Conversation with Onkar Ghate, Philosopher | Yaron Brook Show
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Alright everybody, welcome to your own book show on this Monday evening. It's 8 p.m. here on the East Coast. Hope everybody had a good Monday. Hopefully you did not look at your portfolios and it was pretty brutal out there.

All right. I'm really happy to have with me today, Uncle Gatte, who I think everybody knows, but is the chief philosophy officer at the Ayn Rand Institute and super busy. So it's a real treat to have him on. So welcome, Uncle. Hey, how you doing? Good to be here. So I thought we'd start with your assessment of kind of where we are with Trump and the

How bad has it been relative to your expectations? I know we both were pretty negative or very negative on Trump generally, but I was particularly this term. I thought it would be much worse than the previous one. But he's exceeded my – he's worse than I even thought he would be. And I'm wondering how you feel about it. And then I'd like to talk about where you think we're going from here.

It's about what I expected, I think. It's in some ways the immigration thing is worse than I thought it would be in the sense of how much it seems they want to project power. And so I actually don't even think Trump's that interested in deporting people.

But it is he knows that it plays to the base and he's willing to play that up. But the people he's appointed, I think, are much more. They want to just wield the power. They want to kick people out to show that they have the power to kick people out. I even think they want to do it a little bit differently.

pushing the boundaries of the law or even flouting the law. They want to show that they can do that. So I have a pretty negative assessment of what's happening with the immigration and part of just what's happening, but part of it's he's surrounded himself in comparison to the first administration, I think with more power lusters.

Um, then the, and that's bad, but it's part of, I mean, it's part of what was so bad about him that he pushes out the better people in the Republican party and you get the worst people who, um, who want, who, who much more want to be there. I think you still had in the first administration. Um, I don't know what you think about this, but there were people who thought like they have some responsibility to keep this guy in check. Um,

And it's kind of, he's a child and you've got to humor him a bit. But there are a lot of stories that I think there were various individuals who thought they had to do that and were trying to do that. However, successfully and whether it was fully sincerely or there was a bit, they liked the limelight and power as well. But there was much more that happened.

I think it was definitely. Definitely. I mean, I know John Bolton a little bit. I met him before he took the position with Trump. And he was quite negative about Trump, but he was like, yeah, but if he offered me something, I would do it because it would be an opportunity and I could mitigate some of the bad. I don't know if he did. I think his book later on really reflected that. But yeah, it's funny because I was in, where was I?

I was somewhere. Maybe I was in London. And Joel Bolton walked into the club I was at. I was at one of these British Airways club thing. And he sat not far from me. And I don't think you remember who I was. But I went up and said, I just went up and said, you know, just thank you for the work you're doing. I know how much, you know, how much negativity is around it. And he seemed to appreciate that. So I thought given what's going on in the world,

it's good to boost the better people. But yeah, I definitely think that's the case in the first administration. A number of people, his economics team, I think, was there with the idea. And there was that guy who published that op-ed in the New York Times about, were there adults in the room and we're trying to keep things? There are no adults in the room this time. Yeah. The complete accolades. What do you think about, I mean, one of the things that horrifies me

Yeah, I think the people he's appointed on the immigration issue are really, really bad. But part of what horrifies me is the people on the ground, the people actually applying this to the immigrants, there seems to be a significant number of them that are just cruel and nasty and really enjoying, the little power lusters are really enjoying inflicting this on people.

And that's scary. Yeah, my view has been for a long time, and it's partly just through the experience with the U.S. government. I think the immigration officials, sort of like the average person who's manning these booths or who would join ICE or

It attracts really bad people. I don't think every person is bad. And some people think of it as, yeah, I'm here to try to find people carrying drugs and stop the gangs from coming in. But too many people, it's just...

This is an opportunity to wield power over people. And this is like way predates Trump. I've told this story to some people before I made it, that like, I'm not allowed to talk. My wife does not allow me to talk to immigration border control anymore because I, too many of them, they just want power. When I, so I, I'm a pretty patient person, but the,

We have a green card that says, keep your card in its sleeve. And I had to, you used to, before it's all automated, you used to have to give it to the person.

And it was, why is your card in the sleeve? You have to take your card out. So next time I take it out, why is your card out of the sleeve? It's supposed to be in the sleeve. And the third time this happened, I just... And the idea that it's a job to stop people from working. Like my job is to stop people from working to try to figure out if they're trying to work in the U.S. and if they are to go after them.

And, like, how can that attract somebody who thinks, yeah, that's a productive activity, stop other people from working. So it attracts the kind of person who, yeah, like, I like to tell people what to do. And I like to have them this power over me. And the other thing for the immigrant, which you're seeing now, is

that it's a kind of no man's land where you don't have any recourse. You can't call a lawyer. You can't use your phone. I've been once pulled out of the line. And it is scary because they have a ton of power and you have no recourse. You can't go back to your country. You can't go into the US. You can't call a lawyer. You can't use your phone. And now they're seizing all the electronics often. It's... Yeah, so it...

In comparison, like to say to be a government teacher, which that's a legitimate job, it shouldn't be run by the government. There's so much here that's not legitimate at all. And it has to attract people who want to wield a legitimate power. Yeah. And, you know, this idea of sending people to a jail in El Salvador and, you know, they're rounding people up and they don't get quite the people they want. So they just round people up because they just need to fill the numbers and

It's really scary that there are Americans that are gleefully doing this kind of work. Yeah. And when you read about why they're being shipped to Louisiana, it seems like it's basically two things. One, it's they think they'll get friendlier judges, right?

But it's also deliberately to keep them away from lawyers. I was watching one story. It's not just in Louisiana. It's like upstate Louisiana. It's 100 miles or something from it that a lawyer has to drive. They see a client like 100 miles and drive to drive back. And they're doing it deliberately to make it really hard for them to have representation. And that, if you're, the government can do this to pretty much

powerless people.

I was talking to someone this week about this, that our government is supposed to function by permission. It's not the one wielding authority, doing whatever it wants, and even if you don't care about immigration, even if you think, which I do think, like some of these people are gang members, not all, and I have no confidence they have any idea what they're doing. I mean, if you're using tattoos as your primary form of identification, then you're going to

catch all kinds of people who don't belong. But there are some. But the idea that the government can wield this kind of unchecked power should any American who thinks, yeah, we're supposed to have a government of laws and it's supposed to function by permission, not it gives us orders, we give it orders. It can't function. It can't keep people away from lawyers and it can't function in this way. What's your assessment of him going after the universities, Columbia and now Harvard?

There's a sliver of legitimacy to it, I think, but it's not done in a legitimate way. The guise that it's under anti-Semitism, one, that that's what we're fighting is we have to make them toe the line.

I don't think that's what's actually going. There's a kind of punishment involved, which is like, that's why it's bad. There's a punishment. These are the liberal elites who opposed us. And now we're going to go after them. If for the anti-Semitism, if they deported or took away the visas, approvals and then deported people,

some Jewish people and Jewish-looking people who were involved in the protest on the sort of pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas side, if they said, well, I'm getting rid of them, I'd have more sympathy to maybe what they really want to go after is the people who are pro-Hamas. But it's too much, again, that it is these...

people they're going after will play in the media. That is, it will be there are people from Turkey or whatever and they look like they could be terrorists or sort of the average American could think, yeah, versus a Jewish student who was involved in the protest, help organize these protests. I don't think they would dare. The way they would put it is the optics will be so bad. That's one of the revealing things in the

What is it? The defense secretaries. I don't know if you read the whole, all the messages, but they were very concerned about how the optics of this will play. And it's got to be in spades for what's happening with the universities. So I could, so I can't take seriously that what they're actually going after pro-Hamas people is,

And then, yeah, and then they're trying to get significant control over the universities and the programs and so on. That, yeah, I can't – I don't know what you think, but I can't see it as it's properly motivated. No, I don't think it's properly motivated. Yeah, it's again – but it's getting – it's throwing beef to their MAGA supporters who –

And it's an attempt, I think. And Chris Rufo said, wrote something about, you know, we're going to use the levers of power to bring our ideas and everything to the forefront. We want to take, I mean, if he had his way, they would take over the universities. They can't because they don't have the people to replace the existing professors. So all they can do is really harass the universities at this point. Yeah. Yeah, that's the impression I have. Yeah.

The most plausible one, I think, was Columbia, that there were real problems in what Columbia was doing. But from what I know about Harvard and a little bit, I know like some people who are working on this kind of thing, it's Harvard has made or at least tried to make some real changes about how they're running things and how it's going on. So the idea that they're not, they're sort of uncooperative is,

is not true as well. It's plausible to me. So the stories that came out that this was a draft that was sent by accident to Harvard, I believe that again. So I don't have... So the kind of view that this is some...

There are masterminds behind all of this. I don't have that view. I do think there are people from Heritage and so on who are involved in really trying to strategize what to do, but I don't think they're masterminds either. So I think there's a lot of screw-ups. The going after the DEI things...

Seems to be there's a fair amount of we're just doing searches and if DEI shows up, there's been people in the greater Washington area, the DMV, who have said no.

They were government employees who were forced to go to – who didn't want to go, were forced to go to DEI training. And because they're on the list of DEI training, they got fired. They didn't – but I believe, like, how – because there's no way they can go with the speed and know what they're doing. So they have to have all kinds of shortcuts, and they're going to catch – including people who are against DEI, you're going to kick out –

And they don't care. I mean, that's the other thing. They don't care about screwing up. That is, they don't care if innocent people get caught up. It really doesn't bother them. So where do you think this is heading? I mean, is Trump going to become a dictator? Is this heading towards authoritarianism in the short run? I mean, is there going to be a constitutional, you think, crisis where the Supreme Court says something and he just ignores them? No.

I'd be surprised if it would be that black and white.

There will be the continuous pushing of the boundaries. So of what happened with the immigration, at least what seems to have happened with the immigration, of a flight is midair and the judge rules something and they say, well, no, it's outside of airspace, so we can't call it back. So we're not defying the order, but the order doesn't apply anymore. I think there will be a lot of things like that, including...

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that you've got to return this person who's sent to El Salvador and it's sort of but what was the Supreme Court's language you have to facilitate their return yeah

And then it's, oh, well, the dictator in El Salvador doesn't want to return it, so what are we going to do? If it was Zelensky, you would berate him in the office. But here it's, oh, it's convenient if he says he doesn't want to return to this person, so we'll say, what can we do? I think there already is that, and there will be that continuously. I'd be surprised if it's openly defiant that it's...

Oh, they passed this. Oh, no, we're just not following that versus, oh, yeah, we're trying to facilitate it, but we can't. That's what I expect. So that is a kind of crisis, but it's much more a crisis of thinking of it as the whole operation of government. So here, if...

we had not just bootlickers, it would be there would be pushback in Trump's own party against him. That there was a little bit in regard to tariffs,

but pathetically little, given how stupid and destructive the terrorists are. That's, to me, why we're more than drifting towards authoritarianism. It's much more that Congress will go along with everything than that it's going to be the court versus the executive. There's that tension for sure. And as I say, they're going to try to push the envelope and try to sort of skirt...

meaning and the letter of the law and say, oh no, but the letter of the law, we can't do this. But for Congress, it's, and this has been longstanding, it's Trump wants people who will just do what he says. And they're too willing to

If you saw the senator from Alaska saying, she basically said, yeah, we're afraid of him. We're petrified of him. We won't, we were not speaking up. She said me and my colleagues. And she's one of the ones that have voted against him a few times. So she's one of the more courageous. And yet she says, nobody else, nobody else, uh, uh, we'll do it. I, people are complaining about your audio. Do you have a mic? Is the mic connected? Let me, let me try some once in a while, the, uh,

It resets the sound. So let me just... Seems like it's peaking. Oh, it seems like it's... So I need to lower the gain. Okay. Yeah. Let me try. So it was set to what it normally is set to. Okay. How's that? Does that sound any different to you? I think it's a little better. Yeah. Let's see how it goes. Okay. I don't know what's going on. This is what I normally use. So...

