 Everybody, welcome back to the What Is Money show. I am thrilled and honored today to be sitting down with Mr. Yaron Brooke, host of the Yaron Brooke show and chairman of the board of the Ein Rand Institute. Yaron, welcome to the show. Thanks, thanks for having me on. Looking forward to this. Really looking forward to this. I appreciate you coming on earlier and just you're going to really, I think, help me sharpen my understanding of Ein Rand's work in this conversation. And hopefully my audience gets a lot of value out of that. And we originally connected on Real Vision. We talked about Bitcoin and Gold, I believe. And I really enjoyed that discussion. So thank you for doing that again. And Ein Rand, you know, I was telling you offline, she is someone that I consider myself to be a increasingly a closet fan of. I haven't read any of her books cover to cover yet, but I've been working my way through a number of her texts that are published online. And I have a high degree of resonance with her as it pertains to freedom, relationship to the government or to the state and her ideas on property. So I'm hoping we can start to get into some of that today. And I, you know, again, gonna be really leaning on your understanding because I have not read enough of her yet, but certainly plan to do more of that throughout this conversation. So I started reading the virtue of selfishness today. And maybe I'll just open by reading an excerpt of that. So Ein Rand writes, yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word selfishness is concern with one's own interest. This concept does not include a moral evaluation. It does not tell us whether concern with one's own interest is good or evil, nor does it tell us what constitute man's actual interest. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions. So my current view on this, this is kind of like the Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris debate about ought and is, right? Like we have science in the world telling us what is to some extent, but the struggle has been how to derive what we ought to do from this set of, you know, objectively determined facts. And it appears to me that Ein Rand is sort of surfing that edge about, she's saying there's an objective dimension to human reason, human morality, perhaps this gets into natural law. And I'll just state my current views to see how they may be shaped throughout our conversation is I've labeled myself freedom maximalist, which is essentially libertarian anarcho-capitalist, agarist, there's all these different terms, just maximizing mutual consent in all action, right? No coercion, basically. But the limiting principle of that in my current view is private property rights. Everyone should seek to maximize their own self-interest or their own, I guess as Ein Rand would say selfishness up to the point or up to the boundary of other people's person and property. That's how I think we create the most wealth in the world and it's also how we resolve the most conflict of our scarce resources. So a bit of a mouthful, but I just wanted to kind of put my position out there initially so we can see how it goes through the conversation here. So there's a lot of obviously in common between you views and Rand's, although again, we've talked about this before. She was not an anarchist. She believed in limited government, a government that did not coerce a government that protected you from coercion and we can get into that. But let's talk a little bit about this is art and selfishness issue because I think this is really at the core of her ideas. And in many respects, the politics are derivative of her ethics. You start with the ethics, you start with your purposes in your life, why and how to live your life and the politics kind of come out of that. So it is this question, there's this fundamental question in philosophy about how do we derive and can we derive an art? What one should do from reality, from the nature of existence, from objective fact, from science, from what's out there. And I mentioned you absolutely can. And the virtue of selfishness and the first essay in the virtue of selfishness, the objective morality, is really geared towards solving the problem. There is art problem. The problem that philosophers have told us over and over again cannot be solved that Sam Harris attempts to solve it, I think somewhat superficially, but it's attempts to solve it and that Jordan Peterson is saying, you can't do it, forget it. It's not doable. Rand wrote about this, virtue of selfishness was published in the 60s, so she wrote about this a long time ago. And I think she had it solved. She basically is saying, look, the fundamental question that human beings have to face at the core of everything else is to put in Hamlet's terms to be or not to be, to live or not to relive, to survive or not to survive. We all face a basic alternative. Certain actions we take are gonna lead to death, certain actions that take are gonna lead to life. Death is a one-way street and once we decide we're not going down that street, if we decide we wanna die, human knowledge is irrelevant, ethics is irrelevant, everything else is irrelevant. What makes ethics morality irrelevant is the choice to live. And once you make the choice to live, then the question is, well, what are the things in reality that are required for us in order to survive, in order to live? How as human beings do we live? And that's a scientific question, right? This is poison, don't take that. This is good food, yes, take that. These are behaviors that will leave to destruction. These are behaviors that will lead to a full life as a human being. These are values that if you take seriously lead to death, these are values that if you take seriously lead to life. And basically the ideas, the values, the virtues, that are gonna lead to life, that are gonna lead to success, that are gonna lead to flourishing, that's the good and everything else is bad. And that's the good is morality, right? The moral is the good. Morality is a science of values. It's a science of the values that are essential, that are important for leading a life, for living one's life. It's a basis on which we make decisions about important things in life. So the values and virtues that lead to life are the good and everything else is to be avoided and therefore we would label evil or bad. Okay, that's a good- So the is, if you will, the is as human nature, the is as the fact that we face this alternative that we can die, the art is all the things and we can get into