Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

May 6, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin

01:01:27

Ayn Rand: Philosophy, Objectivism, Self Interest | Yaron Brook | POLITICS | Rubin Report

Participants

Main voices

dave rubin

14:55

yaron brook

46:16

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Show episode speakers

Speaker	Time	Text
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We hear about the 24-hour news cycle all the time.
		The reality is, due to our fast-paced lives and ever-splintering attention spans, stories really only stay in the news for about 24 hours.
		And when stories do stick around for more than that, the cable news shows and online outlets feel the need to deliver us the news in the fastest, flashiest, and often sloppiest fashion possible.
		In the political world, this need for excitement leads us going from scandal to scandal, or he said, she said, instead of focusing on the real issues that affect our everyday lives.
		I mention this never-ending matrix of information because I find along the way, instead of talking about the right things, our national conversation almost always talks about the wrong things.
		We debate whether Trump's wall is racist rather than discussing whether a nation should protect its borders as it sees fit.
		We talk about a $15 minimum wage without questioning whether it will lead to McDonald's replacing all its employees with iPads.
		We argue about income inequality without really taking the time to think about what the role of government should be.
		On top of all this, then we get our news from a pundit class filled with former politicians and campaign people who pretend to be neutral when they usually couldn't be anything further from it.
		Of course, in this election the pundits almost all predicted everything wrong the whole time, especially on the Republican side, but for some reason we still turn to them to predict how the future of America will play out.
		When you add up the fast news cycle with the networks who just want views and online creators who just want clicks, you get exactly what we're left with right now, a whole lot of noise.
		Often it's seemingly impossible to figure out what is true or even who is trying to tell you the truth.
		Throw in an American education system which has been co-opted by safe spaces and trigger warnings instead of critical thinking, and you have a toxic mess designed to cater to the simplest and worst parts of ourselves.
		The more you scream, bloviate, and demonize, the more it somehow seems you are right.
		Righteous indignation has become the new truth But actually it's just a bunch of bullshit, which is why on the Rubin Report I try to focus on big ideas and not get bogged down in the daily grind of nonsensical news stories or the endless horse race of the political season.
		My guest this week is Yaron Brook, the President and Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute.
		Just by saying the name Ayn Rand there, I know some people's heads will explode.
		Ayn was an author and philosopher best known for her books The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
		She created the philosophy known as Objectivism, which she described as, quote,
		"the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose for his life,
		with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
		Ayn and her work are revered by many people on the right and despised by many people on the left.
		People on the right tend to love her emphasis on the individual, while people on the left tend to revile her dismissal of the collective.
		So much of what's happening in the country right now, from the Bernie revolution, to the social justice warrior movement, to the rise of Trump, can be explained, or at the very least discussed, within the prism of objectivism.
		I'm going to dive deep into it with you, Ron, and see if we can come up with some answers to solve some of the problems of today.
		What is man's highest pursuit?
		What is the role of government?
		Can we live for ourselves and still help others?
		These are just a couple of the questions that I want to get into.
		Whether you agree or disagree with all the answers that you'll hear is largely irrelevant.
		We need to discuss big issues so that our conversations aren't dominated by little minds.
		Joining me this week is Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute and co-author of the book, Equal is Unfair.
		Yaron, welcome to the show.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for having me on.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I am very excited to talk to you because you guys sent me literature.
		We did.
		Usually people send me a book, maybe.
		I got the book too, but I got literature.
		I've done a tremendous amount of reading over the last couple of days, so I'm looking forward to this.
		So Ayn Rand, I mentioned at the top of the show, if just by saying her name, Just by saying Ayn Rand, a certain percentage of people go bonkers.
		Go completely bonkers.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		They do?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure I'm not illuminating you on anything.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		No, no.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So before we get into the specifics of objectivism and her philosophy and all that, tell me a little bit just about Sure, sure.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		I mean, Ayn Rand was born to a middle-class Jewish family in St.
		Petersburg, Russia.
		She was Alicia Rosenblum, right?
		That was her name.
		And she witnessed communism.
		She saw it happen.
		She lived under it in her teenage years.
		And it was clear, given her personality, that she was not going to survive.
		She was not going to live through communism.
		She was going to get in trouble.
		So the family got together and they got her out, and basically there was a window of opportunity where Lennon allowed some people out to do research or do something with their studies.
		She got out in her early 20s, came to the United States with nothing, spent some time with family in Chicago, but then showed up in Hollywood.
		Uh, her dream was to be a scriptwriter, to be a writer, and she loved Hollywood movies, she loved silent movies, and she goes to that first day, she goes to the Cecil B. DeMille Studios, and you know, with a letter of introduction, and they say, don't call us, we'll call you.
		She walks out, and there's this big convertible, and Cecil B. DeMille is sitting right there.
		And he drives by and she's staring at him.
		She's this little Russian woman.
		She's staring at him with these big eyes.
		And he stops the car and he says, why are you staring?
		And she tells him the story.
		I'm here from Russia.
		I love your movies.
		He says, get in.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		And he takes it to the back lot where they're filming The King of Kings, the story of Jesus Christ.
		And he says, "Here's a week-long pass "so that you can see how movies are made.
		"You wanna be in the movie business?
		"This is how movies are made."
		So she does that.
		She lands up being an extra in the movie.
		She lands up meeting a future husband on the set.
		And this is her entry point into Hollywood.
		And she gets many, many little jobs in Hollywood.
		At night, she is writing and practicing her English.
		And she works in the wardrobe department.
		She works as extras.
		She works in all, but in the end, she becomes a script writer.
		And she writes her scripts.
		Some of the movies are made.
		And in addition, she writes a couple of plays.
		They are put on in both LA and on Broadway.
		She writes a book called "We the Living,"
		which is the most autobiographical thing she ever wrote, which is about a young woman growing up under communism
		in the Soviet Union and the choices she has to make.
		And it fails.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So what were some of those things?
		What were some of the failures that she had to deal with?
		Or what were some of the things that she had to live under with communism?
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		In communism, well, you know, you couldn't express your own opinion.
		You had to play out the party line.
		Her father, who owned a pharmacy, a private pharmacy, it was nationalized, it was taken away from him.
		They went from living a middle-class life in a nice kind of apartment to sharing an apartment with other families.
		They, during the Civil War in Russia, they escaped to the Black Sea and then had to go back to St.
		Petersburg.
		And just the grayness, The conformity, everybody being the same, the lack of any opportunities, the lack of any future.
		What are you going to do?
		You're always going to be the same.
		There's no progress.
		There's no success.
		There's no advancement.
		You are expected to conform, to stand.
		And this is what We The Living is about.
		It's a brilliant book.
		It's a short book.
		And it was made into a movie in Italy in 1942, I think, and later rediscovered in the 1960s.
		The book failed.
		And the book failed because New York intelligentsia in the 1930s were kind of enamored with communism, right?
