Aug. 25, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Joining me today is an author, a radio and podcast host and the executive chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Thanks for having me back. | ||
| Normally, I don't let people back, but I'm willing to make an exception. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| All right, we got a lot to talk about, and first, I'm gonna tell a little bit of a story that you know, and for those that watched the stream that I did at OCON, which is the Objectivist Conference in Pittsburgh last month, I told the story, but I just wanna reiterate it | ||
| while I'm sitting here with you, that you were on this show for the first time | ||
| in May of 2016, so about a year and three months ago or so. | ||
| And I was in the midst, I had just sort of been thinking about maybe leaving Ora TV, | ||
| which is the network that we were on, a place that I loved being at, | ||
| that Larry King had brought me into, that I felt we were growing and all that. | ||
| But at the same time, I realized we were growing so rapidly. | ||
| There was so much happening. | ||
| I had to own and control what I was doing and all this stuff. | ||
| I sit down with you, you lay out rational self-interest, you lay out the tenets of objectivism, | ||
| you lay out a lot of issues about capitalism and taxes and all of these things. | ||
| And I finished that interview, I said goodbye to you, we shook hands, and I walked into the control room and I said to my guys, I think it's time to go, I hope you're gonna come with me. | ||
| Fortunately, they all did come with me. | ||
| We ended up going on Patreon, became fan-funded. | ||
| That's over a year ago now. | ||
| The rest is history. | ||
| So I do connect some of my current success to sitting down with you in the first place. | ||
| Well, I appreciate that, and thanks for telling the story. | ||
| And it was fun because I think I got a phone call from you either that day as I'm driving home or the next day. | ||
| It might have been that day. | ||
| It was certainly within a day or two. | ||
| Within a day or two saying, you know, I'm leaving. | ||
| And very courageous of you, and I'm thrilled that it's worked out so amazingly well. | ||
| Yeah, you must love, I'm sure that's not the first time that someone listened to you speak and then it affected the way they actually, not just the way they think, that's the important thing. | ||
| I've had many guests come in here that affect the way I think, make me think different things, or change my thoughts, or sometimes it reinforces a thought, whatever it is. | ||
| But you must appreciate that more than anything else. | ||
| When someone goes, I heard ya, and let me put this stuff into action. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, when somebody comes and says, I heard you, and as a consequence of that, I did X, Y, Z, and it changed my life. | ||
| There's nothing more satisfying as a teacher, as a lecturer, as a commentator, than having something like that. | ||
| Now, Ayn Rand got a lot of that, right? | ||
| She changed my life. | ||
| She changed everything about what happened in my life. | ||
| But for me, I'm not an originator of ideas. | ||
| I'm more of a communicator of ideas. | ||
| It's incredibly satisfying. | ||
| It's the funnest thing that happens. | ||
| So we're gonna talk about a lot of stuff here. | ||
| What I don't wanna do is I don't want to just focus on the same ideas of Ayn Rand that we discussed the first time. | ||
| We will link to our original interview below, so if people want the full catch-up, we're gonna do a little bit, but I don't wanna just repackage what we did last time. | ||
| So I thought the best place to start off is that most of my audience knows I am doing monthly events with you guys, with ARI. | ||
| Where we're really focusing on free speech, and I've been usually with Steve Simpson, and then we've brought a few people that I've done shows with. | ||
| We've got Michael Shermer and Colin Moriarty and a bunch of people. | ||
| We have Brett Weinstein coming on, working on a few others. | ||
| And when they proposed this idea to me, I said, well, look, if we're gonna focus on free speech and really just allow us to say whatever we want and talk about why that's important, we can do it. | ||
| How does free speech fit into objectivism, into Ayn Rand's ideology, and into your ideology? | ||
| Well, it's a cornerstone of the ideology in terms of the application of it. | ||
| Objectivism is about reason. | ||
| It's about using your mind. | ||
| It's about using your mind and the ability of our senses and our mind to discover reality. | ||
| We need to be able to express that in some way, through action, through speech, writing books, writing articles. | ||
| We need to be able to communicate those truths that we discover, and the human mind is capable of knowing the world. | ||
| But if it just stays in the mind, what's the point, right? | ||
| And if there are authorities out there that can tell you, no, no, no, that idea is unacceptable. | ||
| You have to be in house arrest in the case of Galileo, or we can actually burn you at the stake. | ||
| Then you're shutting down the human mind. | ||
| People will not think. | ||
| Now, it's true that as part of the freedom to speak, to think, a lot of bad ideas are going to come up. | ||
| A lot of untruths. | ||
| A lot of garbage. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| But in order to strive towards truth, you're going to have to let a lot of untruth be told, be thought, be written, be discussed. | ||
| You cannot establish authority that dictates what is good, what is true, what is not true. | ||
| The ultimate authority is reality. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are there any ideas that are too dangerous to explore? | ||
| So when we've seen bad ideas, really truly bad ideas, the Holocaust, put into action, this started as an idea. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Absolutely, but it started as an idea in the writings of a philosopher, in my view, 150 years before the Holocaust. | ||
| But the fact is... Wait, which philosopher was that? | ||
| Well, I think it's Immanuel Kant. | ||
| I think the guy who separates human reason from reality, the guy who says that morality is about duty, and who says that he's trying to save faith from the tyranny of reason, if you will, is Immanuel Kant. | ||
| And I think he begins the long chain of Hegel and Schopenhauer and Marx and Nietzsche that ultimately leads, I think, to the Nazi ideology. | ||
| But the fact is that the only way to combat Kant, the only way to combat Marx, the only way to combat Nietzsche, the only way to combat any of these ideas is with better ideas, is to engage. | ||
| Once you establish an authority that says, no, Kant, you're going to lead to Hitler one day, we have to silence you, then you're already establishing what Hitler wants. | ||
| You're establishing the authority of somebody's mind over other people's minds. | ||
| And that's what has to be banned. | ||
| It's so interesting because there's a play here that I think goes well for you guys as objectivists, which is anytime someone brings up Ayn Rand, there's the select group of people that like her, that like the idea, that wanna hear this, but for most people, at least in the mainstream, there's an immediate dismissal. | ||
| Oh, that childish stuff, I outgrew that in high school or in college or blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And all that is is not a debate of ideas, that's just a shutdown of discussion. | ||
| Which is the complete reverse of what you want. | ||
| And exactly, and look, as somebody who advocates for radical ideas, and my ideas are radical, they're different from the mainstream, they're different than what people out there believe, I have to have free speech in order to be able to advocate and be able to hopefully change the world for the better and advocate for the kind of ideas that I believe are true and real. | ||
| And if we allow anybody to shut down ideas, I'm gonna be among the first victims, so I have a clear selfish interest. | ||
| In advocating for free speech and in viewing, Ayn Rand viewed free speech as if free speech goes. | ||
| Then it's authoritarianism. | ||
| If free speech goes, what is your only option? | ||
| The only option then to fight for whatever you believe in is with a fist. | ||
| It's with a gun. | ||
| It's revolution. | ||
| So free speech is a recognition that the only way we are going to change the world is through discussion, through reason, through facts, without the use of fists and guns. | ||
| As soon as that is gone, as soon as that is eliminated, All that's left is violence, and that's, of course, what we're seeing on campuses. | ||
| What we're seeing is the resorting to violence, because they've given up on reason. | ||
| They've given up on speech. | ||
| They've given up on discussion. | ||
| I don't know if you saw this, but about a month and a half ago, there was an article written in Der Spiegel about me and a few other people, and it was talking about the rise of the new alt-right. | ||
| Which couldn't be more absurd. | ||
| But I spent the entire day with the author. | ||