the details of what the art is, all the things that make human life possible, that support human life and advance human life. And we can get into what those specifically are, particularly what are the principles, the ethical principles that lead to living versus the alternative. Wonderful. So I like this, this is a good bedrock to start on then. The good, right? The good being that which enables or energizes or improves life in some way, right? And we could, to try to keep this as objective, objective and subjective is something I'm wrestling with a lot lately, but we'll say objective as in rational or true. She called it philosophy of objectivism because she had strong ideas about what objective means because it's an important idea, it's an important concept. Yes, and maybe we can go into that a bit more. So the simple principle I'm trying to extract here is that that which works, right? That which suits the nature of a life form is what is good. What enables it's evolution, it's flourishing, it's continuance, it's livelihood, I guess. So yeah, so it very much is empirical, right? So you start with observing human behavior and you have to have a few hundred or maybe a few thousand years of data to come up with the principles of what works and what doesn't. Right. And she once said that she could not have developed her ethics fully unless she had lived post-industrial evolution. So the experience of the industrial evolution, seeing the industrial evolution taught us something important about what leads to human success because the industrial evolution took the human race from poverty. Yes. So the type of expectancy of 30 from zero progress, zero advance, you were born and died with the same amount of stuff, no wealth creation, no nothing. Do this amazing what economists did when McCluskey calls it great enrichment, right? Suddenly we're thousands of times better in terms of the quality of our life than we were before. So it taught what is possible in terms of the industrial evolution. And you could say politically it's taught us that freedom works. We can talk about that. But morally what it really taught, what Ayn Rand got from it is the role of reason in human progress. That is if you think about reason before the industrial evolution, it was kind of reason, people who used reason were kind of people who sat at their desk and contemplated stuff, right? They wrote and they thought they were intellectuals but the link between reason and life expectancy, the link between reason and quality of life other to the person doing the contemplating, the link between reason and living with a capital L kind of really living was tiny, was hard to see, was hard to observe and world out there. The industrial evolution made it real, right? You saw the link between science, engineering and business that as somebody taking the science and engineering and turning it into life enhancing means all of which are driven by what? By human reason, by the ability to think, to abstract, to understand the world, to observe the world around us, to abstract principles from it and then to reshape nature, to suit our needs. And so she starts with looking at the world and saying, okay, what kind of behaviors, what kind of, what values does human beings need in order to thrive? Number one on that list is reason. And you can look back and say, even pre-industrial evolution, look back and say, okay, well, how did hunters hunt? I often in my talks ask people, I ask people to look around the room and see what a miserable animal human beings are. We're weak, we're slow, we have no claws, we have no fangs, try running down a bison and biting into it, right? And yet there's probably a place just around the corner from where you live that sells bison boogers, right? So how do we get to that point? How do we go there? And you get there because you develop tools, strategies, traps, all require what? They require thinking, they require human reason, they require that faculty that is unique to human beings or what makes us human. And then you look around the world and suddenly you discover, oh, there's reason and there's reason. You know, everything is a product of reason. You can't build a house without reason. We don't have the gene for building a house. Despite of Sam Harris's determinism, animals who are not human cannot build a house. You have to think it through and people can innovate, they can build houses like nobody else built them before because they can really think it through and figure it out and use their reason. So reason is always at the top in terms of the values that lead to a good life and therefore our moral life is a rational life. It's a life guided by reason, as opposed to emotion or as opposed to revelation or waiting for revelation. You know, the only way to discover truth is use your senses and use your mind. Okay, beautiful. Yes, makes a ton of sense in the, yeah, the chart that comes to mind, which I'm sure you're envisioning here as well, is GDP per capita is flat forever until we hit the industrial revolution and it absolutely explodes and is exploding even more in the digital age. So in a way- Yeah, it's important to understand why that happened and what historical consequences happened, but also philosophically, what changed. And one of the key changes is a respect for reason. So think about it this way. In the beginning of the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment starts somewhere around, let's say 1700, right? It's about 75 years before the industrial revolution. The beginning of the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution happens and people like Newton start to explain the physical world to us using reason. And people start looking at that and say, wow, this is cool. I can understand the world around me. I don't have to depend on a book that was written 2000 years ago. I don't have to get guidance from my priest or from my whatever. All I need to do is observe, run these experiments. Yeah, Newton has to help me out because I wouldn't have discovered this myself. But I can truly understand how the world works. If that is true, if I have this faculty called reason, they can explain the physical world. How come I can't make decisions about who to marry? Remember back then, you didn't get to choose who to marry. How come I can't decide what profession to go into? You didn't decide your profession. You basically did what your father did. You joined the guild that your father was in and that's what you did for it. That's been that way forever. How come I can't decide