So, yes, the Congress is just going to go along with the president. The court will probably fight back. You don't think he's going to actually tell the court, no, I'm not going to do what you tell me. Although MAGA is seems to be calling for that a lot is a lot of in social media, in particular, people writing, ignore the courts, ignore the courts.

So where do you think this goes? I mean, is this just setting up the next administration and the future administrations for even more authoritarianism? Is it going to be gradual and over slowly developing? That's, I think, the likely outcome. And I'll say something about that. But on the other hand,

If we get real crises, so if we get a financial crisis from the tariffs, the claim for emergency powers, I think will come. And again, so my view of Trump is he's not power hungry.

So he's too lazy. I really think that he's too lazy to be power hungry. He's prestige hungry. He likes to be the spotlight, and he likes the appearance of being tough, but he doesn't actually want to be tough. It's too much work. The most revealing thing for me in this second term, but it fits completely what he was, I think, in the first administration, was with the list of pardons.

There was a sort of, I don't know if it was a challenging or friendly reporter, but it was, he was sort of, Trump, you pardoned this guy, and he's not, like his record's not just January 6th, and why did you pardon? And no, Trump said, I wouldn't really, I wouldn't pardon somebody like that. I'll have to look into it. And the guy, but you did pardon him, and you gave him a full pardon. And then Trump said,

I don't have time to read a thousand things of what, so he has no idea who he part, and I really believe that. I mean, I believe all the stories that he will only read the first page, and you've got to put the points, the first three bullets. So a list of a thousand or whatever people to part, there's no way he looked at it.

um and he accuses biden of this but i think partly he accuses biden because he does exactly the same he knows like he thinks he can get biden and people can't get him on this because he'll just admit yeah who can read that much and somebody power hungry would it's not that that's not putin for instance um putin would know some of the details and would be going after someone so i don't think he's

power hungry, and that's relevant, I think, for what is happening. If there's some emergencies, he'll be pushed to, you need to declare an emergency and get emergency power, and then they'll have people around him who will want to wield that emergency power. So I think the more likely thing is that it's just continuing down the road to the administration, but if we've got a financial crisis, I mean, partly as a result of Trump's policies,

then I could see it getting worse more quickly.

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So you were just in Germany and you went to the Dachau concentration camp. Any lessons we can... I mean, it's the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Any parallel to what's going on in the United States? Obviously, this is the ominous parallels, Leonard's book. But are there parallels to what's going on right now? How do you see the similarities and the differences? Yeah, so every time you...

Nazis are brought up, people think of it as that's the last card to draw and you can't do it. And it's true. Like this, this, the Nazis and sort of the final solution is so horrific that if that's what, oh, we're like one step away from the Nazis and massive concentration camps. I don't think that, but the rise of the Nazis is interesting because

for many reasons. You were talking about the ominous parallels. That is talking about the whole intellectual climate that was necessary for their rise and that you have to see it as a century and more in the making. I mean, a century in Germany with Kant and Hegel or a century and more, but going back even further than that into the nature and ideas and philosophy. Another aspect of it is

There's a way people can hold it as you got some crazy – like who knows where they came from, how it happened, and they just quickly seized power. That's not what happened. And I think one of the things – so this is part of my – and asking – you were asking what's going to happen if –

When we get the next administration or the next people in the Republican Party, for me, the most important thing, because I have a certain view of Trump, as I said, I don't think of him as he's craving power. But I do think there are people around him who are. I think the most important thing is that all these people, it's the end of their political career. I would put Rubio down.

J.D. Vance, that once Trump is gone, that they cannot get voted into power. There's too many in the country who will say, no, these were bootlickers. They would basically sell their soul. And I mean, that's my view of Rubio. When you see him on camera with Zelensky, he knows he's sold his soul. And Rubio

I've now got to play that card in effect or play that persona but it's

So I think that's, for me, the most important. I would never vote for any of them, ever. No matter what policies they put forth, even if it sounds good, it was, if you're willing to sell your soul, then you're basically willing to do anything. And again, that's the difference that we were talking about between the first administration and the second. There were people around who thought, yeah, maybe I have to stay around to try to restrain Trump. And so...

And you have now the people who want to enable him or use him to get their policy. And that's, I think, really dangerous. And it is, yeah, I have such a negative view of those people. Yeah, I mean, I differentiate between Rubio and Vance. Rubio, I think, is kind of power hungry and he's soul to soul and he knows that he looks miserable. Vance, I think, is...

He knows what he wants. I mean, he is all in. I don't think he feels like he sold his soul. This is his soul, right? This is exactly what he wants. He's a real authoritarian. I mean, he calls himself a Christian conservative and I think a Christian nationalist. And I think he really is a nationalist in that sense. He's given that speech about America is not an idea anymore.

It's a people and a place, right? So he's a blood and soil nationalist. And he scares me. I don't think he can win, but who knows in three years? I mean, he scares me. Yeah, I agree with that. So, yeah, I don't think they've all sold their soul because, as you said, that is his soul. Rubio, I had in the –

I mean, before Trump won in 2016 and before he got the nomination, I thought of the field the Republicans were, the people vying for to be the nominee for their party for the presidential election.

election. Rubio was the most American. He seemed to actually believe the story of immigration in America, of what the Cuban immigrants have done and their right to flee Cuba and build something and it's right for America to be open to them.

And that he can reverse in the way that he has and the way like whitewashing Venezuela because we want to send people back to there. And so all of that is the – that's what I think of as partly as selling his soul. And that – the –

I think a normal American should be really turned off by that. I think they will. Yeah, so I think I might be wrong, but yeah, I think Vance can't have the support that Trump has. And I think Rubio couldn't, unless he really could somehow explain, yeah, I'm changing course again. Now, I've met sort of,

known someone who's known Rubio for a long time and says like, this is Rubio 6.0, that he changes his tune all the time. So which is certainly possible. But yeah, so it's the people around him, Trump now, that I think it's very important that this be the apex of their political career. And when Trump's gone, they're gone.

I mean, I don't know how it happens given how much MAGA and Trump control the Republican Party now. It just seems like this is the Republican Party for the foreseeable future. Yeah. And a lot will depend on if they face any real opposition. That is, opposition that the...

sort of people who are concerned about the authoritarianism and actually like America could feel I could vote for this person against these more power hungry people. But if you feel someone like Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton, who's another power, I think is a power luster, then it's...

Yeah, then I can see events being elected. But not if you had someone like Obama, I think. That people, I still think he would win. I might be wrong about that. Yeah, I don't know. I think you would. Of course, when he was president, we thought it can't get any worse than this guy. Yeah. And then it really did. And now we miss Obama. That's pretty scary. Yeah.

I remember Ruby Tyler, my wife, every time Obama would come on TV, she'd turn the TV on. She couldn't hear him. She just got physically ill. And now after Trump, it's like she's saying, yeah, I could listen to Obama all day. That's a competitor, this guy. All right, let's pivot and let's talk about some of the work we do at the Institute, particularly –

You know, the focus, I think, is now on and has been for a long time on developing intellectuals and expanding the realm of intellectuals. What's the sense that, you know, we've talked about we need lots of intellectuals. Why do you think that is so important? What is the importance of having a significant number of intellectual voices out there from the objectivist perspective? I still find when...

I go out into the, I don't know what the right way to put it, sort of the more mainstream world or something like that. It's shocking how hemmed in people are by their conventional categories and way of looking at the world and that how alien the...

Ayn Rand's ideas, the objectivist philosophy still is alien in the sense that they've never heard this. It's not something they've considered and rejected or found wanting. It's still, they've never heard a view like this. And

The only way they're going to hear it is if there's more and more intellectuals in the culture and intellectual I'm using in a broad term in a broad way. Not so doesn't that I don't mean just sort of the leading intellectuals or the most recognized public intellectuals or anything like that, just that they encounter it.

Some of these ideas in their high school, in the college classroom, but again, it doesn't have to be like the superstar at the university or even at the high school. It's just they get some more exposure to this in a serious way. And this is I was telling you.

before the show that I just did a guest appearance in a Harvard business class. So that's part of how I think of it as it like this is the mainstream. It's the mainstream in academia, but it's not some and it wasn't some professor who's like way outside and everybody of the mainstream people think he's crazy or has strange views or something.

And guest appearance because it's a class where they look at influential people across, not just in business, like a wide range of influential people and think it seems at least sort of two angles on it.

In what way, if they did, did these people change the world? So, like, what's their impact? And then what did they have to do to have that impact, including, like, what did they have to do to have the career they had? What kind of dedication did they... And so it's looking at Ayn Rand as having an impact on the culture, and then what was, like, what did she do to do that? And, like, what's, for instance, what's the significance that she...

wrote both fiction and non-fiction. Is that key to understanding part of her impact and so on? And the class...

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Much more than just the bare majority didn't really know much about Ayn Rand. And what they've heard is

is the various kind of critics and conventional takes on Ayn Rand. So you've got, and then on the ideas, it was, and I still, I mean, I've encountered this often, but the, I mean, often is an understatement, that everybody's selfish and that you can think that, and really like you're at Harvard University

And you can think that it's sort of, yeah, everybody, but what, you can't take it to too much of an extreme, but everybody's like sort of partly selfish. And they have no idea what, like what that means, how to think about that. They don't really believe it because they'll say something different 10 minutes later. And it comes as news to them that, you know, I know it's challenging the whole way you think about selfishness and the

And I mean, one of the good things is so both two of us at the Institute, myself and Alon did guest appearances in the class. And we pushed you can get books for free from us. And the professor wrote back that one of them is starting the fountainhead. And this is part of what the interesting the reaction is.

this book's really good. He was 100 pages in. It's like nothing I've read before. Why didn't I get this in high school or college? It took a guest appearance of someone from an Ayn Rand Institute that I'm sure they never heard of. And yeah, I could get it free. That's how I got it. And that is there's got to be so many people still like that. If you had people in high school, right?

not teaching it to the whole class, but recommending it to students who think this might have an impact and so on. And I mean, we need that in

thousands and thousands and thousands of times over. And that means you have to have thousands and thousands and thousands of people in schools, in universities who are doing this, as I say, they don't have to be the leaders in the field, but are introducing students to

and just young minds to a new way of looking at things. And it's easy when you're immersed in Ayn Rand and objectivism to think everybody's heard of this. It's still, I mean, it's better and work we've done at the Institute, work we did when you were here and leading the Institute, has, so there for sure are more people than 25 years ago, but still it's small compared to what it could be and needs to be.

And it's not just that they don't know Ayn Rand. It's that I find that their thinking is so conventional. They're all their objections to capitalism or their objections to egoism are just the conventional stuff. There's no there's nothing. They live within very narrow bounds of what they're exposed to in terms of ideas.

