 So, Yaron, thank you for this interview. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. So, you've been around Latin America lately in the Andran con in Brazil. Next stop is Costa Rica, Mexico. A lot of exciting things happening. How do you feel when you talk to Latin American audiences? Well, I love Latin American audiences because they're very expressive. Latin American audiences are not typically audiences that sit back and just listen in a blank face and don't ask questions. They get very involved and they get very passionate. So that's always exciting and fun for a speaker to have an audience like that. You know, and I think there's a huge amount of potential in Latin America. I'd say particularly in Brazil for a variety of reasons, but generally I think there's a lot of angst among young people. So young people are looking for answers. Latin America has been a failure for 100 years. And they've tried everything, right? They've tried all the different mixtures of socialism and fascism. That they possibly can and nothing makes it better. And so I think they're more open to alternatives. Then maybe people are more comfortable in the United States or people are more comfortable in Europe where they feel like, you know, why be radical when things are so good? I think that the Latin American audiences are much more eager to be radical and willing to accept radical ideas because in a sense, what do they have to lose? Right. And in that sense, what is the first reaction that people take when listening to Anne Rand and her ideas? Like what are the most common misconceptions or things that bring curiosity from the audience? Well, a lot of it has to do, you know, the downside in Latin America is, of course, religion and how Catholic Latin America is. So a big part of it is, well, what about religion? And how do I square what you've just said with religion? And what about the church? And so I typically get those questions and they're challenging because these are some of the most deeply held beliefs that people have. And one of the things I do, the one of the things I think we all do is try to challenge that and try to chip away without being obnoxious, without being nasty about it, or without being, you know, but just challenge them to rethink some of their concepts, including their concepts around religion. So suddenly religion is a big deal. And then another one is self-interest, egoism. That's true of all audiences in the world. It's very hard for people to really get their head around to grasp this idea of rational long-term self-interest and how it can be right. We're taught from such a young age and from every teacher we have, religious and secular, that morality is about sacrifice, morality is about giving up, morality is about others. And you should never, ever, ever be self-interested, not if you want to be moral. And that is deeply ingrained in the culture and it's very, very hard. So you get a lot of questions about that and they manifest themselves in all kinds of ways, some of them personal, some of them political. You know, the what about the poor question is a manifestation of that, you know, when it comes to politics. Although it is interesting that I get less of that with certain audiences than others. You get a lot more of that in America where the audience is pretty well off and so their altruism, their otherism kicks in and what about the poor. In Latin America people are not that well off so it's not, they have less concern about the poor because they are often the poor. Right. And the same thing in Asia, I found that in Asia you don't really get that kind of attitude, partially because they were poor so recently and partially because in Asia the altruism is less deeply rooted because they don't have Christianity. And that's one of the most interesting answers that you gave in Brazil when you said, I don't care about the poor, I care about good people regardless on how much money is in their wallet. Could you expand a little bit on that? Sure, I mean if you think about this categorization that we have, the rich, the middle class, the poor, it's really kind of a Marxist characterization, right? I mean he viewed the essential characteristic of human being is what class do you belong to. And objectivism doesn't view people as belonging to the group, it views people as individuals. And the fundamental question we ask is, are you a good person or are you not? Are you a moral person or are you not? That's what's important. Right. And you can be a good person and be poor. You can be a bad person and be poor. You could be a good person and be rich. You can be a bad person and be rich. So what we're concerned with is virtue. What we're concerned with is, are you a good person? And we want to create an economic system that doesn't help a particular class. It's often you advocate for the rich. No, we're not about a particular class. I want to create an economic system that supports and rewards the good. Right. That is, if you're virtuous you should be successful. However, we measure success. It might be money, but it might not be. It might just be success within your profession or happiness ultimately for you as an individual. So I want to create a society in which rewards and incentivizes virtue. It incentivizes rationality, rewards rationality, incentivizes productiveness, rewards productiveness. So that people who are ambitious, people who are fundamentally good, people who are rational succeed in a society like that and people who are not fail in a society like that and that would be a just society. But for that we would have to define goodness. Yes. And the problem is that for most people because of this