		Communism was kind of cool.
		And here was a book saying, no, communism was evil.
		And it was really one of the first books to paint that picture of communism.
		This is what's actually going on in Russia.
		Not what you're reading in The New York Times, which is propaganda, but this is what's actually going on.
		She then wrote a little book called Anthem, which she couldn't find a publisher for in the United States and landed up being published in the U.K.
		a year or two before 1984, so it's kind of a dystopian novel, and there's evidence that Orwell probably read it.
		And then she wrote a book called The Fountainhead, and The Fountainhead was rejected by 12 publishers, ultimately published, became a word-of-mouth bestseller.
		To this day, sells over 100,000 copies a year, is a bestseller, has shaped and influenced the lives of many, many people.
		It's about an architect, and I don't know any architect out there hasn't read The Fountainhead, hasn't been impacted by The Fountainhead.
		It took her 12 years to write her next book, Atlas Shrugged, and that book became an instant bestseller.
		You know, publishers competed for it.
		And then she spent the rest of her life, that was published in 1957, she spent the rest
		of her life, she died in '82, writing nonfiction, developing the philosophy that she had discovered
		for Atlas Shrugged, that she really developed in Atlas Shrugged, but really articulating
		its applications in all kinds of areas.
		So she wrote newsletters and articles and books of essays from 19—all through the
		'60s and into the '70s.
		And again, she died in 1982, working, you know, while she was still writing and very
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		active.
		Yeah.
		So I wanted to get a little bit of her history out, because I feel like people don't know
		some of the history, that this is someone who came from communism, who came to love
		America and capitalism and sort of living for yourself, which is a lot of what objectivism
		So now let's unpack objectivism a little bit.
		There are five pillars, and give me the Broadest objectivism breakdown.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		So, objectivism in one foot, kind of, is in metaphysics, which is the Aryan philosophy that studies what is out there, what is reality about.
		You know, it's reality is what it is.
		A is A, kind of law of identity, the law of causality, Aristotle's view of the metaphysical nature of reality.
		Reality is not created by another being.
		It's not what we want it to be.
		It's not what we wish it to be.
		It's not what some external consciousness created.
		It just is.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's here and now.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		It's here and now.
		And we have, and this is kind of the epistemology, we have the tool to know it.
		We have senses to observe it, and we have reason to be able to integrate it, understand it, and actually ultimately shape it.
		It's not a creation of our consciousness.
		It's not a creation of our emotions.
		The way you learn about reality is not through emotions.
		It's through reason.
		It's through science.
		It's through using, you know, what's uniquely human, which is our reasoning capacity, our rational thinking, our senses, and our senses are valid.
		Now, thinking, having reason, being rational, is a characteristic of the individual.
		We don't have a collective stomach to eat.
		We don't have a collective mind to think.
		Only individuals can think.
		So the unit in ethics is the individual.
		The purpose of ethics is to provide guidance for the individual on how to live the best life that he can live.
		what values and virtues to pursue to live a great life, and to live a life consistent with our nature
		as human beings, as rational, reasoning beings.
		So ethics is not about teaching us how to sacrifice for other people, how to die for them.
		But it's also not about getting other people to sacrifice for us and exploiting other people.
		It's about living a full, rational life.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so okay, so let's--
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		That's three.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That's three, right.
		So let's pause there for a second.
		So a lot of what I've talked about here is that one of my problems with what has become the modern left is that they seem to now care more about the collective than the individual.
		And Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who I've had on, she always talks about If you care about minorities, you have to care about minorities within minorities.
		That's very much an objectivist way of looking at things.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Well, Ayn Rand said the smallest minority in the world is the individual.
		That's what it's all about.
		So the framework for everything in politics, in morality, is the individual, not the group.
		But you see, the moral left has bigger problems, in my view.
		That is, the modern left has rejected the idea of reason.
		The idea of reason is actually being efficacious in the world.
		rejected reason as the standard.
		You know, beyond science, and even in science there's some questions, but beyond science, they rejected reason as the standard by which we should evaluate reality.
		And this comes from philosophers like Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer and so on, the German continental tradition, which basically said reason is a mind game.
		It's in here.
		We don't know what reality is.
		You know, we can speculate about what real reality is, but what we see is ultimately shaped by consciousness, not by reality.
		Our senses actually distort reality, they don't identify reality.
		That has created a real epistemological and ultimately moral and political problem throughout the last 150 years.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So this is where you would say that we care sort of more about feelings over fact.
		Sometimes things will feel right to us.
		It seems right to say, well, the minimum wage should be $15 because you want people that are low income to make more money.
		That feels right, but it may not actually be what the system itself can negotiate.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		It's not what happens in reality.
		And this is what people call unintended consequences.
		I'm not sure they're always unintended, but they're unintended consequences.
		If you think a little bit more about the problem, and let's take the minimum wage, if you raise the price artificially, we all study in Econ 101, when a price is raised, demand goes down.
		So, if you raise the price of labor, Then demand for that, labor, goes down.
		And this happens over and over again.
		But people don't want to believe that.
		They don't want to take that.
		But they also don't want to take the inductive evidence.
		That is, the fact that it's happened a hundred times.
		Oh, but this time it's going to be different.
		And I see that in economics all the time.
		The Paul Krugmans of the world.
		Stimulus never works.
		It's never worked.
		That's because it hasn't been big enough.
		We need to do bigger.
		And it's never going to work because they keep loading it up like that.
		And the same with the minimum wage.
		They keep thinking this time will be different.
		But that's anti-reason.
		It's anti-science.
		And what they're placing is wishes before facts.
		Wishes before solid, theoretical theory.
		Theory that was derived from evidence from reality.
		I mean, that's the real scientific method.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So when I've watched these debates, let's just stick on the minimum wage thing for a moment.
		And you know, Bernie says the $15 minimum wage.
		And as I said, it feels good.
		And I've worked minimum wage jobs, too, when I was in high school.
		I think I was making $6 maybe an hour.
		It might have even been less.
		I'm not even sure.
		But it sounds good.
		But what they also, because they don't think through, well, McDonald's, if they're forced to go from $7.50 an employee or whatever it is, $9 an employee to $15, they're just going to replace them all with iPads, right?
		I mean, that's what I mentioned at the top of the show.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		So, absolutely.
		So, first of all, you're going to get iPads to take orders.
		iPads are much more efficient at taking orders than people are.
		Yeah.
		But they're actually machines now.
		They will flip the burgers.
		They will do the whole process and bring you out, wrap nicely, a burger, whatever you ordered on the iPad will get.
		So, automation.
		Automation is going to happen anyway, right?
		But this speeds it up, and people are less prepared for it.
		But more than that, it's going to mean the teenagers.
		If you're a teenager growing up in the inner cities, And you're not trained because public education is a
		disaster.
		Yeah, well, true.
		So you have no skills, right?
		So now you're expected to be able to perform at $15 an hour.
		You can't.
