Philosophical Issues of the Day -- With Greg Salmieri | Yaron Brook ShowNew Recording (draft)
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That's 20% off your first order at American-Giant.com. Code STAPLE20. Fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Yaron Brook Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Yaron Brook Show on this Monday, March 10th. It's Monday. We do interviews in the evening, and I'm

Extremely happy to have Greg Salmieri with me. Greg is a regular guest on the Iran Book Show. He is coming to us from the university, from Texas, from his home in Texas. But he is, of course, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, University of Texas in Austin. God. And hi, Greg. Hi, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. How about you? All right.

there seems to be an argument taking place downstairs between my son and my wife. So, uh, hopefully that's not picking up. So, so who wins those arguments? Um, no comment. He seems aggrieved by something. All right. Um, so hopefully that's not too distracting. Um,

So we don't have one specific theme for today's show. There's been an accumulation of some questions that, you know, I've talked about in the show and you've commented on and we thought it would make interesting for the show. So we're going to cover some of those. And then, of course, what makes this particularly interesting is what you guys have to ask, any questions you guys have. And as I've said...

And there's probably a bunch of questions on philosophy, on history of philosophy that I have given incomplete answers to, put it that way, that now is a good time to ask an expert. So it's a great time to ask Greg. I thought we'd start, maybe because it's the oldest, but start with some...

that came up about Plato and maybe in contrast to Aristotle. There was a question, I think, a while back that somebody asked about, was Plato an altruist? And how do we relate? Is altruism a modern concept? Was it invented by Christianity? Does it have older roots as an ideology? And are some of those roots, do they go back to Plato? Yeah.

If by altruism is a little ambiguous, it can mean a few things. So if we mean by altruism, the idea that other people are what we should be living for, we should be living for others. That's how Comte put it. And then that's a modern idea. You get Comte putting it in the that way in the 19th century. You have if you're going to have an earlier analog to that, it's it's

maybe there are some things in Stoicism, but I would say especially Jesus, this idea that you're, what you do to the least of my brothers is what you do. I want to be in this orientation towards other people, and particularly the, I think this is kind of very central to Christianity, to the least well-off other people, to the poor, et cetera, to the downtrodden, to the meek, et cetera. That is a particularly Christian thing, that is the orientation not just to other people, but to the

people that you might look down on. Um, but in Christianity, of course, it's not because you're actually going to be able to help those people. Um, Jesus didn't think you could accomplish much of anything, right? It's, um, to, uh,

show your devotion to God and to emulate God and not care for yourself and caring about those people. So that I think is a particularly Christian view. And then the modern view that you're serving other people is what I think you get in Comte and then in a little bit less of a gross form in Mill in utilitarianism and Bentham and other utilitarians.

But so if again, if we're talking about the serving other people in particular, then I think it's this modern view other people in effect taking the place of God as the thing to which you should sacrifice. But if the idea is that morality is about sacrificing and sacrificing yourself to something and other people just happen to, you know, be the people that this theory puts into that place.

Then the view is, of course, older and much more widespread. And so Kant, for example, Kant with a K, not Comte with a C, Kant is not an altruist in the sense of thinking you should have your life oriented around other people. He doesn't think you should be trying to achieve things for them any more than you should be trying to achieve values for yourself. What you should be doing is trying to live in the way that he thinks is rational, which is by being willing to sacrifice everything to these impersonal duties.

And there's a variant of that kind of view in Plato and the Stoics as well, an earlier form of the view that Kant is the kind of paradigm of. And it's a variant of, and I think maybe less virulent form of it, because it's not explicitly anti-self in the way that Kant's theory is. So Kant is...

Thinking of anything for you anything that promotes your happiness as an object of inclination or desire He calls it inclination and he's defining the moral by explicit Contrast to that whereas all the Greek philosophers including Plato Or just all the significant ones thought that it's best for you yourself to be virtuous and

And so in that sense, you can think that they're all egoists or have an egoistic element. Virtue is going to be good for you. It's your own flourishing life, etc. However, there's a sense in which some of the time they're thinking of virtue in a way where

The content of it is coming from a prior understanding of what's good for you. And these virtues are either part of that or a means to attain it or maybe some package deal of those two things. I think that you can find that in Aristotle. You can find that in a way in Epicurus. I think much wrong in both of their views. Some idea of it's intelligible how we're understanding this virtue as your good. And even in some of Plato's writings. But in other places in Plato and also especially in the Stoics,

They're thinking of what's good for you is or is largely about getting virtue. And the content of virtue is not at all derived from a prior understanding of your own good and sometimes is understood by contrast to the things that people ordinarily regard as good, so much so that we're starting to get a kind of proto version of the self is the opposite of value, which I think is what you get pure in Kant.