| He watched me do two shows here, and then the evening was at UCLA, where I did an event with the Ayn Rand folks, and I was on with Colin. | ||
| And the way he wrote it was that we were at some sort of far-right, angry rally, and I thought, the video's up there, by the way. | ||
| People can watch it. | ||
| It's on the Ayn Rand Institute channel page. | ||
| And it's like, people can watch this. | ||
| This thing could not have been a more joyous expression But even that shows you what we're up against. | ||
| Just this constant mistruth throughout the media right now that's eroding our ability to accept what facts are. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And look, I'm fine with dealing with mistruths because the truth will win out and we can debate that. | ||
| What worries me is an op-ed in the New York Times a few weeks ago that came out that said explicitly That speech is violence. | ||
| That is scary, right? | ||
| Because as soon as they say, you know, so they call you an alt-right, and you say, I'm not, and fine. | ||
| But once they say, okay, your ideas are equivalent to violence, what they're legitimizing is using violence against you. | ||
| And that is what is really, truly dangerous in this debate, and that's what's going on in Berkeley and Evergreen and all these other places, where the left, these students, feel emboldened to bring out baseball bats. | ||
| Not to defend themselves against somebody else who has a gun or has another baseball bat, but to defend themselves against being offended by somebody else's speech. | ||
| They've given up on reason, they've given up on debate, they've given up on the human mind, and what that represents is a return To primitive brutishness, right? | ||
| To tribal warfare. | ||
| And of course, it's not an accident that postmodernism is all about tribalism, right? | ||
| This is about return to tribalism, where we hit each other instead of debating each other. | ||
| And the great achievement of the Western civilization, and I really consider Western civilization an achievement of Greece and an achievement of the Enlightenment. | ||
| And the great achievement in the Enlightenment is saying, stop killing each other. | ||
| Over ideas, right? | ||
| Because if you think about the 17th century, more people died per capita in the 17th century than maybe any other century, certainly in modern history. | ||
| Because Protestants and Catholics were slaughtering each other. | ||
| And the Enlightenment said, stop with the violence. | ||
| Violence is anti-life, anti-man. | ||
| We should ban it. | ||
| If we disagree, let's discuss it and let reality be the judge of what is true and what is not. | ||
| And we're abandoning that magnificent achievement of the Enlightenment. | ||
| Do you pin all of that on postmodernism? | ||
| Well, look, yes in its modern format, but again, postmodernism is a consequence of a long string of ideas that in a sense goes back to Plato, right? | ||
| You know, it goes back to Plato, but I consider Plato innocent, right? | ||
| Because he was such a genius and he was so early In human beings thinking big thoughts, right? | ||
| Thinking philosophical ideas. | ||
| Then any errors he made, we can forgive. | ||
| I can't be that angry at Plato. | ||
| No, you can't. | ||
| You can't get mad at Plato. | ||
| Now once you get into the modern era, I start getting angry at people. | ||
| Because we've got human history, you can look, you can see, you've got lots of examples of what happens when you have bad ideas. | ||
| But if you think about Plato's ideas, Plato basically said that the truth is to be found in a different dimension. | ||
| That the world of forms is not the world we're seeing. | ||
| So our senses, our reason, is not seeing the world as it is. | ||
| And we only specialists call them philosophers. | ||
| Can actually see the truth. | ||
| So he has this allegory of the cave, where we're all in the cave, chained, and all we see are shadows, and that's reality to us. | ||
| And only if you go to the mouth of the cave can you see the real world, which is the sun. | ||
| Only the philosopher can actually see that. | ||
| That means that we have to be ruled by experts. | ||
| We have to be ruled by these philosophers. | ||
| We have to be told what reality is, because we're just too, in a sense, dumb, or too... We don't have the revelation. | ||
| Now that opens up to religion and everything, right? | ||
| Revelation is truth versus reality is truth. | ||
| I attribute all of these bad ideas, in a sense, back to that epistemological falsehood, I think. | ||
| And then the post-Mohanists have just taken that and turned it into How much of that do you think is just the top-down way of viewing the world versus the bottom-up, meaning top-down meaning through either God or some sort of religious construct as opposed to viewing everything from the individual and from our own minds? | ||
| I think it's all about that. | ||
| And I think it's basically the challenge is, what is human reason? | ||
| Is human reason efficacious? | ||
| That's the fundamental question. | ||
| And if you think about Plato versus the hero, in my view, historically, is Aristotle. | ||
| Aristotle says, no, reason is efficacious. | ||
| This is the world. | ||
| We know the world by using our senses and using our mind to understand it. | ||
| Now, not everything he said is, I think, has turned out right. | ||
| Not everything he says philosophically is right. | ||
| Was that subjective when he said that? | ||
| So the person that's in the shackles, that's only seeing shadows, that still is their reality, right? | ||
| It is, but it's not subjective in the sense that there is a true reality. | ||
| See, he says there is a true reality. | ||
| It's here. | ||
| This table actually exists. | ||
| You might see that angle on it, and I might see this angle on it, but if we use the tools of science, we can shape the table and agree on what the table is and what it's composed of and how it functions. | ||
| So the reality is objective. | ||
| Even though we might see different sides of it, our reality, it is objective, and we have the tools—reason, science—to fully understand the context of the table. | ||
| So, for Aristotle, human reason and our senses actually reflect the reality as it is. | ||
| He was influenced by Plato. | ||
| He was a student for, I think, 15 years or something. | ||
| So he was influenced by Plato. | ||
| So there's some errors, I think, in what Aristotle advocates for. | ||
| But to me, to Ayn Rand, to many thinkers, I think, the real battle of all Western history, and ultimately, I think, global history, because I think Western ideas are spreading all over the world, is a battle between Aristotle and Plato. | ||
| Between whether reason is efficacious in this world, whether we see reality as it is, whether reality is objective, whether reality is independent of our consciousness, or whether, you know, we need to get knowledge from some kind of other dimension, and then you need the experts, and then you need the leaders, and then you need, you know, look, if you look at Hitler, Hitler was just channeling the truth for the Aryan people to the Aryans, right? | ||
| He was the guy who had the revelation, if you will, for the truth. | ||
| And if you look at the communists, well, how do we know what the proletarians need? | ||
| You need somebody to channel, to get to, somehow, in some mystical way, to get to what is good for the proletarians. | ||
| So you have a Stalin, you have a Lenin, you need a leader. | ||
| You know, I reject all of that. | ||
| Aristotle would have rejected all of that. | ||
| You have to discover the truth for yourself. | ||
| It is your responsibility as a human being to discover truth. | ||
| You mean you shouldn't have to accept the truth over the barrel of a gun? | ||
| You shouldn't have to accept the truth over the barrel of a gun or over, you know, over the kind of social pressure that a church or Communist Party or Hitler Youth Kind of dictate to you you should use your mind as an independent human being to go out there and discover What is real and what is not what is right and what is not and and and discover the values that are gonna lead My view the purpose of morality is to is to lead to your own happiness to discover the values that are going to Make your life the best life that it can be make your life objectively The best life that it can be | ||
| Is anything that you've said so far that you believe in not an Enlightenment value? | ||
| Because, for example, I've had several people come on the show who are believers and who would argue that this comes from a Judeo-Christian mindset. | ||
| And I think you can make all of the, I think there's errors in that way of thinking, though I can appreciate it, but I think every argument that you've made has really been about Enlightenment values. | ||
| Is that fair? | ||
| No, absolutely, and look, I think there are a lot of Christians and Jews who would like to take their Christianity and Judaism and massage it so it fits into the Enlightenment values which the good in them responds to. | ||
| But it isn't there. | ||
| And other elements, right? | ||
| Christianity wouldn't be successful if it didn't have an element of individualism in it. | ||
| Your relationship with God is an individual relationship. | ||
