. But there was the genome of the vaccine was released in mid-January by the Chinese researcher. Moderna, within a weekend, that weekend, had developed a vaccine, sent it off to its manufacturing plant. By, I think it was late April, early May, they had vaccines ready to go. Then they had to abide by FDA regulations, which had to extend this all the way. And then, in November, so we could have been vaccinated in April, May, right? And now I wouldn't have vaccinated everybody. I would have said, look, this is an untested vaccine. We don't know what the side effects are going to be exactly. It's safe. We did phase one trials and it looks like it's safe, but we haven't done this on mass numbers of people. But if you want to, you can be a kidney pig. You can come in and you do it and there's a contract and maybe the contract is where you get the exclusion for liability. And I, my guess is the thousands, maybe millions of people would have been vaccinated. We would have had a mass test. We would have seen if it works. We would have seen if there were side effects on large numbers of people, right? Maybe some people, maybe a bad vaccine would have been there. Some people would have got real bad side effects. Maybe if you would have died. But you know, the alternative is, how many people have died since then from COVID? Yeah. Part of the mix there, I know you've got to run, but part of the mix there is the CDC botched their test in April. Yes, I didn't even get to that, to the bot CDC test. All right, well listen. I didn't get to the developer test. All of this is just justification for why government should be hands-off from medicine. Listen people, if you don't agree with Yaron Brook so far, find his channel on YouTube. You have another podcast coming up that you're going to launch soon. What's that? What's the name of that new podcast? Well, I'm not ready to do that, but I can find you on the Yaron Brook Show.com. Find the Yaron Brook Show on YouTube and get schooled on how to say what you already think. I couldn't endorse this man more. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here. It was fun. Thank you. Thanks.