who my political leaders will be? How come I can't decide how to live, what to do? And suddenly you get this revolution of independence, of people demanding their freedom, people demanding the ability to use their own mind because before, the way you control people, the way you control people is tell them they can't think. Tell them they don't know what's good for themselves. Tell them they need somebody to explain and to guide their lives and to hold their hand and to feed them and to, and that was their aristocrats or the king or the pope or God or whatever. That is the way you suppress people. But as soon as you tell people you have in mind, you can think for yourself, you can't stop them at that point, the demand for liberty, the demand for freedom, they wanna use that mind. Who are you to tell me how to live? And you notice the state today, the government today, users always uses paternalistic arguments, right? Of course. You can't tell how to deal with COVID so we're gonna have to lock you up, right? We can't trust you to figure out what the right medications are, what the right this or that is. We have to mandate it, right? We have to force it because you're not smart enough to figure it out for yourself. In the early 17th century, 18th century, people woke up and decided they were smart enough and they, and you know, it's the same with slavery. If you slave owners used to say, oh, we take care of our slaves, they're too dumb to take care of themselves. But once you realize all human beings have reason, all human beings can take care of themselves, all human beings have this capacity, then they break their shackles and they wanna be free. And it's a logic standard. If we can teach people that today, that's how we get the political freedom. I always say, don't start with freedom. Start with these basic concepts and then freedom falls into place. That's what happened in the 18th century. That's what we got in this revolution because I don't have to ask you for permission to start my business. I don't have to ask the king for a permit. I don't, you know, that's the whole principle. I have my mind for myself. I can do it myself. No, that's excellent framing. And I'm especially on the last point where you talk about permissionlessness. Yes. There are certainly echoes of that in the digital age, things like Bitcoin and whatnot. There's a great power in not needing to ask permission. Absolutely. You can think of the industrial revolution as a permissionless society, at least when it came to economics. And that's why we had an industrial, that's why we had an industrial revolution because people could innovate, they could create new things, they could build new businesses, they could merge, they could break up businesses, they could do all this stuff, no permission. And you could think of the world in which we live today is we're moving more and more and more into a permission-driven society. What are regulations? If not ways in which an authority comes in and says, you need my permission to braid hair, you need my permission in California, it's a shampoo hair, you need a license. What's a license? A license is permission from the government. So permission is slow, yeah. And the only way you can have a permissionless society is if you believe that people have the capacity to reason for themselves. So that's amazing. So it's the industrial, well, I guess it's before that even, right? We talked about Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton was a mineral alchemist. Like there was a- You have anything? He was. He was. Sorry, this is again something I got from Peterson, but essentially there was a belief in the body of the church for some time that we didn't need to go and figure anything out. Christ was the final redemption, we were done. We just lived like this forever. But there was a group of people in the church that became known as the alchemist that said, no, we can go out and do experiments in nature and make things better, basically. Which became kind of proto-scientific method, which became, I guess, the discovery of reason in a lot of ways. Oh, I mean, reason was known going back to the Greeks. The Greeks are really the discovers of reason in the Aristotle versus the father of logic and really the father of science and the father of empirical science. What happened in the 18th century is that they came to the understanding that reason could explain the world out there. So they came to understanding that Aristotle had already come to 2,000 years earlier. They finally caught up with Aristotle. And then they said, this is the only means of knowledge. This is where we get to start farming. There is no other way to get information. It's not that they are revealed mechanisms of revelation. No, ultimately the way in which we learn about the world is through our senses and through our understanding, through our mind, through our reasoning capacity. And the reason is connected to our observation about the world. And again, it's not just about contemplation in a dark room. It is about going out there into the world and understanding nature and figuring it out and then reshaping nature to fit our needs. That is the great innovation of the 18th century. It made reason practical in a sense that it had not quite been identified as being in previous centuries. And the church had a lot to do with that cause the church basically said, truth is revealed. That's where truth comes from. It comes from the books. It comes from Jesus. It comes from reading the Bible. This is why they fought against the heliocentric. The earth is the center of the universe. It says in a book and they fought Galileo because of that. So, but no, our senses tell us that it's not that way. Our reason tells us that it's not that the earth goes around the sun. Oh, and once we accumulate more evidence that yeah, we can do this. We can understand the world without reference to that book. Well, the book kind of becomes irrelevant. It becomes less relevant. And now the world is about our ability to observe and understand. Yes, interesting. Okay, so yeah, your great point. Reason had been, we'd known about reason for a long time, but we had not respected reason in individuals widely. It was kind of an ivory tower type affair, I guess. And so another thing that jumps out here is the, there's that quote from, I figured it was set up, but every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So it's almost like we figured out that we could imprint our reason into the world as capital basically in the Industrial