global altruism think that being good is sacrificing yourself, suffering for the others. So let's define goodness and let's define virtues. And of course yes, and of course because they think that, because they think that goodness is sacrifice, goodness is suffering for the other, they're completely open to socialism. And they're not only open to socialism, they're open to trying it over and over and over again in spite of the fact that it fails because it's the one system that promises that the group is the essential, the group is the unit that we should care about. And when they reject socialism, the ones who reject socialism, then they become fascists or some form of conservative, you know, statists. Because that's another system of ideas that promises them that they can sacrifice to a group and that the group interests are the primary. So if people always ask me, why do people keep trying socialism? Why is it so attractive? Because we haven't challenged the fundamental idea because as long as sacrifice and living for others is the, is nobility when it comes to morality, you're always going to look for a collectivistic solution for society, whether it's on the right or on the left, it's always going to be collectivism. And that's why they keep trying these systems and keep failing. So what we need to do is define the good and we need to define it anew and we need to convince people this is why the most important topic, if you will, I think, is morality, is ethics and trying to change the world's people's perspective on ethics, on morality. Because if you do that, then people say, what's really important is epistemology, we need to teach people how to think. But you need to motivate people to know how to think, right? How do you motivate people to know how to think? Thinking is good for you. Thinking is what will lead you to have that successful life. So the motivational part of philosophy is ethics. Because it's how to live. If we can convince people to live for themselves, to live a rational, in terms of a rational long term, for their own self-interest, then they want to know how to be rational. That's epistemology. And they want to know what kind of political system will benefit their own life. That's politics. So that is, of course, the key. And I don't think I answered your question. No, but the thing, no, you are. But the thing is that socialism in itself, people view it as this virtuous, amazing system. The problem is the corrupted people that can never live up to the goodness of the standard of socialism. And there's sensual corruption. The sensual corruption is people are too self-interested. Exactly. And yes, people are too self-interested to live under socialism. Thank goodness, right? That's a good thing. So yes, then there's a limit how much people are willing to sacrifice. There's a limit how much people are actually willing to live to other people. And this is why in free societies, altruism is always held as an ideal. And then people live their lives, right? But they don't live self-interested lives. They live half self-interested lives, right? They pursue what they vaguely think is self-interest. But because they don't view it as moral, they don't devote the thinking, the resources, to what does it mean to really live the best life that I can? Because they feel a little guilty when they do that. And it's not a science. See what objectivism provides is it says, living well is a science. And that's called the science of morality. Morality is the guide to living well. It's the principles by which you should live your life. Now we have principles and we have a science and we have an approach and we use our rationality to figure this out. And to live a selfish life, to live a self-interested life, you have to really think about it. You have to devote real resources to it. You have to devote real time. What kind of life do I want to live? How do I live the best life I can live? And most people don't do that. So most people kind of emotionally pursue, they pursue a career maybe, they pursue love, but they don't integrate it and they don't think about the long term and they flounder and they often feel guilty if they're too successful. So nobody actually, there's no society in the world where people are actually living a self-interested life. I mean, one can only imagine kind of in a science fiction way what such a society would look like in terms of the level of happiness and the level of prosperity that society could attain. And that's something very interesting to talk about because it's not only the collectivism of the socialist sacrificing yourself for the state, there's also the collectivism of sacrificing yourself for religion because most people think that without religion we wouldn't have morality. There's the conception of a morality that is objective, that is rational, that has nothing to do with spirits and saints. It's almost ungraspable for most people, right? Yes, and here there is a deep kind of epistemological problem that people have which comes out of kind of Greek philosophy and philosophy generally. And they believe that there are only two possibilities. One is to go by your emotion. One is to be subjective, whatever you feel like is good. And the other is that there's something out there that's going to tell you what is right and what is wrong. God, you know, they try to get around it sometimes with the concept of natural law. There's a law in nature and you just have to discover that law over there and it will tell me what to do. And they consider that to be objective. What Einrand, and this is why Einrand is such a revolutionary, what Einrand understands is that is a false dichotomy. That