 Welcome, I'm John Caldera, president of the Independence Institute and your devil's advocate. I've been wanting to do this for a long time. I'm so thrilled, he's in town. You're on Brooke who runs the Ein Rahn Institute. And if you don't know who Ein Rahn was, let me do the quick thing, which would be, she's an author. She wrote a few books that seemed to have some lasting staying power. And would you say she was one of the first to really put out a libertarian free market philosophy in a way that people could digest through her stories? No question. I would even say she was the first to really, and maybe the only one, to really put together a comprehensive free market philosophy. There'd been a lot of economists who presented the free market, proved that it worked, showed that it worked, why capitalism actually functions. But in terms of philosophy, in terms of an epistemological, moral foundation for capitalism, who else is there? Talk about who hates Ein Rahn. So here's this little Russian immigrant who got out of Russia in the 30s, was it? I'm trying to remember. 20s, she was born in 05, so she witnessed the revolution, lived under communism through her teenage years, and in her early 20s made it here, kind of the last little window of opportunity to escape Russia, and she got out. If she would have stayed, she would have been killed. I mean, she was a resisting communism at every turn, and she was already on a blacklist. So she makes it here. And her name was Alice Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum, that is. So she grew up as a middle-class Jewish family in the Soviet Union, and made it here with nothing. You know, and if there's ever been an American success story, this is it. She came here, she came to Hollywood. Her dream was to write, and to write scripts. And she did. I didn't know this until I started doing some research. She worked for Cecil B. DeMille. I mean, first day in Hollywood, she meets Cecil B. DeMille. She's at the studio. She's giving a letter of introduction, which you got from a relative in Chicago. And they say, you know, don't call us, we'll call you. And she walks out the door, and there's this big limo sitting outside, and Cecil B. DeMille is in it, and he drives by, and he stops, and he, because she's staring at him. I mean, what are you staring at? And she tells him, I'm here just here from Soviet Union. I love American movies. I love you, your movies. He says, get in. He takes it to the back lock of the king of kings of all movies, right? Which he ends up being an extra in. This was a huge production. I mean, this is a huge sound stage. The extra is all over. You said you want to write for the movies, you got to see how movies are made. So here she is, a young woman from the Soviet Union, and she's just a most in this. And from there, she's an extra. She works in a wardrobe department. She does any odds and end job to get by, and ultimately, write scripts, write plays, and writes some of the best, most well-known American novels in history. Start with her name, because a lot of people mispronounce Ayn, and so it's Ann Rand, but that's all right. I heard that Rand came from the Rand typewriter she used, is that Fib, or is that? Not true, it's completely falsified. So there's a lot of questions about where she came up with the name, but it turned out that she came up with Rand before there was a Rand typewriter. So the name is where we did it. Man, that's just how good she is, right? So, you know, she came up with a different name because she wanted to be out. She knew she was going to write anti-communist content, and she wanted to protect her family. So she chose a pen name, the distance herself from the family name. I don't think it would have helped because the KGB is a little bit more sophisticated than that. They figured it out pretty quickly. But yes, she wrote under their name, Ayn Rand, and when she married, she used her legal name, which was her husband's family name, but as a writing name, it was Ayn Rand. Let me tell you my introduction, which I have always been small L, libertarian, that the idea that two people can have a relationship based on what is important to them, this consensual relationship, and that other people can use the coercive power of the state to stop them is what I think one of the most repugnant hate crimes there is. And, you know, as a young man, I didn't know how to express that really well, but there's something that this is wrong. When a collective of people use a power to say, you and you want to do something together that hurts no one, but you're both benefit from it in whatever ways you figure out. And it might be weird, I might not understand it, I might not like it, but to say, no, you can't do that. There was something that just ripped me inside with anger of how dare you, the beauty of free association among men is what life's about. And so, when I found, I think the first book I read of hers, because I'm dyslexic, I don't know how to read, all right? It's really difficult. So I looked at all the sizes, and there's Atlas Shrugged, and then there was Fountain Head, and then there was, all right, Anthem, Anthem, I can do