Revolution and created this flywheel effect of wealth creation. Right? So we could... You know, I'm a finance guy, so I love capital, but if you think about the flywheel effect, it's what really drives the flywheel is not capital, what really drives the flywheel are ideas, what really drives it is if you will ingenuity, right? But it's knowledge applied in a new way. So the real magic is what happens in here when we take the stuff that we know and we come up with a new idea, a new hypothesis and you and then test it and then figure out how to do something completely differently. So that's where the magic happened and that's where this real acceleration happens. It's the freedom because of the permissionless society. Basically, the freedom says, you can think any thought you want. There's no dogma anymore. There's no dogma that says, this is how it's supposed to be. If you can figure it out, if you can make it work, go for it. You know, we're discovering new laws of physics, we're discovering new laws of biology. You know, we discover evolution, we discover all these things. There's huge amounts to discover out there. Go use your mind to discover and suddenly you unleash the minds of millions of people to come up with the ideas and that's the flywheel effect. The flywheel effect is you build a steam engine, I then figure out how to make a steam engine even better than yours, you know, call it competition. But I make one and then you improve yours and I improve mine and then somebody comes around and creates an electric motor that blows our steam engine out of the water or diesel motor in eternal combustion mode the steam engine is irrelevant now. But that idea, begetting idea in the whole process of ingenuity and constantly refining and getting better at changing the world, changing nature, if you will, to suit our needs. That's the thing that drives progress. That's the things that makes that exponential graph possible. I completely agree that it is, and I've written about this, it's all about ideas ultimately. Information's almost the ultimate substrate, but there is this reciprocity, right? Where we imprint our reason into the world as capital, we've then afforded ourselves even more free time, right? We've caught more fish per man hour or whatever the thing is. We've invented candlelight so we can read into the nighttime, whatever it is. And that allows us to further exercise our reason to create even more sophisticated capital and production structures and create even more wealth. So there's this feedback loop between... Absolutely, it's constant. And think about a big part of why it happened when it happened is that the fact that we had a printing press that was invented a few hundred years earlier that now people could read, they could educate themselves. Again, more people having more ideas. Interacting into this society. I mean, I always say, I hope we have eight billion people today. I hope we have 10 billion one day and 20 billion one day. Because the more people they are, the more thinkers they are, the more ideas they are, the more capital there is, the more progress you get, the more ingenuity you have, the more progress there is. And that's, you know, it's people produce growth. And if you want more growth, you need more people. Absolutely, yeah, there's, I think the number, I could be wrong about this, but I wanna say it's a data throughput issue where we each have, I think it's 120 bits per second of conscious awareness. So you start to multiply that out by number, you know, we're effectively nodes on a network to use the Bitcoin analogy. It's like the more people you have, the more nodes of ideas you have in this network called the global marketplace. That's right. And but if you're not free, and if you're not free, those nodes are meaningless, right? Because they can't do the stuff they need to do. Exactly. Or if they're badly educated, they're not maximizing the throughput. Or, and this is where, you know, I disagree with Sam House for example, if they don't choose, I believe in free will, if they don't choose to use their throughput, right? Right. Then you don't get the benefits. So you all, in order for me to have the best life that I possibly can, I need 8 billion people to be engaged with the world using their reason, free to use it and have the right morality going back to our point about morality so that they're motivated and incentivized to use it in order to improve their own lives. But by doing that, my life gets better, right? Because I'm on this network with all these 8 billion people and if they're all flourishing, it's likely I'm gonna be flourishing and the possibilities that I have to flourish, multiply dramatically. It's why I say it's selfish for me in Iron Man's definition of selfish to try to change the world because if the world becomes better, my life becomes better significantly. Right, absolutely. Okay, so there's this theme then of discovery, right? It's almost like there was a dogma for some amount of time where people thought this was it. We're looking, you know, the universe is finite or everything's figured out, it's in this book or it's in this authoritarian whatever. But then all of a sudden that spectrum has completely opened up to infinity essentially because it's like, no, you can discover things by asking questions and experimenting. And this just unlocked human potential, I guess, that became reflected in the Industrial Revolution. Absolutely, it's exactly it. It unlocked that potential, it's unlocked in Europe. And then when you look at, if you look at China over the last 40 years, think about China and think about all that unlocked, not unlocked, locked potential, human potential under Mao Zedong, right? Nobody was allowed to do anything without permission. And as soon as they allowed some people to do some things permissionless, they started create wealth. And they started, you know, and you get the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution in China on an accelerated basis because they could build on all the knowledge that already existed in the West. Just because they allowed for a little bit of freedom. Right. So imagine if we truly had eight billion free people. Right. You know, free people who are emboldened to think for themselves and not ask permission and to act and to do, we'd be many multiples richer than we are today. Hey, everybody. As you've no doubt learned by watching this show, Bitcoin is the single most important asset you can own in the 21st century. 