is both a wrong, both the subjectivist and what she called the intrinsicist. It's intrinsic in the thing, a wrong. And what is important is the interaction between your consciousness and reality. And the way to discover morality is to understand human nature within morality and understand what is good for us as human beings as a science, not as a subjective thing. Not whatever I feel like is what I feel like is not always true. It's what can I understand objectively meaning corresponding to reality, corresponding to what's really out there. But not that the truth, not that the virtues and values are out there. The virtues and values are out there. I have to discover based on the facts of reality and the fact of reality here that's most relevant is human nature and how as human beings we actually survive in the world, in the world as it is. Regardless of that explanation, most people think of Einrand as a conservative and they put her in the right wing side, right? If you have to choose between Republicans and Democrats, Einrand is always falling on this side because of the huge ignorance that there is about her work. She wrote conservatism and obituary. She warned about the dangers of allowing this collectivist idea, first of all, that the United States was created in a Christian worldview and Cosmovision to Christianity, the United States is what it is. And also people that say thanks to Christianity, we have the concept of individual. Without Christianity, the Western world wouldn't have that. And these misconceptions try to put socialism as the only collectivist menace that there is out there and Einrand had nothing to do with that. No, and it's really unhelpful ultimately to think of the world right now in terms of left and right. Because it might have been reasonable to think about in those terms 40 years ago when there were elements on the right who were pro-individualism and pro-liberty and pro-capitalism and pro-freedom. But with time, as Einrand predicted, the conservative movement has become more and more and more collectivistic and less and less pro-capitalism and less and less pro-individualism. So I think the true political spectrum is individualism and collectivism. And what is happening today is both the right and the left are just two different forms of collectivism. So it's in a sense one-axis individualism and collectivism where the collectivism brand splits off into two, a left version and a right version. And yet the differences between them, the fascists and the socialists are not exactly the same. The way they manifest themselves is different. But they're both our enemies. So if you look today at national conservatism or the rise of the liberal right or all born in Hungary, Putin in Russia and their manifestations in the West, what's the difference between them and the socialists? On economic issues, they basically almost always agree. And their battle is on social issues, a battle that we're not even part of because our conception of the social issues is usually quite different than both sides. So I think the perception of Ein Rand is going to change because the main debate now is on social issues. For example, abortion. So the main debate right now, a big debate right now in the United States between left and right is about abortion. Well, on abortion, Ein Rand is more on the left than on the right in that sense. But even then, she's not really on the left. She's on this individualist spectrum and the explanation for why abortion should be legal is completely different than the left and completely opposed to anything the right says. I think the same true ultimately is going to be about marriage. The same is true about a lot of these issues that are raised, social issues raised between the left and right. Ein Rand is not going to be easy to categorize on either side of this. And maybe people will start realizing that there's something completely different here. And our job, I think, is to go out there and communicate, forget left and right. Individualism, collectivism, that's the spectrum that matters and we are the individualists. We're right there at the far, you know, whatever side it is of individualism. We're consistent individualists. There might be others left and right who are not quite collectivists, center left, center right, who are a little bit more towards the individualist side. But if you want to define individualism, come to us because we are it. And let's talk about those differences in pragmatic ways. And there is one thinker that comes to my mind, Jordan Peterson, right? Jordan Peterson has developed his rules for life in a very conservative mentality, I would say. And then you, inspired by that, did Yaron's rules for life. So let's explore what differences are there. And my first question would be, do we need rules to live? Because when we talk about individualism and escaping any form of collectivism, for some people that means anarchy, that means chaos, that means there's no morality, there's no rules. So the first question is, do we need rules for life? Well, absolutely. And this is where this whole idea of viewing morality as scientific is so important. As human beings, we do not have the embedded knowledge, the instincts that guide us towards survival. And even survive at the very basic level. I used this example at the conference. We don't know how to hunt. It's not an instinct. We don't know how to survive in the Amazon. We don't know how to farm. All of that needs to be figured out. We need to use human reasons to figure out how to survive. And that's just survive, but to flourish, to be successful, to build an iPhone, right? To have lights and cameras and this kind