 I've got some music and I'm going to get started. Though radical, fundamental principles help read up rational self-interest and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. All right everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Thursday night. I am super excited to be doing another interview with Harry Binswanger, so stay tuned. All right, so I think to this audience, Harry really needs no introduction, but of course he is a renowned objectivist, philosopher, and associate and friend of Ayn Rand. It's always a treat to talk to somebody who, and there are few and few of you, unfortunately, knew Ayn Rand personally and got to talk to her. And of course, as a board member of the Ayn Rand Institute, we're just talking about that at 38 years, a board member of the Ayn Rand Institute, so I'm there really from the beginning of the institute, so welcome, Harry. Thanks, Aaron. So today we're going to dig deep into both Ayn Rand's philosophy and into philosophy more broadly and maybe contrast philosophy as typically taught and studied and Rand's philosophy. And part of the context for this is the question that always comes up, I get it, asked in the Q&A here, and I'm sure you get it all the time, is why don't philosophers take Ayn Rand seriously? Is it, you know, to what extent is she a serious philosopher because philosophers don't take her seriously? So what can we say about the reasons for that, for absence in academia? First of all, she didn't take them seriously. She said that philosophy has committed suicide and indeed it has. I think there's a little bit of a rebound. Maybe it's a dead cat bounce, but philosophy is a little better than when I was in graduate school in Columbia in the 60s and 70s, but it's still, well, your audience knows this. Everybody out there who's taken a philosophy course in college, with the possible exception if you went to a Catholic school because they are outside the mainstream, but if you went to a regular non-religious school and took a philosophy course, it was terrible, right? You either dropped it or wish you had dropped it and you were expecting something. You were expecting a discussion of big ideas. You're expecting to find things explained that you couldn't understand. And instead it was about nothing. It was like a big Seinfeld episode. So both sides view the other side as not serious philosophy, but there's no symmetry. It's like the US and the Soviet Union. There's no moral equivalence. There's no epistemological equivalence. We objectivists stand for reason and morality. They stand for nothing. There's a whole school called postmodern philosophy, which champions. We don't believe in anything. In fact, they attack people and say, it's not that we believe in nothing. We don't believe in anything. We don't believe in nothing is too definite for us. So maybe let's step back a second and talk about what philosophy really is. What is it? Because how can it be that all these people categorize themselves as philosophers while having nothing to say or standing really for nothing? What should philosophy be and how is it being distorted, perverted? For the 20th century, everyone agreed about what philosophy is. Every philosopher agreed it's a study of the fundamental principles of man, of existence, and of man's relationship to existence. That's the real focus of it. So what is reality? What is knowledge? What ought a person to do? What is it to really live? What principles should guide him? Now the special sciences, as they're called, are narrower. They do that too. But physics is the study of the fundamental principles governing matter and the changes it undergoes. Biology, fundamental principles of living organisms, qua living. Psychology, the fundamental principles of consciousness and its role in behavior. So all the other sciences have a definite view of their domains. The philosophy, I knew a guy who was for a while an objective as philosopher. That is, he was a philosopher who considered more or less an objective as he's name was John Nelson and he taught at the University of Colorado. And I had a conversation with him once where he offered the opinion that philosophy deals with the questions that haven't become definite enough to hand over to the sciences. So we schmooze about trying to understand what the questions are. And once we got a real question, oh, well, that's for physics, so that's for psychology or that's for neuroscience or something. And that is, that's a guy who really liked I ran, he was president, president at the workshops on objective as she conducted. So they don't, they don't believe they have a subject matter. And then they say that she's not serious because she has a subject. So what happened? And how did we get from, I mean, as as early as the 19th century, there's still philosophers who who value the field and saw it. What happened that explains the shift from a subject matter to really nothing at all to avoid? Well, there was a man named Emmanuel Conch in 1776, he published the critique of pure reason. In the introduction to that second edition of that, he said, I found I had to deny knowledge to make room for faith. Religion was dying and Conch thought he had to save it. He had to save faith from the advance of science and reason. And his solution was to say science and reason and logic to not deal with reality. They deal with fabrications of the human mind. Now that's good enough. Let's just call that, let's take our shared delusion. So like maybe we're living in the matrix, but let's just call whatever we experience, let's call that objective reality. Even though we know it isn't really objective reality says closest we're going to come. So that'll do. And he thought he could have a science of philosophy because he thought all men have the same structure of their consciousness. Now of course, even to say that refutes his whole approach because you can't talk with the structure of consciousness if you're locked inside it and can't get out. But subsequent philosophers said, no, they're different perspectives on the word. Everybody began as racial or economic marks. The bourgeois have their logic. The pro-Therian have their logic and Hitler, Jewish logic, Aryan logic. So then it became even more fragmented. It's my logic and your logic and things today are truth be not true. And as one logic is male logic, but southern male logic and southern male white logic and southern male white logic as in Charleston in the late 20th. So it's necessarily became fragmented as people disagree. Whenever people disagree, you had to say, well, their minds work differently. So could you even attribute kind of the 98 genders to this kind of break down from? Fragmented continuum. Yeah, it's it gets kind of complicated in how it developed. But there's a great line for mine, Rand talking about an unserious philosopher. I like to quote this because. It's the best short statement on the history of philosophy that was ever made. This is from for the new intellectual. The first book she wrote after Atletra, nonfiction book. While promising a philosophical system is rational to monstrous and scientific as mathematics, Descartes, he's where the poison begins. Descartes began with the basic epistemological premise of every which doctor that's your symbol for the mystic. A premise she shared explicitly with Augustine. The quote, the prior certainty of consciousness, those with the belief that the existence of an external world is not self-evident, but must be proved by deduction, proved by deduction from the contents of one's consciousness, which means the concept of consciousness is some faculty other than the faculty of perception, which means the indiscriminate contents of one's consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute to which reality has to conform. What followed, and that's what we're getting into here, was the grotesquely tragic spectacle of philosophers struggling to prove the existence of an external world by starting with the which doctors blind inward stare at the random twists of their conceptions, then of their perceptions, then of sensations. And that's Locke Barclay-Hugh, but no one has ever said that about the history of philosophy. Certainly you would not hear that in any course on the history of philosophy. They don't even attempt to integrate much less get the idea of they try to prove the external world first by complex rationalistic arguments, then by, well, our perceptions must have a cause, and then by, I seem to see a seeming cigarette case. That was what I was taught in MIT in my last year in philosophy, that I seem to see a seeming cigarette case was rock bottom certainty. So and then she goes on to say that the climax was Hume and the man quote, to formalize this state, who closed the door of philosophy to reason was Immanuel Kant. And she goes on to rip him apart. And there are people in philosophy who oppose Kant, not many, but none of them got to the essence of what he had wrong, but she did. So, so what do philosophers think they do today and what do they do today? Because I haven't been in the academic world since 2002 when I taught the University of Texas. And that was just a semester. So my real exposure goes back to the 70s and 80s and the 60s, 70s, I would say. But what did they think they're doing? The following bit can shine. You said we let the fly out of the fly bottle. You know, fly bottle is a bottle with a narrow neck. The fly goes in after the smell and he can't find where to fly to get out. Yeah. We we are trying to work out the kinks in our intellectual muscles so that we are no longer puzzled by pseudo problems like what John Nelson said. We're trying to straighten out confusion so that we're back to neutral. You're troubled, you know, you're troubled by things. Well, how can I trust my senses when they're optical illusions? And you go to a philosopher and they say, well, let's analyze what an illusion is. Well, that'd be a good one if he if he did that. But he would have some way of putting you at peace about that problem without actually discussing anything of substance. So, you know, they all believe that you can't prove ethics. I and Rand believe that ethics is the whole purpose of philosophy to tell you how to live, to tell you what the world is like and what your means of survival, your mind is like. So you know how to live out of succeed, how to be happy. And none of the philosophers today, I don't know. There may be an exception in the virtue ethics school, which is better developed. But basically, they don't think there's anything to say. Life stinks. Get over it. That would be that would be the philosopher's answer. So, you know, so so Rand is really the you know, continues a philosophical tradition, would you say, of serious philosophers from a hundred and fifty years ago? Yeah. Yeah, I think the last serious philosopher of note was unfortunately Hegel. Who was as a primer would say. Yeah. There were some English philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition in the 19th century, William Hewell and H.W.D. Joseph, who did serious philosophy, but they were pretty narrow. And I don't think either of them did ethics. Ayn Rand felt that her ethics and the proof of it was her biggest achievement and biggest contribution to the history of thought. But, you know, when I was in philosophy in the sixties, it just weren't the articles on ethics. There was no discussion of morality at all because the leading school that it just kind of died was called emotivism, which said good means I like it. Bad