 Welcome to Living Outside the Matrix, the show for thinking people where we explode the many modern myths within the matrix by questioning the important issues within the mainstream narrative. Hi there, I'm your host Nigel Howitt and on the show today we're going to bust some major myths and it's a great pleasure to be joined in doing this by Yaron Brooke. For those of you who don't know who he is, Yaron is an Israeli-born American citizen. He's an objectivist, entrepreneur and a writer who rose to become executive director of the Ein Rand Institute. I think until last year, perhaps you can correct me if I wrong, but Yaron, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today and welcome to the show. My pleasure, thanks for having me on. Great, perhaps you could start Yaron by giving us a sort of a brief how you got from growing up in Israel to California and heading the Ein Rand Institute. Sure, I mean when I was 16 in Israel, I think but like most Israelis at the time in the 1970s I was a committed socialist and a committed collectivist and a friend of mine gave me a copy of Atlas Shrugged to read and the book changed my life completely. It changed my ideas, changed the way I looked at the world and really from the age of 16 I became committed to studying and understanding the ideas of Ein Rand while pursuing other careers. I was in the Israeli army then I got an undergraduate in civil engineering, but all while doing this, studying and interested in engaging with Ein Rand's philosophy of objectivism. I moved to the US in 1987 and got my MBA and PhD at the University of Texas in Austin at the same time contacted the Ein Rand Institute. Took some courses with them, some classes on the philosophy got involved in some of the in the conference in putting on conferences on objectivism got to know all the people engaged and involved and ultimately in 2000 they came to me and offered me the job of executive director of the Institute and today I'm no longer there but I'm still chairman of the board at AOI. Fantastic, nice one. Well perhaps you could give the listeners and everybody just a again of quite a brief sort of introduction on Ein Rand who she was and you know her philosophy in a nutshell so we can see from there. Sure, I mean Rand was born in 1905 in Russia so she she witnessed the Russian Revolution she lived under communism in her teen years in the early 20s. It was obvious to her and to her family and everybody who knew her that she couldn't stay that if she stayed they would kill her. She was a real independent thinker she was an individualist in a world of of communism and collectivism and so at the earliest opportunities in the 1920s there was a small window of opportunity where Lenin was allowing people to leave for particular study and things like that. She managed to get a visa to go to the United States where she had relatives in Chicago. She moved to the US went to Hollywood started out you know at the bottom basically and really through hard work and studying English rose up through Hollywood to become a script writer at the same time. She was writing plays writing novels she wrote a novel called We the Living in the 1930s there was about life under communism and you know the intelligentsia in America rejected it because it was too anti-communist and they were all very pro-communist at the time and then she wrote a famous book The Fountainhead which 12 publishers rejected and ultimately the 13th accepted and when when it was accepted it became a word-of-mouth bestseller and sold you know many many copies she ultimately moved to New York and lived in New York the rest of her life. She then wrote what's considered a Magnus Opus Atlas Shrugged which was published in 1957. Publishers competed for that book they all wanted to publish it because The Fountainhead had been such a success and at both books The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged still sell hundreds of thousands of copies today they still would be on bestseller lists if they counted old books it's truly stunning how well they have done given how old they are and then in the 60s and 70s Rand really devoted herself to writing non-fiction to writing her philosophical works and you can you know those are still they all still in print everything she's written is still in print you can get you know the virtue of selfishness capitalism the unknown ideal philosophy who needs it all these books are available in in most British bookstores and most American bookstores that certainly available from Amazon where she wrote her philosophy so that's kind of it she died in 1982 when the Island Institute was established in 1985 so that's kind of a biography in terms of her ideas I mean she said that her philosophy in essence was man as a heroic being and and she very much she very much took as her goal a philosophical goal is is to understand what true heroism what a true heroic man is and she needed that because that's what she portrays in her books and she felt like no philosophy out there really had a proper conception of human beings of heroic man so really everything is centered around that idea the idea that we are we are beings of reason of rational mind that are capable of knowing reality as it is reality is not invented by a super being it's not invented by our consciousness it's not invented by our emotions it is what it is a is a we have the capacity to know it through reason and not through emotions not through mystical revelation but through reasoning mind and that only individuals reason and the purpose of morality should be the flourishing of in the individual so so your purpose in your life should be survival qua human being should be ultimately to be happy and that the only political system that allows people to pursue their values their rational values in pursuit of their happiness is capitalism or in other words freedom so she was against any government involvement in the economy the only role of government was to protect your rights no government involvement in individuals lives other than to protect us from crooks and criminals and fraudsters that's it okay great stuff so that gives us a broad overview and just to add some context at this end to explain to you and some of you as you don't know the metaphor that I use here that about the matrix looking outside the matrix and how that ties in with with Ayn Rand the matrix film and story for anybody that doesn't know is a trilogy that kicks off in 1999 with the Wachowski brothers film starring Keanu Reeves as this character Neo and it portrays a dystopian world where the vast majority of human beings are living in a dream world they're controlled and exploited and this character Neo meets with a band that persuade him to leave the matrix