| Judaism would have survived all the years if it hadn't adapted cleverly to kind of Enlightenment values and embraced Aristotle. | ||
| Maimonides was an Aristotelian scholar, so Judaism in some extent embraced Aristotle in different stages. | ||
| So, these religions adapted, and one of the problems with Islam is it didn't adapt. | ||
| It is sticking to the mystical dogma of its founding rather than having adapted to Aristotle, to these Enlightenment values. | ||
| But yes, all these ideas are at the very least hinted at in the Enlightenment. | ||
| Now, I don't believe They're fleshed out in the Enlightenment. | ||
| I think this is why when Kant and Schopenhauer and all of these guys who are anti-Enlightenment figures came about, the Enlightenment was weak in its response. | ||
| Because I don't think the Enlightenment had completely philosophically fleshed out these ideas. | ||
| And I think that it took Ayn Rand to really flesh out. | ||
| I view Ayn Rand is philosophically the culmination of the Enlightenment. | ||
| I think she's a true representative of those Enlightenment ideas, fully fleshed out, fully | ||
| understood, and the first thing to really be able to combat the ideas of a Hegel and | ||
| a Nietzsche and a Marx and a Kant. | ||
| And that's the philosophical power that she had. | ||
| But yes, it's all there, right? | ||
| The Declaration of Independence, even though morally, if you'd ask any one of the founders or if you'd ask the Enlightenment thinkers, what is the purpose of morality? | ||
| They talk about sacrifice and they talk about altruism and everything. | ||
| But in the Declaration, they chose to say that you have an inalienable right To pursue your own happiness, right? | ||
| So they understood, and they had a deep understanding of the idea of happiness as the purpose of living, as the purpose of life. | ||
| If I'm not mistaken, we're the only country in the world, perhaps in the history of the world, that has a line like that, right? | ||
| There is one other country. | ||
| Oh God, you're gonna blow my mind now. | ||
| There is one other country, and they didn't choose it. | ||
| It was crammed down their throat. | ||
| The only country actually to have it in their constitution is Japan. | ||
| And that's because General MacArthur wrote a constitution after World War II. | ||
| The Japanese wrote a constitution. | ||
| MacArthur said, this is, you know, you have to change all your ways. | ||
| You guys had a bad ideology and bad ideas. | ||
| We crushed you guys. | ||
| You have to change. | ||
| And basically MacArthur and his assistant sat down and they wrote Japanese constitution. | ||
| And in the Constitution, it says that you have an inalienable right to pursue your happiness. | ||
| And they basically forced it down the emperor's throat, and the Japanese have adopted it. | ||
| And I would argue that Japan has succeeded, as well as it has succeeded, because it basically got a version of the American Constitution. | ||
| Do you think there's like a little bit of a catch-22 with putting happiness in a document like that? | ||
| Like, on one hand, it's like said, you're supposed to be happy, which is great. | ||
| We all want to be happy. | ||
| We want to find happiness. | ||
| But on another hand, there's an odd pressure. | ||
| Perhaps, that other country, really, that other country. | ||
| Like in other countries, you work, you do what you do, you hopefully pilfer some happiness out of existence. | ||
| But with us, it's baked in, like there's opportunity for happiness. | ||
| And maybe the human condition at its most honest, I don't know that it's happy or not happy, it just is, and you gotta grab it. | ||
| But you gotta strive for something, right? | ||
| So it's not happiness that's guaranteed in the Declaration, right? | ||
| It's the freedom. | ||
| Which is what a right means. | ||
| What do rights mean? | ||
| Right means freedom of action. | ||
| So you are free to act in pursuit of your happiness. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| I can't think of anything more beautiful in a political document than that every individual has a right to act, you know, to pursue the rational values that are necessary for his own happiness. | ||
| Now, I've put in additional words in there, but I think that's at the end of the day what the founders actually meant. | ||
| They wanted to create a country where individuals could go and they would be free to act on their own behalf, | ||
| rationally, they didn't want crooks, they didn't want bad guys, they didn't want lazy people, | ||
| they wanted people who actually wanted to embrace life and go out there and achieve happiness, | ||
| or at least strive towards happiness and do the best that they could. | ||
| So you mentioned that Ayn Rand is, in your view, the philosopher who sort of pinned all this together. | ||
| So now, as I said, without redoing everything we did last time, and again, we will link to it down below sometimes. | ||
| Sometimes we forget and people get pissed, but we are gonna link to it down below. | ||
| Can you explain to me in just a couple minutes what it is that Ayn Rand put together? | ||
| I know I know it, but for my audience, what Ayn Rand put together that you view as the complete package or sort of the end game of these enlightenment values? | ||
| Sure, well let's put it in the context of the Enlightenment. | ||
| The Enlightenment is still, to a large extent, feels the pressure from Christianity. | ||
| So Locke is still a Christian, or at least claims to be, and he's trying to philosophically justify everything in terms of Christianity. | ||
| And even the founders, right, as secular as I think they were, and as deist as they were, they still felt like at least morality, at least there's certain elements that they felt that they had to be linked back to their Christian roots. | ||
| Yeah, look, God was mentioned a lot, even though they had a separation of religion. | ||
| Yeah, the Declaration of Independence says creator, you know, it doesn't say God, which I think was important to them. | ||
| But at the end of the day, yes, I mean, if you read the Federalist Paper, if you read other things, they clearly are referencing The common understanding of Christianity at the time, a much more secular understanding than a hundred years previous, but it's still under the guise of religion. | ||
| Ayn Rand, you know, secularizes those ideas completely. | ||
| So she starts off by saying, reality is what it is. | ||
| You know, nature is out there. | ||
| It's independent of our consciousness. | ||
| And in this she goes to Aristotle, A is A. | ||
| This table is here. | ||
| This table is here, and we can measure its dimensions, and we can understand it scientifically, and it is. | ||
| And we have the ability to know the table is here. | ||
| You know, use our senses and our mind. | ||
| So, our reasoning capacity tells us about the world. | ||
| And she grounds, and she has a whole theory of concept formations, how we come up with a concept of table, and how the mind in that sense works that is revolutionary, that did not exist before, and really is missing from Lockean and the Enlightenment philosophy, this connection of epistemology and metaphysics to the politics. | ||
| And she says, look, reason, reason is a capacity of the individual. | ||
| We don't have a collective stomach. | ||
| We don't have a collective consciousness. | ||
| We don't have a collective mind. | ||
| So reason is something individuals do. | ||
| And she places the core of morality with the individual, right? | ||
| So your purpose as a human being morally is to survive as a human being, which means to use your reason in order to guide your life towards the goal, which is happiness. | ||
| And she bridges what in philosophy is called the is-ought dichotomy. | ||
| Can you take What exists out there, the condition of man as existing reality, and can you derive arts from it? | ||
| And she says, of course you can. | ||
| We have a particular nature. | ||
| Now, the study of ethics is the study of what is that nature. | ||
| Therefore, what are the virtues and values we need to adopt in order to stay in existence because we face this alternative as living beings. | ||
| Of death. | ||
| We can go out of existence. | ||
| So she bridges all of this and of course connects all that ultimately to politics. | ||
| So the biggest pushback I hear against that is that if it is all somehow just left to us and left to our mind and logic and reason and all that, that the mind plays tricks on us. | ||
| We all believe different things. | ||
| We all get different news sources. | ||
| We all are brought up in different religions or non-religions, whatever, that the system of so many competing individuals will lead to some sort of Well, it turns out quite the contrary. | ||
| It turns out when you leave people free, and you leave people free to think for themselves, you get beautiful things. | ||
| And it is authoritarian. | ||
| The idea of an authority, the idea of one way of thinking of the world, the idea of | ||
| cramming down our minds truth is what is destructive to progress and our ability to innovate and | ||
| create and build and make. | ||
| The fact that we have different values, the fact that some people want to be doctors and | ||