means boo. So it was the total subjectivism and emotionalism. Yeah, both of them are emotionalism, which means this. See, one of the deep things that I ran grass. Aristotle also grasp it was that emotions come from thoughts. So the things you approve of and say, well, that's good are the things that you've concluded are good early in life, perhaps just following your parents. So look at the universal dominance of the altruism. You know, Ayn Rand is the great advocate of selfishness and enemy of altruism and self-sacrifice, living for others. And she saw the connection of this to life. The altruism is a morality of depth. And if you want to live, you've got to live your own life. You've got to be independent. And the people who don't have an ethics of thinking, boo, hurrah, as all there is to ethics, are understandably amoral. They don't have, they don't believe in any values at all. And against them, they're just the religionists who believe, well, what mommy told me is true. They all believe in altruism because they accepted it before they were old enough to know they were accepting. What is your sense of virtue, ethics? Kind of what did it evolve out of? And to what extent is it is it is it a good development? I think it partly grew out of Ayn Rand, because some of the figures in that field, Swanton Foot, I had Philip Foot in college, wrote a paper for her on the objective of this ethics. And I think some of these that in Aristotle has been a big revival of some of the best things in in contemporary philosophies that Aristotle has now looked at. He's now considered a guide to contemporary life. And I think that since Aristotle thought of practical wisdom in his terms, was essential to success, I think that that school came out of the combination of Aristotle and a little nudge from Ayn Rand. That's great. Yeah. Why is the why is the ethics so difficult for people to particularly people in philosophy to grasp? I mean, she she it's it is revolutionary, but she does solve the one of the main problems in philosophy that nobody else seemed to have been able to solve. There is odd gap. Why are they not able to see that? I think it's two things. One is personal and one is philosophically, well, epistemology. The personal is that if you accept altruism at a young age, you start building it in, you start institutionalizing it, your psychology and the thought of going against it is going against your whole past, your whole life. If you bet your life on that this is the right way to live, and it'd be very threatening to be told, no, you were wrong. That was a mistake. And the other thing is that intellectually, they do not have the right theory of knowledge, the right epistemology. So they cannot follow Ayn Rand's proof of the ethics. One of the well-known, probably even to your to the layman in your audience, philosophers is Robert Nozick, who died a few years back. He's the author of Anarchy, State Neutopia. He became a libertarian, helped really get the libertarian wind going. And he got it for mine, Rand, as he kind of sneakily admits in his footnote. He wrote an article called On the Randian Argument, which he tried in which he tried to present her argument and criticize it. And he couldn't present it. He couldn't follow it. His is automatized way of thinking was so alien to what you need to grasp in order to follow her group that he criticized the wrong thing. And he didn't do it because he disliked her. He liked Atlas Shrugged. I talked to him on the phone once and he encouraged I was going to say. I sent him, I did send him a seven page critique of that argument. And what I pointed out was that he was assuming that you had to deduce values, arts, OU, G, H, T, S from facts, from his. And you know, you form the concept and you observe a phenomenon, goal directed action, and you conceptualize that. And that's the basis of all values, including moral values. And I, you know, I get he encouraged me, won't you publish it? So that an inductive process. Yeah. And is that is can they not grasp induction as a way of discovering? They are they are completely opposed to induction. Even the ones who like her conclusions cannot accept the fact that induction, induction, generalization from experience is the basis of all reasoning. And it's funny because there's a principle of logic that they all know. No, the basic unit deduction is syllogism. Socrates is mortal. Sorry. Socrates is a man, all men are mortals. Socrates is mortal, a syllogism like that. It's a well known textbook rule that no syllogism is valid, that lacks a universal premise. Well, that means that syllogisms depend upon induction, because if you get a universal premise from an earlier, still more universal premise, where did that come from? And they have no answer to that. You know, this might be a time to take up that question you you told me about before we started. Yes, this is a question from from Paul Cohen. He he refers you to a short video by Neil, I forget his name. Neil deGrasse, Neil deGrasse, who's talking about mathematics. And he was wondering about what you've viewed as the epistemological errors in the in the video. And how can scientists make such errors? Well, because scientists are not philosophers. It's like when philosophers try to do science, they're not too good, unless they know the science. Now, in the case of Neil deGrasse, he's voicing a very Einstein said the same thing. And so did Morris Klein is studying the philosophy. Namely, how is it that mathematics, which we make up out of our heads, works? It's a miracle. We have these equations and nature is described by equations. And how come that works? We're very lucky, but some mystery. And that's because they don't believe that mathematics comes from experience. They believe it comes from an arbitrary starting definition like the null set. Let's start with mathematics at a good place. Let's start with the null set. And then the set, the null set and the set of the null set, metaset. We'll call that one. Because it has one member, the null set. And then the set that has that and another set is two because it has the one and another set. You probably had this in school, some of you. It's just not one means this as opposed to this. I mean, don't they don't they see young children discover one? No, counts and and and even add. They they they see no relationship between that phenomena in childhood and mathematics. No, none. I've got now we're playing into another prepared thing by accident. Yeah. One of the things I wanted to say in this in this meeting was they are not serious philosophers, we are the serious philosophers. They are playing games. They are rewriting reality to fit their assumptions. They don't care about facts. And here is a logic book. The most popular logic book, at least in the 20th century, introduction to logic by Irving M. Copey and here I'm going to read to this. This will curl your hair if you've got here. Got it. Ostensive definitions. Ostensive, that means defining by pointing like or showing the same. This this is called a mouse. Yeah, your mouth. This is a hand. OK. Ostensive definitions have sometimes been alleged to be the quote first or quote primary definitions in the sense that all other definitions must assume that some words, those used in the definitions, that means the statement of the definition already understood and therefore cannot be used until those words have been previously defined. It has been suggested that this difficulty you define a word in terms of word and those words in terms of words or as a start has been suggested that this difficulty can be avoided by beginning with ostensive definitions. It is by means of ostensive definitions. Some writers have claimed that design ran. That we learn to understand their first words. OK, so some some people have claimed some writers have claimed that a child is shown a hand that that's your hand. And that's how he learns what the word hand means. This is my nose. These are glasses that just pre wild, right? That's crazy. This claim that infants learned by being shown examples is easily, easily seem to be mistaken for the meaning or significance of gestures themselves must be learned. If you point with your finger to the side of the baby's crib, the baby's attention, if attracted at all, is as likely to be directed towards your finger, as in the direction pointed. And surely one is in the same difficulty concerning the definition of gestures by means of other gestures. To understand the definition of any sign, some signs must already be understood. This bears out an earlier remark that the primary way of learning to use language is my observation and imitation rather than definition. So there he is, denying what everyone who's ever taught a baby anything knows you point to it or you hold it in front of them and shaking it, rattle or orange juice. And sometimes the baby doesn't understand because, you know, he's right in the sense that can the baby differentiate between the finger and the thing you're pointing at, not initially, but at some point through repetition, they get it. But it's not just repetitions of process that I ran considered absolutely fundamental, which is differentiation. Yeah, that's right. The Harvard philosopher, one of the big, biggies of the 20th century, Willard Van Orman Kwein, not the name I ran made up an actual philosopher's name, Willard Van Orman Kwein said, imagine a missionary goes to an African tribe that is not communicated with Europeans before and a rabbit jumps in the bush and the missionary turns and says, Gapa guy. Well, does Gapa guy mean rabbit? Does it mean bush? Does it mean or and this is my favorite. Does it mean pre disassembled rabbit parts? Pre disassembled rabbits rabbit part. There's no way to know. There's no way to know. But of course, there is a way to know. First of all, they don't have any such concept as pre disassembled rabbit rights or assembled or just assembled for that matter. But if you're wondering where they're meant, jump or rabbit. You maybe jump up yourself and say, Gapa guy. And he says, no. When you point to a rabbit that's just sitting there, you say, Gapa guy, he says, yes, then you know, it's rabbit. Yeah. But they never consider that. They never consider differentiation. Ironman makes it paramount. The first process of consciousness is discrimination against the background. The difference, the first thing. So when she says it, when you read it for the first time and when you say it now, it seems so obvious. Yeah. So the question is why why did it take three thousand years in the history of philosophy for somebody to get that? And why is it so hard for philosophers today to get it? After she's already stated it after they've rejected. Everything is easy once it's been explained. It's like computer programs. Right. You look at the screen and say, what the hell am I supposed to do here? I want to get back to where I was. I hit a key and some how the hell I have no idea it's a mystery. You look around and somebody comes in and says, like you did to me and the mute. Neil deGrasse was they see that little thing up there in the corner? If you click on that, that will do what you want. Oh, it's obvious now. Of course, it's a little microphone, a little speaker symbol with the line through. It was in a strange place that I'd never seen before. But yeah, OK, that's obvious. And once you learn a program, it becomes completely self-evident. You wonder how could anybody not know that? Aren't you born knowing it? So that's one thing I call that retroactive