And it was one or two places where Plato approaches Kant on that. He says, you know, self-love is where bad actions come from in the laws. And to what extent is Aristotle a repudiation of that, of the worst in Plato?

Well, one way you could put it is Aristotle's an embrace of the best in Plato. This idea that virtue is what's good for you, virtue is the living up, is valuing your own soul and living up to your reason and so forth, which particularly in the early Socratic dialogues, there's a lot of and has a very egoistic flair to it. And some in the Republic and elsewhere also. But

Aristotle is much more explicit that there isn't any sacrifice ever involved in doing what's best for you. Sorry, in being virtuous, that virtue is the thing most worth having. Again, Plato in most moods will say things like that. But there is this passage where Plato says, or the Athenian stranger, one of the characters in the laws who's speaking for him, says that Plato,

you know, we shouldn't be self-lovers, we should be lovers of the good and of reason and indeed self-love is where everything bad comes from. And there are a few early passages in Aristotle or pseudo Aristotle that echo some of those themes, but in his main writing on ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics, he has this really bold passage that even though selfishness, self-love, philautos, you know, phil like in philosophy and autos, self, this is a term of appropriate. People use it as an insult.

And the people that people call selfish are typically bad people. They're thieves and so forth. But the virtuous man is actually more so a lover of himself. He loves himself more than anybody else. And we should be lovers of self in the way he is. And this is a really bold move, you know, reclaiming a term of opprobrium. And Aristotle doesn't do that kind of thing often, but he does it there with that term. And on a few other points where he's wanting to stress that what's good is good for you and you're like,

There's no conflict between what's right, what's rational, and what's best for you. So there's actually a question on Plato. So Helper Campbell asks, did Plato seek to destroy man's mind like Kant did? He just wasn't as good at it? I don't. I mean, people's motives when they do bad things are often mixed.

and it's hard to apportion exactly how much is the thing they claim that they're after and how much is it, which is often good, and how much is it something hateful and bad. Both Plato and Aristotle are very impressed with the developments in mathematics where they're forming axiom systems.

And they're trying to demonstrate geometric truths, you know, from fundamental things. They're trying to understand the heavens in similar terms. And both of them have this idea that there's something the mind is doing when you're doing this kind of work that's unique to human beings, that's really special, that you're kind of alive and being fully human when you're doing this kind of thing. And they really value that. And they also both contrast it to

Other more prosaic forms, as they would say, forms of reasoning, particularly ones involved in productive work. Every sandwich has bread. Every burger has a bun. But these warm, golden, smooth steamed buns? These are special. Reserved for the very best. The Filet-O-Fish and you.

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They associate this higher kind of reasoning with something you can do if you're an aristocrat at leisure, in effect, and not with the kind of business-y thinking that's leading to an emerging middle class in Athens. A guy, he doesn't even have ancestral wealth, and here he is manufacturing shields for the army and making a lot of money. And both of them are kind of look askance at some of those people. And so...

And they're not doing any of this kind of purely abstract reasoning that we, the philosophers, so value. So what's going on here? Is it a real appreciation for something uniquely human and powerful about the kind of abstract reasoning that they don't yet know how to relate to the rest of human life?

Right. And they couldn't know it yet. It had to be learned over time. And it was a great achievement when Francis Bacon and others put those things together. So is it like they're they're they're glimpsing this tremendous thing that the part of our human power and they don't know what to do with that? Or is it that they're resenting people who are working for a living and the emerging middle class? And it's a kind of, you know, lazy aristocrats slapping back at them. And I think, in fact, there's some of both motives in both thinkers, both Plato and Aristotle.