and in this process he's offered a choice he's offered the red pill the blue pill and the blue pill represents just going back to sleep waking up the next day you know don't worry believe whatever you want and the red pill represents I want to know it represents seeking to know to connect with reality and find out the truth of the way things are so Neo proactively takes this step in wanting to know and there's also the metaphor in there that he's the one he's the it could be viewed as the saviour and supporting you know the idea of helplessness but I prefer to think of him as the one the eye the the individual and who takes responsibility so so this metaphor has obviously a lot of parallels in modern life and I consider the the matrix out there reality to just kind of be most things in the mainstream the group think if you like the it's the package deal download of cultural assumptions that the people buy into before they've really sat down and considered things themselves so this is the context this is why this whole lifestyle living outside the matrix and to tie that into iron around I discovered iron around you're on just a few years ago unfortunately I always wish I'd discovered her earlier in life and I found that her philosophy of reason to be an immensely powerful tool for finding truth and it seems to be something that escapes a lot of the you know the so-called truth movement but getting to the nitty-gritty of identifying reality that which is true iron rands philosophy is is spot-on I mean as you said it's the it's what it's the only philosophy up that I know of that does that so that sort of ties things in so I I explore all these myths in the in the mainstream to to try and shatter the untruth and connect us all back to reality so that we can thrive essentially and there are so many myths and there's a list of them on the website in fact then www.lawfulrebel.com anyone who's interested go there but things such as you know money is the root of all evil that saturated fat makes you fat that mercury and Malcolm fillings are safe in your mouth you could go on and on and on and the important point is that all of these myths if you buy into them they have a destructive effects on on our lives due to the cause and effect nature of reality obviously so iron rands philosophy absolutely fantastic for exploding myths so you're on having said that and there are some really fundamental myths out there such as socialism being a good thing so so you're very well versed on this that the myth out there is that yeah being a bit left-wing you you care you might be a bit arty you're all for sharing things out and it's got this it's got this general belief in the minds of anybody who hasn't really analyzed what it is that it's a good thing so maybe we can explode that perhaps first by defining socialism and then going on to give us you know it's real nature sure I mean there are a variety of different ways to define socialism but you know but basically socialism is the idea that the state should owns the means of production or in other words the state as a as a collectivistic entity is the primary the individual is secondary and the purpose of the individual is to serve that state the particular form in which that takes under socialism is we're supposed to help the poor and we don't trust business and we don't trust corporations and we don't trust the profit motive so we have to take away the profit motive and we take away the profit motive by in a sense socializing whether it's by in the moderate form of socialism we regulate the hell out of them and we tax them as much as we can in a more consistent form of socialism we actually the state actually nationalizes you know what what Corbyn would like to do is nationalize many of the industry so you take out the profit motive completely because not so so called the the state the collective governs everything so that's the that's the idea of socialism it's supposed to be all about sharing and it you know if you take it it's supposed to be to each according to his to each according to his needs farming to according to his abilities if you're really able you should be willing to sacrifice more for those were not able and really an entire philosophy built about individual sacrifice for the so-called greater good whatever the hell that is you know and again there are many forms there are many forms of the same kind of idea they're all I would group them all under the idea of statism which that is the idea of the state being so I don't consider socialism and fascism and communism that different I think they're all variations on the same thing which shocks the socialists because they think that they think that the opposite of fascists which in indeed they're very very similar to fascist just a slightly different variation of fascism okay so it's there to be clear they're all forms of statism the fascism which says that the state is superior to the individual the group the collective the common good the public interest any of these kind of catchphrases that everybody uses as if they mean something that is is more important than the life of the visual and it's okay to sacrifice individuals to various degrees anywhere from you know obviously concentration camps all the way to taxing them at 50 60% and taking away their time and enslaving their labor in a sense to to to to the to the collective any one of those variations is is is okay it's okay to sacrifice the individual for the sake of the group for the sake of those who don't have for the sake of those who need you know so that is that is the common denominator among all of them that they're disregard for the individual and the veneration of the group okay and that's fundamentally illogical really isn't it because because the group solely being an abstract concept it has no actual form it is only made up of individuals the individual is the unit of humanity really isn't it yeah so the group is just a collection of individuals so so there's a there's a purpose to thinking about groups because it helps it's an abstraction you know you see a large number of individuals you call that a group and and and certainly some activities we engage in we engage in in groups I don't know a soccer team that's a team that's a group football I shouldn't say soccer when so but it's but the fact is that the unit the unit in reality the unit that eats the unit that sleeps the unit that thinks the unit that knows is the individual and therefore the you know I know it would argue I would argue reality would argue that the fundamental metaphysical unit in reality is the individual it is his life that matters it is his life that's that's that needs to be protected it did his life that he is responsible for nourishing and