		The fact is nobody will pay somebody to produce $10.
		It won't pay them $15 to produce $10, right?
		I'm not going to lose.
		I tell this to kids, right?
		When somebody hires you, they're going to make money off of you.
		That's the nature of the transaction.
		You're going to make money off of them because your time is actually worth less than what you're willing to take at the salary, but they're going to make money off of you.
		Nobody's going to hire a kid who can't produce more than $7 an hour at $15 an hour.
		So those kids are just going to be priced out.
		So whether it means the McDonald's shuts down, Whether it means they automate, whether it means they raise, they jack up prices significantly so that people now can't afford to buy the food that they're producing, so that nothing's changed in that sense.
		It's not good policy.
		We can talk about how to help poor people, particularly inner city kids.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		But minimum wage is the dumbest, stupidest, most economically ignorant idea ever.
		Even Jerry Brown.
		He gets it, right?
		Because why was this negotiated here in California?
		They negotiated, like, a six-year term to phase it in.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		It's because there was a ballot initiative that was going to go into effect that would have had minimum wage go up in the next three years.
		And Jerry Brown looked at that and said, oh, my God, this is going to be disastrous for the California economy, so I'll compromise with these guys by spreading it out, which is the least damaging thing he could have done.
		But even Jerry Brown said there are tradeoffs.
		And what are the tradeoffs?
		Unemployment among young people.
		Take some entrepreneurs going out of business, and yes, some people will make a little bit more money.
		Those are the kind of trade-offs that I find ugly.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And this is where critical thinking is so important, because when I've watched the debates, Bernie says the 15 and gets applause for it, because it sounds good, it feels good.
		Hillary said something like, well, we're going to get it to 12 and then figure it out.
		Now, I'm not even defending her, other than to say that at least she's trying to play the game, at least, of reality.
		Right?
		So, in a weird way, you have to credit her.
		She's doing the Jerry Brown thing, right?
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but this is a sad thing about America right now, and this is on the right and the left, because we're seeing the same thing with Donald Trump, is that after what I believe is about a century of progressive education, where we've taught kids not to think but to feel, Not to be reasoning, rational agents, but to be feeling agents.
		We are suffering the consequence now.
		So, we've got politicians who appeal purely to emotion, that don't discuss facts, that don't discuss evidence, that don't discuss Trump and Bernie.
		Trump and Bernie, right?
		And don't discuss how they're going to get there.
		They don't discuss the details.
		They don't discuss how they pay for it.
		We're going to give you free stuff.
		We're going to, you know, we're going to get back at the Chinese as if the Chinese are the problem.
		And so on and so forth, right?
		But it's all emotion.
		It's all about emotion.
		And yet people are responding.
		And of course, you know, you've talked about free speech.
		But this is the same kind of thing we're seeing on American campuses today.
		You can't say something that might offend somebody.
		And what does it mean to offend?
		It means that it's a little bit out of the mainstream.
		Because their emotions are hurt.
		And we're saying emotions are what matter.
		We'll give you a safe space.
		We'll give you triggers.
		We'll protect your emotions.
		No!
		We should be protecting the mind.
		And the way to protect the mind is to expand it, is to expose them to lots of different ideas and teach them the critical thinking skills that are necessary to figure out What's right?
		What's wrong?
		What makes sense?
		What doesn't make sense?
		But that's out.
		And this is what scares me the most about America today.
		It's this emotionalism.
		So in that sense, it's an epistemological point.
		It's not even ethics.
		It's not politics.
		This is about what is the tool for knowing reality?
		Is it emotion?
		Or is it the mind?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're throwing me all of my favorite stuff right there between the free speech stuff and expanding the mind.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Yes, and we're completely on free speech.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so wait, so circling back to objectivism, did we miss any piece of it?
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Sure, we missed the politics, right?
		So, if individuals are the moral unit, if the purpose of morality is to guide us towards our own individual happiness, if the purpose of morality is to give us the values and virtues, And if it turns out, as objectivism holds, that the most important of those is reason.
		So, our cardinal value, if you will, is to cultivate your reason.
		The most important virtue, the virtue that integrates all other virtues, is rationality.
		Then the question is, okay, what kind of a world does a reasoning, rational individual list?
		Demand in order to be able to exercise his reason and rational and and the answer is freedom All he wants is to be free to be left alone So he can exercise his mind and pursue the values that he believes are good for him now if I turned out that he's wrong but then he needs to learn and adjust and he needs to make those decisions and he should be allowed to make mistakes and the enemy of reason Is force.
		The enemy of reason is coercion.
		So what we want is a political system that protects us from coercion.
		And the concept of individual rights, which the Enlightenment came up with, Locke and then the Founding Fathers, is the concept that recognizes that fact.
		It recognizes the idea that in order for people to exercise their reason, they have to be free.
		And individual rights mean, this is the right to life, means to pursue the values necessary for your life.
		The right to liberty means Think what you want to think, say what you want to say,
		write what you want to write.
		You have a right to use your mind in any way that you can in pursuit of happiness, right?
		That's the ultimate goal.
		So they recognize this individualism.
		So the core there is freedom.
		And the way I see freedom, the only free political system is a capitalist political system, a
		system in which the government's only job is to protect us from coercion.
		Its only job is to protect us from the use of force.
		So that's for the fifth pillar, which is a whole other area in philosophy, which I don't know if we were going to talk about, is aesthetics.
		That is, given the type of consciousness that we have, we need a particular kind of art to reflect back to us the values that we have, so that it can inspire us, so that it can keep us going.
		It provides us with important cognitive and emotional fuel.
		So, Ayn Rand believed in Romanticism as that form of art.
		It has to represent something, but then it has to inspire.
		And she defined Romanticism as art that recognizes the fact that individuals have free will.
		And all art to recognize that, she would consider a superior art form to other art forms.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But she didn't have to like the art specifically, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		If the artist themselves was expressing all of their humanity, right?
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Well, the best example of that is that she loved, she recognized the genius and the greatness of Dostoevsky.
		And she considered him a romantic artist, because he recognized free will.
		And if you've read Dostoevsky, you know.
		I mean, his characters are torn between choices, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		And she loved that kind of art.
		That was the essence of art.
		But philosophically, she was opposed to everything Dostoevsky wrote, right?
		She viewed his view of life as bleak, as awful.
		Hugo is another one.
		Hugo, who was a socialist.
		And Les Miserables ultimately has kind of a socialist, a plight of the poor type of theme.
		She considered Hugo the greatest literary figure in human history, the greatest writer in human history, and a great romantic writer, because he had all these conflicts and this drama, which she loved.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so that's really fascinating.
		So she didn't like the ideas that these people were putting forth, but she loved them as individuals, right?
		She loved the idea that they were expressing.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		She loved their aesthetic.
		She loved the way they communicated the idea and the recognition.
		So what she separated is So there's certain political ideas up here, but she believed that much more important than the political ideas are the fundamental philosophical ideas.