Yeah, that's I mean, I find that it's one of the reasons I was interested in philosophy. And it's still for people who are unphilosophic. This is part of when I categorize someone as unphilosophic. And it doesn't mean bad, doesn't mean stupid, but it just means they're content with the categories they've been offered. Yeah.

And a philosophic person has some inkling and then finds it really interesting when someone says, and Ayn Rand says this over and over and over again, the categories you're using, you can't think with these categories. They're wrong and you need different categories. And I've,

A philosophic person, to me, perks up when they hear that. And it is really like there's a whole different way of looking at things than the way I've been looking at it or have been taught to look at it. And the...

it's what Ayn Rand did but part of the work of intellectuals is to hammer that in because it's so difficult to do and there's many people who won't do it even like some exposure to Ayn Rand won't do it unless it's really pushed and part of the work of the intellectuals is to say no like what she's doing is she's rethinking selfishness and you can't think of it in the way you're doing it

Selfishness doesn't come automatically. That's not the right way to think about it. I mean, one of the ways that I often put it when I'm explaining it to relatively new people, most people's view of selfishness is it's easy and bad. And her view is it's hard and good. And that's... So it's a very different perspective. And

As I say, a philosophic person finds that really interesting, but there will be many people in the culture, and again, it doesn't mean they're bad, who just can't do that, won't do the work unless they're getting it in their education, that it's really forcing them to do it. But you need teachers and intellectuals doing that work

over and over again. And if you don't have that, it's then what you'll have. The conventional views are conventional for a reason. And part of the reason is this is what the educational system gives them. And that's all they'll work with. And unless you get like a big change in the educational system, it will just repeat itself. And it's the intellectuals who have to change the educational system. Nobody else is going to do it.

Yeah, and it's also the intellectuals in the media and the podcast they listen to and, you know, everywhere they go, they get the same range of views and they think that is all that exists. Yeah. And the...

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They both have conventional views, and then they've succumbed to conventional views of Ayn Rand. But again, I still find it – I shouldn't, but I still find it shocking that if you're dealing with people at the level, sort of the –

intellectual and achievement level of, I think, the people, by and large, who get into Harvard. I've seen more Stanford and, like, the people at Stanford or the students at Stanford. Like, they're really smart and achievement-oriented and so on. So one of the things that came up was that

Ayn Rand just glorifies the rich and glorifies business. And I brought up in the whatever 15, 20 minutes of remarks that I had time to do of, well, that's when if you look at Atlas Shrugged, it's like major villains are businessmen and rich in it. And it's...

They haven't even read it, and no one's made the... How can you have a view of Ayn Rand if you haven't read anything? How do you know that this is going... And again, they would need to be challenged in the educational system. You can't form... And particularly if you know that Ayn Rand is sort of... She's a controversial figure. You can't just take for granted that people told you, well, she loves anybody who's rich and hates anybody who's poor, so that must be her view. But...

Like that's you real teachers and educators would push them. How do you have a view if you haven't even read that? But it's they're not encouraged to do that. And.

I mean, if you want better people, better educated, somebody has to do the educated. And if it's always just you're blaming the schools, but nobody's going in and saying, like, I'm going to do it different or I'm going to do it better. How do you expect things are going to change? And this is why you don't need thousands of Ayn Rand's, but you need thousands of people who are really...

Teaching her ideas and worldview in such a way that you'll have students and especially the better students who.

actually engaging with it versus... And again, I don't think it was ill-motivated at all. It's just part of... This is how they've been... They've been trained with the conventional categories and they've been trained that this is what Ayn Rand stands for and so on. And they have not been encouraged to really probe particularly for controversial figures. So I felt sad for the student, not, oh my God, like how could they be... But it's just...

Yeah, education is not serving you if you're being given all this conventional stuff and you're not really – and I'm not putting – like this professor, I think it's good that he's bringing Ayn Rand in and so on. And he seemed to – of the people I heard sort of have been some of the case studies. It seemed fairly wide-ranging, and that was good, but –

When you're looking at the students, I don't get the sense they've really been pushed in their whole education. And that's a tragedy. And there's something in the culture, particularly in the online culture, of everybody has an opinion. You don't have to know anything about the topic, but you have an opinion about it. And you can be actually really, really have strong opinions about things you know nothing about. And people get rewarded for that in the culture, you know, in podcasts and things.

with following on Twitter and places like that. And I think that's become much more of a part of the culture. Maybe it was always there, but they didn't have a venue by which to articulate their ignorance. But now, since they've got some way to write about it, you see it everywhere. People expressing opinions about things they know nothing about. Yes, it's... Yeah, again, I don't know how much...

It's changed versus it's much more visible now, but there has to be some element that has changed in the, that it's easy to think of yourself as, yeah, I'm an expert because I've Googled four things. And so this, this was another aspect that I just thought in terms of thinking skills, really good. Somebody at Harvard, it, so, so there were two things.

that just shocked me that there wasn't more pushback in the class in regard to this. And again, it's just, I think this is the educational system. So one was buying into the story that Ayn Rand doesn't care about, didn't care about her family. And so, so this is in some of the biographies, this is like really trumpeted and they couldn't,

Nobody brought up that, well, she's writing to her family in the Soviet Union, and it might be dangerous to do that. And she's like one of the most fierce anti-communists. And being connected to her, like, might that be a problem for people left back? And

Again, like they're at Harvard, so they have to know something about, yeah, this to Iranian dissidents, this kind of thing happens or even just like Russia. Now, it happens if you're critical of Putin, you have to worry about if you're going back or if your family's like some awareness that regimes take it out.

On the families of people who are outspoken and outspoken critics. Like, it doesn't cross your mind that that might be... That she's not, like, super public. She might be trying to get her family out, but she's not super public about it. Like, it can't even occur...

a question of like maybe something like that is going on but it was just no it's like obvious that she couldn't stand her family so i told them that and i told them that you know there would be a reason for and you could see that for some of them it was yeah that could make sense but that it it couldn't occur and then that you have that for a controversial figure and i want to put it like that a controversial figure not ayn rand specifically

that biographies of a controversial figure you should think are very difficult to do, that you're going to find people who hate that person and you're going to find people who love that person. And you have to be suspicious of both, I think. And you have to think, like, how do you really get to think you've got a reliable...

biography. I didn't do it in this class, but in one other class, because we've done this class a few times now, I brought up, like, imagine the person who likes you the least wrote your biography, like, for you, wrote your biography. Like, how accurate do you think it would be? And should everybody rely on it? And when you put it in those terms, it was, yeah, like, there's some people that really don't like me, and I wouldn't think they're biologists. And I said, well, like, Ayn Rand's a very polarizing figure, and she had

people who loved her, people who hated her, having a biography. You can't just think, well, there's a biography, so it's probably accurate or something like that. But again, they don't have the tools to think. Again, not to have the answer, but just to have a question about, yeah, the controversial figure is probably hard to find a biography that is good. To what extent do you think it's important to know or to have a...

read on Ayn Rand's life in order to gain an appreciation for philosophy? I think it would be interesting to know it. So I used to be... So to put the cards on today, I'm not very interested in Ayn Rand's personal life, personal history. Just I'm not interested. I don't think she was. Yeah, I know she wasn't. Yeah.

And I think that's, it's very relevant for thinking of her. And she said of We the Living, this is as close to an autobiography as I'm going to write, because she wouldn't be interested in writing an autobiography. And what it is, is it captures, I think, her spirit.

and her way of facing the world, not the concrete details of her life. So Kira, I think, is a young Ayn Rand. Not that Ayn Rand wanted to build bridges and so on, but if you can abstract... Yeah, in spirit. And that's what interested her, and that interests me, but you can get that from Ayn Rand's work. You don't need all the personal details of it. And...

I do. So I think more than I used to think that it's relevant to think about her personal life

from the point of view that she said she was living her philosophy. And so how is this actually working? I mean, part of the, after that, the shrug, the whatever about the author, I forget what that section is. And my life comes down to, I mean it. And she says something like, I've used the ideas that I've, it's not like I'm telling people to be selfish, but I think I shouldn't be selfish and wasn't selfish. No, no, she thinks I was selfish.

And so it is relevant to think of that, but I don't think we have access to it. So the, in the sense that these are personal details and, and unless you knew her well, and I think like are a good judge of people, a good judge of character, um,

then you don't really know what was going on with her. Like, that she was depressed after Atlas Shrugged. What did that mean exactly? What was the nature...

There's a way in which I can imagine it of the cultural reception and of thinking, yeah, the culture is more bankrupt than I thought it was. And that's pretty depressing. I can understand. But part of the way it's portrayed, I have trouble believing it was in that form that she sort of the reaction after the shrug, because in some ways,

She had to know this because she's writing out a shot. So she, like she has a view of the state of the culture and she says like, this is 10 years or something down the road. So I think what shocked her really is that she had no defenders, not that the, and, but that's very different than the way it would be put as all the culture. She didn't get good book reviews and she went into a depression like that. I don't believe, but you,

To really, if I'm right about that, I'd have to know her, which I'd never met her, or know someone who I really have confidence in their judgment. I don't know many people like that. So it's just, for me, it's not accessible. So it's interesting, but not accessible. Yeah, I mean, to me, it seemed like the disappointment would be

Then no intellectuals, no philosophers got it and said, oh, wow. Yeah. And that the response from businessmen was there, but it was, we know some of the businessmen who responded positively and they just weren't at the caliber, I think, that she would have wanted and expected. Yeah.

And so many of them were religious and didn't want to give up that. And she confronted all these things that we often confront of just this mixture of loving Atlas Schwab but not really getting it. Yeah, I think that and I think the story that we've seen some of that, I mean, after her death of people who would –

compliment or praise her in private but wouldn't do it in public yep i think that would really bother her because it's that's a straight moral issue it's a it's a kind of coward isn't it and that you can't just it's not they're not smart enough to get this or see this it's it's

And it's so not her that it I mean, she's so courageous that there's nobody who even if they see it, have the courage to say it that. Yeah, that I can. So I can understand that. And I think.

Given the just the artistic achievement that it is Atlas Shrugged, that nobody can recognize that. And again, it's not all like the vast swaths of people, but that there's some other minds that can really see this and will say it.

That I can imagine of having a kind of impact that is, I can imagine that shocking her. It's, if you think of it in terms of her character

kind of artistic vision. It's Winan's reaction to Rourke. And it's, it's, he should try to crush Rourke and he sort of half-heartedly tries, but he can't bring him to, because he can see the level of achievement that is Rourke. And it is,

Yeah, like I have to recognize this. And I think she thought there'll be some people, minds like that, and that if she didn't get that, that's got to be disappointing and shocking. Particularly given from what I've, you know, I can't remember where I read this, but or maybe Leonard said this, she couldn't conceive of herself as a genius. So she thought, okay, well, there have to be other really, really smart people out there who will get this.