| other people want to be architects and other people want to be high tech entrepreneurs | ||
| creates the beautiful world. | ||
| What we have to accept, Ayn Rand would argue, is that morality is objective. | ||
| Just like science teaches us about the physical world, morality should teach us about what is good for us and what is bad for us from the perspective of human action, from human thought and human action. | ||
| That there's certain things that are wrong, that are immoral, that are evil, that are bad. | ||
| And when those things get translated into action, then yeah, then the state needs to intervene | ||
| and take those people and put them in jail. | ||
| But they're gonna be bad people who have bad thoughts and as long as they don't manifest them into action, | ||
| I can say that person's immoral, but I can't do anything about it | ||
| unless he acts in a way that hurts somebody else, that violates somebody else's rights. | ||
| So I think you may have seen this, but I had an interesting debate a couple weeks ago between Michael Shermer from Skeptic Magazine and Dennis Prager, who's a conservative, arguing for the necessity for God to live a moral life. | ||
| Now, I'm pretty clear which side you're on on this. | ||
| Well, but I disagree with both, right? | ||
| Because I disagree with Shurma's basis for establishing morality. | ||
| So that's why I wanted to get to that. | ||
| Yeah, so he's too much of a skeptic in my view. | ||
| So he rejects, and this is the problem I think with a lot of the new atheists, I find them conventional when it comes to morality. | ||
| And this is the funny thing. | ||
| I find Harris and Schumer and Dawkins very Christian. | ||
| In their moral beliefs. | ||
| So they accept Christian morality without attributing it, of course, to Christianity. | ||
| They accept the commandments, if you will, of Christian morality without challenging them. | ||
| And what Rand does, what I believe- Wait, what do you mean they accept them as opposed to accepting them as values of the enlightened? | ||
| As opposed to rethinking them. | ||
| As opposed to rethinking them. | ||
| As opposed to saying, okay, we got a blank slate, right? | ||
| We're gonna take science and apply it to morality. | ||
| And so they accept, for example, the sacrifice. | ||
| That selflessness is morally good. | ||
| You can't justify that if you think of morality from a scientific perspective. | ||
| You can't justify that when you think from an individualistic perspective. | ||
| How can selflessness be a good thing? | ||
| I am here. | ||
| I am alive. | ||
| It's me. | ||
| Shouldn't I care about my life? | ||
| the as the standard for if there's no God that I have to that I have to you | ||
| know adjust myself to that maybe is a higher power more important than me | ||
| isn't my life the most important thing in the universe to me right and then | ||
| based on that shouldn't I then think okay what are the values and virtues | ||
| that my life requires and that And that, I would argue, is a scientific question. | ||
| We have to look at the world and see what works for a human being, what doesn't. | ||
| Violence clearly doesn't work. | ||
| It's very destructive. | ||
| Reason. | ||
| Every human achievement, every value, everything we have is a product of reason. | ||
| So I say, okay, so if I care about my life, What I need to pursue more than anything else is reason, is my ability to understand the world and then to try to shape the world to make it possible for me to live in it. | ||
| So I won't presume to speak for any of those guys. | ||
| I've had most of them on the show. | ||
| So the other argument that I thought was interesting, so the Prager argument in this case, | ||
| is that basically on the macro level, or sorry, on the micro level, | ||
| that yes, we can have atheists and non-believers and we can all pick our own morality and that's all okay. | ||
| But his argument really is that on a societal level that you need this outside force basically | ||
| to temper the parts of humans that get out of control, sort of. | ||
| So you've already sort of answered this, but is there anything you want to kind of add to that? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very bleak view of human nature, and I think that many, many kind of people who are generally secular but believe in religion have, you know, without religion, you know, I could do without religion, but if those people don't have religion, they will all become murderous, crazy people. | ||
| I don't have that view of human beings. | ||
| I mean, I respect every individual, and I view every individual as capable of understanding that going on a murderous rampage is not good for them. | ||
| I think that if we educated people well, and if we held up high expectation, people would understand that stealing, lying, and cheating is not good for them, that the negative consequences that they would bear would far exceed any Superficial benefit they might get from it. | ||
| And when I explain to audiences, look, lying just is a stupid survival strategy. | ||
| It just doesn't work. | ||
| It's not good for you. | ||
| It's not good for you psychologically. | ||
| And Jordan Peterson, who you've had on this show, has some wonderful segments on lying and what it does to you psychologically. | ||
| He's a psychologist. | ||
| You can talk about that. | ||
| So psychologically, it's destructive. | ||
| Existentially, nobody wants to deal with you once you're caught. | ||
| You're always caught, right? | ||
| Or ultimately, you're always caught. | ||
| It just is a bad strategy. | ||
| So, what I want to do is say, look, people, instead of having to go to another power, or instead of saying there is no morality, or saying, well, morality is subjective, whatever you feel like, I want to say, let's use the same tools that we use to evaluate other things in life, which we accept are objective, let's use those tools, the tool of reason, to evaluate what leads to a successful life. | ||
| And we might disagree on some of those, but at least let's accept that the tool to evaluate that is reason. | ||
| I think we'll all agree that lying is not good for human life, so don't lie. | ||
| I think we'll all agree that facts are better than falsehoods. | ||
| So honesty is a broad concept, which is not just being honest to other people, but being honest to yourself. | ||
| We have to agree what the facts are, which is becoming an increasing problem. | ||
| Sure, but how we approach what are facts, that is a question of epistemology. | ||
| It's a question of science, if you will. | ||
| Let's deal with it like that. | ||
| I think we can probably agree on that. | ||
| So let's approach ethics from that basis. | ||
| But let's start with the idea that it's the individual that has to survive. | ||
| It's the individual that has to thrive. | ||
| And it turns out that in order for me to thrive, Me thriving does not entail me exploiting you. | ||
| Me thriving does not entail me lying and cheating and stealing and murdering you. | ||
| Quite the contrary. | ||
| Me thriving entails me trading with you. | ||
| Me thriving entails me creating as many win-win, mutually beneficial situations as I can. | ||
| But not because I love you like I love me. | ||
| I don't I don't. | ||
| As much as I love you, I love myself more. | ||
| I know you feel very warmly about it. | ||
| I feel warmly, but I love myself more. | ||
| And this whole idea of love thy neighbor like yourself, forget it. | ||
| Nobody loves their neighbor like they do themselves. | ||
| Nobody with self-esteem loves their neighbor like they do themselves. | ||
| And I ask even my Christian audiences, I ask them, okay, your kids are drowning in the pool, the neighbor's kids are drowning in the pool. | ||
| Who do you save first? | ||
| Anybody saves their own kids first, and I say you shouldn't be embarrassed about that fact. | ||
| You should be proud of that fact. | ||
| They're your kids. | ||
| You love them more than your neighbor's kids. | ||
| It's okay to save them first. | ||
| I would also try to save the neighbor's kids, but only after I saved mine. | ||
| I don't even know that this is totally relevant, but could that desire be from something that supersedes logic? | ||
| Could that simply just be something that's caked into us, you know, through genes and evolution and everything else? | ||
| Would that even matter? | ||
| It's not clear. | ||
| I mean, this is part of an interesting scientific question. | ||
| What is actually baked into us? | ||
| I actually think less is baked into us than a lot of scientists today think, but I think that's a scientific question that needs to be worked out. | ||
| But yeah, to some extent, Look, we love our kids. | ||
| Otherwise, don't have them, right? | ||
| Because you're not going to treat them well if you don't love them. | ||
| So we love our kids. | ||
| And when we love something, we want to protect it. | ||
| We want to embrace it. | ||
| We want to, you know, save it when it's in harm's way. | ||
| We like our neighbor's kids, but it's just not going to be the same. | ||
| Now, it is true that there are people, you know, there are Mother Teresa-like people | ||
| who will commit these acts that know they'll let their kids die and save the strangest kids | ||
| 'cause that's the right thing to do. | ||