And, you know, it's hard to apportion how much of each in each. Plato, though, there is this other strand of real contempt for and hatred of worldly things. You know, philosophy is preparing for death, and he's drawn to asceticism in a way that Aristotle isn't. And I think that resentment towards...

bodily pleasures, resentment towards so many of the things of this world is a real part of Plato's motivation in a way that isn't part of Aristotle's, and that would be the kind of life-hating, mind-destroying part of it. But you wouldn't put him anywhere near a Kant? I mean, I don't have an x-ray into either of their souls. You get that much purer in Kant, and in Kant you have a reaction against happiness, right?

In a way that you don't have for Plato. You have the moralizing of the hatred of happiness. You have a very deeply Christian self-sacrificial strand that is not in Plato. And you have a fear that the Enlightenment is going to destroy altruism and are trying to protect the idea of sacrifice from the incursion of reason by, you know, rethinking reason. And that, I think, is a very different kind of motivation. You don't have anything like that in Plato, in my view.

All right, so a separate strand of questions that often come up have to do with the nature of free will, and particularly the unique perspective objectivism has on free will. So maybe you can give us a quick kind of summary of the objectivist position of free will, and then we've got some application, a few applications for that. The first point is that we have it. So free will is the ability to make choices.

And choices understood as real choices, things that change the future from what it would have been if you had chosen otherwise. There's that old, I think it's in Lawrence of Arabia.

There's a scene where you have the British military officer and the Muslim tribesmen and the tribesmen are saying, you know, everything's written, everything's written. And the Englishman is saying nothing is written. And it or, you know, this isn't written anyway. That is, the future is not set. I can make the future one way or another based on the choices that I'm making. It's not all faded. And

And that is the fundamental idea of free will, that the future is not set already. The future will be determined by what happens now, including by what you do now. And what you do now is not determined by the past. You have a choice in the moment. And the future can be multiple ways. That's the kind of core idea of free will. And...

objectivism embraces it. It's a pro, a clearly and explicitly pro-free will philosophy. And it identifies, identifies free will, um, specifically in the power we have over our own minds. So although much of what happens in us happens automatically by physiological causes that we don't have any direct control over, um, whether we think or not,

how we think, whether we raise or lower our level of attention, is something that we can control directly. And through our control of that, we shape our characters, our actions, and everything else. So the kind of locus of control is in the choice to engage or disengage your mind. And it's a choice you're making all the time. It's a choice to sort of, in effect, be in the driver's seat of your cognition or let the reins go and...

In effect, drift from moment to moment or in part to maintain that drift, pushing away thoughts you don't want to face. And that's kind of central idea of the objectives to you of free will. It's not wholly unique in the history of thought. I've noticed that people who are very on about free will and on about power and agency and choice tend to not all of them, but at a few important moments in the history of thought, tend to notice its connection to freedom.

engaging or disengaging your mind um probably the best writer on this and and the first to make really clear that he's endorsing free will as opposed to determinism and there's no um you know mushy area between them is the the um commentator on aristotle named alexander of aphrodisias and uh he's uh really fantastic on this wow john lock is very good on this

That free will consists in the kind of control you have first and foremost over your mind. And in particular, do you deliberate about something or not? Do you just go with how you feel in the moment or can you keep on thinking about it? Why do you think the deterministic view, the anti-free will view is so prevalent today among intellectuals from Sam Harris to prominent philosophers to pretty much everybody seems to be anti-free will?

Well, it's associated with science. I think part of that is because, in a way, because of Kant, though not exclusively. So there was a mechanistic view of man associated with science.

With Newtonianism, although I don't think Newton himself held it, but the idea like things are machines, we understand how machines work, we understand matter as working by things pushing against each other and colliding into one another and exerting forces on one another, kind of like a clockwork, right? And we understand how clockworks work. And we seem to be very complicated things made of parts like this. And so shouldn't we be, you know, like machines, like clockworks, in which case we would be

determined by what our parts do. And that tends to go with, although I don't actually think it's the right way of understanding machines, thinking of causation as a kind of mapping from past states to future states.

This was the past and this is the next. And you think about how a system evolves through states. And you think about causality that way. That, I think, is view of causation is very associated with Hume. But it's not new with Hume. Kant, when he comes on the scene, wants to save sacrifice and wants to save morality. And part of that is insisting that we have choice. But he associates choice with morality.