and fulfilling now part of the funny thing about socialism is that it's a massive failure right it every way it's tried to any degree that it's tried it is a it is a massive failure and there really no examples of socialism being successful and yet it is venerated as this ideal and I think it's venerated as an ideal because of something even more insidious underneath at all which makes socialism and fascism and all these other status ideas possible and that is the idea of altruism the idea that morally the purpose of the individual is to sacrifice for the group the purpose of the individuals to sacrifice for others in need and so altruism as Augustine Comte defined it as this negation of self that you know to be truly self-less never think about yourself even when helping somebody else make sure you're not doing it because it makes you feel good make sure you're not doing it because you think it'll buy you into heaven make sure you're not doing it for any self-interested so-called cause you know that idea has been ingrained in us I think Christianity and and secular philosophy certainly since Emmanuel Kant has ingrained that idea that the purpose of life is to serve others that is nobility that is none of us want to do it none of us actually live that way but we all I am other Teresa we think that's an ideal sure and then you think about what is the political manifestation of that a political manifestation that is the system that says yeah you're too selfish to be truly altruistic so we're gonna force it on you we're gonna create a political system that forces you to serve the needy that forces you to sacrifice and that is real socialism I think also I mean we've jumped ahead to to another myth because I want to look at altruism but that's it's that's fine because these all these these all absolutely they're all interrelate and capitalism is on the list as well and so so the idea that I think also altruism helps sort of soften people up to to to offering up themselves doesn't it to present that as an ideal it tends to ready people for any form of abuse and and and suffering and I think that's right and I think religion understood that a long long time ago and really tribal lords understood that a long long time ago that if you want to control people then the best way to control people is to tell them that they're not that their responsibility in life is not to themselves not to their mind not to their well-being but the purpose of their life is to serve others and how do we know what others need well we know what others need because the great leader tells us what other needs you know that whether it's the political leader whether it's the witch doctor or the pope or the priest or whatever they know what's good for the people and they are the ones who then convey that knowledge to us and then our job is to go and sacrifice for them this is I think how tribalism you know really held on to people and why we didn't break out of tribalism much earlier in our evolution and I also think it is how religion to control and and and controlled people for so long and I think ultimately it's how kings and tribal leaders and any any form of authoritarianism holds on to us it says your mind is impotent and anyway you shouldn't be living for yourself so since you can't know the truth and since you shouldn't be living for yourself anyway you need me to guide you in service to others and I commune with God or I commune with the Aryan race or I commune with the parliamentarian or I commune with fill in the blank the English people the British you know the white whatever I commune with the group and I'll tell you how to live and and that's that's the the secret source for all authoritarians and we buy into it because we've been convinced by this altruism and again it ties in we've been convinced by the idea that reason is impotent all these ideas are connected right altruism depends on the idea that reason is ultimately impotent because if we all can reason we don't need the supreme leader and we don't need to lift out the people they can live for themselves and we can live for ourselves you know what's the problem right so so all of these are necessary in order to impose on us a myth of statism statism is one form of authoritarianism of socialism where we all are supposed to sacrifice for the poor the government the political leaders are going to tell us how that sacrifice is going to manifest yourself who are the winners who are the losers who gets to do what how you get to live your life what you get to do with your money they ultimately dictate our lives because they are in touch with the world of spirits they're in touch with the truth the truth is not available to any of us so we don't know who to sacrifice to they will get us in our sacrifice yeah and I think also socialism feeds into that desire to be looked after doesn't it it's sort of with the idea of the welfare state which again on the face of it sounds all well and good it sounds nice that we should help our fellow man but of course we know that we that's what humans do anyway i mean ui and everybody of course we help people when they're needed but the idea of this welfare state seems to feed into um the the the the sort of the parasite class that you don't have to it kind of rewards inactivity doesn't it yeah but i would also challenge the idea with the we help people i mean look i don't help everybody i mean i help who i want to help and i help people i think are deserving of help and the fact is not everybody's deserving of help there are people out there who don't deserve my help who who should rot right and and and they deserve it because they're irrational and because they they're not productive because they don't take care of themselves but they're fully capable because they you know i i call it the wife beating drunk doesn't deserve my help you know he's brought in hell that's what he deserves and and the problem with one of the problems with the welfare state is that it doesn't differentiate everybody gets help whether they deserve it or that they don't whether it's help to get them up on their feet so they can go and work ultimately or whether it's somebody who's never gonna work who never doesn't want to work who wants to exploit the system and just just live like a bum so the welfare state doesn't discriminate private charity i think would discriminate because it's donors would demand that it discriminates i wouldn't give money to a charity that didn't discriminate between the worthy poor and the unworthy poor some people and you know they're unworthy in in every category of humanity so i believe in justice i believe in judging i believe in in not treating everybody the same no matter whether they're needy or not needy i'm willing