self-evidentcy. It's self-evident once it's been pointed out. The other thing as to why they can't get it is that they have automatized not only content, but method. They have automatized a way of thinking that is inimical to grasping points about real life. I ran parody and she had this great parody of how philosophers operate. One philosopher stands up and says, since man has only two eyes, he can only see two things. And then possible and then Jews schools arise. One says, yes. He can only see two things. We think there are many things that they're really only two and just shows that you cannot trust your mind, because clearly there can only be two things. We've only got two eyes. You can only see two things in the other schools. No, no, no, that's crazy. The solution is we have many, many eyes. And that is only a fiction writer could come up with that. That's that's a great example of how they operate. One of them will announce something based on the slimmest evidence. You can't even go on evidence consideration. That really makes no sense. And the others will then create an industry of attacking it from the same wrong premise, but on the other side. So there that's what they've been doing all their lives. That's what they're good at. It's like someone has been playing chess all his life at eight hours a day as a career. And now you want him to play something completely different, chess with completely different rules, chess that, you know, operates in a way that he could not conceive of and he's not going to be very good at. That there is a momentum, you know, there is a time that takes time. Even the bad philosophies that were following their predecessors take time like it took 80 years for Marx to come up from Kant. So it does take time and I'm hopeful that we'll see some change recent in the academic world. So what's the essence of what makes Rand so unique? So true in a sense or so much of a real philosopher. I think it has to do with her unique combination of qualities. I've given this some thought, so I'm ready to spin out my answer here. Go for it. Well, first of all, she was a genius. I mean, she was way ahead of almost everybody in philosophy. Much more intelligent. And you need to be that. Secondly, she was completely rational and moral, including independent. So she didn't have old baggage like Kant had religion that she wanted to defend. She just wanted to know what was true. And that already narrows down the field tremendously. The philosophers actually want to know what's true in reality rather than how to get published and get admired by your colleagues. And then I think it's you have to be a valuer. You have to burn with passion for this life on earth. And it's no accident that she was an artist. And if she had not been a novice, we never would have heard of her. She wouldn't have succeeded in convincing any of the people who offered jobs in philosophy. And we never she would have died in total obscurity. It's only her novels and her glorious sense of life dramatizing that that gave her an audience and were people willing to listen to her. So you needed that combination of intelligence, honesty and passion with an ability to get an audience. And that's that's just unbelievably rare in the history of thought. Yeah. So maybe let's what would you say the. Biggest issues that no one else could solve, you know, that she really. Well, she's old. She she she gave us the answers to what are the big, big questions in philosophy that she kind of resolves? Well, one of them we've already. Kind of talked about, which is the is auto academy. How does the reason prove a code of ethics? And I haven't gone through it here, but basically. Her she was able to answer that because of her solution is the problem of concepts. Her equally enormous historic advance was to solve what's known as a problem of universals, which is stated by the Greeks. There was a guy named Antisthenes who said, I have seen many men, but never have I seen math. Yeah. Where is this thing? Man. Wittgenstein, twenty five hundred years later, the most celebrated philosopher of the last century, said to say all these objects, pointing, you know, in effect, pointing to my shirt. And some other blue things like this. To say these objects have blue in common by itself, says nothing other than we give the same name to the blue. We apply the same word in each case. Now, for for decades and decades, I thought he was there saying and there is nothing, but he wasn't real. If you read him as I again, what are you saying is there's still a problem. It doesn't solve the problem to say, well, they have blueness in common. By itself, it doesn't say anything. But that's a modern, the modern question raised form of the question raised by Antisthenes. What is it that an abstract concept stands for? Take two or one for reason or romanticism. What are those things stand for in reality? Because all the examples of romanticism are different, right? Beethoven is not Chopin is not Brahms is is not Dolly, who's a sort of romantic in certain of his in his metaphysical period, as he calls it, to Hugo. They're all different and all the blues are different. So one philosopher said, OK, but if you can find blues that are exactly the same, like postage stamps all have the same ink and you can't tell the difference between the colors, that's what blue stands for. But the problem with that is, as he realized, when you get to a concept like color, there's no one color that's the same among all colors, let alone all blues having one shade and then attribute all attributes. How could you have a concept of that? So the the problem is what do general ideas stand for? And there are only two answers that have been given up to her. I don't know how much you want me to go into it, but she she got the Gordian knot and went in a different direction to answer. Give us an indication of the direction she goes into. What's the direction she goes to? Mathematics, actually. She says that the things that you put under a concept have the same attribute, but in different measure or degree. And that's never been said before. And it lends an objectivity to our groupings, which everybody in the Anglo-Saxon world thinks are just rough approximations. But she had a whole technology of how you form concepts. One of the things, well, wait a minute, let me I think I have loose energy. OK, so the big the big things. Yeah, so we got is odd. We got universals, universals and that higher order universals like colors, higher order to blue, an attribute is higher order to color, are hierarchically based so that you cannot form some concepts, except on the base of having already formed others. So the example is say legal. Has to come after law. And. Internal has to come at the same time, at least as external. You can't say like one guy said in our club in college, my first axiom is internal existence exists. Everything's inside inside of what? Or, you know, everybody's heard the idea. Everything's expiry. Everything is appearance and we don't know what reality is. Well, you can't have the concept of appearance except by contrasting it with reality. If everything's a dream, there are no dreams. The dream is contrasted to what happens when you wake up. So she called this a policy of the stone concept. She grasped it certain concepts. They are based on others. And if you deny those more basic concepts, you can't hold on to the derivative concepts because they exist only as the branching out from that basic concept. And that's what enabled her to solve the assault problem. Because she said, well, where is good? Where does that come a morality, moral virtue? Where do those come up in the hierarchy of concepts? How do I form them? What are they based upon? And she realized that it based upon some things that you act to gain and or keep benefit your life and some harm. In fact, that the very concept of benefit implies that you are facing the alternative of life versus death. So she held that your own life has to be the value at the basis of everything for you. And it becomes objective when you ask, well, what is my nature as a living being? What is my means of survival? But that that approach is so alien. Even though they do what they call conceptual analysis, they don't get the idea of a hierarchy of building concepts on other concepts. And she lays it all out how it works in her book, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, which I just taught at the Iron Rand University online. So that's a way of going into there's a lot to still need the third. The third one was free will. Yeah, I think free will as the choice to use your mind or not, to focus it to the task of understanding the world or not. And that's what brought me into objectivism. I heard a talk at MIT where I was a freshman and I was floundering. I didn't know what anything meant, what I was doing. I was starting to get really bad grades. I was on academic probation. And I thought, you know, I need some answers. Maybe she's got some answers. She's controversial. I'm going to go listen to her talk. And I didn't understand anything until all of a sudden halfway through the damn talk, she said man can focus his mind to a full purpose, full grasp of reality. Or he can drift in a semi conscious days at the mercy of any chance stimulus. Dot, dot, dot. And I thought, Jesus Christ, I'm in a semi conscious days right now. This is really important. This is the most important thing I've ever heard. And so obvious, I mean, I must have heard this before, right? No, never said before. Yeah. Her theory of free will ties in with her ideas on both concepts and life, that you have a free will choice to turn on your means of survival and drive it or just to ride, you know, like George Costanza or someone just react to what's happening according to your feelings. And if you make the choice to know, to drive your mind to think, then one kind of future lies ahead of you. And if you dripped a very different and opposite future lies ahead of you, that's why that's your basic moral choice. She said in Atlas Shruggy said, if I were going to speak your language, I would say there's only one commandment. Thou shalt think the morality doesn't deal in commandments. So she integrated, she had a theory of free will. A lot of philosophers think of free will in history, hardly anyone today, but in history. But she integrated it with the view of how the mind works, that it works in a certain way and you have to run it by your choice. And that fit in with both the epistemology and the ethics is an amazing integration. It runs throughout objectivism, what underlies the concept of objective for her. So those are the three things and other little things like showing why we have rights and showing how art works and naming the axioms of all philosophy. You know, other little things like that. But she solved the two problems and the three problems in the ages. Three problems of determinism, problem of the universals, what's in common among the concretes that you put under a concept and why you act this way rather than that way? Because it's your life that's in. Amazing. So we have a lot of questions that keep rolling in. So we're going to be here for a while. All right, so I'm going to I'm going to start with these. I'm going to do them based on how much money the person, you know, we're good capitalists, so the more money you put in, the higher priority you get in terms of having your answer, your question answered. So. The W.R. Brown, 19, all right. So he says self esteem has been has long been considered an