With God and immortality, with these three things that you have to believe exist, God, immortality, and free will, in order to function morally and sacrifice yourself, though you can't have any evidence that they exist.

and can't know they exist from looking out at the world. And so he has this kind of area where he makes room for mysticism, and then these things are in this area that you have to be mystical about. The real you, not that you can observe, but the you as exists outside of space and time must have choice and also must be immortal and so forth. Or at least you're entitled to believe that, and you have to believe it in order to function. You're entitled to believe it because you can't know it's false.

and you're entitled to because you need it to function and to function morally. So with that kind of company, God and immortality and a world you can't know anything about, free will is in fairly poor company. And that's one reason why it's been less believed in by scientifically minded people, I think, since. It's also more generally the way we think about science is that

fairly materialistic, and that's associated with the denial of free will. Although, fundamentally, the main reasons historically for why people haven't believed in free will have been theological. God knows everything, God controls everything, then you don't have any choice. So I think the way that the denial of free will has come into science has actually been through

the secularization of some religiously motivated errors, including religiously motivated ways of thinking about causality. But that's a kind of fairly deep issue in the philosophy of science, but it's infected how we think about cause and effect in the physical realm. And it's made it more natural to just think of science as going with, um, with determinism. So probably the most prominent intellectual out there who talks a lot about free will or the lack of it is Sam Harris. Um,

And yet Sam is quite moralistic. He's constantly trying to convince us that he's right about specific issues. Sometimes he's very good. Sometimes he's terrible, but he's always adamant about his position and quite consistent. How do you, how do you, how do you, how does somebody like that hold that in their mind? On the one hand, he's trying to convince you of something. On the other hand, he's denying your ability to choose. Well, part of what,

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There's another term here, which is do you think that ideas matter? And ultimately, I think to consistently understand how ideas matter and what role they have in our lives, you have to believe in free will to fully consistently do it. But there's a real difference between people who believe that human beings are run by ideas and

run by culture, which are ideas. We run ourselves by culture and by the ideas we share and so forth. And people who think that we're run by genetic urges, but the differences between people aren't ideological cultural. And Harris has a real appreciation for the role of ideas in life. He just tends to think of ideas more like software, right? You know, you've downloaded objectivism and someone else has downloaded Islam, and that explains why he's, you know, blowing him, you know, um,

Islamism forms a form of Islam and that explains why he's blowing himself up and you're not. And then there's another guy who's what was downloaded into him wasn't Islamism, but it was a form of Islam that makes him more of a sanctioner of the Islamist and so forth. But someone else's and you think of it as sort of software that's downloaded or memes that are spread between people.

And in that sense, you're thinking of it at a certain level of depth as, you know, it's still deterministic. It's not free will. But nevertheless, there's a real enthusiasm in Harris and a caring about the ideas people hold. And I think implicit in that and implicit in what he's doing to fight for them is a recognition that he's thinking about these ideas and he has a kind of choice about it. But that can be subtle, noticing that. And you can notice and care about ideas without thinking

understanding them is chosen in that way. You can notice and care about consciousness without noticing fully the role of choice. And Harris is someone who cares a lot about consciousness, right? Like he's, in a way, he's kind of a mystic in some ways to do with consciousness. But he's not a materialist. He's definitely someone who believes there's a mind and the mind is, you know, powerful. Now it's not, he doesn't quite believe there's a self because he's, but ideas and, you know, ideas matter to him.

And that's a kind of motivation that I think, like any motivation to be consistent, ultimately you need free will in the mix. But his orientation against good ideas versus bad ideas, ideas that lead to good lives and success and peace and so forth, versus ideas that lead to misery and war. And that's why he's so good on the issues he's good on, I think. So another intellectual who's come to prominence in the last couple of years is Rishit Hanania.

who is a real mix. I mean, sometimes he strikes you as brilliant, really insightful, an original thinker, actually. And sometimes he just says stupid things. I mean, things that strike is really just dumb. How do you evaluate him? And do you think the issue of free will plays a role in his thinking? Yeah, I mean, I think the fundamental problem with him, where he's wrong, is that he doesn't believe in free will.