to help people but but i i want to at least believe that they're innocent uh but before i help them or but if i know that they're not i'm not interested in helping them um but yes i think part of the part of the attraction of socialism is that those people don't want to work but of course this is a self-perpetuating thing what socialism does and what the welfare state does is it grows that group right it tells people you're incompetent you can't take care of yourself you don't have a mind don't worry be happy we're gonna take care of you of course they can't be happy because they're not being productive and they're not really engaging with the world they're just getting a check from the government don't worry we'll give you and of course if the group originally the really needs help is very small the welfare state keeps expanding that group and expanding that group and expanding that group to the point where today the welfare state funds many things at the middle class like you know healthcare and uh and social security all things the middle class could take care of themselves there's actually no problem of them taking care of that but the welfare state has expanded expanded to the point where the middle class doesn't want it you know if i say anything negative about the NHS in the UK you know it's like i'm a child murderer you know i'm immediately condemned it's it's a real holy grail and of course the NHS is just a dumbing down of the middle class and and providing them with an inferior product in the name of don't think about it don't make an effort we'll take care of it don't worry about it and that's what the welfare state does and it continues to expand to take over more and more of our lives and it impacts more and more people and it's a dumbing down motivating down creating dependence on the state as much as possible because that's what gives them power is out of the pence on sure and so the the ultimate proof if you like that socialism is a myth as you alluded to earlier lies in in the statistics of the millions of people that died at the hands of socialist regimes should we call them in the last century i'm sure you got some statistics on that but would you say that's the ultimate proof and obviously we're talking about sacrificing individuals to the group you're talking about the loss of human life and also from there why is it in the in the face of that weighty evidence do you think that this myth still perpetuates so to me the ultimate truth is is the the fact that groups don't exist that the individual is the only thing that exists and therefore the individual is responsible for their own lives the ultimate truth is the fact that we do have reason and we can't cope and we can't flourish and we can be successful as individuals and we don't need to be mothered and and pampered by by the states and by others the that is the the ultimate truth is how how horribly unhappy people on welfare really are but on top of that we have this huge amount of evidence that everywhere socialism is tried it has failed everywhere socialism is tried and the more consistently it is tried death and destruction follow whether it's starvation in venezuela and you know right now right now as we're talking people are starving to death in venezuela little babies are dying of malnourishment in venezuela venezuela that 30 years ago was one of the richest was the richest country in latin america venezuela has more oil reserves than than saudi arabia it's it should be one of the richest countries on the planet it has fertile land it used to export food but because of collectivized farming because of the nationalization of all the entire oil industry because of the of the of the government attempt to control every aspect of the economy that economy today has inflation i think something like 10 000 it is people literally and it's it's a crime that our media is not reporting this literally starving and and and people are being murdered the crime rate in venezuela has gone through the roof and most those crimes i think or much of those crimes are committed by forces aligned with the venezuelan government and that's happening right now but but it's that is that was true of communism that is true of every attempt to inflict any form of socialism it's true to some extent not to that extreme because it was never practiced that extremely but in in in the uk in the 1960s and 1970s when the when the when uh when the uk uh floated with socialism when uh industries were nationalized when the labor unions were powerful uh when the state was everything before margithacha kind of dismantled much of that or some of it uk was horrible there was a massive brain drain people were leaving anybody with with with smarts was leaving and there were stories in the all of british papers about the brain drain because nobody wanted to live under such conditions london was dark and filthy and horrible uh you couldn't find uh you know many goods in london stores uh you know to compare london today to london of 1970s is like night and day it's it's incomparable london in comparison today is a beautiful robust energetic dynamic city back then it was the pits it was awful and and and the uk was in horrible condition people relatively poor today the uk is one of the wealthiest countries in the world so you know the differences are vast and yet people don't learn from those differences israel when he was socialist when i was a when i was living there was relatively poor uh today as it's freed up its economy and introduced more elements of free markets israel is a robust relatively wealthy successful economy um everywhere everywhere sweden when it took socialism everybody uses sweden as the example sweden when it took socialism seriously from the 60s through the 90s uh became poor it used to be the richest country in europe it slowly deteriorated by 1994 the swedish government was basically bankrupt it had lost all its major industries uh it was really sweden was struggling in the early 1990s and the fact is that since the 90s early 90s till today the swedish government has shrunk the role of government shrunk government spending shrunk social programs and and shrunk government intervention in the economy and as a consequence of all that of moving towards more free markets the swedish economy is recovered and doing better it still redistributes way too much wealth but in terms of relative to the america for example it regulates business far less than america does and it's as economically free as the united states of america so sweden is to the extent that it's successful is not socialist when it was more socialist it was fairly sure okay well maybe we can move it on to capitalism and again this conversation is going to everything is