important value for good reason. However, we have discovered from the hierarchy of needs that self actualization may be more psychologically urgent. Have either of you considered or even experienced a need to evaluate or view the prime values? Yeah, that's why I went to that lecture. Yeah, he's referring to Maslow's hierarchy. And as I was very, very good, he's not completely clear the way on your end is. But he's a kindred spirit in this regard. And self esteem is. A kind of total assessment. So is self actualization. You can't get self esteem is kept by earning it and you earn it by achievement, by thinking, by working to get what you want. You know, Peter Keating in the Fountainhead, the antipode of Howard Rark, the hero, the kind of George Costanza figure of the Fountainhead says, why did they tell us it's easy to do what you want and hard to be moral to do what you want? What you really want is the hardest thing of all. Yep. So true. And I think Maslow was onto that. So what do you take as the difference between self actualization and self esteem? Self actualization is the process that you do, which if you do it rationally will result in self esteem. So one of them is self actualization means go out and achieve something. And the result of that is that you respect yourself and you feel confident if you can achieve it. So it's almost about your productiveness. Yeah, but it's more metaphysical than that. Now, I haven't read more in a page or two of Maslow getting it mainly people who are more familiar with him than I am. But my impression has always been this is a little less specific and focused version of what I ran saying. Now, for instance, what do I mean by that? On your end says that no value is higher than self esteem. And she has three cardinal values reason, purpose and self esteem. And she defines each one of those. So self esteem is the conviction that you're able to live and worthy of living. I don't know that Maslow has a definition of self actualization, at least if he does, I would bet any amount of money is not as clear as able to live and worthy of living. So I ran, you know, I wrote the I ran Lexicon, which I'm going to hold out. This is a hard cover. This is a collector's item now. Everyone has a big and it's online for free. I think I've got one of those. Yeah, you do some way. The next long time. So that makes sense. Yeah. In in that she defines about 100 terms and makes statements closer definition on 400 terms so you can look up what her theory was. I've collated it took the best statements. What you see of self esteem is defined the way I said it is in there. It's everything from abortion to zero reification of. Yeah. And people really like it. To live man must hold three things as a supreme and ruling values of his life. Reason, purpose, self esteem. Reason as his only tool of knowledge, purpose as his choice of the happiness, which that tool must proceed to achieve self esteem as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means is worthy of living. And that's a longer statement, but she has a shorter one in there. That's that seems like self esteem is almost a precondition to self actualization or is deeper in some sense that self accession. I wouldn't care to say that because you have to earn self esteem and you can have partial self esteem, do the right thing and then have more self esteem. So it's not all or nothing. And neither one of them is self actual. But they are close. So let's take another one. So same same person asked after reading how we know and truly understanding epistemology, I felt much more intelligent, honestly, much more intellectually aware than everyone around me. Given your experience, what is the percentage of people that actually epistemologically competent in their area of first hand concern? If they're not intellectuals, pretty high in the United States. So. Well, I'm going to pick one that isn't this little debate about auto mechanics. I have a classic car and I had to take it to several auto mechanics before I found one who really knew what he was doing. But most of them are pretty good, right? They're not like they are in philosophy. They're not praying that your carburetor on clog itself or something. I'm from the era when we had carburetors. So I would say in their concrete jobs, it's not bad, it's not shockingly low. But when you get them out of their comfort zone into the higher levels of abstraction, so you want to talk about, well, what's the proper government? And what is masculinity, if anything? What makes art good? They're at a loss. They don't think about it and they don't know how to think about it. So they can. Objectivism arms you. Objectivism does not tell you how to be a good auto mechanic. It tells you how to learn to be a good anything in principle and very, very wide principle, but it does give you a lot of answers to the questions that. Joe, the plumber doesn't confront, doesn't think about and therefore has pretty bad views on so I have a benevolent view in the sense that people's irrationality in the United States and the Western world generally concerns the more abstract topics that they should have thought about, but they haven't and they can be pretty competent at their jobs. Yeah. OK, Vadim asks, how are you? What is the difference between the concept privilege and the concept right, if any? My answer is that a privilege is something earned while the right is something everyone is entitled to by the nature of our identity. Is that right? Well, the the second is correct, but privilege means a gift. It's it's a special entitlements that you were given and you didn't necessarily deserve just, you know, like you grew up with wealthy parents. So your privilege in that in that way, you got benefits that are not the result of your activities, but of luck. So privileges is a it's a neutral thing, really, but rights are more principle. Rights are what you are entitled to by rational moral standards. I wouldn't just say by your nature, that's true. But you have to bring in that rights are that which you ought to have by your nature because you're a human being, you ought to be free. So it's a moral principle. All right, let's see. Awesome, Mr. Brown. Hi, Harry, if words serve as sensory auditory symbols for concept conceptualization, would it be logical to say that the electrical voltage of bits organized into computerized words registered in the computer memory be considered sensory symbols of concepts as well? No. Thanks for asking. No, nothing goes on in the computer that doesn't go on in a light bulb, which is more complicated circuitry. There's no sensing, there's no consciousness. Artificial intelligence is something that exists only in the academic world when people are very intelligent, but very artificial. It doesn't exist in a machine. Now, here's the kicker. Computers don't compute. They don't even add. Currents flow together, switches are thrown, capacitors are charged and everything else is how we look at it. It's how we use it. Your fingers don't count. You can count on your fingers, but your fingers don't count. Computers don't add or counter to any of those things. And that's why artificial intelligence is not a threat. Because it has no mind. It has it's just a machine. It's like saying, oh, I'm worried my car is going to decide it wants to kill me. Your car can't decide that. Now, people can use cars badly to kill other people. We've seen that. And you can use artificial intelligence to kill people. That's a threat. But they're a lot more good people than bad people. And they're using artificial intelligence to stop the bad people's artificial intelligence. So I would expect the good guys to be way ahead of the bad guys in exploiting any new technology. Look, who got the atomic bomb first? Adam asked after not being introduced to objectivism for my first 40 years, I found it amazing, amazing personal enlightenment, but often challenging to live in a world that doesn't reflect an advanced philosophy. Are you often discouraged in any advice for dealing with this reality? Yes, and I'm less discouraged than most people. There's a couple of reasons why I'm less and then I'm going to give advice. I'm a philosopher, right? So I'm used to looking at at least a century as a unit of time. So if Biden gets elected, my thought is, is he really any worse and bill more people we never heard of in the 19th century who were presidents? Probably is, but. I expect it because I know the principle on which the world is being run, which is the kanji and philosophy is coming more and more dominant. People trust their minds less and less. And so that they you got to expect more control. So one thing is I take a quote philosophical attitude. No one promised me that other people would have the right ideas. You know, I was important saying, well, talk about privilege and right, you have a right that other people not be stupid or irrational or misinformed. No, I don't have I'm living my life. And that's the other part of it is to focus on your values. Don't let other people control you. If they're irrational, leave them alone, go a different way. Now, I thought the question was going to be asked, doesn't it take a lot of strength to go against everything the society is trying to put on? And I said, no, not at all. Doesn't take any strength. Maybe if you live in a dictatorship, it takes strength because they'll come and arrest you, but if you say. Like I do, I have coffee with a bunch of mainly very religious people by accident because I'm living in Florida and they were there. And so I'm an atheist. I don't believe in that superstition. And they accept it. What are they going to do? Oh, we're going to jump you and tie you up. It doesn't take any strength to define who you are. And and people will come to terms with you. Oh, that's me or leave. Yeah. And if they don't want you, then you don't want them. So no, I don't find it takes any strength at all. I'm quite outspoken and people don't agree with me, but they kind of respect it. So it can change your course after 40 years. There's a lot of inertia there. A lot of duty premise problem that you have to root out. But you think about what do you really want? That's the key. And that's a great value of self-esteem is that you can have that attitude of you know, they don't like what I say tough. So their problem, not mine. Yeah. All right, let's see. I like Claude of respect and trust, concepts of consciousness like other emotions. Could you define and discuss how trust and respect are related to each other and how they integrate with other rational values? Thank you for both all you do. Respect has to be. Well, there is a certain basic minimum that you grant to any human being because they're a human being, as a matter of fact, you're probably well disposed to the higher animals or even nice looking trees. But, you know, life is a value to life. Consciousness is a value to consciousness. Conceptual consciousness is a value to another conceptual consciousness. So there is a certain minimum, you know, which accounts for a wife you yesterday I passed by in my car, a guy whose car had stalled and he couldn't get it started. And I was in a hurry, so I passed him by. But I felt almost guilt, you know, because normally I would stop and help it out. And he looked like a very nice, reasonable guy. And I like helping other people who are trying to live just like I've seen my cats try to live. So there's a certain minimum, but beyond that respect above, you know, well, you're a human being, that's good. Is has to be