And I don't know whether he would say he does or doesn't, but he also doesn't believe that ideas matter. So the way I think of Hananya is he's someone who really values intelligence and reason, although he has those two things packaged together. He's not very clear on the difference between someone who's maybe not that innately powerful of mind, but really being rational, and someone who's intelligent

He doesn't have the choice and the rational and the intelligence component as distinguished as I think they ought to be. But he's someone who really values intelligent, rational people and is really disgusted by them.

um, stupid, irrational pointlessness in a way that I certainly have always been as a child. And that I clearly Ayn Rand was, and you could see this valorization of intelligence and rationality and the things not being fully distinguished, um, always, uh, in her work, in, in his work, I think, and a lot of us who gravitated towards objectivism, uh, in our sense of life as, as children reason and human beings. And we can do this versus, you know,

that guy over there who can't think or won't think or something he just seems like like um like a brick you know or or like functioning like a beast and i think for hanania that contrast is really salient it's what he has in mind by high versus low human capital which he talks about a lot and um and and insofar as he's interested in ideas and cultural systems it's which ones will apply will appeal to and encourage high human capital versus which ones low human capital but there's

not really the idea of attending to what are the ideas someone holds and what are the choices they're making and what's just that some people are smarter than others. And they're not totally separate, of course, because if you...

choose well and um and think well over time you develop better ideas and the ideas empower you to come up with smarter conclusions so it's not like intelligence you know functional intelligence is totally separate from the choices you're making there what you what what manifests as intelligence in someone you meet is always a choice infused an idea infused but um

He tends to treat it as one thing and not to be alert to the issue of choice and to be less alert to the issue of ideas in life than I think he ought to be. And for both of those reasons, he's

but especially the not emphasizing of choice and the choice to be rational versus the irrational people, he is generally not moralistic. And you could see it. He was at one time a racist and you could see where the racism was coming from, right? There's a lot of, he thinks of himself as smart. He thinks of it as genetic. He thinks, you know, a lot of people are telling us to sacrifice and tear down standards because, um, uh, uh,

and people of other races are seen as beneficiaries of that, whether they really are or not. And he's read books like The Bell Curve and other things like that. And he's come to associate intelligence with some races and not with others. And so then he, you know, becomes a racist, right? He rejects that eventually, not because he doesn't think there are innate average differences in intelligence, I think, because I think he still probably does, but because...

Like most white people aren't that good and aren't that bright. And some black people are. And anyway, the kind of policies that are associated with one or the other are bad. And he becomes convinced of liberalism and free markets and so forth. But,

He doesn't, and he regards some of his old views as odious, right? And he wrote a piece on them called something like, Why I Used to Suck. But notice it's why I used to suck. There's no like, how did I make this mistake? Now, he does talk a little bit about what led him into that mistake and so forth. But it's all like, this kind of thing befell me. There was no taking responsibility for making a bad choice or for the consequences of his bad ideas.

on other people if he were promoting these kinds of ideas and if he using his intelligence is making a case for really odious ideas and maybe that would have you know gotten other bright people to follow it um now i think he's made up for that now by he's you know using his intelligence to make the case for a lot of good ideas but there's still no sense of personal responsibility in it it's all um he writes you know more deterministically right

Right. So you have a view of associations, right? Like there's a lot wrong with MAGA, but that's not a reason not to vote for Trump. And and and how he looks about the Ukraine situation and so forth. He interviews racists regularly in your show. He will give them a platform. That is, he platforms people he finds odious. Yeah. Although there there's some.

idea that maybe like he's a vector back to sanity or back to reasonability like he could make this journey and maybe some of these people could um but still there's no whatever the view is there's no moral ire around any of this the he has discussed reactions to the ideas that he views as awful bad wrong he'll he'll mock them you'll you'll hear the contempt in in his tone of writing and so forth but there's not a a blaming there's no moral fire to it

Do you think these deterministic views are part of what seems like a real rise of anti-Semitism and racism? I mean, I think we've talked about it on the left, but now on the right, where it's home is, I guess, in the past. But there seems to be... Joe Rogan's now interviewing explicit anti-Semites and defending... Of course, Tucker Carlson's been doing it for a while. I don't think it's...