| Now, I view that as awful. | ||
| I view that as evil, right? | ||
| That you would not take your life seriously enough to save your kids before the neighbors. | ||
| But there are some people, and we usually saint them, we usually, you know, give them great honors, | ||
| who are willing to sacrifice their life, their values, everything they hold dear, | ||
| truly, for the sake of a stranger, for the sake of, sometimes for the sake of nothing. | ||
| Um, and-- | ||
| And that's what religion does to people, and that's one of the things I think is so horrible about religion, is it inculcates this idea that there has to be something greater than yourself. | ||
| So with all that said, then what do you do about the religious people? | ||
| Because if I was to take, I don't want to, new atheists I think get attacked a lot, often unfairly I think, because people just pick, they think that they're so mean and they're trying to destroy religion and they hate religious people. | ||
| I very rarely have ever seen that. | ||
| I think they attack the ideas of religion, which as you know I would say should be attacked just like any other idea there is. | ||
| Going under this objectivist ideology, what do you do with the religious people? | ||
| How do they fit into a society? | ||
| Because I don't think you're trying to exterminate them or even fully their... certainly not the people, but even the ideas of religion. | ||
| I don't sense that you'd prefer, I suppose, that they start crumbling, but not... No, I want them to crumble. | ||
| There's no question. | ||
| I want them to crumble. | ||
| See, I was trying to be nice. | ||
| No, I want them gone. | ||
| But there's only one way to do that, and that's education, education, education. | ||
| It's to speak. | ||
| It's the reason with people. | ||
| And I think my whole project, everything I believe in, is to some extent dependent on the demise of religion. | ||
| I don't think without the Enlightenment and the beginning of the demise of religion | ||
| in the 18th century, you would have had a United States of America. | ||
| I think the United States of America is a secular achievement. | ||
| I mean, counter to all the religious right who claim it's the culmination of a Judo Christian. | ||
| There's nothing Judo Christian about the United States-- | ||
| Jesus rode to Texas on a dinosaur. | ||
| Yeah, and in the Old Testament, there are individual rights, | ||
| and the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. | ||
| I mean, it's not there, right? | ||
| This is the achievement of human reason, of secularization, of the idea of relegating religion to your private life, which politically is enough, right? | ||
| So we can have a free society if we say religion is relegated and you can't bring it into the public square. | ||
| But that never happens, right? | ||
| The evangelicals are not just gonna sit there and say, we're never gonna go into politics, as we see today and as we've seen for the last 40, 50 years. | ||
| They're very involved, and they were in the 19th century, very involved in political life. | ||
| So, and they bring religion into the public square. | ||
| And I also, the other thing is, I'm not in this for politics, right? | ||
| Politics is the outcome, it's great. | ||
| If we get to live in a really free society, that would be so cool. | ||
| But to me, much more important is what we started out the conversation with. | ||
| is the impact I can have and these ideas can have on an individual human being in making that individual's life | ||
| better. | ||
| So to me, the objectivist ethics, the objectivist moral code is much more important to me | ||
| than all the politics and capitalism and all this stuff. | ||
| The capitalism is just an outcome of that. | ||
| So I, partially, I want to see demise of religion because I want | ||
| to free those religious people from what I think are barriers to their own | ||
| success and their own happiness. | ||
| And partially because I think that a truly free society cannot exist as long as a significant number of people take their religion seriously. | ||
| I think religion is anti-freedom at its core, and the more seriously they take their religion, | ||
| the less free we'll be. | ||
| So I want to get rid of religion, but I realize that that's going to take forever. | ||
| It's going to take a long, long time, decades, centuries maybe. | ||
| In the meantime, convince as many people as I can, bring in these ideas. | ||
| I have people writing to me and they sign it, Christian Objectivist, and then I have Jewish Objectivist, Hindu Objectivist, and everybody thinks their religion and Objectivism are the same, right? | ||
| Fine! | ||
| So my view is I'd rather have you be a Christian Objectivist than a Christian Christian, right? | ||
| I'd rather have you adopt certain ideas from Objectivism, into your Christian framework than not adopt any of the ideas. | ||
| So to the extent that they can impact people's lives, even if they don't embrace everything that I say, right? | ||
| And it's a little spooky if we sit here and talk and somebody says, yeah, I agree. | ||
| I've never heard of you, Ron, but I agree with everything you just said. | ||
| Go read a little bit, go study, right? | ||
| Because all I'm trying to do here and in my public talks is get people thinking. | ||
| And then if they read and then one day they come to the conclusion I was right, cool. | ||
| But if people are convinced by one lecture or one talk, then it's scary to me a little bit. | ||
| Isn't it funny though, that association thing is kind of funny, because the phrase, well I don't agree with everything he says, I feel like people say that all the time now, implying that if you even say something nice, or you like a tweet of someone, you obviously endorse everything that they've ever said, ever. | ||
| So I appreciate that you're saying that, but I know you're not just saying it, because I've been to several of these events that you guys put on, and colleges, as I said, we're gonna do a whole bunch come this fall. | ||
| The wide variety of people in diversity of thought. | ||
| There was plenty of diversity in all the other stuff too, but in the diversity of thought, so it wasn't as if, well, those objectivists, they only accept, there were people there who said they were believers. | ||
| Most of the people I talk to, most of the people, I'd say 90% of the people that I actually speak in front of, Either don't know anything about what I'm going to say, or violently disagree, hopefully not violently, but they disagree intellectually, fundamentally with what I say. | ||
| And I just have to say, I enjoy speaking to hostile audiences much more than I enjoy speaking to objectivist audiences. | ||
| You know, they can agree with what I say, I can push the envelope a little bit here, a little bit there, I can stimulate them a little bit. | ||
| But to see an audience that comes in hostile, And and at the end of the day is a little respectful of the ideas because I've said something and I've said it in a way that Resonates with them and they go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So maybe I need to think about this again That to me is so much more fun and so much more interesting and so much more world-changing at the end Then just talking to the converted if you will and and talking to people so I I love I love being challenged by young people I love going to universities and having people really go after me There's videos online and videos online you could find them and and you can tell that I'm enjoying it because I really get into it But yeah, I mean it's it makes it fun for me right out. | ||
| I want to be challenged I once I keep telling audiences. | ||
| I want you to come up with a question. | ||
| I've never heard before Yeah, I want I want to be pushed because it's it's not fun stagnating even if you think I You know, even if you think what you're saying is true, you don't want to stagnate on that. | ||
| You want to keep pushing the envelope. | ||
| Yeah, and even this just idea out there that somehow objectivists are all serious or whatever. | ||
| I mean, we did this event, there's video of it, 500 people. | ||
| Not only did I have everyone cheering and screaming and standing up and going crazy, we did this whole funny thing about the seven dirty words, George Carlin. | ||
| I don't know that everyone was thrilled with me, but I had everyone screaming all the words and all that. | ||
| But it goes more to the point that I think people are just starved for some reality these days. | ||
| Just having fun, yelling out some curses and it being okay. | ||
| Like we've sort of forgotten how to just be okay with some craziness. | ||
| There's this perception that if you're an advocate for reason, if you're rational and believe in science, | ||
| they somehow stuck up. | ||
| Yeah, and you don't believe you know, I love emotions, right? | ||
| I'm a passionate guy, but I love sitting down just listening to music and just feeling you know You live you experience in life through your emotions and and you got a value your emotions. | ||
| You got to cultivate your emotions you got to really you got to really experience your emotions and Emotions are just not tools of cognition. | ||
| You don't discover facts. | ||