earned. And the other one was what was. Trust, trust, trust. I don't deal in trust. I don't see the basis, this rational expectation of what a person is going to do. If you know that somebody has a good track record of. Honesty and helpfulness and whatever other human qualities you're looking for, you can expect them to continue, but it's not an issue of trust. I think trust is a dangerous word. You don't you don't say about your wife. Well, I trust you. You know, I mean, she's great. She's honest. She would never do anything to hurt me or dishonest. I know that I know what her character is. That's not an issue of trust. She's like trust comes up when you have reason to be a little wary. And the person says trust me. Yeah, anybody says trust me. Shouldn't be trusted. Almost. So do you do you these as concept concepts of consciousness? Respect is is an emotion based upon an valuation of a person as a value and competent and trust. Trust is not an emotion. Trust is more a evaluation. Yeah, decision almost. I trust him. He's in the best sense of it. You know, I trust my doctor says I need to get the COVID vaccine. I trust him, but I would never put it that way. I say he probably knows. I don't know. Yeah, probably knows. But you have to understand that not necessarily. Children, when they're growing up, expect their parents to be right. So my parents told me there was a God and all the, you know, paraphernalia that went with it. OK, I guess there's a God. Yeah, I accept that. But I didn't really accept it. I didn't think that settles it. That's the end. It's I'm not I'm not going to look at it again. I just thought, well, that's a good hypothesis to work with in a page. And I didn't commit myself to it. And I went along with it, assumed I assumed it was right. But when I got a little older, I saw there wasn't. So it's not an emotion. It's more of an assessment of the reliability of somebody. All right, so here's an interesting question. Harry, could you discuss your differences with Iran over drug of a gun control? The article you posted. What's that? Do we have any differences? I think you I think you're more what your view is no government involvement in guns. Right. Any guns, any weapons, any weapons, but. If the person buys a tank, let's say. Since there's no peaceful use for a tank, you could go to court or a policeman could go to court and get an order. You know, prima facie that is on on the surface of it. This is a threat and rats can be acted again. So I wouldn't make the difference is like you can use a a pocket knife as a weapon. And the answer isn't to regulate pocket knives. You can use a baseball bat as a weapon. Don't regulate me. You can use a gun to do bad things. Don't regulate them. But if there's something like a dynamite, you're storing dynamite in your basement. And you live next to somebody else. He's rational to feel threatened and maybe you can prove. No, it's not a threat because it's the fuse has been removed. I don't know what, you know, maybe he can prove it. But the burden of proof is on him to show why what looks like a threat really isn't. So, yes, I think if we if we disagree, it's about what constitutes a threat and to what extent, you know, how many guns, what kind of guns are you stockpiling? That's also a threat. Yeah, maybe you're a collector. If you can prove you're a collector and the firing pins have all been removed and you're a man of upstanding character and it collapses. You live in a wilderness and they're gang surrounding you that have big weapons. I mean, there are lots of reasons. But it's but the state, the government has a wall. If it constitutes a threat. Is is an objective threat is forced and must be opposed by the government, must be stopped. So so I'm going to say the same person asks, could you discuss your differences with your own over open immigration? So again, I think the difference is a small. You know, I think I think I think I ship Peters a view of some monitoring who comes in in terms of infectious diseases and running background checks. But other than that. I think we think you're about about immigration. I think. I used to believe that when I was young. An idealistic. Now, I think once you allow an apparatus to be set up of border inspections and so forth, which there's no reason to treat differently than people coming out of a movie theater in Peoria, you know, we don't say, oh, look, those there are a lot of people coming in the movie theater. Maybe some of them are criminals or have infectious diseases. Let's monitor them. There's no more reason at the border to do that than there is anywhere else. And once you start setting up stations with officials and looking at papers and so it's going to get out of hand because you're there is no proven threat there. If there's evidence of a threat, OK, like they're coming from an Ebola written locale, but they could be Americans coming back from an Ebola written locale, then you have to. Yeah. And if there's a plane coming from Ebola written locations, putting up monitors, some kind of monitoring system, if there's probable cause would be fine, and if if if there's, you know, a civil war in Syria and the millions of Muslims moving towards Europe, you know, having some kind of screen as to who's coming in and who's who they are makes a lot of sense. And the same thing would happen if there was a, you know, mass migration out of Mexico because of civil war or something. So yeah, it's a whole question. When is there probable cause to fear of someone and has nothing to do with this and nationality? There are plenty of bad Americans. Yeah, no, the only context of nationality would be the context of what is going on in that place at a given time. Yeah. So I don't think we have any real. No, in terms of nationality, that would never be a in my view, would never be a constraint on somebody coming in the nationality and of itself. All right, let's keep going. Applejack asked value for value. I cannot give enough. Thank you, Iran. Harry, thank you and salute your mind. Thank you, Applejack. Q sent us, Harry, I admire you. You work in epistemology and I've been studying it thoroughly. Please try out my tool as a tool. The domain is conceptual dictionary based on the objective epistemology, you will have fun with it. This is from Brazil. Interesting. Conceptual dictionary.com. All he has here is is conceptual doc dictionary. Oh, OK. I'll I'll give it a look. I don't I don't know what happens when you type that is some kind of natural language technology, right? Let's see. Dylan, what has what did Peacock mean in the past by saying that the field of psychology needs an Aristotelian person revolution in order to make the field legitimate? Objectivism seems to dislike psychology. And I wonder why. Thank you both a million for teaching me. It was I ran who used to say that to me. That I mean, I'm sure Leonard said it also. But that psychology is not a science yet. And to be a science, it would have to have axioms. It would have to have axiomatic concepts named and defined and foundational work done of that kind. Imagine that you're at dealing with biology before Kuvié systematized it so you have well, there's there's things that move and fly and swim. And you have a whole bunch of observations and you know a lot about lamprey eels or something, but it's not a science. When you get a definition of a light and you get an understanding of inheritance and of the descent, the tree of life, as it used to be called, then you've got a science and the biochemistry, too, was it's also because otherwise it's sort of mystical. So psychology has a lot of observations, not academic psychology, which is pretty worthless. There are probably a few exceptions, but practicing clinical psychologists have amassed a lore of knowledge. And there's some good stuff out there in the self help movement, for example. But it's it's in the age of pre science. So to be scientific, you would have to have, you know, what you describe concepts in a in a theory. Axioms and principles. Yeah. Imagine that we were talking about politics and we knew that. The king shouldn't hurt his subjects or something. You know, so it was before the Magna Carta and the feudal system. And you knew, you know, some observation, but you didn't have the concept of rights, you didn't have the concept of the different forms of government and what they how they are to be classified. So you didn't know any decision the king would make. You didn't know if it was good or bad or even if there should be a king or not be a kid. That's kind of the stage we're at. Cosmo asks, what are today's philosophy, doctoral candidates need to do in order to earn PhDs if reality isn't the standard? How do they teach us? Know if they pass or fail? It isn't an issue of pass or fail. It's an issue of. Can they write some dissertation? That impresses their colleagues that they have they know how to play the game. I didn't go that round. And I wrote on my dissertation committee at Columbia. Was the world's authority on my topic. Gold directed action. Ernest Nagel. He wasn't my first reader, but he was my second reader. I was too small a fry to have him as my first reading. In the first meeting, we had a series of upstages you have to go through. And in the first one, he called my pieces garbage. At the meeting. And my doctoral defense, which I got conditional pass on, which means you passed, but you didn't pass. A question of two biologists and one on the committee, because you had developed one of them asked me a question, which I thought was pretty damn easy for an objectivist to answer. And I answered it and I look down. Nagle is at the head of the conference. It was going like this. Now, just for a point of personal privilege. Two or three years after I finally got my degree by making certain revisions that were not compromises, but made it acceptable and afraid to fail me. He gave a talk called teleology revisited to ology is another word for go directed action. This is the book form of it. Yep. And in that talk, a prestigious series of lectures to the whole New York community, he put forward my theory and never mentioned. Wow. Now, it's not quite as dramatic as that because there was another guy who had a regular academic bluster named Larry Wright, who's a good guy who had independently come up with the same theory. And he credited it all to Larry Wright, but to his own student or his own surf, he didn't even mention me in in. You know, it would have been easy to say, well, I had this student who had a similar idea. I didn't really think it was as good as the way Larry Wright. Good, good, good. No, no, so it's can you play the game? Can you impress them with your ability to sling the ball? But it's not just bull. I mean, it's it's very technical and involved and you have to be skilled. It isn't you can't just go mouth off. You have to know the rules and how to say it. And that's what if you if you can't get through that and a lot of people can't, you don't become a PhD. All right, Ryan says, I have heard many critiques of ranch personal life. I considered irrelevant and have never researched it. I stick to reading the work. Is there any rational purpose to learn more about her life vis-à-vis controversy? Yes and no. I knew her well, and I thought she was a hero right out of her books. I mean, I knew her really well. Yeah. I visitor once or twice a week for two years at the end of her life. And I watched her from more of a distance over about 20 years. And she was scrupulously honest and fair. And of course, there's been a