of setup. Think of the amount of the number of people who had to do real hard thinking to do all this, to discover all this technology, to build a building, to everything we have is a consequence of human reason. So we have to have principles by which to live. Marl principles. And those Marl principles are supposed to guide us towards surviving as human beings, which means living the best life that we can as a human being, which means flourishing and ultimately achieving happiness. We don't have the instincts. We don't know it automatically. And the fact is everybody knows this, even the anarchists know this, that if you just rely on your emotions out there, you just get into trouble all the time, right? Every time we get into real trouble in life, it's almost always because we didn't think it through. It's almost always because we relied on our emotions and didn't use our minds. So Rand's basic principle of living is think. Use your mind to guide your actions. And that's kind of the core of ethics. She has seven virtues that she lays out. At the heart of them all is rationality. And kind of what I try to do with the rules of life is take them and concretize them for people, really, and maybe broaden them into some other applications, some of the applications of the moral principles. And they're going to be very different than Jordan Peterson's because our philosophy is very different. So let's talk about that, because Jordan Peterson in some of his rules also says, don't do not rely on your emotions, be more rational. But it seems to me that when it comes to faith, to religious faith, in that sense, you can turn your reason out. So how does that work? Like how can you have rules for life and somebody that has as many followers as he does? But at the same time, this incoherence of saying, but in other regards, don't use your reason. Yeah, but that's why he has a lot of followers. He has a lot of followers because at the end of the day, he's not really challenging us too much, right? So he's maybe challenging the left because his principles are more associated with the conservative right. But he's not challenging a fundamental belief. So he's not challenging us on religion. He's accepting religion. And his vision of religion is not simple Christianity. He has the stories that he tells and he tells them differently. But at the end, it's the same thing. At the end, it's about faith. And he doesn't challenge us when it comes to morality. At the end, you're more responsibility. At the end, Jesus is a superhero, according to Jordan. And he's a superhero. Why? Because he's willing to die for our sins. Because he's willing to sacrifice himself to the worst kind of painful death. Not for something he did, but for something we did. So at the end, Jordan is out and out, altruist. So yes, once he accepts faith and altruism, he tries to apply rationality to what's left. But that rationality is not divorced from reality and it's certainly divorced from a rational outcome, which is altruism is an irrational outcome. It's divorced from kind of a proper morality. So yeah, he comes up with a bunch of things that are not too challenging, not too deep, not too serious. Make your bed, you know, so be organized. Okay, my mother taught me that, right? When I was little. Is this really, and what does that actually mean? So I think his rules for life ultimately are going to be superficial because the other thing Jordan Peterson says, which is interesting, he says, happiness is an accident. Happiness is not something that if you do the right things in life, you will attain. You might not, if you happen to be happy, happen to be happy. Embrace it because it's a rare thing. And that kind of sucks, right? If life is like that, if it's just being happy, it's an accident, you might be, you might not be. It sounds very Protestant, you know, the Protestants believe, at least some Lutherans believe, that when you're born, God already knows whether you're going to hell or heaven. It's predetermined. So it's completely from your perspective, it's really an accident if I'm going to go to hell or heaven. There's nothing I can do to achieve heaven, right? Nothing I do in life makes any difference. It's already pre-written. And there's a sense in which Jordan applies that to happiness. Nothing you do actually will achieve happiness. So it'll either happen to you or not. And that is completely upside down from the objective ethics, which basically tells you these are the principles that are essential for achieving happiness. The more consistent you apply them, the more you'll be. Now look, there are accidents in life. You could get run over, bad things can happen to you that mitigate your ability to be happy. But in general, here are the principles that for most people will result in happiness if you understand the principles and apply them consistently. So what happens at the end with Jordan? It comes out as dogma. Why should I make my room? Because in the end. And it's not reasoned out. And it's not reasoned out for the sake of your own well-being, your own flourishing, your own success as a human being, because he's got again this conflicting morality of some self-interest and some altruism always combined. And so in that sense, I think that making your own bed, what he's trying to say in that combination of altruism and self-interest is don't pretend that you can go and save the world when you don't even make your own bed. Which is something that is actually happening with woke America. I want to tell others how to live, but I am a mess in my own personal life. That can have some truth, but the thing is it's always in the benefit of the other. Because if