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So think about, think about for fine land, right? So this becomes morality, right? So it's moral to use your reason, right? Because you have the option not to use it. And if you don't use it, what you're basically choosing is not to live the best life that you could live. So reason is correlated with living your good life. It's causally related, right? The more reason you use, the more successful you will be at life. So it becomes one of the primary moral values is pursue reason. And that is incredibly empowering as a philosophy. So think about what a pre-rand. What is most moral theory about in the world in which we live and certainly in the world in past centuries? Moral theory is about teaching you how to sacrifice, how to suffer for the common good, for the public welfare, for God, for your neighbor, for anybody who happens to have less than you have. The whole, I mean, morality is almost synonymous in our minds with helping other people. Why? Rand turns that up suddenly, she says, no, morality is about teaching you how to live, not teaching you how to die, teaching you how to live, and how to live the best life that you can. That's a moral life. Now it turns out that living a good life means not violating other people's rights, property rights, other rights, because that would be harmful to you if you violated other people's rights. And you wanna live in a rights-protecting environment because then your rights are protected. So, but at the core, it all comes from this idea of selfishness, of self-interest as a moral ideal which rejects sacrifice and suffering for the sake of others. Okay, so given the importance of reason, I wanna get real clear on our definitions here. Can we unpack reason, define reason, its relationship to knowledge and or epistemology? And then the two modes of epistemology that I've explored are rationalism and empiricism, one being based on axiomatic presuppositions of some kind, the other being based on experiment. Let's just really get solid on reason given its importance to everything we're gonna talk about. Yeah, huge, huge topic because there is this dichotomy and epistemology of rationalism and empiricism. And what Einwitz says is that's a false dichotomy. Interesting. There is a third option, which is what she calls objectivity. It is that you, yes, you look at reality, you are engaged in empirical activity. But from that observation of reality, you induce principles, you induce principles from which you can deduce conclusions. So it's in a sense, they are axioms. She has a few, one would be kind of a, this is the same axiom Aristotle had. Well, existence exists, things are what they are, they just are, A is A Aristotle said. Now, is that an axiom devoid of empirical evidence? Well, of course not. It's kind of, it's based on the fact that this world exists, the world that I'm observing. So it takes away this idea that there's a conflict between axioms and observation. Your axioms are basically conclusions you come to from. From observation. Sorry to say one thing here, even Mises, who, man must act, this is core axiom, he was asked how do we know that man must act? And he said through observation. So I think he would agree with randomness. Yes, so it's, yes, and Mises and Rand were friends. And at least for a while, they used to have dinner together. That would have been fun too. Yeah, no kidding. They don't know those. So this economy, this economy of things are not connected to observations. They're just axioms, this is the kind of sitting in a dark room and deducing all of philosophy. Well, that can't be right. But it also can't be right that we're just observing stuff and we're learning more materially and everything is in flux and nothing is permanent, nothing is constant. What we need is to, from observations of things, induce, this is the power of induction, the principles that then we can then use to live by, use to do science by, use to do economic by. We induce the principle of man must act. And then we can now work with that, right? That allows us to work with a principle. We don't have to recreate all the empirical observations every time we wanna make some observations. So reason is the faculty that makes that all of that possible. So reason integrates man's perceptions. So we perceive stuff, right? Light shapes. But what reason does is it takes that perceptions and helps us form concepts and abstractions, right? Animals perceive, but they don't think. They can't abstract, right? They see, so a lion sees a zebra. Maybe it sees zebras, but it doesn't, it can't have a concept of, it doesn't have a tomb for it. It doesn't have a concept for it. It doesn't have these zebras are part of a family. Some of their family's food, some of their family's not food. It just has a zebra and it knows to eat. It must hunt the zebra. Human beings create a concept of animals. Within it, there's zebras with their mammals, their reptiles that, you know, we classify, we go more abstract, we go more concrete. So we take observations, all we see are zebras. We don't see animals. We see zebras and lions and ants and we see, and then we abstract from all these, the concept of animal. Yes. And people don't think about where we get a concept. Like you see, you can kind of perceive a chair, right? But you can't see furniture. Furniture is now an abstraction that unites chairs and sofas and beds all under one concept. But there's nothing that looks the same about all these things. You now have to have an abstraction furniture, which needs a definition that's separate from the chair and the bed and the sofa. So reason is that faculty, it's our ability to abstract, to form concepts from empirical observations, from our perceptions, right? So animals stay at the perceptual level. They just perceive stuff. They can differentiate between the stuff, but it's just stuff. We categorize, abstract, create even greater abstractions, manipulate, and then we can build the stuff, right? So then we can start changing nature to fit what we need to fit. Right. So it's the only way in which we grasp reality, we know stuff is through this use of reason. And reason depends on both induction and deduction. It depends on both parts of logic. So induction being more like the discovery, whereas deduction is, you see a sudden phenomena, so you see little kids doing this. See little kids are great induces, right? Your kid will take this and they'll drop it. And you might pick it up and give it to them and they'll drop it again. And you're getting frustrated because why do they keep dropping? Because