going to tie in together um look can we um define capitalism because there's a major myth out there that capitalism is the bad guy it's all about fat cats and greed and if you're a capitalist you're evil so so let's try and dismantle that one of it i mean the essence of capitalism as i understand is is a social system that's that's based on recognition of of individual rights particularly property rights and and where the individual owns the means of production and um and there's no regulation by any coercive um or authorities which is government it's really a system of freedom it's individual it's a system of individual freedom freedom from coercion freedom for force freedom for authority it's a system that recognizes the individual's right to live his life as he sees fit to pursue the rational values necessary for his own survival neither you know violating other people's rights and not allowing other people right to violate his rights and the role of the state is limited to protecting the rights of individuals to protect us from shooting each other killing each other hooting each other through physical violence or committing fraud and that's pretty much it's a military a police and a judiciary system it's the system that takes the idea of individual freedom seriously it's a system that takes the idea of the efficacy of human reason seriously it's the idea that every individual out there poor rich middle class can take care of themselves can work for a living can make it make it so that they can you know do well in this world not equally it's not about equality at all because we're not equal we're not born equal we're not raised equal we're just not equal we don't have the same moral character we don't have anything uh equal about us so the results are going to be when you leave us free the results are going to be unequal but it really is the system that leaves us free leaves us free to live based on our values based on our principles based on using our individual minds and so it's it's you know i i i think of it as the only system that actually takes the idea of freedom seriously sure and it rewards productivity doesn't it rewards thinking it rewards reason well i mean thinking and reason are rewarded in a sense by reality all it does is leave you alone and then the question is what happens when you're left alone it protects your property rights it protects your right to act and what happens when you're left alone is that if you produce values and if you if other people value the values that you're producing then you can make a lot of money and and you get to keep that money because it's yours because you created it and it's nobody else's business what you create if you but you it also lets you fail and and if you start do a startup in Silicon Valley and it doesn't work like 99% of them don't work you fail and if you're if you're if you're if you have the right kind of character then you learn from that failure and you rise up and you try again and you do something different the point of capitalism is it is a system of justice that is if you really create values and then you're gonna do well and if you don't create values you won't do well and hopefully you'll learn from it and you start creating real values and you'll figure out what what what you know what works and what doesn't work it's a system connected to reality and to and to the the the wants and and or the the capacities of other people to to consume so if you do something that you think is a great value but no we can't convince anybody else then then you're not going to make any money but if you like Steve Jobs and you produce something without asking anybody what they want but if you produce something that people really do want that people really do need and you can show them why they want and why they need it then you can become a billionaire there's no limit the only limit is what you produce what you create the values that you you know put out there into the world that you produce and so it's a system of justice it's a system of reality it's a system that leaves individuals free to pursue their lives as they see fit to flourish to to use their minds to achieve their individual flourishing and at the end of the day I think I think overall people are happier more successful more prosperous richer you know material well-being is unbelievably better because all the incentives are right I mean in that in that sense again the evidence parked in reality is that is that capitalism works brilliantly doesn't it and you you've just outlined you know the the sort of moral case and why it works and yet it still it still persists you know I speak to people all the time that still you know implicitly when their actions and some of things they say they give away the fact that they still think that capitalism is this great big evil and do you think that's just down to the socialist or the propaganda the the false messages deliberately put out it's about the altruism it really is so let's bring that back in then the altruism because the other myth I wanted to it's actually I want to separate it but the myth that self-sacrifice altruism is good that denying yourself to help somebody else is good versus you know and also it's corollary the myth that the self-interest is evil the fact that if you if you rationally take care of your own stuff if you look after yourself and your and your kin that that's somehow bad so maybe we can pull that apart as well sure so I mean the idea of self-sacrifice the idea that taking care of others at your own expense at the expense of those that you love is a good thing I mean the way to explore that is to ask a very simple question why why should I self-sacrifice why is they happiness more important than my happiness why is their life more important than my life why isn't my life to me more important given that I'm living it I have one shot at this life it's my life you'd think that that would be the most important thing to me and indeed it is logically so yeah yeah so this is just simple logic so the whole idea of altruism is to deny the self it's to destroy the individual and of course capitalism relies on the individual it relies on the individualism it relies on you pursuing your own values and you wanting to pursue your own values and believing that your values are worth pursuing altruism undercuts that altruism nullifies that it tells you no you are worthless your only purpose in life is to serve other people you and indeed it associates self-interest and it really ingrains in people's minds that self-interest equals lying cheating stealing exploiting raping pillaging that's real self-interest right and the only alternative in more the only alternative in life is either to be a lying cheating