lot of junk thrown at her by people who hate her ideas, who hate her and hate her ideas. If you look at the so what would be the purpose of learning about her to be inspired and to know the nature of the enemies? You're probably never going to be able to resolve all the little little stuff that she one time supposedly. Oh, I'll give you an example. She once said to me, and if you believe that, you can go to hell. And a couple of days later or a week later, I said, I reminded her of that. And she said, did I say that? She had a temper like Russians, you know, Europeans, those passionate people. But it didn't. She didn't act on it. She was just an exclamation. And she was very positive, too. She was very warm, very friendly, very ready for humor. She used to have me do impressions politicians that I picked up from watching Real Impressionists. So she liked me to do Hubert Humphrey. She would laugh. So I don't think you're ever going. You aren't, I know, but you're not going to be able to resolve every little charge. But look at the whole picture. You could read two books, 100 voices published by the Einwren Institute and Marianne Searus and Charles Searus wrote facets of Vine Rands, a beautiful portrait. Yeah. And people who knew her found her to be an amazing, uplifting, inspiring and somewhat tragic figure because tragic because a lot of people, she loved the traitor and the world didn't give her the recognition she wanted. But she didn't go around worrying about that. It's kind of my perspective, you know, how sad it is. But she was a winning person. She was not, you know, there's the myths about oh, she was a juggernaut. I mean, she was in a way, but when you read 100 Voices, you'll see how she captivated people, make friends. She was a lifelong friend of Mike Wallace from when he did the 60 minute interview with her, which you can get to see on YouTube. She completely enchanted him. And I think it was his 70th birthday party. She was invited. And I saw a photograph of her from that. So yeah, it's it's worth knowing that it's possible to be completely irrational and it's inspiring when you see it. It's just very uplifting. Yeah. Harry, please take a look at clustering and classification algorithms and machine learning. You will notice that they are basically implementing the process of integration and differentiation as explained by ayn Rand. Yeah, you know, the father of object oriented programming, butch, I think Grady Butcher credits ayn Rand in one in one place as being an input to his development of object oriented programming. So you're not wrong on that. Let's see, Ryan says, if philosophers automatize disconnection from reality, they must be miserable SOBs. This is unbelievable and sad. Thanks, Harry. Um, there was a talk given one of the better philosophers is still very mixed was Wallace Matson. There's a whole story about him at Berkeley and me teaching with him a course on objectivism. And I went to a conference. I guess Matson's incidental match was at that conference, but there was a talk given why are philosophers philosophy in the real world out there. And the philosopher gave the talk said, we're an uncommonly neurotic bunch. We have ticks. We have shakes. We have, you know, we're visibly neurotic. Why is that? And that's true. I once saw John Rawls and he looked like if you said, boo, he would run screaming the other way. He was a frightened, scrawny little guy. Not I hope people say boo to him. He deserved it. Yeah. Oh, he's terrible. He's terrible. Harvard seemed to have the worst of the worst. They had wine, Rawls, Nelson Goodman, who wrote a seminal argument on grew, G-R-U-E-N, B-L-E-E-N, grew is something that is green if it's before the year 2000, but blue if it's after the year 2000. Not that it changes, but we change the meaning of the word. Yeah. Certain date. And he goes on about this and tries to say as a new riddle of induction and based on grue and bullying. And I won't bother you with it, but the Harvard philosophers. I mean, Nozick was a Harvard philosopher, and that's why people had to listen to him. But they hate it. Let's see, Troy, thank you. Troy came in with a big contribution. I appreciate that. All right, Richard, what's the relationship between a values, hierarchical, hierarchical rank and its abstraction level? For example, my highest values, like independence, are more abstract than my lower ranking values, like Latin cuisine are more concrete. No, the two different hierarchies. There are. Hierarchy means a system of ranking one above the other based upon a first principle for the ground state. And there are lots of different hierarchies. The Catholic Church has a hierarchy, you know, priest, bishop, cardinal pope. The military has a hierarchy. There's a hierarchy of concepts in the learning where a philosopher is after man. And then there's a hierarchy of concepts of generality where man is wider than philosopher, so it ranks above it or in a different direction. So there's more than one hierarchy. Hierarchy of values means, first of all, well, I don't know, first of all, one meaning is concrete, so. So your top value would probably be your career and your wife or spouse or loved one. And then the second one might be the second level after that might be travel. I mean, that's a little bit superficial, but then there's the abstractness. So on that, the top value is life. And then under that would be productive work and romantic love and under productive work would be a division of the types of productive work such as for money or not for money, because if you're an artist, you may not be able to make a living at it. So the two different hierarchies. And it's important to know your concrete hierarchy because that's that's what guides your life. I mean, the first, the abstract one is for validating. So they have to be integrated, right? They have to be consistent. They can't be conflict between them. Yeah, so if it's if it's my wife and my mistress, you've got a problem. But if it's my wife and my work, they can very well coexist. So one of my things is for for checking, for validating that you've got rational values and you have them in a reasonable prioritization. But the other one, the concrete values are for directing your specific action. I've been neglecting my wife. I've got to spend more time with her. Or I've been neglecting my career. I've got to spend more time on that. So they're different. Andrew Rand said that an evil in ethics, that an evil in ethics that she opposes was that while means can be chosen rationally, ends must be chosen irrationally. What does the disconnect between reason and goals? Where does it come from? And what are its implications? Just what I said earlier, the failure is all the is odd problems. See, those people said, well, you can't you can't prove about an ultimate end. What are you living for? What is the good still thought? Well, we can talk about provisional. You know, like, well, if you want to be a bank robber, then you ought to spend a certain amount of time casing out the bank. It's good to know the layout of the bank you're going to rob. It's good to know where the police are and can you pay them off? That would be good. But whether you should be a bank robber or a productive person. Who knows, you know, reason can't enter there. So it's a it's what I ran called a despair value in another context. OK, we can't have an objective ethics, but at least you give me a starting point and I can tell you what follows from that, but it could be any starting point. And it doesn't even hold up on its own because suppose you're your values, I want to be a productive individual, maybe seventy five percent of the time and twenty five percent of the time. I want to cheat and lie for my ultimate value is I want to do something really exciting, hey, it would be really exciting to kill somebody and get away with it. So if the ultimate ends are not objective, the means can't be objective either. You're free to reject them at any time. On that view. Justin asked, I'm told that my determination of my values is subjective. When someone claims that even the valuing of one's own life is subjective, how can I efficiently efficiently convince them that is indeed objective? Well, there's an error in the question. You can't take as your assignment to correct the errors of other people. You can't make it your job to convince him. If you if you want to, you can say so. You don't care whether you live or die. And if he says, no, not really. Then you have no basis for talking. If he says, well, I don't want to die, but I'm not going to die because I lied about my credentials on the application for the job. And then you have to argue. Yes, you you moved yourself way towards death by doing that. So that can be argued about. But if a person says, no, life, death, peanut butter or chocolate vanilla, it's just death is another lifestyle. There's nothing you can say to him. And you shouldn't try to simplify your life. All right, we still got a lot of questions. These are rapid fire. These are rapid fire ones. So these are lower dollar denominated ones, so we can go for this. Megan just says, thank you for your logic course at ARU. I assume she was one of your students. Harper says, is the reason Thomas Aquinas was successful in undercutting irrational forces because he was part of the intellectual establishment while Einwand was an outsider? Yes, but basically it was because enough people in the church chose to think about the issues that they were unwilling to back the Pope banned Aquinas during his lifetime in Paris. He was not allowed to teach in Paris. But there was pushback from the Catholic priests around him. And there were enough of them that chose to think it's a small number of people. If you get a small number of highly intellectual people who do the right thing, it makes a big difference. And then why did he have a big effect? Because his compromise between reason and faith was they don't contradict and when they do, reason has to be the thing you go by. Yeah. Andrew says, why do most people have trouble connecting totalitarianism with leftist socialism, but are able to connect to totalitarianism with right wing fascism? That's a good question. The flip answer is because they don't think there might be a better answer. It's a good it's a good double standard question. Oh, I guess it goes back to the left celebrates weakness. Yeah, altruism. Yeah, altruism. The Nazis were altruists, but they they were on no. You should sacrifice to me. Yep. A side of it, the receiving side of altruism. So the Christian tradition fits better with communism than fascism. Justin says, why is called Papa's epistemology so popular? Because his name is Papa. It's got popular right in it. You know, that he was the last philosopher. No, there was one afternoon. Next, the last philosopher to say something to scientists that they could actually think about news. The last one was Thomas Kuhn, from whom we get the term paradigm and paradigm shift. But he was, if possible, worse than Popper. Popper is the pits and Kuhn is a carnival celebration advanced macabre in the pits. Kuhn said science is just public relations. But you can't there is no right and wrong in science. It's just what sells. And that's even below Popper, who said there is no truth. I mean, he didn't say quite that openly, but those who think he's a good guy because he said some concretely good things that he's terrible. We have a lot of Papa fans who are also in fan fans. So there is there are people out there. Read objective. No, I