they're testing. Is gravity always work? Well, only sometimes. And at some point, they go, yeah, gravity... You pick it as a constant. Yes. And they might not just do it with this, they might do it other places, they might see that they fall down, they might see other phenomena that are similar and they'll induce from that. Right. Things fall down, which later they'll learn as gravity. Right. Things go on downwards. You are abstracting out a principle from a sample of observations through induction. And then deduction would be, once you've established that as a presupposition, you can logically or conceptually deduce from that assumption. And you can connect it to the rest of your knowledge. Right. You can connect it to other things. And you can generalize that way. So you can induce, you know, I don't know, you can induce things drop. You know, can I come up with a good deduction from that? But yeah, I'd need to think about that. But you can then use deduction in, you know, deduction to kind of generalize, okay, I figured out it works here. You can maybe deduce a human of the thing so a human would probably drop if they walked off the cliff, right? Without having to empirically test it. Exactly. You would deduce that. Yes. All things drop, humans are things, humans would drop, right? Yes. You know, that's pretty rough, but something like that. Exactly. So you use deduction to generalize after you've come up with the principle. Now you test it out. Now you might find birds don't drop. Okay, so not all things drop. Maybe things without wings. And now you have to, now you start refining your knowledge based on, based on stuff like that. But induction is how you generalize to a new, all new knowledge is inductive. Right. Because you're generalizing from perception, from reality, from what you observe. Understood, okay. All right, so this is really interesting. Then we, what is distinguishing human beings as more successful than all other animals is the fact that we're using our reason to create higher resolution maps of reality and effect. You can think of it that way, higher resolution. You can think of it as just as a map, right? Because animals don't have a map. I mean, maybe they remember paths, some animals programmed into them, but they don't have a sense of geography, right? Because again, they can't abstract. But yes, there's a sense in which we make maps and we can make maps through time, which is against something animals typically can't do. We can project 20 years under the future and have a plan. Right. But I think what differentiates human beings from animals, and this is, it's a pretty amazing leap within evolution, that human beings have the capacity to reason, to use this capacity for abstraction and conceptualization, but they don't have it automatic. See, this ability is not an automatic ability. It is an ability that must be initiated. It must be turned on, if you will. And that's the essence of free will. Free will is not whether I raise my finger or not, right? Free will is whether I choose to focus my mind or not. If you will, free will is to think or not to think. That's the fundamental question we all face, right? To think or not to think. That is what it means to be or not to be, to live or not to live, is to think or not to think. And some people choose for whatever, for no reason, but they choose. No reason that we can come up with. They choose not to think. They choose not to focus their minds. They choose not to engage in reality. And therefore, you can see them out there, right? They're people who are just zombies. They're just walking through life. They're just doing what's expected of them. They're doing what they're told. They might think at work and not think at home. They might think sometimes and not other times. They're drifting, right? They have a sleep. Real free will is turning that on and keeping it on and being focused and engaged in the world, which means staying focused and staying thinking, right? Staying thinking about stuff, right? And I think the people who change the world are thinkers, the people who change their own lives, the people who live happy lives, the people who think it through, figure it out. They don't just accept. They don't just absorb. This calls to mind, a quote I learned recently was the price of freedom is constant diligence. You could say that the price of the price of, yeah, I mean, constant vigilance is politically is the cost of freedom. And you could say that epistemologically, vigilant is the price of truth, the price of efficaciousness in your thinking. You have to be vigilant, you have to be constantly on. You, I mean, you could rest, nothing against resting, but achievement, success is a consequence of turning reason on and being fully embracing it fully. Okay, love this. So let me ask you this. This is a question, I don't know if this is a question or an assertion, I'm just gonna try to say it. So we're attempting to fashion the world from reason. This is almost, it's like we had this whole history of human development. And then we actually turned reason in on ourselves in a way to discover reason that we noticed that there are these patterns across all of human history. Like, hey, if we adhere to the dynamics of these patterns, then we can create a better reality. But there's also this weird moral line where sometimes it could be from a purely objective economic standpoint, quote unquote, reasonable, say to go and steal someone's food or farm or whatever, the product of someone else's labor. So there's this dance or this line we're trying to navigate between imprinting our reason into the world while also securing ourselves from the traps that others can create with their own strategies or reason. Like, this seems to be the line of morality somewhere in there. So, I mean, going from reason to property rights, I mean, there's a sequence, a logical sequence we would have to go from reason to property rights. But look, the only basis for property rights is reason. There is no basis to having property rights other than reason and other than the recognition of human reason, ultimately. Could force be another one? Sorry, because I've connected. The force is the entire reason. The force is crucial, right? So force is a crucial concept because force, so this is the logical sequence in there. If we hold that reason is man's basic means of survival, so the way human beings survive, whether they recognize it or not, is through reason, right? You can't plant food unless you have a plow. Somebody had to produce that