| You don't discover truth emotionally. | ||
| That's what you use reason for. | ||
| But it doesn't mean you demean your emotions. | ||
| You put down your emotions. | ||
| It means you know their place in your life. | ||
| Emotions don't have to do with truth. | ||
| Maybe truth about me, but not truth about the world out there. | ||
| Reason to discover truth. | ||
| You just need to know what part of yourself is responsible for what so Objectivists who understand the philosophy and many of them don't many of them. | ||
| I mean there are a lot of jokes out there There are a lot of people who use the philosophy to be jokes, but Objectivists who are well integrated are emotional people you know because they they they understand the important role emotions play in human life and So, you have been bouncing all over the world. | ||
| I'm honored that you stopped in L.A. | ||
| during this world tour. | ||
| Quickly, just name some of the places that you've been just in the last few months. | ||
| I mean, you have really been all over the place. | ||
| Well, just in the last few months, I did a tour of Asia. | ||
| I went around the world for the first time. | ||
| So I went from California, I went to Tokyo, Kyoto, Seoul, South Korea, Wangju in Beijing in China, Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, London, Clemson University, which I know you're going to go to in the fall, and then back to California. | ||
| And spoke at every one of those places, gave talks to all, and there are people in all of those places passionate. | ||
| I've also been, as we've talked about, to many places in Eastern Europe. | ||
| I'm heading back to Tbilisi in Georgia. | ||
| I'm going to Baku in Azerbaijan. | ||
| But I've been many times now, and I'm going back to Kiev and to Warsaw and to Krakow and to Sofia, Bulgaria. | ||
| And I was in Albania and in Montenegro and Macedonia, you know, which most people, So many Americans don't even know where they are in the map. | ||
| Half my audience just thinks you're making up words right now. | ||
| I hope not. | ||
| Your audience is more intelligent. | ||
| Wait, I want to stop there because I'm glad you mentioned Eastern Europe because that's where I wanted to go with this because you mentioned to me a couple weeks ago that you're finding that in Eastern Europe right now they're incredibly receptive to these ideas. | ||
| Because they've had so many bad ideas for so long, they no longer can tolerate bad ideas, or that they're starving for good ideas. | ||
| They're starving for something. | ||
| They know what they have is wrong, right? | ||
| So within memory, within a couple of generations, Maybe three, right? | ||
| They've had fascism. | ||
| They've lived under the Nazis. | ||
| They've had communism. | ||
| Brutal communism, right? | ||
| I mean, their parents were oppressed by communism. | ||
| And now they just have corruption. | ||
| They have democracy. | ||
| They vote. | ||
| But the sense, generally, in Eastern Europe is the government is corrupt. | ||
| Everything is cronyism. | ||
| They look at the West and they see America, they see Germany, they see England. | ||
| They know it's possible in terms of wealth. | ||
| They know it's possible in terms of freedom. | ||
| And they want that. | ||
| And they're looking for what it is that leads to that. | ||
| And they know that the alternative, and they look at the European Union. | ||
| And they're suspicious of that too. | ||
| Centralized power, autocratic, bureaucratic, dictating from the top down. | ||
| So they are, my sense in those places, and I'd add Brazil and some of the Latin American countries to this as well, they've experienced so much horror over the last hundred years. | ||
| That young people, you know, college-age people, high school, early 20s, are looking for something different and they're open to new ideas. | ||
| They're willing to be challenged. | ||
| They're not going to buy into the Marxist garbage. | ||
| They're not going to buy into silencing free speech because it's been there, done that, right? | ||
| So when you come to them and talk about freedom, when you come talk to them about real personal responsibility, taking your life seriously, pursuit of happiness, They are open in ways that a rich, complacent college kid in the United States isn't, right? | ||
| Marxism sounds kind of cool. | ||
| I've never experienced it. | ||
| I don't know any histories. | ||
| I don't know what it's done in the world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I don't even understand the role of ideas and how ideas actually impact actions. | ||
| So what the hell? | ||
| And I'm really worried about the next iPhone and whether it's going to have the features I really want. | ||
| But I hate capitalism. | ||
| You know, capitalism's evil, but the iPhone, oh my god, I need that, and Twitter and Facebook. | ||
| They also get over the fact that it's made in China with people being paid very little. | ||
| Yeah, they attack me at my talks as they're reading the question off their iPhone, right? | ||
| They attack me for praising Apple and then they go after the Chinese workers, but they're using the iPhone. | ||
| They have no respect for even the ideas that they hold, because if they were truly held those ideas, they'd give up the iPhone, they'd give up the Samsung, because the same thing with Samsung. | ||
| They wouldn't use modern technology because their ideas are not consistent with modern technology. | ||
| But they're complacent. | ||
| Life is too good, right? | ||
| Life is too comfortable. | ||
| And I'd add, so it's complacency on the one hand. | ||
| The other thing you notice is that our educational system in the United States It's hard to express how bad it really is. | ||
| It is anti-thinking. | ||
| It is anti-really using one's mind. | ||
| It's all about emotion. | ||
| It's all about cultivating emotion, not as a way of living, but as experience life, but as a tool of cognition, of knowing reality. | ||
| What you feel is true. | ||
| I mean, you see that on the free speech debate. | ||
| That is a big part of the free speech debate. | ||
| Feelings are truths. | ||
| And the world is no objective reality. | ||
| It's whatever I want it to be, whatever I feel it to be. | ||
| That's the post-modernism. | ||
| That's the culmination of it. | ||
| But that's in our educational system. | ||
| That's deeply rooted in education. | ||
| When you sit down six-year-olds and ask them what they think about or what they feel about Trump, what does a six-year-old know about politics? | ||
| I mean, six-year-olds should not be exposed to politics. | ||
| Apparently, a lot of the pundits on Twitter, their children know these incredible essays and have such incredible insight into Trump. | ||
| My kid just said, and then they lay out something that obviously the kid didn't say. | ||
| But in a class, we ask these kids for opinions about topics that they know nothing about, right? | ||
| You have to have life experience, you have to have knowledge, and if you don't have an educational system... So, looking back to Eastern Europe, The educational systems in Europe, not just in Eastern Europe, but even in the UK and certainly in Asia, are just better than ours. | ||
| So the kids know more. | ||
| They know history. | ||
| How did they get education systems right if they got so much politically wrong? | ||
| I didn't say they got it right. | ||
| Or not right, but better. | ||
| Okay, better. | ||
| So what I would say is the educational system in the world was at a certain level going into the 20th century. | ||
| and the United States adopted progressive education and went like that, went down, right? | ||
| And the rest of the world kind of punched around in mediocrity, which is where I think they are today. | ||
| So their educational system are mediocre. | ||
| They're not good, but they're mediocre. | ||
| Ours is a catastrophe because we took James Dewey seriously. | ||
| So we embraced, 'cause he was the first American philosopher. | ||
| Everything else came from Europe. | ||
| Finally, we found an American who spoke philosophy. | ||
| We just embraced him and made him one of, and his philosophy was a pragmatic philosophy, | ||
| which appealed, I guess, to some extent to Americans who were action-oriented rather than intellectual-oriented. | ||
| So we embraced this idea of. | ||
| Of progressive education, which was focused on socializing kids, not on teaching them, and not on knowledge. | ||
| So I think the British system and the European system is bad because it's too regimented, but what it's good at is conveying knowledge. | ||
| The American system doesn't convey knowledge. | ||
| It lets kids, but if you're exceptional, you do very well in that system because you learn yourself, and then you're allowed to innovate. | ||
| So, that's what you get, I think, the Steve Jobses, the real innovators, the Silicon Valley types, because it's not regimented. | ||
| So, what you need is a well-calibrated, I wouldn't say middle ground, but what you need is a system that both conveys knowledge and allows individuals, the children, to innovate, to think freely, to experiment with ideas. | ||
| So you mentioned that your passion really is not the political side of this, but the philosophical side does, ultimately, it feeds into everything that becomes political. | ||