this, this was this big. And I was like, finally, somebody is talking about something that touched me. It's like, this is what I've been meaning to say, and it's in words. And then once that started, I had to read the rest. And it wasn't for me that, you know, oh my God, I am convinced. For me, it was finally, somebody has written out what I feel, what I feel, what I believe. And a lot of people, I hear that kind of response all the time. For me, it was very different. I grew up in Israel, and was raised in Israel, and a very collectivistic, very tribal culture, particularly back then, a lot less so today. You were raised to sacrifice for the tribe. The tribe was the primary, the collective was the group, the state, whatever, and I had bought into that, and when I was 16, I was an altruist, morally, I was a collectivist politically, I was a socialist politically. And a friend of mine started, you know, we used to get together to talk about ideas, and he would start, started these free market ideas, and I'd looked at him one day, and I said, where is this BS coming from? And he said, you gotta read this book, and he handed me, as the shrugged. And it took me months to read, because I fought it. I said, this can't be true, and I'd throw it against the wall, and I'd argue against it, and I'd yell at Ayn Rand, she wasn't there, of course, but by the end of the book, she had won me over completely. I mean, I'm still, right? Although, you know, the John Galt speech at the end could have cut it down just a little bit for those of us who don't have the attention. Again, maybe, but for me, it was like revelation, right? This was amazing, this was, he was a whole new philosophy, a whole new way of looking at the world that had never been exposed to, you know, laid out in front of me comprehensively. Yeah, I wanted to get to the story, but what an essay that is just as a standalone. Let me put out a couple of thoughts on this, and tell me if you think I'm hitting it right. Unlike other books on economics, or political philosophy, or relationships, what Ayn Rand did for me is she put it in a story, and the story allowed me to get a hold of this, and think about these things. Now, when I talk to people, they go, this is a ridiculous story, this is, and I go, I- Did they watch the news? Yeah. But what I'll say is, you don't take it as a novel in itself, you take it as a description of a philosophy, and we illustrate the philosophy through this story, and that makes it accessible to guys like me. Now, Ayn Rand went on to do lots of- Philosophy. Philosophy books. I can't read them. I couldn't get through one of them. Yeah, I know a lot of people can't read the fiction. Exactly, I've heard that too. I've heard that too. But see, she wouldn't agree with what you just said, because she had a purpose for writing fiction, and her dream since the age of nine was to write fiction. And to her, the key to the Found Head and Alice Shrugged and Anthem is the story. And the byproduct of the story for her is the philosophy. So it's not that she starts with the philosophy and says, I want to illustrate in a story. To her, she starts with the story, and she said, to really tell the story, well, it turned out I needed to develop a philosophy, because I couldn't find- Really? She actually writes it. She says, her goal in writing was the projection of the ideal man. Right, right? And she said, I read all these philosophers, and nobody could tell me what an ideal man was. Everything they were saying about man, I found repugnant. So I had to develop my own ethics, if you will, my own system of philosophy and my own epistemology to center man around reason, for example, and around his own self-interest, which is her philosophy, in order to be able to present him in fiction. And that's where you get Howard Walker, and that's how you get John Galt. Which are, in my mind, mythical men, archetypal men. I have a hard time saying, that guy over there, yeah, he's John Galt. No, he has John Galt characteristics. It's ideal, it's ideal we strive towards. That's how she viewed it, the perfect man. And that's the ideal that we try to model ourselves after. So I'm going to school up at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and I'm walking through the student center, and there is a student display, you either have the little clubs or whatever, and it's all about ripping on Ayn Rand, who, you know, it's like, wow, and I was like, wow. But, you know, the girl at the booth was really cute. So I was happy to, oh, I don't know. But there was this violent, and I do mean violent reaction to these books still today, some 50 years after Alice Rudd. I'd say more today than ever. I mean, not a week goes by where Salon.com doesn't write some scathing thing about Ayn Rand, or will write a regular article, but has to, in one paragraph or another, you know, take some jabs at Ayn Rand. Quigman, Paul Quigman, you know, a national economist, I guess, or pseudo economist. He, every quarter, right, on the dot, he has something that attacks Ayn Rand. Huffington Post, monthly attacks Ayn Rand. It's almost unbelievable. It's almost like this derangement that this is a