		So she looks at Hugo and he says, here's a great author who recognizes something very, very important, maybe the most important thing about human beings.
		We have free will.
		Versus many modern artists, many modern authors, where the story just rambles along, nobody makes any choices, everything's by accident.
		She would say they're denying free will, so even if they use beautiful prose, Shakespeare's a good example of this, right?
		Even if they use beautiful prose and they write beautiful stuff, because they're denying free will, You know, I really, really hate that.
		Now, I admire the prose, I admire the story, I admire—but I resent them philosophically, who go, because he recognizes something more fundamental than politics.
		In a sense, I'm willing to forgive the bad politics, because we're allies on the more fundamental philosophy.
		I can get a lot of fuel, spiritual fuel, from the recognition of heroes, even if they're fighting for something I don't believe in.
unidentified		Right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So really, more than anything else, it sounds to me like she wanted to have the battle of ideas.
		And that's very much what I do here, what I try to get people to think about and to talk about.
		But unfortunately, we don't seem to live in a time when this is working, right?
		As you just said, between the Trump stuff giving you easy answers and the Bernie stuff
		giving you easy answers, we don't live in a time when the underlying bedrock is cared
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		about.
		But this is the danger of living in a time where we've elevated emotions among all else.
		Because once you accept emotions as your standard, there's nothing to talk about, right?
		Because it's a question of, "Whoa, what you're saying makes me feel X or what you're saying
		makes me feel Y."
		But that's not a conversation.
		A conversation is about reason.
		It's about ideas.
		It's about proof.
		It's about evidence.
		And that requires critical thinking skills.
		And we have trained maybe several generations, but certainly the latest generation, not to
		I'll tell you more.
		When we have 5-year-olds or 7-year-olds or 9-year-olds sitting around a classroom and we ask them, what do you think about something political?
		Well, that's ridiculous.
		A five-year-old doesn't think about politics.
		He can't think.
		And even a nine-year-old can't think.
		What nine-year-olds need is a lot of knowledge, a lot of information in the skills, the math and science skills, that train you in how to think.
		And our public education system has destroyed that.
		So what she was interested in is reason above all.
		She said, I'm a champion of capitalism.
		Because I'm a champion of rational self-interest as my moral goal.
		But I'm a champion of rational self-interest as my moral goal, because I'm a champion of reason as man's basic means of survival, as his tool of knowledge.
		So, the fundamental Feyn Rand's philosophy, and this is what I think so many people don't get, and they respond emotionally to, is reason.
		You know, and a lot of your audience says, we're for science, we're for reason, we're for facts, we're for science.
		Well, this is Ayn Rand.
		Now we can debate the politics.
		But let's at least agree that the standard by which we have this debate is a standard of rationality.
		It's a standard of facts and evidence.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's so funny because I tweeted yesterday that I was having you on, and I happened to be watching Bernie speak, and I took a picture of Bernie speaking in the background about income inequality.
		Then I had your book in the foreground, and then I tweeted that you were on, and then people immediately, and I'm very proud that we've created something good here because I have a lot of people on the left.
		And I have a lot of people on the right, and I'm trying to get these people together, right?
		Let them have the conversation.
		And let them have the conversation, and then we'll see.
		And look, people will respond in the comments section to this, and they'll say either, well, I agreed with X and Y, and I disagree with this, or whatever.
		But immediately, a bunch of people jumped on you.
		Yes.
		And I was watching the back and forth, and you were doing it.
		I try not to do the back and forth on Twitter that much anymore.
		But you were doing it, and you were trying to calmly, well, read this.
		You know what I mean?
		They were jumping on you, but you go, well, try this, read this, or maybe you misunderstand that.
		And that's where we all have to get if we're going to move forward.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I said, of course, it's very hard to do on Twitter.
		It's unbelievably frustrating, because Twitter, you know, you've got this character limit, and you have to make it snappy and catchy.
		And you can't have a rational conversation on Twitter.
		This is why I try to say, please read the book, or read this article, or here's a link to a video.
		You know, because you can't articulate any kind of case on this.
		I mean, what we are trying to do is make this a philosophical debate.
		And the problem is this today, and this is one of my exchanges with one of your, I think, audience followers, was about this.
		His view is philosophy is useless.
		Philosophy is a waste of time.
		It's completely arbitrary.
		It's just people rambling, right?
		And that's, to some extent, true.
		Modern philosophy is completely useless, completely rambling.
		It's detached from reality.
		What I'm trying to suggest is there's an alternative view.
		First of all, we all have a philosophy, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, whether we articulate it or not.
		We're all guided by a philosophy.
		But secondly, there are alternative philosophies that are pro-science, that are pro-reason, that are pro-fact.
		They're so used to these floating abstractions, detached from reality philosophy, that so many people have abandoned it.
		And that's sad to me.
		It's very sad.
		Because I want them engaged in that debate, particularly those who are pro-science.
		I don't want science versus philosophy.
		I want them to try to think, what kind of philosophy is there that is supportive and enhancing of science?
		It's no accident.
		That science, the scientific revolution happens when it does.
		It happens when the West rediscovers Greek philosophy.
		And it's no accident that Greece is the start of science.
		Because they philosophically, they viewed philosophy as a tool to understand reality.
		And you know, Aristotle created the scientific method.
		He made a lot of mistakes in science.
		Huge mistakes in science.
		Sure.
		It was an empirical method of testing and observation, and it was because he was guided by a particular philosophy that allowed him to do that.
		It was because in the Renaissance and later in the Enlightenment, we had a respect for reason and for our senses that science could develop.
		So the two, if you abandon philosophy, you will ultimately abandon science.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so using the example of Greece, you must find modern-day Greece to be a very depressing example of using philosophy properly, because I guess you would argue they abandoned it, because they have all kinds of problems economically, but it's mostly because they went with more left-wing Well, so again, yes, it's left-wing policies, but left-wing policies are driven by philosophical approach.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		So, I view, this is Ayn Rand and other thinkers within objectivism, you know, I view all of history as in a sense a battle between Aristotle and Plato.
		And you can find all the bad policies that Greece, that we, that, you know, even the emotionalism, all of those link back to Plato.
		And all the good stuff links to Aristotle.
		The Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, America as a free country, all in the Aristotelian tradition.
		And there's a constant philosophical fight going on.
		Plato believed that we all live in a cave, that we don't know real reality, and we need
		philosophic kings who somehow commune with the world of forms to know what the truth
		is.
		So you need a pope to talk to God to tell us the truth, or you need leaders, right,
		whether they're tribal leaders, whether they're political leaders, who know what's good for
		all of us, because we are still in a cave and we don't know what's good for us.
		That's where authoritarianism and modern kind of democracy comes from.
		Aristotle believed that each one of us has the capacity to reason for himself and that
		the purpose of morality—Aristotle's very similar to Ayn Rand here—the purpose of
		morality for Aristotle is to guide us towards eudaimonia, which is flourishing.