plow. Somebody had invented. Somebody had to figure out how to use it. Reason made that possible, right? So you only have a plow because of reason. So man's means of survival, it's basic means of survival, that the thing that makes it possible for human beings to live and to flourish and be successful is reason. Well, what's the enemy of reason? What is the thing that makes reason impotent that makes it irrelevant, that takes it out of the equation? Well, that's force. If I put a gun to your head, your thoughts are irrelevant. Your analysis of reality is irrelevant. Your knowledge of science is irrelevant. You're gonna do what I tell you to do because otherwise I'll pull the trigger, right? Your life now depends not on reason, on obedience. It's the only circumstances in which, you know, reason is irrelevant. You know, you could think, well, I could use my reason to figure out how to overcome the force. But, you know, if I'm literally putting a gun to your head, there's no overcoming the force and I'm good at it and so on. Then your reason is impotent. So when we come together in groups, right? When we come to society, then we have to figure out in order for individuals to survive, to thrive, we have to be able to say, how do we eliminate reason from human society? Sorry, how do we eliminate coercion, force, authority from human society? Because think about authority. Think about before Galileo when the Catholic Church had a real grip on human knowledge and you came out and said, uh-uh, the earth goes around the sun, not the other way around. What happened to you? You'd be burned to the stake, right? There was an authority to determine what the truth was. So the enemy of reason is any form of authoritarianism, force and coercion. Right. So we need to extract force from society. So when we come into, and there's a huge benefit of living in society, there's a huge benefit of trade, of living with groups and it's why people move to the city. There's a huge advantage in numbers and in networks that are created when we can meet face to face. But we wanna make sure that we can meet face to face without you pulling a gun and destroying everything that it builds. Right. Now to identify that, we have come up with a concept and that concept is individual rights. What does a right mean? A right means that it's kind of an ethical political concept but it's really an ethics. It basically says that you are free as an individual to use your mind and to act on your judgment in pursuit of your values, free of coercion, of force, of authority. So individual rights recognizes your freedom as an individual to use your mind in pursuit of your values. It recognizes the fact that forces the enemy of reason. It says you have a right to be free of force. And how do we operationalize individual rights? I would say we need a foreign institution, right? The basic job is to prevent people from shooting each other. It's basic job is to prevent people from stealing from one another, to prevent people from violating other people's rights. That's it. And then arbitrating disputes because sometimes it's tricky to figure out who violated whose rights, whose property line is it? And that's, let's call it government. It's a horrible word these days but that's what governments should be for. That's it. It's the protector rights and to arbitrate disputes and that's all we need governments for. But we need them because you need an institution to be able to do that, to extract force from human society because forces are evil. Property rights are derivative of the fundamental right to life. That is, if you have a right to live your life based on your judgment in pursuit of your values, property is a big way, maybe the most important way in which you do that, right? It's not meaning to live in your life in pursuit of your values if you don't get to keep the product that you produce that anybody can take it from you at any point. That's what it means to live your life based on your values. So the most important derivative from the right to life is the right to property, the right to free speech, the right to liberty is another one, right? These are rights that are right but really there's only one right. And that's the right to your life, the right to do what you wanna do with your life in pursuit of your values, using your reason. And you're gonna be doing stupid things sometimes. Right. Immoral things sometimes. But as long as you're not violating other people's rights, it's none of the government's business. And rights are not there to protect you so you can do stupid things, right? So they're to protect you so you can do smart things. But because the government is not in a position to decide what's smart and what's not, it has to permit you to do anything. Right. As long as you don't violate other people's rights. Interesting. Okay, so my prior view was the sole human right was choice, essentially. But I guess that you're effectively saying the same thing, the life, right? Like you own your life and then you get to choose what to do. Yes, I don't like to say own life only because ownership is something you do want your life. So life predates ownership if you will. So owning your life kind of, I think inverts the hierarchy in terms of what comes first. First you live and yeah, my life's mine. Nobody else's, it's mine. And then that means my choices are mine. That means, and this is where individual rights comes, my actions are mine. I have a right to act on my own behalf based on my judgment. So choices two inside your head. Action is what rights are really about. Rights about freedom of action. It's about the ability to act in the world out there. Interesting. That's a great way to look at it. And another useful framing I've heard is, you know, natural law has the three pillars traditionally of life, liberty, property. That really each one of those is a temporal manifestation of freedom ultimately. Like your life is your future freedom, your liberties, your present freedom, properties, your past freedom effectively. Well, I don't like to think about property's past freedom because property is not about what I've accumulated. Property is about the right to accumulate. And I'm accumulating in the future. I'm accumulating present. So it's not so much preserving. I don't think of the right to property as I want to preserve. I think of the right of property as I want to produce. And I don't need your permission to produce. I don't need, you don't have a ability to take what I produce. So it's a, all rights are focused on the future. All