cult, that this is a woman who started something and poor saps are following mine. There's some irrational hatred of this. Let me give you one aspect of it. I heard a lot of this, which was from women. Here we are, a couple guys talking about Ayn Rand. So let me ask you about this. You know, the rape scene in Fountainhead, the way that men dominated women in this and that she had this, that was a sexual thing for, that is just so wrong, it's anti-feminist. And of course, during the 70s, this book that she wrote decades earlier comes into the center of a feminist storm. Sure, but this is the absurdity of what they're claiming, right? Who else in all of American literature, including today, has a woman executive running a railroad more competent than any guy out there who is driving the man around her to succeed? She's clearly superior intellectually and as a business person morally from her brother and then all the other guys out there. Yes, Ayn Rand has a certain psychological view of sex and maybe many women disagree, maybe many men disagree. But that is a psychologically view of sex, which I think needs to be taken seriously because I don't think it could be completely dismissed. She was a smart lady. But if you look at the novels, if you look at the characters, if you look at Dominique in the Fountainhead, if you look at Dagny in Atlas Shrug, these are women larger than life. Now, not only that, think of 1957 when Atlas Shrug was published or 1945 when Fountainhead was published. These books have sex in them, right? There was no sex in 57, right? Nobody wrote about it in movies and on television. Married couples slept in separate beds, right? So she was way ahead of her time in terms of the whatever good there is in feminism, the idea of women being able to achieve, being able to be successful, no glass ceiling. Ayn Rand was way ahead of the feminist. She invented feminism from that perspective, right? As a collectivistic type, you know, women think differently than men, nonsense, yeah, she rejected all of that and I'm happy that they reject Ayn Rand. But nobody presented stronger women. Nobody presented women who were more successful, who had kind of guy stuff than Ayn Rand did. When Orson Welles made Citizen Kane, he was a remarkable thing because he had complete control. And ever since, once that flopped, nobody ever got, it became a collaborative effort, nobody could do it. And it was a flop. And then it started getting on it and discovered it. And understood how he did things that were amazing. You know, Fountainhead didn't do well at first and Atlas Shrugged really didn't do well at first, if I recall. How many copies, let's go with Atlas Shrugged, how many copies have been sold? Well, let's say both books did well. So what happened with the Fountainhead is the Fountainhead was rejected by 12 publishers. Nobody wanted to publish it. Finally, when it was put out, they only printed, I think, 2,500 copies or something like that. Sold like that, word of mouth got around. It became a word of mouth bestseller. It was unbelievably successful very quickly. So by the time Atlas Shrugged came out, publishers were fighting to get to publish Atlas Shrugged. But that was almost a decade later. Yeah, 57, 12 years later. So Atlas Shrugged was an instant bestseller. Atlas Shrugged, I mean, has sold millions of copies. Fountainhead has sold millions of copies. Total for Einrad is around 25 million copies of all of her books. The best number I know for Barack Obama for the current president, I mean, this is his greatest achievement in my mind, is that since his election, Atlas Shrugged has sold over 2 million copies. And it spiked, clearly it spiked after his election. Let's bring it to today. Now, the names have changed. The names of the laws. There's not a dog eat dog law. There's all these. But I look at how the regulatory state is keeping people apart. Last week, we had a show right here on two people who wanted to have a bar where you go and smoke vaping. It's steam cigarettes. The landlord and the tenant. And they want to have this relationship. But the city council thought, that's perverse. We don't know. And so you can't do this. The regulations that have come in, particularly in the last six years, but even before that, it's growing, it's growing, it's growing. Sometimes I turn around and go, this is so close to that. Oh yeah, no, this is what's going on in America today. Well, give me a couple examples. Whether it's Obama, if you read the little, there's a little speech in Atlas Shrugged by the doctor who goes on strike not to give the whole plot away. And you read that little section. And he's like he's complaining about Obamacare. The way people have made a link between the regulation of the railroads in Atlas Shrugged to net neutrality and the whole idea of the government wanting to come in and tell us what we do with the internet. What we do with our cable provider, what the cable provider does with the provider of content, with the provider. All these relationships, which the marketplace does beautifully and arranges beautifully and coordinates beautifully and the government has to step in and intervene. So at