		So, individual flourishing.
		And then, you know, while I might disagree with the particular things that he advised people to do in order to achieve happiness, the goal is the same.
		Now it's just a scientific question.
		What actually leads to human flourishing?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so okay, so for the Plato version of this, of you're in a cave, basically it's saying that we need, we need somebody upstairs, whether it, either a religious figure, as you said, or the Pope, or just people that we elect, or some leader.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Lots of kings in Plato's terminology.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Some leader to because we can't do it ourselves.
		Now, obviously, I buy into the Aristotle version of this, but I think what a lot of people would say is, well, if everyone is doing what they think is best for themselves, this is the main critique.
		I've heard, I was watching you once on John Stossel on Fox Business, I think, and somebody was asking you about this, that if everyone is doing what they think is best for themselves, that that really is anarchy.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Well, but it's not.
		Because the caveat in that is, what's good for you is not to exploit other people.
		Exploiting other people is bad for you.
		Right.
		And I have whole seminars on why lying, stealing, cheating is just bad for you.
		It's destructive to your own soul, your own ability to communicate with other people.
		And also we have to realize what doing good for you means.
		Being rational about it, right?
		Reason is the fundamental.
		So you really have to think.
		I tell people, if you want to be selfish, I mean, Rand talks about selfishness, right?
		If you really want to do what's good for you, it's hard work.
		You have to really think about it, right?
		Most people think, oh, being selfish is like what a two-year-old does.
		And I'm saying, no, a two-year-old doesn't know what he's doing, right?
		It's just guided by emotion.
		They don't have the frontal cortex.
		It's not developed enough for them to reason themselves into self-interest.
		Self-interest requires thought.
		It requires figuring out, okay, I've got 50 years to live, if you're young, right?
		What is the best path for me to take?
		What are the choices I should make?
		Does honesty make sense?
		Not as a commandment from above, not as something that society tells me, but does honesty make sense for me?
		And I would argue absolutely.
		You know, being dishonest is just stupid policy.
		It's really, really bad for you.
		If you think about it as rational long-term self-interest, and if we're all rationally long-term self-interested, There's no clash.
		There's no—I mean, we're not trying to exploit—what is the relationship people have with one another if they're pursuing their own self-interest?
		It's trade.
		I want you to be successful, because when you're successful, you're producing and creating values that make me more successful.
		I love Apple, because I get to buy an iPhone for $300, and it's made my life significantly better, and it's worth much more to me than $300.
		Apple won.
		I won.
		I love my wife because, you know, my life is better because of having a relationship with her.
		Her life is better, I hope, for having a relationship with me, right?
unidentified		Right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'll have her on next week.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		There you go.
		So, all of life for a rationally self-interested human being is about win-win relationship.
		This is another thing I hate about Trump.
		Trump views life in terms of winners and losers.
		I view life in terms of winners and winners, right?
		And yet we're not going to win at the same rate, right?
		Some of us will be incredibly successful.
		But then also, what does success mean?
		I mean, I find it interesting that the left always measures success in terms of dollars.
		And I don't measure success in terms of dollars.
		I chose to be a teacher.
		I could have gone to Wall Street because I love what I do.
		And this is much more fun than having millions of dollars in the bank account.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Right?
		So it's about having a great life.
		It's not about how many dollars you accumulate.
		And we're all gonna—we all have the opportunity to win.
		And it's not—when you win, it's not at somebody's expense.
		It's the opposite.
		The only way to make money, the only way to be successful, is to provide a value to somebody else.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so that's really interesting.
		So you'd say that the left would look at this and say, well, this is just unleashing the chains, unshackling people to be purely selfish.
		But really what you're saying is, if you were left to your own device, well, you're giving me your own personal example, but that the average person left to their own devices, it's not that you just want to be selfish just to make money, because you also want the people around you to be happy, and you want your family to be happy, and you want your community to be better.
		And people are operating under this idea without even realizing it.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely, but I mean, let's be clear, I'm not saying that if you just unleashed everybody tomorrow, everybody would be rationally self-interested.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, there are genuinely bad people.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		There are genuinely bad people, and then there's some people who just don't think, and therefore will do stupid things.
		They do today, they'll continue to do them.
		But, what you're giving is the opportunity for people who want to be rational, who want to pursue a good life, the opportunity to do it.
		One of the things you have to teach people is how to be moral.
		I'm all for moral education.
		But what morality boils down for me is teach them how to think.
		How to think not just about science, not just about the world out there, but think about what About themselves.
		What's good for me?
		What's not good for me?
		What will lead to a flourishing life?
		What won't lead to a flourishing life?
		So, rather than—today, self-interest is associated with doing whatever you feel like doing.
		So, there's a line of cocaine there.
		I'm going to get a high.
		That's in my self-interest, right?
		And I'm going, no, it's not.
		If you know anything about cocaine and people who take it regularly, it's destructive to your life.
		Don't do it.
		So, you have a right to do it, right, a political right, because you're not coercing anybody by taking the cocaine.
		But should you do it from our perspective?
		And I'm saying no, not because you're going to hurt somebody else, but you're hurting yourself.
		The most valuable thing you have is you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		So don't hurt yourself.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		So yes, pursue your self-interest, but do it rationally with your long-term interests in mind.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		OK, so everything that you've said so far, about 40 minutes in, I'm pretty much with you.
		This is where my evolution has been going.
		So why have these ideas Why haven't these ideas had better sellers?
		Where's the Ayn Rand of today?
		I mean obviously this is what you are doing and there's plenty of people that I think are more libertarian like Penn Jillette and Michael Shermer and some other people I know that are selling these ideas.
		But where are the people going, man take your life back and live for yourself and through that you will make the world a better place?
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		They don't exist, or there are very few of us.
		And the reason is, I think, is what we talked about, education.
		I think the educational system has destroyed that.
		Where are the great economists?
		I mean, where's the Milton Friedman?
		I mean, we were talking about the minimum wage.
		If Milton Friedman were alive today, he would be on every TV show, he would be everywhere explaining this.
		And nobody does it.
		Or take Donald Trump's claims about trade, which are ludicrous.
		And Bernie Sanders, of course, agrees with him.
		They're ludicrous!
		Any economist would say, and there's nobody defending them except, I saw a really good editorial from a guy who, I hate to say, wrote a really good editorial, but he did, Alan Blinder, where he disagrees on almost everything in economics, and he wrote this really good op-ed about free trade.
		Now, where's the Milton Friedman doing that?
		You know, we just, we lack, and I don't know as much about science, but I fear that we just don't have the Einsteins and the Newtons and the Darwins.
		I just think that we are much more mediocre today than we were in terms of our geniuses, and maybe our geniuses are going to business and they're the Steve Jobses of the world, but we don't seem to have those bigger-than-life You know, same with novelists.
		We're the Victor Hugo of today.