She couldn't quite conceive of how far ahead of everybody else she was. And if I could see her disappointed in the fact that there weren't people like her out there. Yeah. And I think it's got to be, I mean, my guess would be it's more than just genius. So, because I'm sympathetic. It's not like there's one genius in the world. It's that I don't think she,

fully grasped, or at least at this point, of how rare a positive, philosophic genius is. And she comments on this later when she's writing the non-fiction of how, it's something like she uses the metaphor, how few lions are

have gone into the field of philosophy. They've left it for the losers, in effect. And, I mean, she called Kant the kind of idiot savant. So there's an element of, like, real powerful mind there, but it's not a positive orientation. And her view is it's not like...

uh kant and aristotle are on the same level a positive genius is just so much to achieve it's just so much more than to use your genius to to destroy that you're not you're not in the same galaxy so that it it's so rare and i don't think that she she was took philosophy as sort of everybody thinks philosophically like how could you not and so i think projecting a genius

that doesn't think philosophically is hard for her. I mean, she makes a, she's aware of it in the end. She makes this kind of comment about Einstein, who's clearly a genius, but she puts it on like he's so conventional once he gets outside of science. And it's, but that I think would have been so alien to her that it's hard to project. Yeah. Yeah. Because even, even the geniuses, the villains in, in her novels are,

you know, they deal with philosophy. They might be evil about it, but they're not ignorant of it. Yeah, and the part, like her part, I mean, it's part of what her heroes are too, but I mean...

Rieran's not a philosopher in comparison. He's so philosophical. And that's like, yeah, so that she didn't, there's nobody who could understand philosophically what she's doing. That I think it was hard for her.

to understand and to project. I mean, she came to see it was true, but the project that, yeah, there can be some genius level minds, but they're so conventional philosophically. Yeah. All right. This has been great. Let's we've got a bunch of questions. So let's, let's start digging into those. You guys can still ask questions. So, but let's start with Wes. Thank you, Wes. Okay.

Ankur, is there an aspect of philosophy you enjoy talking about or studying more than others? Yes. Broadly speaking, I'm most interested in morality. I'm most interested in talking to people about it. It's most of what I think about when I'm thinking about philosophy, in part because

Well, in part, it's just, I would put it, I'm a moralist, first and foremost. It was what my attraction to philosophy was, attraction to Ayn Rand. It was when I first read Ayn Rand, my reaction, in effect, if not in so many words, was, this

this is a person who takes morality more seriously than I do. And I took it seriously. So it was like, that's the impression she made on me and that Atlas Shrug made on me. So it's been, it's my interest from the start into philosophy. But part of it is Ayn Rand thinks of morality for good or bad as having causal power over

So to understand people's actions at an individual level, to understand the way cultures work, to understand something like the Trump administration, you have to think in moral terms about what is happening. I mean, part of what we were talking about earlier about there's an element of

Now of people who've sold their souls around him versus what there was before that's thinking in moral terms of what is the dynamic between him and the people he's surrounded himself with and so and that most people don't think of morality as having a causal impact and that

I think they just miss so much of what's going on in reality because of that. So that's the area that I'm most interested in and think a lot about. What are we talking about at Ocon likely will touch on some aspects of this. Let's see, Evan. Oh, this relates to something I said earlier. At the 2 p.m. show, YB mentioned that Candace Owen and so on may be suffering from acute stupidity.

and or insanity. I'm usually skeptical of blaming things on stupidity, but in recent years, I'm wondering if this is a real problem. I mean, I'll just say what I mean by stupidity is not that she has some innate inability, you know, her mind, you know, she's got a low IQ or something like that. What I mean by stupidity is that she's not using whatever she has, that she has embraced a pattern of non-thought and

that makes her stupid, that divorces her from the facts of reality, divorces her from being able to see real causes. I don't know if you saw her latest thing about, you know, NASA and space are just a satanic conspiracy. But here's a line that was really amazing, where she says...

It really is, you know, from the Church of Satan or whatever, because their whole purpose is to make us believe in man. And she's right. But it's so she doesn't believe in the moon landing. She says, how could they call? She said, how could they call back to Earth? There were no cell phones back then.

So that's proof that it's a conspiracy. I mean, you got to laugh at how stupid it is. But it's again, she's not she's she doesn't she I don't know how smart or not she is. But that is just a mind that's gone. It's it's been so corrupted by non-facts and and and by evasion, evasion, evasion, evasion. Yeah. Yeah. I've stopped even looking at it.

I told everybody today, I said, now I do Candice on corners like things just for entertainment. There's no, we're beyond the point of criticizing, you know, the fact that this represents the right or something like that. Now it's just so stupid. It's just entertainment. Andrew asks, why is it rational to be selfish? Because it's the essence of morality. So the, the,

Selfishness just means the pursuit in moral terms. It means the pursuit of one's self-interest, of one's life, of one's happiness. And that the whole perspective in objectivism is where do values come from? They come from the fact that

that you're a living thing that has to reach certain goals to stay alive, to maintain yourself in existence, to maintain yourself in the world, and to prosper in the world. So the whole dedication to selfishness is a dedication to what's in your self-interest, what will enable you to thrive in the world. And from that perspective,

What rationality is for human beings, our minds, our ability to think, is our way to thrive in the world. So why is it rational to be selfish? Because that's the goal that you need to reach, and thinking is your means to reach it. Tom says, here for Ankar and Yaron, millions should be tuning in. Yes, they should be. Chase says, for Ankar, as a professional jazz musician,

a guitarist educator, how can I apply objectivist principles to evaluate improvised music or music without lyrics? Are there objectivist resources beyond the Romantic Manifesto? Not that I know of. So I know there's other objectivists who are thinking about music, how it works. I don't know of anybody's. I haven't looked at anyone's work yet.

in enough detail to have first-hand knowledge or first-hand view of it. But I would say this is a very difficult field. And when you read what Ayn Rand's hypothesis is in the Romantic Manifesto about how music works...

It's a rich but complex hypothesis about how it's working. And she says it would require the integration of different fields and what's happening in different fields. And

That integration is... It would be difficult if you had good people in those fields to try to think of the integration of the physiology of sound and sound of the whole auditory system and the way the mind works, of values and emotions work. It's... So...

This, it's a difficult thing to even have a hypothesis about. So it's not like, oh, if someone spent half a year working on it, they can figure it out. This is, I think, would be a lifetime project. And even then, there's a real possibility of failure. But I think he asks...

I mean, are they objective principles to value and provide music and music without lyrics? I don't think they are in existence. And there might be principles one day. They wouldn't be objectivist because there wouldn't be any grants. But there would be at some point somebody will come up with principles to be able to value. And the fact that it doesn't have lyrics is what makes it challenging maybe. But it doesn't rule it out. Although even lyrics, how do you evaluate objectively the quality of lyrics?

is a hard enough thing even within prose. So the whole field of aesthetics is way underdeveloped. Anka and I have talked about this in the past. Way underdeveloped in terms of the principles. Ayn Rand is giving us a great blueprint for literature mostly, but there's still a lot of work for the other arts. Yeah, and there's a way to take both what she's saying and sort of the...

the field of aesthetics as much simpler than it actually is. So one people thing they take from Ayn Rand, which is not right. And music is part of the, the, the concrete of why it can't be right. That art is representational. What it's supposed to do is represent. Yeah. Yeah.

represent the world, but represent doesn't mean, um, sort of your, you want a copy of it. Part of the, the sound is you're not trying to copy what bird songs are or things like that. It is the part of her hypothesis is it's a creation of a new mental entity. Um, and you have to think a lot about that, but it's not like we're trying to reproduce something we heard or something like that. And, uh,

So just to think of it in those terms, it's difficult to think about what that means. And music is not a thing that copies in the way one might think of painting as copying your visual world. I don't think that in the end is what painting does either, but it's more practical.

plausible to think, well, that's something that what it's doing, but that's not what music is doing. Michael asks, I think an organized protest in Boston, this Ocon makes sense for our movement to build awareness and stand up to the constitutional crisis thoughts on an organized process protest. For most protests,

It's an issue of numbers. I'm skeptical of protests in general, but for them to have some impact...

It's an issue of numbers and we're not going to get numbers that will impress anybody. And if we did some of these small kinds of protests where they block a bridge or something like that, if we did that, people should rightly look at it as a.

There's got to be something wrong with you and your viewpoint. If you think, like, I can stop everybody from going to and fro by taking over a bridge or something like that, that's how you get media coverage. But real Americans should think there's something wrong with you if you think you have that power to stop everybody else. So I agree that we should be...

arguing these issues but physical protest is not an argument that it's we should be drawing attention to these kinds of issues i don't think it's legitimate to do it by uh protest yeah michael thinks we can get 5 000 people out and that that would create a stir but even 5 000 is not that much and i doubt we could yeah i doubt we could get 5 000 people

All right. Doodle Bunny usually asks obnoxious questions. So he says, why should we keep donating to ARI if they couldn't even stop a clown like Trump? It shows objectivism has no influence in the culture. And whose fault is that? Yeah. So I don't think of it at all like that. I don't I don't think any small movement.

you're going to think what they could do is impact the presidential election. That would be true of movements and groups on the so-called left.

they don't have a small viewpoint that still has not that many adherents. What's going to happen is not, yeah, they're going to impact the presidential election. So if that were one standard, like I will only give to things or only support causes that I think can have that kind of impact, then you can only support things

that are relatively mainstream, because it's only the things that are relatively mainstream that could make that kind of difference. I think of it as we're an organization with a longer-term mission, and it has to be a longer-term mission, because, yeah, we eventually want to see these ideas have...

real cultural impact and changing the direction of the culture. But that can't happen in five years or of 10 years. Like you can't, what I was talking about earlier about how even like students who are potentially interested in these ideas haven't been exposed to them and so on.

how are you going to have an impact on how they're going to vote in five years when they don't know anything even about these ideas? So the real work, but it has to be long term because it's you slowly get the ideas more and more into the educational system. And I think compared to 20 years ago,

for sure Ayn Rand and the ideas have more prominence than they had, but they're still nowhere close to having the kind of cultural impact that one, anybody who thinks the ideas are true hopes that they'll have in the future, but it's not the near future. Yeah. And as we said, you need thousands of intellectuals. If you do a, if you do a, just the math on what that will entail in terms of how many people you have to get to, to get thousands of intellectuals and how long you have to train them,

and get them out there and for them to get any kind of reasonable job and reasonable influence. This is, you know, many, many, many decades. This is not something that happens in the short run. Eric says in the chat, 90 years since Anthem. Yeah, you know, it probably takes a couple of centuries. This is not something that happens quickly. And particularly given how

revolutionary objectivism really is in a sense of it's rethinking everything. It's not about politics. It's this particular issue in politics. It's about the way you think about politics from the ground up. We think about politics completely differently than everybody else. And it's going to take a long time to make that change in the culture in terms of how people think about these things. Yeah. And my view of this kind of thing is

You try to do it as quickly as you can. And it might be true that in the modern world, with modern technology, modern education, the way ideas can spread, that it can happen more quickly. But when you have to have, at least as a grain of salt, that historically there's never been a rapid growth

positive, philosophic change. Like 30 years or something like that, you get all these good ideas that have taken over. It just doesn't happen like that. And I think there's a reason why it doesn't happen. It's harder to build than it is to destroy. Yeah, we can think of Thomas Aquinas to the creation of America as one lengthy intellectual movement of bringing Aristotle back to the West. That's 500 years? Yeah.