| So what would the right amount of government be, in your estimation? | ||
| Because I hear this all the time also, that, well, objectivists are just sort of fancy libertarians or something. | ||
| They're libertarians that maybe have thought it through a little bit more. | ||
| Or some libertarians will say objectivists are libertarians who haven't thought about it enough. | ||
| So what, in your view, would be the right thing to do? | ||
| Well, I don't want to position ourselves necessarily versus libertarians. | ||
| I mean, I think we're more philosophical than libertarians. | ||
| But I also don't know what libertarianism means. | ||
| I think that's the biggest problem. | ||
| It's a big tent, which includes anarcho-capitalists. | ||
| Some of them nice anarcho-capitalists, like Brian Kaplan, who was on this show. | ||
| Some of them Not very nice anarcho-capitalists, who are real, really bad guys in my view, and who do a lot of damage to the liberty movement, all the way to people who are kind of conservatives, who want a big role for government as compared to what I would want, but still consider themselves Republican libertarians. | ||
| So, to me, the whole libertarian thing is kind of meaningless. | ||
| I believe that government has only one role, and everything needs to be measured in that, and that is to protect the rights of individuals. | ||
| To protect your right to life. | ||
| That's the core, right? | ||
| To protect the ability of individuals to pursue the rational values they need in order to live, and to thrive, and to be happy in the end of the day. | ||
| So what does that entail? | ||
| Well, protect them against what? | ||
| Well, the criminals that are going to steal your wallet, they're going to punch you in | ||
| the face, they're going to murder you or rape you. | ||
| There are always going to be people like that. | ||
| So you need some protection entity. | ||
| It cannot be privatized because that is legitimizing violence. | ||
| over the use of retaliatory force. They're there to protect you from the | ||
| criminals. So when the ANCAP say even that could be privatized, that's | ||
| somewhere where you say we've... Absolutely not. It cannot be privatized because that | ||
| is legitimizing violence. That's saying violence, oh we can have a market in | ||
| violence, we can trade in violence. So it's a rejection of the idea that | ||
| violence has no place in civilized humanity. | ||
| They view it just as another market good. | ||
| I view it as a different type of thing. | ||
| It's the anti-reason. | ||
| So if you focus on the positive, which is reason, force is the anti-reason. | ||
| It has to be excluded. | ||
| But more than that, what the anarcho-caps are saying is the truth What is right about property rights? | ||
| How we define property rights? | ||
| Truth is something to be negotiated between protection agencies. | ||
| And objectivism says no, truth is something to be discovered by people responsible for discovering that truth. | ||
| So what are the boundaries of certain types of property rights which are hard, right? | ||
| Intellectual property rights, which a lot of anarcho-capitalists reject. | ||
| The role of government is to define those. | ||
| It's to set boundaries of what they actually mean. | ||
| And if you disagree with them, then that's what you have, a court system, and that's what you have, a judiciary system. | ||
| But at the end of the day, they have to be experts who define certain things about, so you need a legislature. | ||
| And then to define, but it's very narrow. | ||
| It's to protect property rights, it's to protect individual rights. | ||
| And then you need a military to protect us from bad guys, invaders, terrorists, or whatever. | ||
| But that's it. | ||
| But what about roads and postal service and things like that? | ||
| Postal service, I mean, does anybody use the postal service anymore? | ||
| So you would be for privatizing that? | ||
| All of that would be privatized. | ||
| Certainly roads could be privatized. | ||
| A whole book's written on how to do it. | ||
| I'm not an expert on privatizing roads and I think it's the last thing. | ||
| that we need to deal with, but I don't think it's that hard, particularly with modern technology | ||
| to privatize roads and to charge a fee for usage on roads. | ||
| These are easy things. | ||
| You know, I think the challenging stuff that people talk about is health care and things | ||
| like that, which I don't think is challenging, because I think the only reason it seems challenging | ||
| to people is they lack imagination. | ||
| But I ask audiences... | ||
| How would it be not challenging? | ||
| I can't let you go fast enough. | ||
| Social health care is so easy, but you know, I'll get to it, right? | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| So I ask audiences all the time. | ||
| And I have to use mine. | ||
| Well, you took my iPhone. | ||
| I don't have an iPhone! | ||
| I don't have my phone on me either. | ||
| You took my iPhone. | ||
| I can't use it as a prop. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyway, I ask audiences. | ||
| We'll pretend you have an iPhone. | ||
| So here's the iPhone, right? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Would you want this designed by a government committee? | ||
| What would it look like if it was? | ||
| And everybody freaks out, and of course now we don't know, don't let it touch that, right? | ||
| And I say, okay, what's more important? | ||
| Healthcare or the iPhone? | ||
| Well, healthcare is more important. | ||
| Why would you let an entity who would not design an iPhone? | ||
| Why would you let them design a healthcare system? | ||
| Why would you let them dictate, you know, what doctors to see and what treatments to get? | ||
| Why would you let a bunch of bureaucrats, who can't design an iPhone, a simple product like an iPhone, deal with a human body which is a million times more complex? | ||
| Or with education? | ||
| I use the same example for education. | ||
| I don't want to think about touching education. | ||
| Because it's too much for them. | ||
| It's not what they're able to do. | ||
| Why would you want the institution responsible for force, using guns, to come into a hospital? | ||
| I don't want guns in hospitals. | ||
| I don't want guns in schools. | ||
| I'm going to get the Second Amendment guys after me. | ||
| I don't want the government. | ||
| I think when I see government, I see a gun. | ||
| I see force. | ||
| I see coercion. | ||
| I see authority. | ||
| The only place authority belongs is to protect from people with guns. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I don't want that use of force anywhere else. | ||
| So what is the solution? | ||
| The solution is to privatize it. | ||
| The solution is to bring the same kind of Innovation. | ||
| Imagination. | ||
| Entrepreneurship. | ||
| Into the healthcare space that we have at Silicon Valley. | ||
| Imagine if doctors viewed themselves as entrepreneurs and if insurance companies could offer any product in the world. | ||
| You would have, and economists have come up with these, you would have insurance against pre-existing conditions. | ||
| You could buy a product like that. | ||
| It wouldn't be that hard. | ||
| You would have all kinds of different insurance. | ||
| I could customize insurance policy for me, and I would use the marketplace to figure out what treatments I wanted and didn't want, when their prices would be clearly identifiable. | ||
| So the solution to health care, the problems that we have today in health care, is more freedom. | ||
| Just like that's the solution to any Economic issue. | ||
| It's free up the entrepreneurial mind, free up the creators and the builders and the makers. | ||
| So what, though, would you do about all of the people that just simply can't afford to get in the game? | ||
| So using your iPhone analogy, obviously not everyone can afford an iPhone. | ||
| There's gonna be a certain amount of people no matter what. | ||
| Now I understand, before Obamacare, we took care of them at the emergency room and it was absurdly expensive. | ||
| Yeah, it's not a good solution, that's crazy. | ||
| And now we have a different situation. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Do you think the free market would somehow lift those people? | ||
| There's no question that they would. | ||
| Look, so before Obamacare, 30 million Americans supposedly couldn't afford health care, to buy health insurance. | ||
| And the question was why? | ||
| And if you looked across states and you looked at the various insurance products, in states like California, which regulated to death exactly what an insurance company could offer, I have to pay for pregnancy and maternity and acupuncture. | ||
| I've tried acupuncture. | ||
| I don't like it. | ||
| Never going to use it. | ||
| And a million other things that are covered. | ||
| My insurance is incredibly expensive. | ||
| But there are states, and I can't remember exactly which ones, but there are states that you could go to and get a simple policy that covered your emergencies and cost less than a cell phone bill. | ||
| Now, how many Americans can't afford a cell phone? | ||