every level, you know, Sabine's Oxley is probably a classic that could be taken out of the book. But this has been 100 years in the making of these regulations. Even down to a tiny area, I just heard today of a yoga studio school has decided to certify their instructors. And so now they complain for all their competitors who haven't been certified the way we're certified. You need to put them out of business and the state just sent out 88 letters to do this kind of stuff. And to take these people who are just having relationships, consensual relationships and saying, you two people, you can't have the relationship. So in California, you need a license to shampoo here. Right? And you see this across the board. You see it. You think I care about that? I know you don't. I don't care about that. I know you don't care about it. I know sympathy about that. I care about it, because it raises the cost of shampooing my hair. One squeegee has lasted years. And the reason we both care about it, right, in spite of everything, is because who does this really hurt? It hurts that ambitious poor person who's trying to make a living, who's trying to get up and out of welfare and trying to get a job. And what the state is doing really is oppressing them. It's keeping them out of the workforce and keeping them out of their ability to earn a living for themselves. Help me with this. Some people get it in certain areas. I see how much the gay movement has moved in the last few decades. It's amazing. It's amazing. And people go, they just want to have a relationship. The government should not stop them from having a contractual relationship of their choosing. And then they turn around and support Obamacare, which forces people into relationships they don't want to have. And so I feel optimistic that if people understood the bigotry, and I'm talking from purely human area, I'm not talking about it's good for poor people. It's good for the economy. It's good for all of which is true, but the sin of stopping free association between individuals. Using force to stop people from interacting voluntarily among each other. And the left gets it when it comes to gay issues, and maybe Moana in Colorado, but it certainly doesn't get it when it comes to any economic issue. And here's where I think we have to go deeper. I think the opposition to, let's call it economic freedom, capitalism is not about helping anybody. It's not about economics. I think we won the economic argument a long time ago. The free market guys have had all the good economists. We've solved all the problems. We've made the argument. It's done. Although, let's make this point. A lot of people believe that corporate welfare and cronyism is capitalism. And that is just as. They didn't 30 years ago. They didn't 40 years ago. This is a modern, more modern phenomenon. Yeah, we were drifting away from capitalism. We've been drifting away from capitalism for almost 100 years. But I just want to make clear, cronyism is as ugly as any other form that stops. Absolutely. But in my view, it's almost all the government's fault. Because if I pointing a gun at you, you're going to do stuff to defend yourself. When government points a gun at business, the business is going to try to get the gun pointed to somebody else. Although, let me. It's rare that business goes to the government and starts at it. Well, let me say this. When a business has a foothold in whatever they're doing, they want to use the government to close down entry into that business. We see it with taxicabs. We see it with all sorts of things. And that happens a lot. But the problem is that when somebody has the power to do it, the problem is that somebody has the power to do that. But my favorite example of this is Microsoft pre. And then we'll get back to the topic. But pre-1990s, Microsoft spent exactly $0 on lobbying. Had no presence in Washington, D.C., no offices in the area. And they were brought in front of Congress and sent it to Arun Hatch, Republican from Utah, lamblasted them for not contributing and for not having an office in D.C. A year later, you can find this stuff on YouTube. A year later, the Justice Fund goes after them. So guess how much they spent today on what? They have, first of all, they have a beautiful Washington office. Not far from the Capitol. Glass, walls, it's just gorgeous place. And then they spent tens of millions of dollars a year lobbying. Now, did the lobbying go from defending themselves to attacking their competitors? Sure, once you get into that slippy slope, there's no any. But let's remember what starts this is the fact that the government has the power to cause these businesses, to regulate them, to control them. And I'm not excusing many of these businesses. But if we're gonna attack anybody, I think we need to attack it at the source, at the source point. It's a government that grants protectionism to certain industries. But that's not what protectionism. And it regulates it. It shouldn't regulate it. In my view, in Iron Man's view, we should have a separation of state from economics. The state should have no wall in economics. They should have no wall in voluntary transactions