The rise of anti-Semitism or explicit racism is associated with an increasing popularity of explicit determinism. That is, if you asked all of these people, if you asked, you know, is there free will or are we determined determinism?

10 or 20 years ago when you asked it now, I don't think there'd be a huge shift or that the shift would correspond to who has gotten more racist. But it's racism is a deterministic way of thinking. And it's a way of thinking that doesn't value reason and individuality. And I think it's not changes on the on the.

explicit understanding of the metaphysical issues, but people less seeing themselves as individuals, less valuing reason, being more afraid and more retreating into tribes. That's on the one hand. And on the other hand, a lessening of some stigmas against it. A big part of it, and this does relate to free will, is not the explicit view of whether one has free will, but the extent to which one thinks of oneself as an agent.

Another way of putting it is the extent to which one has self-esteem, the extent to which one feels efficacious in the world and able to create things and control one's destiny. Whatever one would explicitly say about how much control anyone has. Do you feel capable? Do you feel able? Do you feel like you could exert yourself and achieve something? Or do you feel like a victim of the universe?

um and the more you feel like a victim of the universe and maybe it's a victim of those guys in the universe and and they're in a cabal and so forth the more various forms of tribalism um uh uh dominate and uh and anti-semitism is just one of the ugly forms of it yeah so um so i did a show a few days ago on um explaining trump and um you know i think uh

A lot of people thought I was pretty harsh on him. But you found me to be too generous in terms of my arguing that Trump is the ultimate pragmatist. So why is pragmatism too generous and indeed inaccurate in describing him? And how would you describe him to be more accurate? Well, when I think of a pragmatist politician, I think in one way the ultimate example is John F. Kennedy.

That was Rand's kind of example of it. And then in another way, at a lower rung of intellectual sophistication, it's people like Richard Dixon and Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama, for that matter. He's a little bit more like Kennedy. What is pragmatism? Well, pragmatism is a philosophical theory in the first one about the role of ideas in life.

And the role of truth in life. And it's a kind of fairly sophisticated theory. In Atlas Shrugged, you can think of Floyd Ferris as a kind of pragmatist in a way. He has views about these esoteric matters and he's got a whole complicated line about it and theorization.

and theories about human motivation and what a person is and what the role of truth in life is and how ideas really are blah, blah, blah. And a politician who has that in the real world would be Kennedy. What, what, what the ideas amount to is it's the idea that ideas aren't important.

But you could hold it as a theory and complicated ways of explaining away and trying to undermine ideas. And that's what Randall Kennedy was doing in a lot of his speeches. It's what a lot of philosophy professors and psychology professors have done. You're an intellectual, but you are aimed at the mind.

And undermining abstract thinking as an intellectual matter, you have theories about how to do that. That's what pragmatism in the kind of most specific sense is. Then there's a kind of thing which is a lower order pragmatist. Think someone like Richard Nixon, who Rand often described as a pragmatist. He is not a philosopher with kind of very abstract ideas about how to undermine the mind, but he's...

the sort of immediate offspring of that. He's someone who is engaged in real politic. He's, but engaged in real politic as a theory, right? Like he thinks this is the way to understand things and other ones are wrong. And he's dissembling in certain ways and he's a deal maker and so forth, but has a view about this as one approach in contrast to others. And there is a kind of,

some level of understanding of a principled approach and trying to undermine it.

if understanding is too strong at least cognizance of it you can think of of mr thompson and atlas shrugged as this kind of a pragmatist or i think really all of our presidents after uh after jfk have been this kind of a pragmatist they're erudite thoughtful people but they're skeptical of of abstract principles they tend to be kind of wonkish and they'll drown you in details about how it doesn't really work the way you think it works if you have some abstract principle

But Trump isn't like that. He's not wonkish or thoughtful, even about why you shouldn't be thoughtful. He's not someone with some complicated rap to tell you about the role of ideas in life or even some complicated rap to tell you about his policies. He's much more like a brute.