know, I know you can prove an induction is invalid. Yeah, they you eject induction completely. So you reject knowledge completely. It's exactly right. Michael says, well, I know his ideas take over the world without any contact with academia, or is there some way she must dominate academia in order to change the world? Not at this start. She said a casual offhand thing to me here, which I've never forgotten. She said she thinks the way it will start is by student demand. That students will demand objectivism be taught. They won't come from the inside. They'll come from the outside, pressuring the academic world. But whether it could be, you know, a series of people like Jordan Peterson, a Republican intellectuals that are conceivably, but you do need the hardcore philosophy in the culture. Maybe the internet changes things. Maybe we don't need formal university positions to reach the world. I'm hopeful of that. Simon asks, is math invented or created? Yes, it is. It's it's devised, created just like programming is. It's it's a method of identifying quantities. Facts are out there, but the method of figuring them out is invented, devised. Friend Harper says, is someone who lives by the code survival of the fittest, the strong can take care, can take from the weak a form of altruism? If not, is it a third moral code next to altruism and egoism? Well, it demands that the weak submit to the strong. That's altruism, but it takes this it's a standpoint of the strong. But this whole idea of strength is from the jungle. We say, oh, Bill Gates could take Arnold Schwarzenegger any time. Yet Bill Gates took Arnold Schwarzenegger in terms of money. Yep, productive achievement. And Schwarzenegger did some good things, but it's not the idea of looking at his strength is wrong. It's it's creative thought is what wins the best idea. Let's see, what is what is philosophy philosophical pragmatism? Is the pragmatic when is it pragmatic when Wynand says the banner was the financial fertilizer to make more important projects possible? No, he's not being pragmatist. There's no pragmatism. Well, maybe. What's that? What's the guy that worked for Wynand? You get old, you can't remember proper names. I can't remember names. Anyway, no, none of the major figures in any romantic novel would be pragmatist. Those are opposite. Romantic novels are presenting people who consciously choose values and consciously go after them. Wynand made a big mistake. He thought the good couldn't win. So he was going to beat them at their own game. He wanted power. But as he came to realize, power is a leash with a noose at both ends. Or a leash is is a rope with a noose at both ends. And when he says that the dead things like the banner are only the financial fertilizer that make you boss, what he's saying is. My life is over. I'm dead. I have nothing to live for anymore. But at least I can provide you, Howard, with the money, the capital to do your great buildings. So it's not he's that's despair, that's suicidal thinking that he's engaged in. It's not pragmatist. All right, Michael says, why are you so confident medical progress will continue at rapid rates without the abolishment of the FDA? Because the the metaphysical principles, knowledge, builds on knowledge. The concrete manifestation of that is that biology is accelerating. And the FDA is not accelerating. It's not it's as it always was and maybe even a little better. They seem to be granting more exceptions to their death and dealing regularly. But that when this knowledge comes out. So suppose it isn't used in America right away, it's going to be used. Somebody's going to use it and you're going to see, for instance, old people becoming young and then there's going to be a tremendous demand for that that the FDA can't stand up against. Suppose you had thousands, tens of thousand people in the street marching legalize this medicine. Was the FDA going to say no, sorry. They're they're not going to have the fortitude to do that. Yeah, fortunately. All right, rapid fire. What are your thoughts on Oppenheimer, the film and the real historical figure? I have a story. I haven't seen the film. I ran met Oppenheimer and she said, quote, he fell for me. Oh, I don't mean romantically. And she told about how he loved her idea that the Germans were never going to make the atomic bomb because of there's war against the mind. She loved he loved that. So that's good. And I think it's his wife was the real communist. So what was the other one? Basically, what the film, but you haven't seen the film? I haven't seen the film. So Anthony says, what has been the most difficult part of objectivism for you to understand and master? Cause I want it. Cause Ali, I'm still working on it. Simon. Oh, we did that already. All right, Michael says, why do you think psychology has improved so much after over the last 50 years? Is it Nathaniel Bannon's influence? Well, I wouldn't discount that all together and not Nathaniel Bannon's influence, but I ran that his first book, The Psychology of Self-Esteem, is about 97% stuff he wrote under her auspices on her editing and is her just giving voice to her idea. The stuff he wrote after that had no impact. You know, it's all just pop nonsense, like look in the mirror and ask yourself, am I the kind of guy that I wanted to use? It's just the most mundane, uninspiring stuff. But you ask a good question. Why did psychology increase so much? Behaviorism died. Why did it die? Because they face a test of reality, which is helping patients get better. And there was a kind of natural selection for systems that actually did something. And they became more known. And Freudianism isn't among them. But what they call cognitive behavioral stuff helps people somewhat. So there were a few important intellects. Maslow was mentioned before, but I think even more of this. Aaron Beck. Was an important influence. Magda Arnold, certainly very good. She was a risk attaining. I don't know if she had the influence or not, but she was big two volume book that we Jean and I both studied. So I don't have a full answer, but it's hard to have a science of psychology that doesn't in any way help your patients. Yep. Justin asked, why does Randid Maidostiefsky, despite his horrific philosophy? So talented at concretizing a theme and showing that it's due to the choices of the person not to fate. Another one of the little line ran story. I was reading the Brothers Karamazov and I asked her about two things because she was from Russia, as most of you know. The two things there that really surprised me. One was the village idiot. Was which we would today call. Well, yesterday would have called a retarded person, a person challenged to intellect or something. Yep. In the village, if the if a retarded idiot, the village idiot came by and took food off your plate, you were considered blessed by God. So these demented children and older people go around to houses and just the way they just pick food off people. Oh, go please, please have. They were revered because it was considered defined to be insane or retarded. The other one was something very good happened to one of the brothers. He was very happy. So he got drunk and smashed all the windows in his own house. As a celebrate, smash all the now. You got to remember how poor these people are. Yeah, I asked windows and I said, is that what it was like? Oh, that's Russia. All right. That's Russia. So Michael asks, from my experience, intellectuals seem to reject Iran not because they committed altruists, but because they're stubborn narcissists with power and control issues. It's not because they're committed altruists either, exactly. It's because there's second handers almost all and then, you know, they've heard you can't you can't like her. She's not allowed. Yeah. So what are your thoughts on the LGBTQIA plus movement? Why was Rand hostile to it? He didn't exist when she was there. It exists. Yeah. He was very much on the view that masculinity is something definite and femininity is something definite. And the difference in the romance is about the masculine man and the feminine woman. And that's you can see that in her novels from the rape scene, which isn't a rape scene, but from the way Dominique regards work. Although that's malevolent, that's due to her malevolence. But to the agony starts to bear with Francisco. And you remember the thoughts when she's 16, the thoughts that were going through her mind as he begins to take off her clothes. Oh, don't ask me. Don't ask me. She's, you know, one of the man to take the take a charge. Yeah. And the surrender. So that was her integration from her own observation and her own childhood. And she was once asked about it late in her life when these things were starting to come up and she said, well, there are too many integrations. You know, if you don't get it, there's nothing I can say. It's too much deeply in you from too many integrations is the way she put it. But a casual comment to have any effect. So she kind of backed off from it about convincing other people about it. And who asked, what is a sense of life mean to Harry? Is it changeable? Not directly. I'm going to be speaking on that in two, three days on Monday. I'm giving a keynote speech at the Resurrecting Romanticism Conference is on music and sense of life. What is sense of life and how does music evoke sense of life? What you want something beyond what I ran said and I don't want to give it away. So I'll have to listen to your talk when you give it. All right, I assume it'll be recorded and it'll be up some way at some point. I don't know. I hope so. I hope so. Right, Michael says, was Albert Einstein a major rationalist? Did Rand ever mention him to you? Oh, yeah. Yes. He went through different stages in his career. There was early in his career, he was under the influence of Ernst Mach, who was a positivist. And he championed hypothesis or free creations of the intellect. You make stuff up and then you test it. Later in his life, he became a more of a realist. He opposed quantum physics and was convinced that it could not. He said, God does not play dice with the universe. It couldn't be chance all the way down. And a lot of the weirdnesses, they call it, of quantum physics had to be resolved, they couldn't be as those people were describing it. So he became better. But the only thing she mentioned to me was she once talked about her theory of circular time, which does not mean time goes in a circle, but that there is no one time for the whole universe. There's only time within a certain huge scale, like a galaxy or something. She didn't, she called it local, but there's no time. And she says, somebody told her that Einstein held the same thing. And she thought that was interesting. So she was not against him. Oh, the one thing she said that was fascinating, I didn't know. He was an ignoramus when it came to politics. He once proposed that the way to solve the Cold War was to have the Russians top guy and the Americans top guy generals trade countries for six months. So like Eisenhower, he was a tough guy. He'd come head of the Soviet Union military and Zhukov would come over and had him. Deep, huh? Yeah. Justin says, were you concerned about your financial prospects when you chose an intellectual career, ever thought about doing something that makes more money? Well, I was fortunate to have rich parents and they made it clear that I wouldn't have to worry about money, not we're not stinking rich, but enough so that I could get most of my income from my family's investments. Both