you become a better altruist, then your society is going to be better. If you are happy, it's just an accident. Yes. So it's always the goal is always ultimately altruistic. But it's also superficial, right? So yeah, make your bed. But what does it mean to take responsibility for your own life? Right? It's be organized and be clean and be inside the schedule and yeah, but that's not what's important. To take your life seriously is to take your life seriously. It's to think through what kind of career I want, what kind of life I want, what kind of romantic partner I want, what kind of life I want to live, what are the values I want to pursue. So conservatives often talk about personal responsibility. Oh, people should work for a living but they don't go deep enough. You should do your own thinking. You should figure out what's right by your own terms with your own examples. You should use your own mind to discover. You shouldn't accept, so a lot of, I think this is true sometimes of objectivists and sometimes you people who come from religion to objectivism, this is true. Iron Man wrote Seven Virtues. Okay, now we know what morality is. It's the Seven Virtues and it's just plug and play. It becomes dogma and it's useless if it's dogma. The whole point of Rand's morality is you have to understand every one of the virtues. You have to be able to apply them to your own life. You have to be able to prove the value to yourself. If you take them as dogma, then you just become a robot doing, oh, I need to be rational now. Okay, you know, I should be honest. You drop context. You don't fully understand what it is that you're doing and you never actually get to benefit from it fully and you don't achieve that happiness. So Jordan presents them as somewhat of a dogma. In objectivism, we want to go deeper. We want to understand why I should make my bed and what are the deepest meanings of that? The purpose of taking responsibility for self is to be happy, right? That's the deepest sense in which I want to be moral. That's the deepest sense in which I want to take responsibility for my own life. The applications of it in terms of making your own bed are not easy. I've never made my own bed in my life. A big source of conflict with my mother, right? Because I hated making my bed. You know, it turns out that whether you make your bed or not is not that important. But whether you have a career or not is important. Whether you take your life seriously or not is important. Where you think through your life is important. So it's that taking responsibility for your life, making your life the best that it can be. That to me is, so that is my rules of life. Always start and end with, how does it make my life in the most fullest sense possible good, meaningful, successful, worthy of living? So every rule should contribute to that. And I don't really like using the term rule, but since Jordan used it, you know, I'll capitalize on the marketing he provides. There's something that you said in Brazil regarding rules and I think it's also important because when you automatize rules, like say, make your own bed, be productive, go to work, be responsible, but you don't go deeper as Objectivism offers, it sometimes confuses people with material comfort. That sometimes what capitalists and conservatives are after is just material stuff. And I think you said something very deep in Brazil when you said you shouldn't just pursue comfort. You should pursue a great life. And more and more we are seeing, especially elder people that are very lonely, accumulating material stuff until the point that there's clutter and there's absolute misery in their life, you know, like even foreign aid bringing a bunch of trash to poor people thinking that that's gonna like bring them out of poverty and it's not about stuff, it's not about comfort. And you said you should go and pursue something even better than that. It's pursuing the best life that you can possibly have and that goes beyond material stuff. And this coming from the philosophy of Objectivism, which really puts an interest and an importance in being productive and producing. But a big part of being productive and producing, look I love material stuff, so none of this is to knock on material stuff and it's good to have material stuff and life is enhanced by material stuff. Life is made possible by material stuff. Without agriculture and without producing food, we wouldn't survive. And I want to be rich, right? So all of the material stuff is good. But what brings you joy and happiness is even when you're producing, is the producing itself, right? If you're just producing to make money, you're not gonna quite... Because think about how much time we spend producing, how much time we spend at work. So have a purpose, do it with purpose, have a meaning in your work so that the work becomes something you love doing and you enjoy and you embrace and it's fun to do. And it's not always gonna be fun, they're gonna be challenging part, but generally you get immense satisfaction from the work and productiveness that you engage with. So for objectivism, productiveness is a virtue because it makes the material well-being, it makes it possible for us to have the material well-being that we need in order to survive. But it's also a virtue because it provides us with purpose and life and it provides us with immense spiritual pleasure, spiritual joy to achieve things, to produce things and to achieve things and I think to live the best life one can live one needs to be productive, not primarily for the financial well-being, for the stuff that you can buy, but primarily for the satisfaction, the joy, the pride one gets from