		I just don't see those kind of people, and I think we've averaged down in the name – by the way, it's related to the book, right?
		I think in the name of equality.
		I think that's one of the evils of equality, is it averages this down not only on economic terms, but it tries to average this down on everything else.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so it fully explains the Trump thing.
		I mean, everything you're saying explains the Trump thing because we've dumbed ourselves down.
		We want easy answers.
		And then he gets up there and he explains some of this trade stuff.
		So, okay, so just for the trade stuff, real quick, without making you fully explain all of these policies, when he says simple things like, you know, we've had bad trade deals and we're going to have better trade deals and all that, I think a lot of people watch it.
		And me, to some degree, I watch it and I go, well, this is a guy who's a businessman.
		I get it.
		He's used the bankruptcy laws to his advantage.
		He sells ties in other places also to his advantage.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		He might be a great businessman.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Being a good businessman doesn't mean you know anything about economics.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		And he doesn't.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So, but when he says that stuff, do you – so you just think it's complete nonsense that he can't negotiate trade deals any better because that's just simply not – There is no such thing as a negotiated better trade deal.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		The best trade policy – and look, Adam Smith wrote about this in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, right?
		Ricardo wrote about this in the 19th century.
		There's no economist left or right – almost no economist because there's always some wacko somewhere.
		But there's no economist left or right, and this is why Alan Blinder wrote about this, right?
		He's a leftist economist.
		He's a Keynesian.
		I disagree with him on so much.
		But there's almost no economist who doesn't believe that the best trade policy for the United States, from our wealth maximizing for Americans, for individual Americans, is zero tariffs.
		Just take tariffs in America and put them at zero and let the rest of the world do whatever
		the hell they want.
		Now, for those countries, for China, the best trade policies is for them to lower it to
		zero.
		And if we lowered it to zero, they would have lots of pressure internally to lower it.
		I'm against trade deals because I think we should just do it ourselves.
		Now, are some people going to suffer as a consequence within the United States?
		Sure, some people lose their jobs, and they're going to have to figure out new jobs.
		But other jobs will be created.
		And the net effect clearly, again, shown by economists for 200 plus years, is that the U.S.
		economy and individuals within the U.S.
		become richer, wealthier, more successful.
		It's the same as if a plant leaves California and goes to Nevada.
		Do we get all apoplectic about, oh my God, how awful?
		No!
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		They made the decision.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		They made the decision.
		It's cheaper over there.
		The fact is that, you know, in this case, we can import the stuff from Nevada.
		Import it, right?
		We don't even think in those terms.
		The stuff is going to be cheaper produced in Nevada, so therefore we'll buy it for cheaper.
		We'll have more money to consume and other things, or to save, God forbid, save in America.
		We don't believe in that anymore.
		But save some money, invest it, and create the kind of businesses where we, in America, have a comparative advantage.
		Look, a hundred years ago, 80% of the American population worked in farming.
		Today, less than 1% does.
		And we produce much more food than ever before by a long shot.
		In 1979, manufacturing jobs peaked in the United States.
		We have half the number of manufacturing jobs today.
		We produce more stuff than we ever have ever.
		Most of that has nothing to do with China or anybody else.
		Most of that's automation.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So it's just science and technology has changed the world.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		And new jobs, and new jobs are going to be out there.
		And it's not just science and technology.
		Globalization has changed the world.
		But that's great.
		A billion people, a billion people have come out of poverty in Asia over the last 30 years.
		That's a billion people to me.
		We should be celebrating, dancing in the streets.
		Nobody talks about it.
		Because they came out of poverty, not because of foreign aid.
		They came out of poverty because those countries adopted a little bit of free markets.
		And because there's this perception that they did it and we lost jobs.
		To some extent that's true, but we gain more jobs than we lost.
		The fact is that when trade is free in America, unemployment is very, very low.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So a lot of people are going to be listening to this and say, but you're not offering any net, any social safety net for the people that need it the most.
		And at the same time, if you're saying that the minimum wage doesn't work, even for all the philosophical reasons that you laid out, they're going to say, but no matter what, there's a certain amount of people that need help.
		I basically believe that, which is why I haven't fully gone libertarian.
		So, what's the response?
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		So, I agree.
		There's a certain number of people – I think it's very small, by the way – who need help, because I think capitalism, in all of history, anywhere it's tried, creates more jobs than there are people.
		So, anybody who is able can work, and work at a decent living where they can live their life without a lot of help.
		But look, emergencies happen.
		Bad stuff happens to people.
		And some people truly cannot survive, right?
		They've got problems.
		Whether their brain is not developed enough or their body is not developed enough.
		Something they need to be taking care of.
		So, I believe in a safety net.
		I just don't believe the government should provide it.
		I don't believe I should be coerced to help them.
		You want to help them?
		I want to help them.
		We can get together, start a foundation.
		So, charity is the safety net.
		Charity was the safety net in the 19th century.
		But not only charity.
		You know that in the 19th century they sold insurance against poverty?
		They were mutual aid societies where we would all get together and buy insurance, in a sense insuring all of us, you know, a mutual type of insurance deal for poverty or if your house burned down or kind of just generally bad stuff happening in life.
		You could, in a true free market in healthcare, for example, you could buy an insurance policy, maybe even for life, on a baby that hasn't been born yet.
		I mean, the possibilities, once you free up the economy from regulations and controls If you actually let people make decisions based on their own interests, unbelievable.
		So, I don't believe anybody's going to be dying in the streets.
		I don't believe anybody—I believe the opposite.
		I think fewer people will die from poverty.
		Fewer people will be hurt from poverty.
		I think people will be much richer, much better off, and that the safety net that exists will be much more effective and driven primarily towards those people.
		Who for no fault of their own are in this situation.
		Some people deserve the fate that they get.
		If you're a wife beating drunk, capitalism's not good for you.
		But I'm all for that.
		I believe in justice.
		I believe in fairness.
		Fairness is not equality.
		Fairness means getting what you deserve.
		And white beating drunks deserve bad stuff happening to them.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So it's so interesting to me how it really sounds like a branding issue because people think of capital, there's this idea now, and I think it has a lot to do with crony capitalism and the way our politicians have allowed corporations to basically steal from America and hide money elsewhere and hide taxes.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		But we of course object to cronyism, and the only solution to cronyism is to shrink government power so that government doesn't get involved in business, so business doesn't have any incentive to lobby it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So that's basically Atlas Shrugged right there.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You just gave me the one sentence.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		The smaller the government.
		The less cronyism there is.
		I mean, there's a famous story about Microsoft.
		In 1994, they were brought in front of Congress, and Orrin Hatch, who was then a young senator from Utah, lamb-blasted them for not lobbying, for not having a presence in Washington, D.C., for not doing all the things that corporate America was expected to do.
		And Microsoft walked away and said, look, you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone.
		We're not interested.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Right?