stealing sob or to self-sacrifice and what I and really says this is a genius he says wait a minute that that's a false dichotomy there's a third alternative and that the third alternative is to live for yourself rationally pursuing your values and it turns out that if you think that through what's really good for me it's not good for me to lie it's not good for me to cheat it's not good for me to plunder and so on all those things are actually destructive to me as an individual and certainly to live in a society in which that's allowed is destructive so capitalism is not a system of exploitation it's not a system of lying cheating stealing it's quite the contrary it's the system but that's what people are convinced it is people are taught because of altruism it's a system of self-interest now that's true capitalism is the system of self-interest but then they go but self-interest is lying cheating stealing being an SOB so it is the system of lying cheating stealing and being SOB and that's what they associate with capitalism it's Bernie made of it's cheats it's crooks it's criminals and I say wait no no no no capitalism is a system of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Sam Walton and you know and great scientists and great engineers and great producers and great creators and great thinkers that's the essence of capitalism it's the production of values it's individuals pursuing their own happiness by producing by creating sure so I suppose the the reason comes in here when when we when we add the concept of reason to self-interest we suddenly shift it don't we we suddenly pull it out of that false dichotomy and all all of a sudden it's self-interest is not about exploiting somebody else because as you point out my rational my yours everybody's rational self-interest involves getting on with people offering value trading you know helping out occasionally perhaps all all of these things are encompassed within within that framework of reason that I ran so so beautifully brought in I would say there's no such thing as self-interest other than rational self-interest sure as a biological being the way in which human beings survive the way in which we thrive the thing that leads to success and flourishing and happiness for a human being is our reason and you when you divorce reason from the individual you divorce the individual from his self-interest so my self-interest is to be to use my reason because that is what evolution has given me as my means of survival as my means of success it what allows me to rise above the animal state it's what allows me to flourish and be happy qua human being sure and this kind of ties into another myth the myth of subjectivism because uh it's a widespread myth out there and I must admit I subscribe to it for a number of years that we create our own reality there's this new age mystical idea that that somehow we can we can shape things actually in reality through through our power of intention and thinking and and what fascinates me Iran is that is that the way a lot of people implicitly demonstrate in our everyday life that we accept that reality is an absolute an objective absolute and yet we have other behaviors and and we subscribe to these ideas that are that are subjectivists that are actually in complete antagonism of the two ideas contradict each other what's going on there this is the power of philosophy you know philosophy is a very very powerful thing uh ideas are very very powerful things and all human beings need philosophy whether they know it or not whether they recognize it or not whether they study or not all individuals need philosophy and what iron rand teaches us is that if you don't study it if you don't identify it if you don't adopt a particular philosophy consciously through study you will just absorb philosophy by osmosis from the world around you and it'll never be integrated and it'll be full of contradictions it'll be the matrix that any teacher says and your neighbor says and you'll be full of contradictions so it doesn't surprise me at all when i see people living contradictions because that's exactly what happens when you don't actually use reason to define your own philosophy in a thoughtful purposefully purposeful kind of way so yes i mean people are very careful in the way they cross the street but if you're a real subjectivist and you believe you're creating reality then the car coming towards you is not really there and you should be able to will it away and you should be able to cross right in front of it and and it not hitting you but of course nobody even even the biggest mistake it doesn't doesn't actually believe that um and but but i know a lot of people who believe oh no but but with subjectivist when it comes to our values our values are subjective it's whatever i feel like it's whatever i want no even that's not true because the fact is that human beings have a particular nature everything has a nature everything has a a is a you know the the law of identity and the law of causality hold things act based on their nature and to understand what's good for human beings to understand what's good for you as an individual you have to understand your nature and your fundamental nature as a human being is a reasoning being so what is good for you is what is rational what is good for you can only be discovered through a process of thought even what food is good and what food is bad you talked about saturated even to discover what food is good for its food is bad for you requires thought requires science requires real evaluation of reality you don't instinctually know right we have to you know unfortunately people probably tried to poison died people learn from that through a scientific in a sense a scientific method to discover what's poison and what's not what what actually allows us to live long and what doesn't we don't know instinctually any of this so you cannot discover what is good and what is true without using reason and without recognizing the reality that exists out there you have to study the world to know what is good and what is bad what what what will lead to your flourishing what will lead to your success and you have to study human nature those are the two things that I study so philosophy really should be on on the the everyone's life curriculum I mean obviously that's one thing that's conspicuously absent from any any of the modern institutions calling themselves schooling particularly in this country if you think about a religion is a poor man's substitute for philosophy and that's why everybody almost everybody adopts religion because religion is a form a philosophical approach it's a wrong philosophical approach but it's people need philosophy one way or the other yeah and religion is