Something like that? 600 years? Yeah. Yeah, 500 plus. Yeah. So it's... All right, Molten Splendor. Why are the Trump MAGA supporters repeating the lies? Do they not know or do they not want to know the truth? Well, you have to delve into a little bit what the lies are. But I think...

there's a big element that they don't want to know. But this is, I don't think this is, there's a way that the, you can single out the MAGA or the Trump supporters or Trump's base, however you want to think about it. As there's some incredible aberration and that nobody else is like this. I really do think we live in a tribal age where,

part of what the Trump phenomenon showed is it's more tribal than one may have thought. That's one of the lessons that I take. If you ask this, so to take some equivalent of the MAGA crowd around COVID, however you want to put it, the progressives, the left,

but just sort of the supporters of it, that all of this had to be right, and you wear a mask even when you're alone, walking outside and so on, and yeah, and then you'll berate somebody else who doesn't do this and thinks, like, really, when I'm outside, I've got to wear a mask, and people are 15 feet away, and if you think of it as it was sort of

I think of that it's exactly like Trump's base. And there's an element of the more you hammer on it, the more you don't have to think about, like, really? I'm saying you've got to wear a mask. I saw people driving by themselves with a mask on. And it's a way of not thinking about it is...

sort of just repeating it and often berating other people like so proof of how loyal you are to it is look I'm going after the people and that's yeah you don't really want to know and you don't really want to think about it but if you think of it as just

Like it's the MAGA people who do this and nobody else does this. I think you're just not, you don't really, you're not really seeing the phenomenon and you're not then seeing, but unfortunately it's partly, um,

It's a little more depressing. It's not just the MAGA people. I don't know if, because I think this is very revealing. So there were a lot of, I mean, a sizable enough percentage of people voted in this way that AOC had to go on like a podcast or whatever, a TikTok of people who voted for Trump and her. Yeah.

And to me, that fits completely. I'm not surprised at all that there's a lot of voters like that. But they both appeal to more tribal elements in people. And yeah, so I think, yes, there is for sure an element of they're trying to convince themselves. But it's not just the MAGA people who do this. I just saw a graph.

about people's attitude towards trade by party affiliation. And so a few years ago, or two years ago, basically 20% of Americans were supportive of free trade. 20% of Democrats, 20% of Republicans supported free trade. And since Trump was elected, fewer Republicans support free trade. But, you know, it went down from 20% maybe to 15% or 10%, something like that. But among Democrats, now 70% of Democrats support free trade.

Now you tell me that they've gone through some kind of understanding of the value of trade over the last three months that justifies them all being supporters of free trade. It's just a tribal thing. It's the anti-Trump. So Trump is anti-free trade. We support it. It's, uh, yeah. And they'll often, because I've met, unfortunately, people like this who, and if you point out like, haven't you just changed sides? Uh,

they'll say something about trade and why globalization is good. But if you ask, is that really the reason they believe what they're saying now and they hold the position? No. So it's much more they're trying to tell themselves a story that I haven't just changed sides because my tribe's changed. No, there's reasons for it. But those reasons aren't actually governing their thinking. And...

So that's the sentence in which, yeah, they're pretending to themselves, not just to other people, to themselves they're pretending. That's it. Orem says, Douglas Murray on Rogan was a breath of fresh air. I don't know if you saw the Douglas Murray, Dave Smith. I haven't watched it. I've seen some clips from it, but I haven't watched the whole thing. He says, he's quoting Douglas Murray, I guess, you can't time travel, but you can travel. It's quite easy.

That's when Dave Smith admitted to never being anywhere, really. Do you see a pro-reason coalition forming in the culture in response to the idiocy of the right and the left? No. So I think there are better individuals on certain issues, and Murray's really good in regard to Israel and the...

the pro Hamas sentiment in the West, but there's, they would have to for really, you would have to coalesce around a philosophy and they don't. So this is, if you, what was it that you can think of it as the sort of radical

a radical atheist, and then you have the intellectual dark web. And it's again, will be put as, well, they're responding to the whatever irrationality, mysticism, lunacy that they see all over the place and on both political sides and so on. But it's too much. What's uniting them is opposition to something. And if you ask, what is it that they deeply have in common with,

It's not even that they have a shared understanding of rationality. Is religion rational? Not like belief, but that you need religion. They'll split in regard to that. They split in regard to how to think about science and the pandemic. They split in regard to Trump. And that's because there's not a shared positive vision. And it's easy to to.

relatively easy to spot irrationality.

What actual rationality looks like is the much harder question. That's what objectivism is about. But crucial in objectivism is to have a real perspective on rationality. You have to see it not just as cognitive, but as normative. And you have to integrate your ideas and your values. And most thinkers cannot do that because...

Because they have a conventional view of values, which does not enter. They have some form of altruism slash utilitarianism, which does not integrate with reason. So you're not going to get this coalescing around a positive vision of reason governing people's thinking and action.

Yeah, I mean, we've seen it so many times, the appearance of some kind of coalition, and it can't survive because, I mean, the Tea Party was an anti-movement. The intellectual dark web was an anti-movement, and they just fall apart very quickly because they don't stand for anything positive. And while I love some of what Douglas Murray says, we don't agree on important issues, on really important issues, particularly on the positive. I think he clearly considers himself a cultural Christian, right?

like like Dawkins and that's a problem yeah so though I was happy to see this I don't know if you've seen Dawkins walked back a little bit yeah yeah that I probably shouldn't have and but what's revealing like

I think he's right to walk it back that he didn't actually mean what he said, but he can't, he doesn't know what he means. No. Yeah. I mean, this is the key about, I think I'm doing a talk, I'm doing a talk, I think, when am I doing this? Yeah.

Oh, yeah, Mackinac Center next week. I'm doing it next week at Mackinac Center about Western Civilization. And, you know, the Mackinac Center, they're quite religious. And, you know, the whole point of the talk is going to be, yeah, it looks like I support Western Civilization and you support Western Civilization.

But we're not supporting the same thing. It's not the same thing. And we have to – if we don't define what it is that we're actually supporting, if we don't define what Western civilization is properly, then the good in Western civilization is going to die out. Because to them, Western civilization means Christianity. It just does. And I think to – Maui is better than that, but –

To a large extent for Murray, I think. And I've seen him with Holland, who thinks everything is Christianity, basically support that position. I don't think he quite holds that. But I think he thinks that Christianity plays a huge positive role in Western civilization, and we think it plays a huge negative role in Western civilization. Yeah, I had that at Clemson. I talked about that at Clemson, and...

The students, very bright students, but you could see the cognitive dissonance. They just couldn't. They agreed with a lot of what I was saying. But then as soon as it came to Christianity, Western civilization is not Christian. You know, it was a real struggle for them. All the questions, almost all the talk nominally was in Israel, Palestine. But almost all the questions were about Western civilization and Christianity. And it was fascinating.

And the faculty were bemused as well. So it was a conversation over dinner afterwards too. Daniel says, any prediction on the future of America? Are we destined to some form of authoritarianism? I don't think we're destined. And so...

It's both, I think, theoretically, but also practically important that one not think of it as destined. So Ayn Rand was adamant. She was adamant even about how hard it is to make predictions, let alone that it's obvious that this is the only outcome that's possible. But even to think what's likely, she thought it's very difficult to do that.

And that if you don't have evidence that this is inevitable, and again, it's very, very, very hard to have evidence that it's inevitable.

That then you have to act and you have to fight so there's a way in which if thinking Oh like we're destined for authoritarianism It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's like what can you do? So don't do anything like what death and yes, so if nobody does anything to fight then we are Death but we're not testing. It's the you've given up in in effect. I

But so, no, I do not think authoritarianism is some inevitability, but it is the way we're moving. So you need people to push against this and, um,

There are people pushing against it, but I think particularly in the legal sphere, and it's important to support these people. Like I would support, again, we talked about how the Congress as that branch is caving in to the president, but I would support any congressman that I thought is just willing to sort of...

exert some of the power of Congress. So some of these people have said, like, yeah, the president shouldn't really have the power to impose tariffs like this. And he shouldn't. It's not clear he even does. So there's going to be legal push on that. But that... So there's things...

And specific people, causes that you can support. I'm supportive of some of the organizations that are pushing back on the immigration things, for instance. And it would be crazy for them to think, well, but it's inevitable that we're going to have authoritarianism, so what's the point of doing this? Richard says, I'm taking objectivism through Ayn Rand's fiction and discovered I have some psychological resistance to objectivism.

What guidance can you provide for introspecting that resistance? He says, I'll ask Aaron too.

Well, one is good to notice that. If you are really fighting the ideas for a certain reason, it's to notice, yeah, I seem to be doing this. And even if you don't know the reason, but it's like I've got some... I'm starting to see that, yeah, maybe this is right or maybe this is true, and I'm sort of resistant to go there. That's just a good thing to note. And then it's to think...

what are, like, why do I think I'm resistant to this? And there's, here's possibilities, not exhaustive, so none of these might fit, but you have to, like, really think about it and think, yeah, is that what's happening? There's people who will equate a philosophy and a religion for various reasons. So, I'm coming to see it thinking, yeah, Ayn Rand's right about this, or this idea is true. It's

am I starting to swallow a religion? And again, and that's not how I think of myself. And maybe rightly and for good reasons, like you think, yeah, I don't want to just follow along. That's not what I do. But is it? Are you following along or do you actually see that it's true? And to be able to distinguish. But it's not an easy thing to distinguish. So there's people who, the more it gets systematic and say, yeah, this idea makes sense and that, and this, they connect together. It's more like,

well, am I falling for a religion? Look, I've got a system of ideas. Or it can be because modern education and culture is

Certainty is simplistic. So, and Ayn Rand's certain, like what she projects is certainty. I think it's an earned certainty, but there's an easy way to think about it, thinking, yeah, but there's got to be something wrong. Because someone who's this certain, and it has echoes of the religious aspect, because these two things go hand in hand. So you can have, in effect, a suspicion of certainty.

That you don't really know you have and it's sort of in the – and so you can find – I would put that as you feel a kind of psychological resistance. You see it's true, but certainty is for morons or religious types. So those are two, for instance, that I –

I've seen people who, yeah, and it is, yeah, but it doesn't change the fact that this idea is true. And I've got to get over this. So it's a good thing to know, and then you have to probe it. And don't be, like, you have to really probe it. So neither of those might be explanations for you. And then you have to think, well, what else is going on? Anne says, I think this is to you. You said Harris called Trump a fascist without backing it up.

Were you saying she shouldn't call him that or that she should have used your points? I don't remember saying that, but it is true, I think, that the accusations of fascists are made way too easy. That is, anything they don't like,

will be labeled, this is fascism. And you empty the term, one, you empty the term of meaning, but it's also what you do is the people who are not sort of Trump's base, but people supporting him,

Will be disturbed by some of the elements of real authoritarianism They will be disturbed by but if you call everything that's happening fashion, then it they'll tune it out and

And this is just another of the people who hate him saying he's engaged in fascism. So if you make that kind of accusation, you have to be able to explain it in detail. What do you think the fascism and if fascism is cutting government positions?