		And of course, six months later, the Justice Department comes knocking, goes after Microsoft for giving a product away for free, Internet Explorer, destroys the company from my perspective, right?
		Today, Microsoft spends tens of millions of dollars a year.
		They have a beautiful building in Washington, D.C., about equal distance from the Capitol and the White House.
		This is how it happens.
		The politicians come and they say, give us a handout, or when we write the regulations, we're going to screw you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Wow, I really want to get into that for a second, because I remember that happening in 1994.
		I was, I think, a senior in high school.
		I remember that.
		So Internet Explorer was just the, it was the internet browser that was built into Windows.
unidentified		Yes.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And basically the government said, you have a monopoly on this, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		But of course Netscape invented web browsing.
unidentified		Right.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		They were charging, I think it was $50 or $70 a pop, and here was being bundled with
		the operating system, and Netscape was saying, "Wait a minute.
		We can't compete against a free product.
		You're dumping."
		And this is antitrust laws.
		You know, just quickly, antitrust laws, and this is absurdity of antitrust laws.
		If you sell a product really, really cheap, then you're violating antitrust laws because
		you're dumping.
		If you sell a product much more expensive than your competitors, you must have a monopoly,
		so you're in violation of antitrust laws.
		And if you sell your product at the same price as your competitors, you're colluding!
		It must be collusion, because how would you sell it all at the same price?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So that's like the cell phone companies, because everybody's within five bucks.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Antitrust is a law that is meaningless.
		It is completely at the discretion of the regulator when to apply it and when not.
		And that's what authoritarians always love.
		They love laws that are not clear, that are not objective, so they can choose.
		You didn't pay me this month, so I'm going to go after you, right?
		You're not lobbying, so I'm going to go after you.
		Google has learned this, right?
		Google and Netflix and these guys, they spend huge amounts of lobbying.
		Democrats, Republicans, they spread it all around.
		It's interesting that Google has no antitrust problems.
		Apple does, because Apple has lobbied very little, right?
		Microsoft did, because it lobbied zero.
		So this is the game that's being played, and it's a game that is determined by the politicians.
		They're the ones with the guns.
		They're the ones forcing this upon businessmen.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So, is there a risk there, though, that if you remove all of that stuff, that the companies eventually will become more powerful than the government?
		Now, I suppose you wouldn't view that as a risk, per se, but that Apple, at this point, that Apple has more money than the government, right?
		Sure.
unidentified		It's great.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Apple's in the black, you know?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I love it.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Look, this is the difference.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		And this is a fundamental confusion.
		This is what you said.
		A lot of this is about Woods.
		It's about Woods, yes, but the deeper philosophical meaning of Woods.
		There's such a thing as economic power and there's such a thing as political power.
		Political power is about coercion, it's about guns, it's about force.
		Economic power is about voluntary transactions.
		I have no problem companies gaining more and more and more economic power.
		They can only have that power as long as I voluntarily choose to trade with them.
		I can choose to buy a Samsung tomorrow.
		I can choose to boycott Apple for a variety of reasons if I want to tomorrow.
		There are other choices.
		There always are choices.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But there is the risk that they could just buy every other company and eventually... Never happened.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Never happened.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Because a better mousetrap will always come along, right?
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		A better mousetrap.
		The classical example of this is Rockefeller, right?
		Had 90 plus percent of all oil refining in the 1870s, right?
		So monopoly.
		So what were we taught in Econ 101?
		Prices go up, quality goes down.
		Never happened.
		Prices went down every single year.
		I challenge anybody to look at the data.
		It goes down every year.
		Quality goes down every year.
		Because Rockefeller understood that if he raised prices, competition would come about.
		And competition will often come about from products you would never expect.
		So, for example, in the 1870s, Rockefeller's oil was being used for kerosene to light us.
		Who competed him out of that business?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I guess the— Thomas Edison?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		What bureaucrat, what central planner would have sat back in 1870 and says, yeah, this guy in that lab, he's going to—nobody would have imagined that.
		That's the beauty of real freedom, of real capitalism.
		Today, of course, Edison would have never been allowed to have the lab, because he violated every code in the book.
		I'm sure he didn't wear goggles when he did his experiment.
		There's no way the regulators would allow that.
		Bunch of murderers, probably, yeah, yeah.
		In the 19th century, we had relative freedom, and the consequence was the greatest pace of innovation in human history, the biggest innovative leaps in human history.
		I mean, really, today, we get another app and we get all excited.
		Electricity was invented, right?
		Lighting.
		Think of all the stuff that comes from electricity.
		And then, think of the trains, automobiles, airplanes.
		I mean, the innovation in the 19th century and early part of the 20th century are massive.
		Today, they're a little incremental.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So is that possible that just sort of...
		arc of humanity has changed, where those things...
		No, so you think it's boundless, it really is...
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		I think it's boundless, and I think what's constraining today
		is our educational system, which is pathetic, particularly in science and math and the things where we
		teach kids to think.
		And I think it's political.
		I think when you regulate people, when everything you do is by permission,
		people don't take risks, people don't challenge themselves.
		And this is what I meant by the enemy of the mind is the gun.
		If I put a gun to the back of your neck and say, "These things you cannot do,"
		it shuts down whole parts of the mind.
		And this is exactly what the Enlightenment was fighting against.
		This is the whole idea of free speech.
		And free inquiry was the idea that you can't shut down the human mind.
		You can't shut it down in science.
		You can't shut it down in philosophy or religion.
		You can't shut it down when it comes to business, because what you do when you do that is you destroy.
		whole areas of inquiry.
		And some of those inquiries will be wrong.
		I mean, some experiments, you know, blow up in your face, right?
		But you've got to fail in order to be successful.
		When we bail people out, when we don't allow restructurings, when we don't allow the dynamism
		that exists, we suffer.
		The reason we have so much innovation in Silicon Valley is because that is the least regulated
		industry in our economy.
		The reason Wall Street keeps collapsing is because it is the most regulated industry in our economy.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So, okay, so Wall Street is regulated, and we bail them out, and when they're too big to fail, we make them bigger.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So I get all that.
		So what would the alternative have been if we had just actually let them all fail?
		I mean, people basically say Obama saved- That's a false alternative, right?
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		80% regulation or 90% regulation?
		No, the alternative is zero.
		The alternative is to unwind the system.
		The alternative is to get rid of the pages and pages and bookloads of regulations over the financial industry.
		Free them up completely.
		That will probably lead to a completely different looking banking system than what we have today.
		But also make it clear.
		We're not going to bail you out when you deposit money in the bank because there's no deposit insurance.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		But we're also not going to bail any banks out when they get in trouble.
		We're just stepping back and letting the market be free.
		And look, before 1913, the United States had no Federal Reserve.
		It had no bank bailouts.
		It had bank regulations, particularly on a state level, which were disastrous.
		And generally, the economy grew the fastest in human history.
		From the Civil War until World War I, it was an amazing period of economic growth and economic success, without a Fed, without central planners.