stepped in to fill that gap partially because philosophy is hard but yes everybody should have philosophy and and everybody should study it to the whatever extent they are capable of studying it they should know that the basic principles of how to live their life which all come from philosophy sure yeah it's it seems it seems to me that the root cause of it you know and this is something that I got from Ayn Rand is that really thinking is the answer the it's the best thing you can do because through that process of thinking and applying reason and logic you know you can arrive at you can expose these contradictions and when you see a contradiction you know contradictions don't exist in reality and then you can revise things and it seems to me that that all of our problems could easily be resolved if uh if people could sit down and think things through yeah I mean it's it's it's thinking not in a you know there's a false view in our culture about thinking that it's something you do inside your head but but thinking it's about observing it's about integrating it's about seeing the world it's about seeking out facts and being a hundred percent committed to facts not emotions not what people tell you not opinions but actual facts and then integrating those facts and constantly working with the material in reality and logic to discover new truth or to understand the world I suppose also another myth that we could touch on is also the the idea that emotions that you you've mentioned it a couple of times now I think this is a very significant duff steer for people where where they might be considering an issue and the first thing they'll grab at is how they feel about it and in the mistaken belief that somehow that's giving them some objective information about that issue and and you know maybe you can speak to that because that's one of one of Ayn Rand's core things that she taught me was this this fantastic insight of using our emotions as as feedback as to whether or not we're we're successfully moving towards our goals yes I mean emotions are not tools of cognition they don't tell us what is true or what is not about the world out there emotions tell us how we are responding automatically to things how in a sense our subconscious is integrating the information and the knowledge that we have that's the information that we get from emotions now the the more you think the more you rely on your reason the more consistent your emotions will become with your reason but if you don't your emotions are going to respond in ways you don't recognize because they are consequences of thinking you've done in the past conclusions you've come to the past it might be logical might be illogical it might be it might be rational or irrational might be something you you identified when you were a child that has nothing to do with your life today but that is feeding your emotions today Ayn Rand says recognize your emotions identify them think about them try to discover where they come from but they're not guides to action they should not tell you what to do that you should get from your thinking that you should get from your cognition you but you want to have a integrated life where your emotion and your thinking are one but to do that you have to introspect why am i feeling this what's causing it is it right for me to feel this way is this emotion justified based on the fact and if you do that your emotions will change and they'll change to be more in alignment with your thinking and everybody's done this right so you you're in love with somebody and they do something horrible and it takes a while for the emotion of love to go away even while consciously you know that you shouldn't love them but the more you think about it ultimately their emotion will go away you know and we all experience it that's why it's so hard to break up with people because your emotion wants you to stay but your reason tells you know they're no good and it takes a while for those to get aligned the more you think about it the more you actually focus on it the more you get the alignment sure do you think there's anything to be said for the idea that intuition or a hunch i see a rational explanation for this as my subconscious perhaps throwing up something relevant to the situation that i haven't i haven't got consciously in my mind so i can see that that there could be times where a hunch or what we might call intuition could actually serve me where my my conscious appraisal of the situation is inadequate but something you know within my store of knowledge in my subconscious actually says hang about you know we've been here before so what do you think of that yes but again i don't think what should act on it until one has more information so let's say you meet somebody and it's somebody that's important to you i don't know it's a boss or it's a co-worker or something like that did you gonna have to hang out with him and your intuition says that this is a bad person you can't act on that you you have to say okay i've noted that now let me examine the facts and i'll really make an effort to figure out what's going on with this person maybe it's an employee and you're deciding you can't just act oh i hate this employee i'm gonna let him go no you you have to get the evidence of course the context an emergency you know an emergency yeah sometimes you have to go on a hunch but if you've got time you have to justify your hunch with reason at the end of the day reason is your tool so of course our subconscious does things very very fast sometimes and and very accurately but but we don't act on it until we understand why sure yeah okay well maybe we can touch on just one last one i'm aware of time here the the the big one that i'm rand showed me was that if you zoom back far enough and we sort of get the biggest abstraction the broadest concepts is that there's fundamentally a battle going on between reason and mysticism and it's condensed down into this this whole struggle of ideas that we see in the political arena of between individualism collectivism and all this sort of stuff how do you see and how do how how have you addressed this challenge in the iron rand institute of without outright opposition or outspoken opposition towards religion how do we challenge the fundamental here this this idea of mysticism perhaps we can also um for any listeners quickly uh define mysticism i mean yeah mysticism is the belief in something with no uh no evidence no you know some mysticism is the is the is acting or believing in things based on no evidence uh never might prove but even no evidence um you know in the way to fight that is to advocate for a positive which is to advocate for reason to show the efficacy of reason to show the success of reason