He's much more like Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun. I mean, we don't know what these people actually like, but what the stereotype of them is. He's much more like, you described him as a mafioso or a corner loud. It's that kind of thing. In Atlas Shrugged, he's much more like Cuffy Megs. And Cuffy Megs looks at Daphne like he doesn't get her. Like, he doesn't even think of her as someone to make a deal with or to try to manipulate. She's just, he's, he's, um...

mystified but has no comprehension. He's a much lower level of person. And he's not that kind of person I don't think is the product of bad ideas. That's kind of like the dregs of society that's always been there. It's the product of certain kinds of ideas that they're elevated and can be in a position of national prominence, whether in business or in politics. But it's just a very different thing. And if you look at, for example,

Mark Andreessen talking about why he would support Trump and what he does. There are some things Mark Andreessen says in this context that make sense and so forth and are good, but other things that are quite bad. But what he's doing is he's got a view about it, and the view about it is why it's okay to deal with this kind of guy in this way, why he's better. That's pragmatist thinking.

But, you know, if you want to, you know, give a toddler a bazooka and think that that's going to help you get the criminals out of your house or something, you're the pragmatist, not the toddler. He's, you know. He just is what he is. Yeah. And now in the case of someone like Trump or someone like a mafioso, they're that way by choice and they're blameable for it. But the thing they are by choice is a lot less of a sophisticated thing than what I think of as a pragmatist.

Do you think there's do you think there's elements of nihilism? Oh, yeah, for sure. I think there are some elements of nihilism in pragmatism generally, but less than this is. It's a kind of, you know, if you're there's a real I mean, my view of Trump is very, very low. I don't think the man has any values at all.

And I think he's only driven by resentment for people who seem better than him or seem to think they're better than him. I think that is the kind of basic thing that's driven him for as long as I've kind of seen him. He's at some points a prestige seeker, but even the prestige seeking is...

this, you know, I'm from the outer boroughs and I want to show that the people from Manhattan are going to be better than me, but not show it by actually accomplishing something just, you know, in their face about it. I think he's that kind of really low, loudish person. I mean, these are, we're going into details of his biography and so forth, but I think what you see in his public presentation has always been that, and I think that is a kind of

a nihilistic type of motivation, not nihilism as a theory, but just a kind of motivation that's around resentment and hate. A kind of motivation that's involved in the people who, you know, want to burn down their own neighborhoods out of some grievance they have against the society. Maybe there's something to the grievance in some way, but surely really thinking about what's best for you is not that it can't lead to this. And I think it's the same kind of mentality. Yeah.

All right, so we have a lot of questions. So let's go to those. And then if we have time, we can come back to a few other topics and maybe make sure we end on a positive note. All right, so let's see. We've got Molten Splendor. Yeah, that's a great name. I found outspoken moral judgment uncomfortable. That's surprising from somebody with a name like Molten Splendor. Yeah.

What situations require that outspoken moral judgments be made? At what point is silence considered acceptable, considered acceptance because a moral judgment is not openly made? Well, it's in a situation where you're silenced

would imply acceptance or consent by the social milieu that you're in. So if you're one person in a lecture hall and there are thousands of people in the audience and someone on stage says something you disagree with, nobody could possibly... You're not speaking up, doesn't communicate anything. But if you're talking one-on-one with somebody and he's saying something that

you find abhorrent and looking at you as though you agree with him, then you're not saying anything to the mirror does suggest you agree with him. Or again, there's a kind of person. I had a particular person I knew in high school who was a bit like this. And I have some relatives who are a bit like this. They'll,

Start making undermining jokes about people. And at first it might just be a joke, you know, and it might just be fine and not ill-intentioned, but they escalate a little bit like they're looking for like, what can they get out? Can they enlist you on their side? And at some point what you're doing is not is what they're doing is they're looking for a kind of agreement or sanction from you. And at some point, you know, it's always contextual to judge where it is, but at some point you are helping them. You're supporting them when you're not saying otherwise.

Saying otherwise is not always making a federal case of it. You just say, no, I really disagree with that. I don't think that's true or I don't think that's right. And that's often enough. You don't have to get on a soapbox. Now, there are other situations. You're a business person. You're being persecuted. There's something really evil going on. And we have to go through the different situations. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, it's worth introspecting about why you find it so uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable in the culture in which we live, which is a culture of non-judgmental often. But it's worth thinking about why it is what it is about it that makes you uncomfortable.