my parents died when I was pretty young. I was 23. My father died when I was 15. My mother died when I was 23. So I inherited, you know, a small but comfortable amount that could live off the interest from or at least take down a little of the principle. So, no, I didn't have to think and that was bad in some ways. Good in some ways and bad in some. Michael says, is the reason Kant was not completely undone, has not completely undone the Enlightenment, despite Enlightenment thinking having no academic credibility? Is it because of practically it is hard to undo what works? There might be some small element of that in it. But there's too much knowledge. You know, you can pretend nobody knows anything for certain, but, you know, the people who say that. You can't know. You can't make a claim about certain things, but I don't live my life that way. And not only that, but then when it comes to climate change. Oh, no, no, that science. That is beyond question. You're a denier, if you. Is there a reality? I don't know who's to say. But it's changing. It's warming. We know that if there is one. Yeah, I think it's the in a in the metaphysical sense that we live in a technological society that certainly has to have a largely free society, half free society now that has a big educational effect. So all these people, I talked to you guys, did you have a philosophy course? I hear all the because I ask, did you take philosophy? Yeah, how was I? It was of no use whatsoever. I didn't take a drop out and never took another one. I didn't know what he was talking about. They don't say, oh, yes, it was found. He didn't know whether he existed. Yep. So they so they tend to Americans tend to dismiss it. Yeah. Let's see, Justin asks, what are your thoughts on Steven Pinko? Well, I like what your own likes. So just tell me your own, what do you like? The idea that life is getting better in the physical sense. And in the humane sense, I like that. And that is I have the book right here, which I only dabbled in. This one. Yep, enlightenment. I like the idea of it. Yep. I'm suspicious. He said, Harvard. I'm saying no more. But I'm mildly I'm impressed by some of it mildly on his side. And I heard him. He was at a seminar that I was at and he was asked about ethics and morality. And he can't quite go there. He doesn't quite get it. But he's on the life premise. He's on the pro-life premise at least. So there's something positive there. But then his idea of what rationality is and what reason is is completely wrong. So his epistemology. He's just he's he's he's got a book rationality. And a lot of it turns out just to be statistics and probabilistic thinking. It's sad because he's he's. It's almost like he wants to get it. He's on the right track and he can't go. You know, he's too confused. Why did Howard Walk take six months vacation in the novel? It doesn't seem good for his career to do that. Was it six months? You know, something about it that I don't. When he went on the yacht with Gail, I am. Oh, I don't think that was I can't remember the details for six months. But but it was stated in the novel that he was burnt out. That he he was. Working on engineering challenges, having to do Cortland Holmes and he would just burnt out and needed an extended vacation. Also is convenient for the story. So they wouldn't be there to see what they were doing to Cortland Holmes. Yeah. Batch Banigan is a scientific discovery. If a scientific discovery were to invalidate a principle in a philosophy, is the philosophy or the science wrong? The science. But what what kind of what if there's a war between the two of them, if it's in a in an area that philosophy speaks to. It has to take precedence like quantum mechanics where they say, oh, the law of excluded middle doesn't hold any more. On the quantum level, it's not either or. That can't be right. And you have to use philosophy to get to the scientific results. So it's like saying, well, standing on this ladder, I can see it has no runs from this height. It can't it can't be. Now, I suppose that there could be a war between somebody's theory of aesthetics and basic physics or somehow I don't know how that would be. But in all the cases that I've seen, it's it's physicists under the influence of wrong earlier philosophy. So like quantum mechanics, the people who launched quantum mechanics like war were rabid positivists who wanted to wanted to find evidence that there is no causality and wanted to embrace contradiction. So it's really their practice comes from their philosophy. So it has to be philosophy that went in a conflict. But philosophy can't. Here's the way I came up with it. Philosophy is like the judge, not the legislator. Philosophy can rule certain things inadmissible. It can veto. No, that theory makes no sense. But it can't suggest positive content. Philosophy doesn't know what's going on at the quantum level and cannot figure it out. But if somebody says, well, it's an A that isn't a, they can rule that out. Robert says, a very good show, a peculiar question. I know objectivists who are blood donors as am I. I know why I do it. But do either of you have or no rational compelling reasons for donating blood? Yes, I do. I think I have rational compelling here. Say, donating plasma, I am told by people more knowledgeable than I, helps prevent aging and maybe even reverses it a little. It's called plasma pharesis. And it comes from studies done where they took young mice and put their blood into old drain some of the old mice mouse blood out and put the young mouse's blood in. And suddenly the mouse was visible younger. And then they found out they didn't need to put the young blood into the mouth. Just take out some of the old blood and let it regenerate. It's not regenerating the crap that's floating around in the blood that's causing problems. So I've given three times now and I'm eager to give the fourth plasma. So that's a rational reason. I wouldn't say it's irrational to give for charitable reasons. Like charity is fine. If it doesn't, you know, bother you. I never did before this because I was squeamish. And and I used to faint when I had to have blood tests until I learned how to prepare myself for it. So this plasma pharesis, look it up. Pharesis, the P-H-A-R-E-S-I-S. And I'm getting my information from someone who knows biology, but maybe he's wrong. I can't I can't advise. Yes. All right, Florida Nick says, why did Rand not talk about Frank and their relationship since he was so important to her? He is kind of an enigma. Can Harry share any stories about him? He must have been pretty awesome to get Rand. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I could share a lot of stories about just tell you one about her and him. I started the magazine, The Objectivist Forum, which I'm looking for the year. Now, here it is. This is the bound collection of it. When I ran was in her final years and we were talking about her and Frank informally, the two of us, as he said, someday I'll write an article for you, my debt to Frank O'Connor. And if it's, you know, he died, I guess I'm not sure whether he had died at that time or not, but he died. And later I asked her, are you going to write that my debt to Frank O'Connor? And she said, if you really want to torture me, you will hold me to that promise. Yeah. So she felt really indebted to him. And first of all, for spiritual fuel. But second of all, she talked ideas with him. And when I knew them at all the events where ideas were talked about for late into the morning, he was there. He didn't say anything. Well, once in a while, he would say a zinger into the conversation, but he was very strong, silent type, didn't say much. And he was nowhere near as intelligent as she was. But as far as I could determine, but he was incredibly creative. And I, my favorite painting is out in that room by him, his spirit is, you know, her sense of life and his sense of life were one. So. Yeah, he, everybody loved Frank. I mean, I don't know anybody who thought, oh, Frank, I don't like him. Everybody would admire him. He was kind of a terrific figure, even when he was 75. You know, he was handsome and dashing, clever and witty. And she relate somebody. You know, she quoted him in the fountain head and out the shrugged, you're casting pearls before swine without getting even a pork chop in return. That was his and brothers, you asked for it. That was him. And even out the shrugged as a title of a chapter or maybe the idea of using it for the book was his. So. He was a fascinating guy. I didn't know him. I didn't get to know him that well, because at the time I was able to socialize with the personally, he was. Declining terribly. One time he commented to me, I don't know whether I'm in New York or California. So I only I had some conversations with him. Here's a little concrete. 1969, he was much better off mentally. Then I came back from a trip to Italy and I had two postcards. One of the Sistine ceiling creation of man, you know, and one of one of the squares in Italy. And Frank was at a lecture that was I think one of Leonard Peacock's lecture on epistemology in the audience. And I sat next to him and he spent the whole lecture staring at those cards. He was an artist. He was a painter, right? And what he was learning, I don't know, but he was riveted on those two cards. So he was a very unusual person. Hey, Justin, last two questions. Justin, autism and ADHD caused by bad philosophy? No. Maybe some diagnoses. Are. Overdiagnosed ADHD. But I know someone, an objectiveist couple who had a child who had all kinds of behavioral problems. About nine years old in school. And this was early on. They gave him Ritalin and within 20 minutes he was a different person. And he himself said, I can I can take control of something like that. You know, I'm calm and in control for the first time. So it's real, but I'm sure they're overdiagnosing it. Charlie asks, what do you think of the concept of economic fascism? A lot of people struggle to define fascism because they only focus on the political side of it, having a dictator and such and not on the economic side. Yeah, they can't afford to because that's what we have here. Yeah. And I'm a fascism is the state dictates all the ways that business has to operate. It's a regulatory state is the economic fascism. That's what Mussolini put in. So yeah, it's not it's both like capitalism and communism. It's both economic and political. Well, this has been a real pleasure. We've got two hours and 15 minutes. That's thanks for sticking through it. This is fun. And I think you now hold the record for most money raised in an interview show. I think you just you just crushed Alex Epstein and you now have the record. I don't want to crush Alex. Well, in the in the friendly competition, that is the interview show competition. Right, right. OK, well, Alex, that's good work. We don't want to crush him. I'm ready to come back and you can be a guest on my interview show. Sounds good. I'm Sunday and I look forward to seeing you at the board meeting in. I actually will now be at the board meeting. This is first board meeting I'm going to miss in I don't know how many years, but probably ever, but I actually had a previous commitment that I can't change. Wow. OK. You can set up a robot like on Big Bang Theory with your face and AI of Iran. Yes. Yeah. There you go. Good. Thanks, Harry. Have a great night. Thanks, everybody. Thanks to all the superchatters. You guys were great. We we we did reach your record. So this is fantastic. Thank you. Good night. Night.