Yeah. Like if that's fascism, then it loses all meaning. And just thinking, well, but is fascism bad then? Like you can never reduce the size of government? And yeah, so it definitely can be counterproductive. And by so much of the left, it's counterproductive of what they're doing. Not your average algorithm. I don't know how it could be that so many intelligent people think

can wall off a part of their mind and believe in something that a part of their mind must know is not true. So a lot of people struggle with the idea that people evade and people really do. It's a recurring question I get on these shows. I think the more you think about the motivations involved...

the more understandable that it becomes. And it's... So a few things about that. It is not true that people's default motivation is that they're seeking the truth. And then you have to do something to warp that. It's most people's...

basic motivation is not that. This is part of the Fountainhead. It's a different novel from Ayn Rand's other novels. It's the one that's most set in...

kind of just a contemporary world, a contemporary America. And you can't get from the film. The perspective is most people are seeking the truth in it. No, most people are second handed in various kinds of ways. And it doesn't mean they're oblivious to the truth, but it's the truth's conditional and it's on a leash. And, and so it's not the bold pursuit of the truth. It's, you know,

Yeah, I'll take that if it's convenient, not too threatening. But if it is, I will start to tune it out. And you have to think of it more like that. So if you can't get, if you were thinking about in regard to Trump, if you can't get that people like him for some understandable reasons,

Then you think that, well, the whole thing's crazy. But if you think, if you can get to the position of thinking, yeah, there's some pushback against woke and people respond to that. And then you

If it's going to be, yeah, but what he's doing with immigration and so on, isn't there something really troublesome? Well, no, he's sending back gang members and he's doing this. But it's because they still want, yeah, but he's tough on woke and he's going after it. And I want that. And...

If you think, well, but if you start thinking Trump has real problems, it's going to jeopardize that. Then it's you sort of downplay the problems. And it's and I like I've had many, many conversations. It's yeah, it's not too good, but it's a one off case like this. And it's and it's starting to fudge. But you have to see this. It's motivated by something, not just, OK, now the person is sort of blind to reality. That's not what's happening.

Chris asks, I'm seeing list after list that put AOC as the most likely Democratic candidate for 2028. How likely is an AOC versus Vance election in 2028? I don't know. So I've seen some of the stories because the rallies that she and Sanders are doing are getting big crowds and so on. I agree with the...

People who think this is, they're further out of touch in the sense that they think they could win a general election like this. It will be, it will be a way of handing someone like events an election if they do it. And this is like how bad the mainstream slash like leaning statist people

People are. So if you remember after Trump's win in 2016, a lot of media outlets like the New York Times, but just a lot of people who thought of themselves as the mainstream was like,

Yeah, we don't really seem to understand the country. And we probably ignored the middle of the country for so long. We've got to start really investigating. What are their grievances and why do they seem so pissed with us? And whatever the coastal elites are out. But I don't think when you look at that in large numbers,

That there was genuine soul searching in regard to that. There were some individuals who I think had some genuine curiosity. Like, why is it that these people thought Trump's better than Hillary Clinton? But I think the vast majority, they're not interested in that. And they showed that. And that's,

really bad. It's a form of pretense of thinking these people, maybe they had some legitimate grievance, and they do have some legitimate, that's the whole thing, they do have some legitimate grievances, and there was too much of a hand-waving towards this. So I think there's probably particularly some of the crowds that were around, there's too much of a focus on

Trump and his base are crazy. Not seeing, yeah, but there's so much that's crazy of what's going on. I do think Trump and his base are crazy. But it's not, I think it's the only thing that's crazy. And part of the way the New York Times and the Washington Post and so on function is crazy. Yeah.

Michael, shouldn't generals, members of ICE and high-ranking military personnel be given directives to side with the Supreme Court over the president before they take those positions? I mean, if you take seriously when people, what they're swearing is an oath to the Constitution, that has to mean something. And I don't think it has to mean you have to side with the Supreme Court or something like that. But in a division of...

uh, power system that we have, there are certain things that the court has the jurisdiction. It gets the rule and it gets the final say. And in that sense, yes. Like if a court has ruled, what a note to the constitution means is yeah. Like the constitution says the Supreme court on this issue in this has the final say, and that's the end. So, so,

So yes, in a broader sense, like it has, it has, and it should have a meaning that you're swearing an oath to uphold the constitution. Part of the challenge now is that he's chosen people to those positions who, you know, clearly hold their Alliance to Trump and not to the constitution. Michael, have you, have you done the numbers? Do you add about a, Oh, he's asking me, I guess. Do you add about a thousand new subscribers per year or every six months?

It really depends. Right now, I'm not adding many subscribers. I seem to be losing quite a few over Trump, I think. I mean, we're still adding small amounts, but typically I add anywhere from 100 to 300 subscribers a month, if that's helpful. So over a year, I should add more than 1,000, and some years significantly more than 1,000. It depends. If I get on a good podcast...

subscription go up a lot. If I get good publicity, if like now I'm mainly talking about Trump, I lose a lot of people. So it varies over time. Thomas, what's the possibility that Trump's second presidency will be so bad that having J.D. as VP, that Trump alone will end the national conservative movement? So what's the possibility his presidency is so bad that the national conservative movement will go away?

I don't think there's any possibility of that. So it might be that it's harder for it to gain power, but that's not the same as it going away. And I don't know how much Trump will be seen as representing. Yeah, I don't think he will. They're trying to use him. I mean, it's both directions. Like he's trying to use them.

And he has a certain kind of that, that many people like this, a, a,

a feel like he is a people person in a certain kind of way and so he was criticized a lot for taking vance as um his running mate but i think he knew what he was doing in regard and there's a way what like he's trying to use them and there's a way they think they can use him um and it how that will play out it's much more likely i think that they're using him

Yeah, and I think they're the only intellectual movement on the right. I think they're going to – they dominate that. They'll morph. They'll change. They'll adapt to what Trump does. They're it. I mean, the better right, the better conservatives are being completely marginalized. I mean, they don't have any following. And that's why I won't – I mean, it's an intellectual movement that's not going to go away because even if, like, Trump –

It's seen as failing and is thought of, well, the failure is some because he had some connection to national conservative. That's not how an intellectual movement will go away. Does psychology need a philosophical foundation? I think objectivism would be the best philosophy with its reality-based morality.

Yes. So I do. Basically, any science needs a philosophical foundation, but psychology in particular, because it's a specialized study of consciousness. If you don't have the basic principles about thinking about consciousness that are correct, then.

you're going to just go completely wrong in psychology. I mean, one of the most obvious ways is when you had materialism in psychology

philosophy you had psychology like behaviorism in psychology that doesn't even think you're conscious and yeah you can't get anywhere if that's what so you need a base that the philosophy is establishing and the basic issue in philosophy is how to think about consciousness's relationship to reality and i think objectivism's view is right in regard to that so in that sense it would form the base of a proper psychology yeah

Michael says, do the thinkers behind MAGA, he puts thinkers in quotes, think that making us less of a consumer materialistic nation will somehow make us spiritually richer and less nihilistic if we don't have the option to shop on Amazon as much? Yes, in a certain kind of way, I do. So if the...

So this is, I think, an element of what one saw in fascist movements of

The scorn of materialism, material comforts that makes people soft. So the people who push, we need national service because that is, like if we had a war, that would be the greatest thing that we could have said. But even if we have this kind of hard work

where they learn some kind of, like it's a bogus, but learn a work ethic. There's an element of that that I think they actually believe it. Because it is in part what a religious mentality looks like.

that people are falling in line and are doing their duty is one way to put it. And that they think of that as, and it does have a, it's spiritually bad, but it has a spiritual, like this is how people should be thinking. And we need to mold people that again, that they have this kind of more obedient character where they think, like it has real meaning to them of, yeah, I've got to do my duty.

That is an element that is real. It's a perverse spiritual dedication, but it is a spiritual dedication. Hopper Campbell, I find it hard to believe less than 100 years after the fall of Nazi Germany, we're going to do it all again. I don't think we're saying we're going to do it all again, particularly not in that particular form.

This is the conference where we just did in Berlin. I talked a little bit about this, and I think I'm going to, I mean, my talk is going to be about saving the Enlightenment, and I think I'm going to talk some about this, that it, I think that there is an element of something happening again, but if one holds it so concretely as, well, what we're going to have is concentration camps, and it's,

No, that to repeat history doesn't that's not what it needs to mean to repeat it. But that there's that the opposition of that's the to think of the Trump phenomenon, but more broadly, I think populism around the Western world. You have to see in what they're say they're in opposition to.

And the plausibility of people thinking, yeah, we need someone who's going to stand up to this. That's part, I think, of what's repeating. But in a different but never a simpler form. And you have to think of it like that. You have to try to really think what gives this appeal versus just thinking, okay,

These whatever, however you want to put it, Trump's base, MAGA people, populist around the Western world. They're all crazy. And so and one of the phenomena I think one should take seriously. And that's something I've been thinking more about. I know people who I think of as good who are.

have embraced these kinds of things in whole or in part. And so you can just sort of brush it all away as well. They're now all irrational or something like that. Or there's deeper dynamics going on. And my view is it's the second. So that's part of what I want to talk about probably at Ocon. Yeah. I think particularly on the issue of immigration, both.

Here and in Europe, especially, you know, in Europe, the dynamics are a little different than here, but it's still, it's still immigration is still, there's something there that people are really upset about and offended by that I think is still wrong, but it's not crazy. Harper, once intellectuals dumbed down the population at a certain level, does fascism become inevitable? So I think we've answered that.

Yeah, I don't think of it as exactly as dumbed down. But if you think of it as the intellectuals have conditioned people, yes. And that's sort of the part of what the ominous parallels is about. But part of the reason I don't think of it as dumbed down is my view when you look at the 20th century is

The appeal of fascism is to the more educated people. The appeal of socialism is to the less educated people. So Marx thought communism is going to come in Germany and the leading intellect. It's not what came. Communism goes to Russia where the people are backward, uneducated, because...

I don't think anybody who has some experience with the modern world can really think that if we abolish private property, everything's going to work well. Some person who hasn't been educated, hasn't been in capitalism, think, yeah, we just took people's property over, everything's going to work. So the fascist was...

Yeah, we're not going to just take everybody's properties. We're going to take their lives in effect. They still own property, but we'll tell them what to do. That appeals to a more educated mind of thinking, well, yeah, maybe that could work. You can't just socialize everything and think. And so that's the sense in which it's not, that's partly why I resist the dumbing down, but it is a conditioning of people to think this could work.

Yeah, and I think also egalitarianism appeals to a certain type of person. Fascism keeps the... I mean, there's hierarchy, there's a semblance of merit, but it's, you know, so better people at the top, and there's a, you know, let's see, Meccano...

Advice for one in their 20s drowning in melancholy for months over messing up a relationship. The sort of, she was the one, nothing else is as good.