rights about movement. There's no passivity. There's no protection. It's all about movement. And that's why, for example, you have a concept in rights in the law that says abandoned property is no longer your property. Because once you abandon property, you're not using it. You're not doing something with it. After a certain period of time, it's not your property anymore because what's meaningful is the use. It's the actual production. It's actual movement. Right, right. You do need some ability to preserve the fruits of your labor though. Otherwise, you can't build this flywheel effect towards greater freedom than we've described. Sure, but that is part of, I produced it in the past. It's mine, it's mine, but you can't take it away from me. But essentially what the property right is there to protect is my ability to do that production. Yes, okay. So this is how Rand defines right. Just to, she defines right as a moral principle, defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. So you don't have a right on a desert island. It has to be in society, right? Because it's vis-a-vis other people. So right is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. So basically it's free to act. And she says, there's only one fundamental right. All the other, it's consequences of corollaries. A man's right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generating action. The right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generating action. Which means the freedom to take the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So it pertains only to action. Specifically the freedom of action. You're free to act. Free means no coercion, no force, no authority. So the, again, I'm back to this unresolved line in my mind is there are individuals that may be in a certain asymmetric position of power for whatever reason. They could have a technological advantage, a geographic advantage, a wealth advantage. That it seems to me they could determine on purely objective reason alone that it is reasonable to go and violate the property or personage of others to enrich themselves. But that also seems to be immoral. So how does objectivism deal with that? So it'd be immoral because it's actually not good for them, right? So the take-up, it's not good for the take-up. It's not good for the take-up for a number of reasons. Let's try to do two, right? One is psychologically values that you don't, that are not yours, that you did not produce, that you did not create, are never going to be real values to you. They're never going to have meaning to you. It's like the people who even, people who win the lottery and lose it all like that, because it's not real to them. They didn't produce, they didn't make it. It's not theirs. There's no real spiritual benefit from gaining that if you didn't make it, if you didn't produce it. So there really is a moral contradiction. There's a contradiction in how we want stuff, we need stuff in order to live, but to really benefit from that stuff, to get the full value of that stuff, we have to produce it. And so you never see other than in movies, successful criminals, happy dictators. Dictators always live in fear and the paranoid and they're obsessed and they're crazy and they're sick and they're not happy. And you never see happy thieves, right? And remember there's a famous story of the bank robber who got away, they robbed the great train robbery in England in the, I don't know, 50s, 60s. And they got away with a huge amount of money. This guy made it all the way to South America and he had a enormous amount of money. And for decades he tried to enjoy that money. And he just, it was meaningless. And he ended up going back to England and giving himself up and like life sucks. It's like Bernie Madoff. Bernie Madoff, I don't know if you know the story of Bernie Madoff. Only at a high level, yeah. largest pyramid scheme in human history. Stole from his best friends, from his buddies, from everybody around him. When he went to jail, he said he was happy in jail than he was before he was caught. Wow. And this is reality. This is truth. So before he was caught, he couldn't look his friends in the eye. He was stealing from them. He couldn't have a relationship. He can't have a relationship. Relationship is based on integrity, based on honesty, based on shared values. None of that was there, he couldn't have. He was afraid his family would find out. He wasn't afraid of the cops. He was afraid of his family. So he had this, he kept lying to his sons, his son were in the business. But this part of the business, he shielded from them and he lied to them constantly. It was his son who actually told the SEC about him and actually brought the cops in when he discovered it. Because the SEC are so incompetent, the government is so incompetent, they never caught it. And he was miserable. And if you, I always, you know, if you take people you know who a liar is, I mean, we all know people who lie all the time. It's not a successful strategy for happiness. Right. It might be a successful strategy for getting the money today. Yeah. But getting the money today doesn't lead to happiness. And this is where this idea of thriving and flourishing and being successful at living, I like to say with the capital L, it's really living as a human being, right? That's a long-term project that requires certain principles. And one of those principles is be honest because the fact is that dishonesty is gonna screw you. And, you know, you might be tempted at the moment to be dishonest, but if you have, don't always be honest as a principle, you won't be tempted because you know that even though I can't see the thread between my lie right now and bad things happening, I know it's gonna happen because it always does. Lying always gets me in trouble, right? So why try it this time, right? This is why I'm not an empiricist, right? This is about objectivity. This is about I observe stuff in reality and then I derive a principle from it and I stick to that principle. Now, lying is tricky because, you know, you are gonna lie and proudly so to the rapist who asks where your daughter is, right? Or your wife is, right? You are lying because you're preserving a value. They have no right to that value. So there are always these emergency situations, these things outside of the definition, but honesty is a crucial principle and it's a crucial principle for what? To live, which means to be happy. So when you violate it, you want the same as stealing. Stealing is bad for you. It's just not good for you.