achieving something, from building something, from making something, from living a great life. But living a great life requires producing and making something. Whether that means a lot of money or not, but it's, you know, you could be a teacher and not make a lot of money, but if you do a great job as a teacher and you love it and you see the impact you have on your students, you're gonna get as much satisfaction as anybody who produces it at any level. Pursue beauty, travel more are part of your rules for life and why do you advise within this productiveness pursuing beauty and traveling more? Is it part of that greatness of life? Yes, I think life has so much to offer and the potential of what one can do with one's life is so vast. And, you know, beauty, you know, so many people today obsess about politics and they read all the newspapers and they watch the news and it's depressing and it's very, very depressing. And the fact is that most people have very little impact on the politics and what's gonna outcome. And so they get depressed and life loses meaning for them and one of, I think the anecdotes there, one of the ways to combat that is a detachment of yourself a little bit from the news. You don't have to listen to every commentary. You don't have to read every story. You don't get the highlights because you need to know what's going on in the world, but go live your life. And part of living their life and part of mitigating that darkness that is outside and the culture is pretty dark and the political world is certainly dark is create a space for yourself that is beautiful, that is filled with values and things that you love and that bring you joy. So, you know, if you walk into your home and it's filled with things that just bring a smile to your face, then it's gonna bring a smile to your face because these are your values and these are the things you love. And at least for the time you're there, the outside world with all its problems can get a second place. And the fact is, again, that this is not sacrificing anything because the fact is it's not like if you worked a little harder you could change tomorrow the politics of the world or you could have an impact. We're not going to as individuals. It's gonna be rare that we can. So let's focus on the things that we can control, how we live our lives on a day-to-day basis, how to make the most of our lives on a day-to-day basis. And while certainly surrounding yourself with beauty and traveling are not virtues at the level of rationality and productiveness, they're kind of subservient values. They're still values. They're still things that one should strive to achieve and one should strive to do in one's life. And traveling gives one context to understand the political environment. You know, you go to very, very poor places and it gives you a sense of what's being achieved and a sense of how much you as an individual have achieved and also a sense of, you know, as bad things are maybe in America or in Europe, they're not that bad. And there's still some life to be lived which is ultimately what's important. Let's not give up on that life to be lived. And it also gives you a sense of how much we've achieved in 250 years because poor people today live at the same kind of standard of living as all of us lived 250 years ago. We were all poor. So it gives you a certain context. It gives you a certain, but also when you meet people whether it's in the favelas in Brazil or whether it's in Cambodia in small villages where they have nothing, you still get that human spirit. You still get, you know, they hustle. They want to make their lives better. They're striving towards something. And they're not, I don't get a sense of envy from them. Most poor people don't want to knock you down because you have stuff. They want to be like you. They want to figure out how to become like you. So it's that ambition, that hustle. You see these little kids trying to sell you anything for a dollar in Cambodia because a dollar for them is a lot of money and they want a better life. They want to achieve more. That can inspire, particularly in a world where so many people are just giving up and so many people are kind of lazy and just sitting around and not hustling to make their life better. To see poor people really hustle can be inspiring and sad at the same time because you'd like them to be a lot better off and that struggle for survival that they're engaged in, it's sad that in the 21st century we still have that and of course we know what the answer to that is and that's more freedom and capitalism and property rights and all of this. It's frustrating because you know how to solve the problem and yet nobody is listening. Somebody once asked me, what's the biggest frustration you have in your job, Iran? And my answer was that I know the truth. I know how to make the world a better place pretty much for everybody and nobody is listening or very few people are listening. Some people are like maybe many of you are listening. Let's hope that this interview gets a lot of listeners and a lot of shares and thank you very much, Aaron. I'm very happy that your sense of life means bringing these ideas to everybody in the world because we desperately need them and something that I've learned from you is that the political and economic battle is in a second place. We have to go deeper. We have to go to the philosophy to inspire people to know how to think and I think that you're doing an excellent job at that. So thank you very much for your job and your interview. Thank you for helping us achieve this and for being such a great voice for these ideas out there in Latin America and the world. Thanks.