to show how reason is efficacious in the world so uh i i i absolutely agree with iron rand this is the battle at the end of the day it's an epistemological battle it's a battle about how we know reality how we know truth how we think um and uh it is it does place us opposite religion and there are occasions where you have to go up against religion and and so be it because the fact is that religion is a problem so therefore you have to deal with it i don't think you can win this battle if you shy away from the conflict that they reconfrontation with religion i think you have to have that confrontation um but it's not just religion i mean much of modern philosophy whether it's postmodernism or a hegel or kanto or or the existentialist many of them are ultimately mystics even if they're atheists because you know playdough uh you know even if he even if he doesn't believe in the god still believe that the world of forms is in some other dimension and to know the truth is to commune with that world of forms that's mysticism that is the negation of reality and and our capacity to reason from reality so um you know you challenge it by showing its absurdity and by offering a positive and by showing how efficacious the positive is fantastic yeah i mean i when i look around and see this this idea of oneness as well this idea that we're all one gooey amorphous sort of uh entity um which is totally contradicts everything in our real experience you know if you're in a room with somebody else you just you know you're so obviously individuals are different different thoughts and you know it's a good room what about the planet sorry i don't feel them i'm not one with them in any sense indeed and yeah this so it seems to play into you know the idea of socialism and collectivism it's it's me it seems like that spiritual collectivism you know the idea of attempt to justify altruism and it's an adempt and it can only be achieved through mysticism through the negation of reason negation of evidence and facts and reality you know you listen to deep actual pro somebody like that and it's mumbo jumbo they say nothing that can connect with actual reality and that that's the whole point they are they are in a in a plane that is not connected to reality and they're feeding off of the pseudo-intellectual idea that that is somehow and again it's a plate platonistic idea that somehow this is more intellectual this is floating abstractions that are unconnected to reality is real intellectualism no that's mumbo jumbo garbage that's what it is so hat do you see and have you seen from your experience within ari that things are moving in in a in a positive direction do you see the the reason prevailing over mysticism in a broader sense because one one of the things that iron ran pointed out to me was that that the prevailing philosophy we can use as a barometer of expecting future outcomes and i think she spoke of a hundred year lag or something but so do you think that all those things told are you seeing encouraging signs i think she was wrong i think it's a two to three hundred year lag unfortunately uh so i think we're still in the beginning no not culture-wide i'm certainly seeing more and more people engage with these ideas more and more people interested in them some you know more and more interested in in the ideas by some of the mainstream but the mainstream generally is still dominated by altruism and collectivism and bad ideas even in america and it's still moving in the wrong direction the group of people who realize the truth is growing but it's not yet growing fast enough and is not yet reached the level of influence enough to impact the culture in in meaningful significant ways so i think it will i think over the next few decades we'll start seeing real substantial change but it certainly hasn't yet do you think it's inevitable because you know reality has that way of imposing on us you know we can't uh i mean i mean nothing's inevitable we could we could get into a nuclear war and we'll all die so nothing's completely inevitable but i think yes i think truth wins out reality wins out we might have to live through another dark ages to get there but at the end of the day people will discover the truth people will embrace the truth and live the truth you know i probably won't live to see it but i i i truly am committed to the idea that it will happen because in logic it must happen again unless unless we we we completely all die off absolutely and one of the problems i guess we face is that people tend to become so entrenched in their thinking in their beliefs their personal philosophy tends to crystallize isn't it and and i don't know what age people become fully set as it were i think any people that's 30 there are always exceptions and that's why we at the institute focus most of our efforts on young people before that's set in sure excellent well that's marvelous thank you so much uh you're on for you know wonderful expose i think we've dealt with a number of issues there within the given time thank you so much for for skipping around so with such agility and where can people reach you these days i think you've got your own podcast show haven't you do you want to give us a few details of where you do the best way is your on brookshow.com and you can link from there to everywhere but you can subscribe to my channel on youtube and you can download my podcast on itunes and of course i'm in facebook and twitter just put in my name and it pops up but your on brookshow.com has the links to everything and of course importantly you should all go to einran.org a-y-n-r-a-n-d.org read Atlas Shrugged read the fountainhead read the virtue of selfishness and capitalism are not an ideal these are the most important works written in in the last i think thousand years and and people really need to engage with them and study them and understand them because because your life depends on it because your life is the most valuable thing to you in the world and therefore you're you know do it for you don't do it for me or for anybody else do it for you sure and and i'd add to that that some of the courses that are fantastic some of the educational resources that you can take there i'd heartily recommend yeah einran.org slash campus is where we have all our courses and you can really study these ideas in depth with some of our best intellectuals the best intellectuals in the world wonderful excellent well i do hope that for all of you listening that this has helped explode some of those myths address some of these really entrenched issues such as altruism and socialism these are very very hard ideas to shift in our minds but hopefully this discussion has helped along to that effort so do hope you've enjoyed the show please