| Almost none. | ||
| Ninety-something percent of Americans have cell phones and pay their bill on time and do something like that. | ||
| The health insurance should be affordable to anybody and it could be affordable to anybody if you got all these regulations and all these constraints and then if you encourage competition with insurance companies. | ||
| One of the problems is we have two or three insurance companies that dominate the field but that's because they can only sell a particular package. | ||
| When you commoditize insurance you get monopolization. What you need is to get rid of the | ||
| commodity aspect of it. Let competition reign. Let people come up with new innovations. And then | ||
| you get real competition. And what does competition do everywhere in every field? Drive prices down | ||
| and drive quality up. And if you did that, there would be nobody, I'm not going to say nobody | ||
| would have no insurance, somebody would. | ||
| Some young person would say, I don't need to buy insurance. | ||
| I'm young and I'm indestructible. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| And a certain sliver of people that simply still cannot afford it. | ||
| A certain sliver couldn't afford it. | ||
| So what do you do with those people? | ||
| I mean I would say... | ||
| I'd say the main thing you do with those people is you provide them with the safety net, but that safety net should be provided privately and not a government. | ||
| A government shouldn't decide who gets to be part of the safety net and who doesn't. | ||
| We should decide. | ||
| And again, I ask every audience, there's a video of me doing this at a school. | ||
| I say, how many of you want to take care, are willing to take a portion of your salary every month and pay into a fund that takes care of people who really cannot take care of themselves? | ||
| Every hand in the room goes up. | ||
| I say, so what's the problem? | ||
| Why do we need a government bureaucrat to come with a gun and collect the money from you, when you are happy to do it voluntarily? | ||
| And you all see why it's good for you, and it's good for the world in which you want to live, to help those people who have fallen in bad luck, or who can't, for whatever reason, take care of themselves right now. | ||
| So we create a private safety net. | ||
| Now I know, because we talked about this last time, and your listeners are very cynical. | ||
| Oh, nobody would pay in. | ||
| But that's just not true. | ||
| In the 19th century in America, there was no government safety net. | ||
| And this country was relatively poor as compared to how rich we are today. | ||
| And immigrants just flooded. | ||
| You think the illegal immigrants from Mexico, some people think, are a problem. | ||
| The flood of immigrants that came into America in the 19th century far exceeds anything that has come in from Mexico. | ||
| As a per capita basis. | ||
| They all found jobs. | ||
| Or some of them struggled, and family helped them. | ||
| And others struggled, and the community helped them. | ||
| But the government didn't intervene. | ||
| And almost nobody, I'm not going to say nobody, died in the streets, but almost nobody died of starvation in the streets. | ||
|
unidentified
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Today, we're far richer. | |
| We have, you know, Patreon, we have mechanisms to raise money that have never existed. | ||
| You know, there's no question, and we have these billionaires who have, you know, the amount of money that they have, the amount of wealth that they have is unimaginable. | ||
| The idea that in a culture like ours we couldn't afford to take care of a few people who really can't take care of themselves is ludicrous to me. | ||
| The idea that we need some government bureaucrat to decide how much of our income we'll have to donate is bizarre. | ||
| Is part of that that we've just been sort of dumbed into submission? | ||
| We've just accepted at this point that this is how it is. | ||
| So if you were to say to the average person, well, would you give more? | ||
| They'll say yes. | ||
| But then to actually take the notion of I'm gonna now vote for people that are going to make that a reality is sort of a bridge too far. | ||
| Like we've just done this forever. | ||
| But it's more than that. | ||
| It's that a lot of people say this, and this relates to a lot of issues. | ||
| People will say, I would do it. | ||
| I know I would do it. | ||
| But they won't. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And I've talked to businessmen who say, my industry does not need to be regulated. | ||
| We're honest. | ||
| We do it right. | ||
| There's competition. | ||
| But that industry, they're all really bad people and they need to be regulated. | ||
| And you see this projection, and this comes from a certain cynicism about the world, but it comes from a certain view of human nature, which again I'm trying to combat. | ||
| And I think this goes to the core of, I want people to adopt this idea that we can be rational. | ||
| that we can think for ourselves, that people can take care of themselves. | ||
| 99.9% of humanity can take care of themselves, can feed themselves, can clothe themselves, | ||
| can live a life that is successful. | ||
| There are few people that for genetic reasons or whatever, born incapacitated or accidents happen to them. | ||
| But if you look at a human being out there, they can take care of themselves. | ||
| What they need is to be taught how. | ||
| And they need to be educated. | ||
| And they need to stop feeling sorry for themselves. | ||
| and they need to get up on their feet. | ||
| What a waste of a life to moan and complain and bitch and assume that everybody's a bad guy around you. | ||
| Embrace life! | ||
| Do something positive, you know, make something of yourself at whatever level of ability you have. | ||
| You know, some people, Have a low IQ or not as strong or whatever. | ||
| Whatever realm you live in, you can make something of your life. | ||
| That's what I'm about. | ||
| And if that's what you want in life, then the system that makes that possible is a system of freedom. | ||
| It's a system that is not going to place artificial barriers in your pursuit of life. | ||
| And as long as you're not hurting other people. | ||
| You do what you do. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| You're going to fail sometimes. | ||
| Failure is part of life. | ||
| And when you fail, you can go to your neighbor and ask for help. | ||
| And if you've been a nice guy, they will help you. | ||
| And if you've been a rotten guy, they might not help you. | ||
| That's part of the personal responsibility question here, right? | ||
| And, you know, take responsibility for your own life. | ||
| Live it. | ||
| Don't expect other people to be forced to help you. | ||
| You don't have a right to pull a gun on your neighbor and demand their help. | ||
| Somehow that gun goes away when we vote to take money from our neighbors to help us. | ||
| No. | ||
| This is a great point, right? | ||
| If something's immoral for an individual to do, it's immoral for the group to do. | ||
| It's a point I ran make, right? | ||
| So if stealing is wrong, Then stealing is wrong. | ||
| And it doesn't matter how many times we vote on it, doesn't matter how many people vote on it, it's still stealing. | ||
| It's still taking, using force, taking something away from me that belongs to me. | ||
| So, if we can just adopt that simple principle, right, and if we can understand and people can accept that personal responsibility, That's the hope I have politically for the future. | ||
| Jeroen, I usually like to offer a guest a chance to kind of sum up their philosophy and do it in a nice little bow. | ||
| You beat me to it. | ||
| I think you beat me to it. | ||
| I do want to add, though, before we end that, as I said before, next time maybe I have Shermer and Prager and we can get you involved in something like that. | ||
| That would be fun. | ||
| That'd be fun. | ||
| That'd be fun. | ||
| But for the record, you have offered to debate plenty of people that I've had on the show. | ||
| We're gonna do, Ben Shapiro just said that he's willing to do something with you, so we're gonna do that, and see if we can mix this in, because I think the next evolution of the ideas behind this show are having more of these conversations. | ||
| Yeah, and as people can discover on YouTube, I've debated plenty of people, so it's not, I don't shun the debating format, I enjoy it, and these are people I respect, so even though I disagree with many of them on many different issues, I believe in that dialogue. | ||
| I believe the only way to actually move things forward is to discuss, to debate, and to use, as long as we all accept it, reason is the guide for truth. | ||
| And that's where we're going to discover truth out there. | ||
| And yeah, bring them on. | ||
| It's going to be a lot of fun. | ||
| Are you going to do any of these events with me in the fall? | ||
| You're all over the world again. | ||
| I'm all over the world again. | ||
| I'm traveling this fall. | ||
| We'll do some events on campus. | ||
| We'll make it happen. | ||
| All right, very good. |
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