		That's what I'd like to see.
		The lesson of 2008 is get rid of the Federal Reserve.
		The lesson of 2008 is stop regulating the banks and the credit agencies and the rating agencies and all these things that distort markets.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So my Bernie people are not going to be happy with you, because you're both saying there's a problem here.
		You're saying the problem is the government has artificially controlled what Wall Street can do.
		He would say we have to control them even more.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		And I'm saying we've tried Bernie's solution since the Great Depression.
		During the Great Depression, the first thing FDR did when he came into office in 1933 and 1934 is pass massive bodies of financial regulations.
		Since then, we've had inflation, we've had the S&L crisis, we've had 2008.
		Those regulations that were passed in 1933 and 1934 Don't work.
		They never worked.
		They were disasters from the beginning.
		It just takes decades to see their full manifestation.
		The solution is not to load up on them a whole new set of the same bad thing.
		If you run an experiment and it doesn't work, you don't double up on the experiment.
		What you do is you rethink your fundamental ideas about it, and we need to rethink finance from the beginning.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so I love that this really all comes down to human nature, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Because if you were, let's say you were of the Bernie mindset and you'd say, we have to regulate them more, I guess what he would say is, or what you would say is, well, someone, even if with all the regulations on earth, someone, because of human nature, is going to come in and figure out a way to still screw it up.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		No, no, it's the regulations that are screwing the system up, right?
		The regulations cause the crisis.
		The regulations provide the incentives for people to behave in particular ways that are screwy.
		I'm saying it's the reason we trust regulation and we don't trust markets.
		And this is the key, right?
		Because in every field this is true.
		A crisis happens, we regulate it, which causes another crisis to happen, we regulate it even more, which causes a bigger crisis.
		And this was observed by Ayn Rand in the 50s and 40s.
		This is a new phenomenon.
		This is the way government functions.
		This is the way human beings function.
		The fundamental we don't trust is self-interest.
		We think that self-interest leads to lying, stealing, cheating, all this bad behavior.
		So we regulate it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		So all that happens is the regulations cause incentives to be misaligned and bad things to happen.
		So we go, oh no, it's greed, it's self-interest again.
		So we regulate even more.
		I'm saying that if we trust the self-interest, and why do we trust the regulators?
		You walk into an elevator, anywhere in the United States, and there's a little diploma on the elevator thing that says, a government regulator inspected this elevator, it won't kill you.
		And why do we go, oh, okay, now it's safe?
		Because the elevator inspector, we believe, is for the public interest.
		He's on the common good.
		He's not self-interested.
		God forbid, be self-interested.
		He's just doing it for all of us.
		And I'm saying that's a bogus, immoral standard.
		I don't want people to be in the public interest.
		The public interest means nothing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So you think these elevator guys are just walking in there and signing that sheet?
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		I'm saying that the guy who inspects the elevators, a government employee, is probably much more
		open to bribes than if the inspection of the elevators was done by the insurance company
		That if something bad happened to the elevator, they would suffer financial costs and that guy would be fired.
		The elevator inspector hired by the government will never be fired.
		He's got tenure.
		Take food inspectors in California.
		California farmers are much more worried about the grocery store inspectors than they are about the government inspectors.
		Because the grocery store has something to lose if they poison us.
		The inspector from the government has nothing to lose.
		This is why, when Ben Bernanke—Ben Bernanke, in my view, is one of the most awful Federal Reserve chairmen ever.
		He screwed up 2008.
		He completely messed up 2007.
		The recovery's been the slowest in history.
		Everything the Fed did, everything he said in 2007 and 2008 turned out to be wrong.
		He was wrong about everything.
		He said the housing crisis wouldn't happen.
		It wouldn't cause a recession.
		Freddie and Fannie were fine.
		Lehman Brothers wasn't going to go bankrupt.
		I've got a list of all his statements.
		They're all wrong.
		What happened to him?
		He got rehired, and today he gets a quarter of a million dollars to give a speech, right?
		He's become a hero.
		What happened to the private bankers who actually drove their businesses, who did what the Fed did to their own businesses?
		They're out of jobs.
		Yeah, they're not behind jails.
		I know Bernie would like them all in jail.
		But they've suffered the consequences.
		They've lost their jobs.
		Nobody wants to talk to them.
		Nobody will hire them again.
		That's what happens in business.
		In business, if you fail, you're out.
		Government, when you fail?
		We reward you, particularly if you're in the bureaucracy, right?
		So, I'm saying let's shift the model to where we trust individuals, we trust their self-interest, we leave companies alone, and if the companies do bad things, let them fail, we can boycott them if we don't like the way they behave towards, I don't know, gays or whatever.
		If we don't like their behavior, don't go to Chick-fil-A.
		Just don't buy Chick-fil-A.
		Boycott them.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so this is where you would say if the Christian pizza maker doesn't want to make pizza for gays, you wouldn't say let the government stop them from doing that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You would say, well, boycott them and don't give them business.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but I want to be a little bit more radical than that, because this is a problem.
		We have Ted Cruz and people like that talking about religious freedoms.
		What religious freedom?
		I just believe in freedom.
		And the fact is that people have a right to discriminate.
		But don't give them your business.
		So my point is this.
		If the baker doesn't want to bake a cake for a Jewish wedding, He has just as much right to do that as he has to discriminate.
		But I would never go near the plate.
		I would stand outside with a placard.
		I'd be on the barricades to drive that immoral bastard out of business, right?
		But he has a right to be a bigot.
		People have a right to be racist.
		They just don't have a right to force it on you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm with you on that.
		You know, some of my friends on the left will say, well, but they're using, you know, the public street that they're on, so then we wouldn't want them to discriminate against black people.
		And I get the idea behind that.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		But once they walk off the public street into your store, it's yours.
		I am very discriminating on who I invite to my home.
		It's not discrimination based on race or any of these other factors.
		But people who I think are nice are invited.
		People who I don't like are not invited.
		We all discriminate.
		Discrimination is a good thing.
		What we need to teach people is not to discriminate based on stupid things or non-essential things.
		You discriminate based on a person's character.
		That's the appropriate discrimination.
		But are they always going to be irrational people?
		Are they always going to be stupid people?
		Are they always going to be bad people?
unidentified		Yes.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		The job of the government is not to legislate them out of their stupidity.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		The job of the government is to let them suffer the consequences of their stupidity, which means back off.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we barely got into this here, so I know.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I certainly hope you'll come back so we can unpack more.
yaron brook ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely, we'd be happy to.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, this was a pleasure, and I think I'm looking forward to the comment section.
unidentified		Yes.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's gonna be wild.
		All right, I want to thank Yaron Brook for joining me today.
		You guys can follow him on Twitter.
		It's at Yaron Brook, and he does respond, and he'll fight with you and send you links, and maybe he'll send you some of these pamphlets, and you can check out his book, Equal is Unfair, in the description right down below.

▲