between two consenting adults. What is, we've only got a few minutes left. What is the role of government? There are externalities, and doesn't government have a role to make sure that people aren't dumping acid into our drinking water? Sure, so the wall, the wall of government, I don't like call it externalities, but the role of government is to protect us from criminals, terrorists, foreign invaders, and to arbitrate disputes. And that's it. So somebody pouring cyanide into the air or into my water is attacking me, physically attacking me. And there are plenty of laws on the books without the EPA that adjudicate that, as in civil courts through legislation. You can't poison your neighbor. You can't pour your trash in your neighbor. So a lot of the externalities are problems of property rights. If we have property rights, we can solve the problems of externalities. Beyond that, the only role of government is to catch the crooks, catch the fraudsters. It's to arbitrate disputes when we disagree honestly about stuff. There needs to be a system of objective law, and to protect us from foreign invasion, have a military and so on. But that's it. It's to protect individual rights, or to put it simpler. It's to protect freedom from coercion. It's to protect my ability to live my life as I see fit, free from my neighbor cursing me, and suddenly free from the government cursing me. Are you more optimistic about American politics? Are you less? I go back and forth. I'm overall pessimistic as hell, but I see opportunities here in my home state of Colorado where I see we have a path towards bringing liberty to Colorado. So I'm generally pessimistic, and you have to be because you look at the facts. The facts are not good. And particularly if you look at education. I mean, I think everything starts and ends with our schools and our universities, which are overwhelmingly leftist. However, I agree with you. You know, and otherwise, how could I do what I do? I mean, I work- Neither one of us would get up in the morning. Very long days to fight this fight. If I thought it was certain that we lose, I wouldn't do it. I think it's likely that we lose, but I think there's a good chance we won. And Colorado's a good example. I've been coming to Colorado for over 10 years as part of the leadership program of the Rockies and giving other talks that is steamboat and universities and stuff. And then, you know, can I see a difference? I've made, I think so, in small ways. But Colorado's moved over that period. And I think the other people- I believe Colorado is a libertarian, small L, libertarian state. We want people to, we're not social prudes. You do what you want to do. You want a smoke pot, go smoke pot. But we want government out of our lives. The problem is we want them at most, but that's true. I mean, unfortunately, most, I mean, it's an optimistic way of viewing people. Well, you actually push people. They still want their Medicare. They still want their security. They still want their values on other people. They still want to push their values. We've got a couple of minutes here. Gossip here, okay. Yeah, sure. Let me ask you about the movies. Sure. Now, when Ayn Rand died, she was working on a mini-series for- We have that script. Really? How did the rights for the movies that have been made, the trio of the movies, was that given by- So Ayn Rand left it to Lena Peekoff, who basically inherited everything, and Lena Peekoff, and she told him at the time, she said, sell them, make money. Don't worry, you can't, you won't get script approval. Nobody will give it to you anyway, right? I barely got it for the fountain head. You're not gonna get it. So in 1994, he was approached by a businessman, Johnny Gliloro, to, and you know, he could grow to check. Johnny Gliloro got option on the movies. The option was renewed a couple of times, and then it was just about to expire, and Lena was gonna get the rights back, and by this point, there was a lot of interest in making this movie, and there was a lot of money, and it could have been made. And on Gliloro, two weeks before the option was gonna expire, you know, ran it into production, crammed it through, and the result is an awful movie, and three awful movies that Ayn Rand- I didn't want to have to say this because they were terrible movies. It's true, it's not an issue of opinion. I didn't want to bring you up hard. And the movies are awful. Hopefully at some point, somebody will be able to buy the rights back and make a profit with an edition of Alice's Sugar. I think she deserves better, much better. And I believe the story could be made in a way that visually would work, and as a film would work. It's possible. I just can't imagine Hollywood ever doing it. Well, but it could be, today you do a lot of independent movies, there's people in Hollywood that could do a good job with it. Real fast, people want to learn more. Where do they go? Ayn Rand.org, A-Y-N-R-A-N-D.org. You can also follow me on Twitter, you're on Brooke, follow me on Facebook, wherever you are. I'm so excited to do this, I've wanted to do this for years, thank you, thank you. Tell a friend and we'll see you next week.