I'd be suspicious of that conclusion that in your 20s that it's one chance that it's gone. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what you should be rethinking. And it's hard because you're in the motion of the breakup and the, you know, melancholy of all of that. But you've got to get out there and you've got to.

there's every reason to believe that there's not one person. We're not matched up in some mystical way to have just one person that we mate with. And we like people for different reasons. You could find somebody else who's very different than this woman who will be the one in a different way. So you've got to get over this idea that there's some, it's almost a religious idea that

God has assigned you somebody. There is no such assignment. There isn't a one. Yeah. And the more you can have the opposite perspective, which is,

I was able to do it once. Why can't I do it again? Versus sort of, I was lucky that it happened once. It will never happen again. But if you really think of it, no, this was, I was in a relationship that was good. And partly because I was good, like in then, yeah, you can do it again and you can find somebody else. So we've got two hours, but still have a bunch of questions. So hopefully you're okay. Okay. Chris, the way that,

Obrego Garcia's clothing and tattoos are being used as evidence of gang involvement. Reminds me of the West Memphis Three. Are you familiar with that case? No. I mean, I might, and certainly not under that name. If maybe the description of the case, I would, it would ring a bell. Yeah, me neither under the name. But I agree that they're using those characteristics to

identify him and therefore penalize him is a travesty. And part of what I've read about it is that

there it makes i'd still so there's an issue in a court of law what meets an evidentiary standard and so on and it can't just be well they've got tattoos or something like that but but supposedly for some gangs tattooed like it really tells you something about membership whereas for others it doesn't and the part of the allegations for is for some of the gangs here it doesn't tell you a

affiliation. And certainly not that you'll have a lot of false positives. Maybe there's not in one direction, it tells you something, but not everybody with this tattoo is part of the gang. Even though everyone in the gang has this tattoo, not everyone who has this tattoos in the game. And that, so like, that's part of what the worry is here. So that's one kind. And, and it is,

The more you're trying to move quickly, you just, oh, yeah, like we made a mistake. We thought everything works like this gang. But no, there's all kinds of different gangs that work in different ways. And that's part of just the sort of the atmosphere around it.

everything the administration is doing. But there's a different issue of whether you can convict someone based on tattoos with no other corroborating evidence. And that's for courts of law to have real evidentiary standards that that can happen. Andrew, how would you characterize the modern intellectual trend in epistemology? If that doesn't mean like among intellectuals or something, if that means the modern trend is

inability to distinguish between faith and reason. Thomas says, I'm reading more in RAND and have lengthy, detailed questions about the philosophy. Are there any intellectuals, fellows at AOI that I could email, call for my objectivist questions?

So, yes, certainly can email. That's not a guarantee you'll get replies to everything. But for many of us, our emails, you can find them on the website. Then we have things like discussing objectivism, which are I believe.

I think it still is. You can drop into three. It's a kind of subscription thing for people who go to 12, 15 of these where you're reading something by Ayn Rand and one of the scholars at ARI is having a session where we're talking about it and you meet with some fellow people interested in Ayn Rand. So it's discussing objectivism and it's...

The first three you can just drop into for free, and then if you want to continue, it's a subscription. So that's another place, like if you're really reading the stuff and have questions, you can see in advance what the essay is and drop into one or two of those to see if you can get. And you could join ARU or apply for ARU and become a student there, and then you'll get a lot of these questions answered.

Thomas also asked, how can I transition from altruism to selfishness in friendships? I'm in this conflict where in my initial reaction, I don't want to start a friendship because I don't want to be a servant to somebody. So I think the important thing is to hold it as a positive, not as I don't want to be somebody's servant. And if...

I've met people like this in their encounter with objectivism. Objectivism wakes them up to the fact that their relationships aren't real trades. And the positive is you want to be a trader. You should think, like, I'm bringing something to this relationship. There's a reason why people would want to spend time with me, be around me. And I should be getting something from the people I'm spending time with. So we're both gaining. We're both benefiting.

People who've been raised in a sort of very altruistic way

frame where the expectation is always that you're to give and it's often women are raised like that you're to give other people to receive it so can find yeah i want to stop doing that and think like the solution to that is not be in relationships but it's rather to change the nature of the relationship it's not like withdraw and because people i don't want to be a servant to people it's rather try to have relationships where there's

Like, you know what you want to get from the relationship. And thinking of the other person as, yeah, they should be thinking of bringing something to the relationship and benefiting too. So trade means you're both gaining. James, I think it's worth the cost for ARI to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times or Washington Post. We're in 1925 Germany. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I'm skeptical because you need a lot of explanation for this. So part of the that objectivism doesn't fit into any of today's camps. We're not part of any tribe and so on. There's a way in which there's so many people, again, as it would be put today, that they're on the left.

who think of themselves as, we're the ones fighting fascism, we're the ones who tell you, and no, you're the ones who have helped bringing fascism to the country. So that kind of ad would so easily be taken as, yeah, we're on the side of the academics, and no, they're the main reason that we've got Trump.

And that's part, but part that to say there's some push against the elites means in significant part, there's a push against the intellectuals. And that push is understandable. That's part of the issue. And if you don't see that that's part of what's going on, then you're not understanding, I think, the Trump phenomenon.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think we got that much out of the four-page ads after 9-11. And that was an easier, in some ways, an easier topic to deal with than I think this is. But there's something similar in that what I think what happened with that ad is, so if you're asking the way the reader of whatever, New York Times, Wall Street Journal is processing it, it would be, oh, you're like the neocons. Yep.

And even the ad we took out had some quoting of neocons in it. And we know we're not. We know we're the op. But to explain that in an ad...

So that the person getting it will be, oh, okay, these people are really different than the neocons. So that's why an ad here, there will be put on a certain camp on the right. Oh, you're like the neocon. Here, an ad like this against, whatever, 1925 will be put, oh, you're like the academics who are writing about fascism and have been said they're worrying about Trump. And no, we're not like that. Yeah.

Thomas, are there any objectivist courses or classes that focus on teaching polemics? Well, there's certainly an element of that in understanding objectivism. There's a section of proper versus improper approaches to polemics. So I suspect from the question it's

how to be especially effective in polemics. And there's some of that in that course, but that's more a course about how polemics can screw up your thinking because you adopt the context of what you're arguing against. And that's Leonard Peikoff's understanding of objectivism. Andrew says, Peikoff claimed he created his course objectivism through induction as a result of frustration in failing to be able to educate rationalists.

Why do you think rationalism is a popular affliction? I mean, for a variety of reasons, it's a popular affliction. So teaching people abstract ideas when someone else has formed those ideas is difficult. And a shortcut will seem like, well, start with the ideas and

And then we can talk about examples of them and maybe a little bit of where they come from. But there's a way in which that whole education, like it's difficult, it's inherently difficult to do this, of how to teach abstract ideas to minds that haven't yet formed them. And there's a way in which

You can teach it in a way that makes it seem like, oh, the idea's already here. And rationalism is a perspective of the idea's already here. There's not that big of a question of how did they get here because they're already here. And our education system has doubled or tripled down on the worst form of that error, which is, and take it of science and math, so often are taught, here's the formulas, here's

Sort of memorize these formulas. We'll give you all kinds of problem sets where you have to apply them. But why do we have these formulas? Who created them and why? What problems were they dealing with where they couldn't deal until they discover these ideas and so on? So, oh, Newton has three laws. Here's the three laws and now start. And that makes it seem like, oh, the ideas are just out there in reality.

and just go grab them and start using them. And that's sort of the rationalist whole approach to ideas. So the major reason I think it's so prevalent is it's the method by which ideas are taught in our educational system. Action Jackson says, great to see Ankar on again. It's been a while. John says, I've corresponded over the years with people who knew Ayn Rand and they say the existing biographies are accurate.

I think we've talked to people in New England and they say the biography is inaccurate. So take that for what it's worth. And I would also say, so yeah, for sure, people who know, but various things have been released.

where they were private before, like even something like workshops that she held on ITOE, the fiction writing course, things like that, where you're seeing things that were not meant for publication in the form that you're seeing them, where she does not come across at all like the way the biographies present. Yeah, and there's so much of that that the biographies ignore. They just don't, it's as if that material doesn't even exist.

You can see real flaws in it without actually having known her, just based on the published evidence. Daniel, does a country that reelects Trump deserve a dictatorship? Well, it depends what deserve means. So there's a perspective of...

You get the kind of government you deserve, but deserve just means there that there's a causality to it.

it doesn't mean that everybody morally deserves this. And if there's a lot of people who are resisting this, like, what does it mean? Oh, but yeah, but you deserve a dictatorship. No, you're trying to resist this. And anybody who's like really pro-American, what they deserve is to live in freedom. And so, but from a causal perspective, if too many people turn tribal and

that you'll get what they want is some form of follow the leader, some form of authoritarianism. Yeah. So there's a sense in which causally, this is the outcome you're going to get. And in that sense, it's earned. But it doesn't mean that people who are actually pro-freedom morally deserve this. Neo, doesn't it make more sense that the world is platonic, given our need for experts, everything from cars, mechanics, to philosophers? Also, since you're Canadian-

Are you voting for Pierre or for Connie? I don't... I haven't voted in the recent elections because I don't follow the Canadian politics enough to think that I know what I'm doing, voting. The... I don't get the platonic element. So...

So relying on experts is not blindly following authority. And if that's like the connection that Plato thinks you have to have philosopher kings who you can't understand what they're doing, but you sort of have to have faith that they know what they're doing and have seen the forms and are well motivated and so on.

That's not what it means to rely on experts. You have to have reasons for thinking a person's an expert. You have to have reasons for thinking they know something. And to know something means it's in principle accessible to anybody and everybody. Like I don't think of a doctor I go to who specialize, I don't know, in colon cancer as something.

Yeah, like I could never learn this. I can't understand this, but somehow he's been able to figure this out. So I've got to turn my life over. No, it's he's specialized in this field.

I could learn it if I specialized in it. And I want to see that he can, in effect, explain it to me, a non-expert, in a way that makes it, yeah, okay, like that's plausible that that's the causality. And if I studied it more, I'd be more convinced that that is the cause. But yeah, so it's not at all like you're blindly following, if you're properly relying on experts. Andrew says, I'm interested in Rand personally as I'm interested in his psychology background.

Through her journals, letters, and 100 voices, you sense a hero, brilliant, benevolent, lived to morality, and achieved greatness. Yeah, and I certainly don't want to – I said that I wasn't especially interested in her personally. I don't think there's something weird if somebody is in it. And I know, I mean, there's people who love working in the archives. It's just – it's not a pressing issue for me. Yeah.

Action Jackson says, is there any point in discussing Ayn Rand with someone whose starting point is Ayn Rand was a psychopath? Yes, if you have some reason to think that person will question their starting point. So I...

I brought up way earlier some forms of people thinking, oh yeah, I know Ayn Rand just loves the rich, hates the poor. There's all kinds of variations on that where it's including, yeah, she's for selfishness or there's some way in which she must be a psychopath or something like that. And if you ask...

what have you read of Ayn Rand's that you've, and if they tell you nothing and they, yeah, maybe like, maybe that's embarrassing that I have such a strong view and I haven't read anything. Then yeah, you might be able to get somewhere with that person. If they just keep telling you, oh no, but I know that she's a psycho. I don't have to read anything. It's all. Yeah. Then there's no point in further engaging. Action says, is leaving auto-completion on, on my phone, an example of being second-handed? No, no,

You know better than that. Jonathan says, Ankur, thank you for so many years of outstanding and inspiring scholarship. Thank you, Jonathan. P. Gupta says, is it okay to evade and be happy about dismantling and cut back of some of the Department of Education, which seemed unimaginable a few months ago? Why would it involve evade?

I mean, we haven't talked about Doge very much. I mean, it's come up a little bit, um,

I think the long in the sort of intermediate to long term, it will likely make these kinds of this kind of cutting much more difficult. I wish I just wish they had done it honestly. And and even if it was like this is part of what I mean by honestly. So not if they had done it way better than what they did, just honestly, if they had said no.

Yeah, we're cutting all kinds of things. We're doing it super quickly. There's all kinds of things we don't know what we're doing. We might even fire good people. We might try to rehire some of them. Some of them we might not try to rehire. But

If we don't do it sort of at the start and quickly, it will never it will be just be tied up in the bureaucratic pushback and so on. But if it was much more open and not all of this is fraud, but many of these programs we just don't like and we want to bring to an end, not ever. If then I think it. Yeah. Something positive happens.

Could it happen both short term and longer term in regard to it? But because of the way in which it's done and that there's so much misrepresentation and lying about what is done, it makes it easy. The pushback is sort of like this is what it looks like to cut government.

And it, yeah. And very little is being achieved. And so it, you know, big promises are being made. Very little is achieved. And the idea will be, okay, well, this is the best you can do. And it's far from the best that can be done. Yeah. It really is. So, you know, I don't think you need to not be happy that the Department of Education is being cut back.

As long as you can hold the broader context of what Doge is doing more broadly. But yeah, Department of Education is smaller. That's a good thing. It's not as great as it could be, but it's a good thing. Lucinda says, can't watch live right now, but very excited to watch this later. Everyone remember to reach the Super Chat goal. Thank you, Lucinda. Lucinda needs to join the AIU at some point. She's a hardworking student and really smart.

What about music that is primarily percussion based? I've heard objectors feed bad about this, including Iran. I recall in regard to rap music. I mean, percussion is part of music, so I don't know what. You know, I have a problem with things that have a constant beat. Nothing ever changes except that constant beat. I find it mindless music.

And kind of primitive, very, very primitive. And it's a little similar to what Ayn Rand wrote about folk music. It's a primitive form of music. It's entertaining up to a point, but it can't be more than that. Yeah. I mean, I don't... I'm not a consumer of rap, but I can...

It doesn't seem like it's all like that, though. So that's again, like as a form. Yeah. When music becomes monotonous, it starts going outside of even being music because you start to tune it out. But yeah, that doesn't tell you like that's all rap is or that everything there is to it. I don't like rap, but it doesn't mean there's nothing there. I know people who do.

Yeah. Daniel says, if labor theory exalts the virtue of physical labor, how does that comport with mainstream leftism that scoffs at materialism as unimportant and inferior?

Well, it depends what you mean by mainstream leftism. Like this was part of the change from the old left to the new left. And it was a change that Ayn Rand saw and that she commented on. So the old left promised material abundance.

If you think of Marx as prominent among this, but many of the socialists promised, we're going to out-compete capitalism. And when the facts of reality showed otherwise, they basically had two choices. It was, yeah, we're pro-material progress, abundance, prosperity, and therefore have to give up socialism, communism, all that.

Or we're going to give up material abundance and prosperity. And what the new left did was, well, we want to cling to our statism and control over people's lives. So we'll say, I'm going to put something like, now we'll tell people it's better, you're better off to go barefoot. And that's part of what the environmental movement was. It's, oh, okay, we can't produce abundance, so abundance is bad. Yeah, and that doesn't contradict the fact that they think that

Physical labor is how everything is produced. Yeah. You know, you can still be poor or you can still advocate poverty and still believe that. Clark says, do you expect the objectivist movement to be, did you expect the objectivist movement to be this small and fringe 68 years after the publication of Atlas Shrugged? That's over two generations of exposure. Well, I wasn't around. I would have been, I think, if I were young, I

reading Atlas Shrugged in sort of pre-publication form, I would have been in the camp that said, the culture's cooked. In 10 years, it's going to all change. Because like,

The ideas are so forcefully presented. Who's not going to see them? I would have been in that category. I would have been wrong. And not just wrong, sort of, the whole perspective is wrong. That's not how ideas work. It's not how fast philosophical change happens. But I would have been... So...

Yes. So I would like if I were around at that time, I would be surprised by how gradual the change is. But it's just because I would have had a wrong view, not because the change has been so slow and it should have been and we should have expected it to been super fast. Yeah, I have a very impatient listening audience. They want change now.

Kim asks, what led to pragmatism originating and spreading in the U.S. as opposed to other countries? This is something that if you read Dr. Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels, there's a lot of discussion of pragmatism.

in there, including its appeal. And one of the ways he characterizes it, which I completely agree with, is something like, it's not necessarily word for word, but something like, it's a philosophy designed to appeal to Americans.

So it's a philosophy that promises the cash value of ideas. We're not going to get bogged down into theory, spend our time in the ivory tower. We want ideas that work.

And what America has done is transformed a country into the greatest, wealthiest country in the world. They want stuff that really works. And we have a philosophy that the whole emphasis is...

Not hot air, but ideas that work. And if they stop working, we pick up other ideas. And that was the appeal of, oh, okay, so this is thinkers who actually value practical action in the way that Americans do. And that was why it was, yeah, it really is a philosophy designed to appeal to Americans.

Andrew says, do you think collectivism is a psychological consequence of incorrect epistemology that leads to an impression of cognitive dependence? It's in part. So most of these kinds of things go hand in hand, or putting it a little differently, there's vicious circles. So collectivism is

It preaches the idea that you really can't think on your own. The individual is hopeless. You only think in a group. And the more a person absorbs that, they stop. Like, what's the point of thinking by myself if it doesn't work and so on? And they're

But the more you do that, the more helpless you are. If you really do give up thinking, which is what collectivism is, to give up individual thinking, which means to give up thinking, then you do feel out of control. And collectivism seems to make more sense then. Like, yeah, as an individual, I don't have any control and I'm not able to do things. But collectivism promises, well, but the group will be powerful. So you move more in that direction. But then you're preached those ideas. And yeah, so it forms a vicious circle.

Do you think Josh Shapiro might be able to beat Vance, governor of Pennsylvania? Yeah, yeah, yes. I think there were a few Democrats that could probably beat Vance. Yeah. So it's – if my view of Trump is right, that he's not a power luster –

I think it's still the case that a person who wears the power lust on their sleeve turns off Americans. It's partly why Hillary Clinton really turned people off. I can understand why she did. In comparison to Bill Clinton, who I don't think of, he's more also, like he liked the spotlight to be the circle of attention. There was an element, there's an element of,

power, lust, and Bill Clinton, I think. But he didn't wear it on his sleeve in the way that Hillary Clinton does. And I think someone like a J.D. Vance projects much more a kind of contempt and, well, I should be able to wield power and crush people. And someone like a Josh Shapiro doesn't. He seems more American than J.D. Vance. And I still think the electorate would respond. If that's the choice, they'll respond to the person who seems more positive.

Neil says, wouldn't it be strategic for ARI to assign people to politics, assign people to politics, who can help spread its ideas? And have you met with YouTuber Tick History?

So yes, on the second he came to the conference in Berlin, I didn't actually get a chance to spend a lot of time with him because, I mean, we were both much more talking to the audience who came to the conference than to each other, including like during the breaks and so on.

So what was the first again? It was the, oh, strategically assigning people to politics. Yeah. I mean, you can't do that. People have to have an actual interest in it. But I would say this. I'm not in the camp, if there is such a camp,

It's too soon to go into politics. People shouldn't engage with it. It's the last thing that's going to change. Part of what we were talking about before, that it's a real problem that bad people go into politics. And I would support anybody who I think of as...

This person actually values America, even if I disagree with a whole slew of things. But they actually value the country, value the Constitution in a way that there's so much now hand-waving towards it. The national conservatives, I do not think, value the Constitution. They might say they do, but I don't think they actually do. And I would encourage anybody who I thought of having good motivation to

to go into politics, if they're interested, yeah, go, we need better people in politics. So I don't want to assign people there, but if people are interested in it,

Yes, I think you should go into it. There's positive things you can do if you don't have a sort of unrealistic view. Oh, I'm going to become president and change the whole country or something like that. But if you think, yeah, like maybe I could help Congress take back some of the power that it's ceded to the executive branch. And so and that's a long term goal of why I want to go into policy. So, yeah. And if you're well motivated, I'd support and encourage people to do that.

All right. Marylene says a full page New York Times ad costs one point four million and up. Yeah, definitely not doing that. I think it cost us two hundred thousand after 9-11. But we had dedicated donors. This is what they wanted to do. And basically two people funded those ads that we did in the New York Times and Washington Post.

Simon, why do theists distort causality by insisting on a first cause, ignoring that causality presupposes existence and action and not a beginning? Because most of the arguments for the existence of God are rationalizations.

So it's not, there's, you probably could count on one hand the people who are deeply religious, who they've been convinced by an argument to believe in God. It's they already believe in God. And then it's really, you just go by faith. Oh no, I've got arguments for why there is a God and things like the first cause argument and,

I mean, that argument is exploded by children. Well, if God's the first cause, who created God? And then if it's, well, he doesn't need a cause, well, why does the universe need a cause? A child can see through that reasoning, and that's part of what tells you that it's a rationalization. It's not why they hold the idea. It's they want you to think they hold the idea because of this argument, because then it's, oh, yeah, I'm rational just like you. Right.

All right, last question, I think. Does the minicarist political philosophy known as pro-paterianism have any meaningful degree of integration with objectivism, or is it too lacking in intellectual rigor and egoistic morality? Is it interesting in any ways?

Have you heard of these? No. No.

on the spectrum of how big the government is. And so minarchy is, anarchy is no government, like it's the smallest zero. Minarchy is a little one and then you have whatever, a mixed economy. That's, objectivism completely rejects that, that as though the essential is the size of government. The essential is what government does and

So it's the powers of government, not the size. And it has a positive view that government is a proper government is a positive. So it doesn't classify itself as minarchist. It doesn't think this is the right way to look at the political spectrum. It's rather, is the use of force under objective control, which means is it used only against the initiation of force?

And proper government, yes, and improper government, including no government, is the use of force is not used only in retaliation by objectively defined rules and principles. And anarchy is just everybody can use force when it strikes them as, yeah, we'd like to use force. That's not force under objective control. And then the other is

I suspect that propertarianism means of thinking of the essence of rights as they're about property. And no. So objectivism rejects that too. And there was some mention about egoism.

Rights are moral concepts, and the attempt to make property rights the fundamental in regard to rights, not it's the right to life and all the aspects, which includes earning and keeping property, is an attempt to make rights non-moral.

It's like property rights. Oh, you've made the stuff. So like somehow it belongs to you, but belongs to you means you are morally entitled to it. And then you need a moral perspective and a moral evaluation. It's not like you've made the stuff and now it's part of you. No, it's not literally part of you and somebody could take it. The whole thing is they would be wrong to take it, but wrong means morally wrong. So you need a moral perspective and the people and, and,

libertarians really at least sort of a wing or faction tries to make everything about property rights because they think of property rights as this bypasses moral argument moral evaluations now it doesn't actually and if you try to bypass that then you can't get to a political philosophy because a political philosophy says this

This is the right way to organize society, which means this is the good way as against the bad ways. And that's a moral perspective. Excellent. Thank you, Ankar. We've kept you at two and a half hours. Appreciate that. Thank you guys for all the questions. And I will see you guys tomorrow at some point. Ankar, I'll see you at the Ocon.

Yeah, definitely. But I'll see you probably in meetings on Zoom before then. Yeah, I think we have a meeting this week, actually. Yes, on Thursday. All right, good. Okay. Have a good night. Bye, Carl. You too. Bye, guys. Bye, everybody. See you all tomorrow.