Yeah, and in what forms you can first become comfortable with it. Like, in what forms you can start exercising this that are showing that whatever bad thing you think will happen when you express your judgments don't happen, and that there are ways to do it that may be

Because you might have, or your models of somebody expressing a moral judgment might be not good ones, or not ones that would work well for you to do, given your personality or situation. But the more you try to do it, like anything else you're afraid of, you build up the skills to do it and the recognition to do it. It's something we can all work on. All right, now to your average algorithm. You answered in today's show that a small subset of people...

would die under pure capitalism. And he's okay with that. Did you mean, I guess you're asking me, did you mean wife-beating drunks? Generally, I have a low view of wife-beating drunks. Or people with Down syndrome. Why is donating to a home for retarded not necessarily altruistic?

Which of us is for that? I mean, first of all, I have to say I have a much more extreme view than you're on. I think everybody would die under capitalism, just like everybody would die under every system. We're not immortal. Under capitalism, there's some chance of some chance for life extension. But I think everyone will someday die. But you mean we'll die early or younger, not be helped. I mean, I find I find the arguments that sometimes I see objectivists make.

utopian in the negative sense. Under capitalism, everybody's better off. Nobody is worse off. Nobody is worse off in a physical sense, let's say. Nobody would die. Everybody would be rich. And I find that ridiculous. I mean, some people are still going to be unbelievably immoral and, in a sense, kill themselves. And the safety net would be more discerning and might purposefully not catch them in those circumstances.

and so that's a very different case from the people with um downstairs still handicaps or things like that um who you would expect there would be um there there's every reason to um want to help such people when one can do it at low cost i mean there's all upside and no downside um for everyone involved for their lives going better for they're not

starving on the street, where they're being able to make whatever they can of their lives given their limitations. And so you would expect there to be people, as there are and have been, wanting to do what they can to help them. Yeah, and I think what makes it non-autistic is everything Greg just said. And think about it. The first people who would be donating to such causes are the family members,

And in a relatively wealthy society, such donations could, that might be enough. It might not require massive contributions from a lot of other people, even though there might be a lot of other people who would be quite happy to do it, given the horror of what would happen to these people if they weren't taken care of.

But also, this is not how one judges a society. This is a fairly small part of society, and if other things are functioning well, the problems of such people, insofar as they can be remedied, will be remedied. It's not the thing to focus on in judging society. Dave, some humans have neural disabilities, which make them incapable of self-reliance for survival.

How do such humans differ from non-human animals that depend on humans for survival? Non-human animals that depend, like... Yeah, so what makes these people human versus animals that are not human? Yeah, but I mean, most animals that are not human, you know, go off and survive on their own in the wilderness. They don't need... Even, like, it would be a goldfish or a pet or something.

Well, first of all, human beings are a species, right? It's not that you define human beings as rational animal and then you go around to everything in the universe and you see, is it rational animal? Then it's human. If it is, it is. And if it's not, it's not. But it doesn't have a functioning faculty of reason. A human being is a certain species of animal differentiated by other species of animal by being the one that lives by reason, but that has various qualities.

you know, rational faculties that it could use in certain ways. But any life form exists in all kinds of injured, defective, malformed states. It's, again, a fact about the species, not a fact about everyone severally that they're this kind of life form. And then with respect to moral principles and rights, the fact that we are this kind of life form that lives by reason has implications for how we should treat one another.

And that those implications are then going to spill over or they're going to apply, although in unusual ways, to people who, because of injury or birth defect or whatever it is, are not able to live by reason. For one thing, I think the most kind of obvious point to make is one has to know that somebody is really and truly.

Irremediably like this that is unable to live by reason in order to treat them as though they don't have reason right like the fact that they were human being means that we first have to if you know you see someone think this is someone who could live by reason and I'm going to treat him you know respect his choice and and try to deal with him by persuasion etc until I have very good reason not to and as a legal system

We're going to have to have that default, and then you have to prove, well, this person's incapacitated or whatever. Or it goes by age, like children can't, but we make laws that

about when people reach an age of majority and so forth. But all of that is in the context of it's a fact about human beings as a species that here's how we live. And then in light of that, you come up with principles and means of interacting with individuals of that species that apply that knowledge in light of everything else we know about living species, which is that they could be immature, diseased, defective, in senescence, or whatever the case may be for a given person.

Dave also asks, do you think the assumption that all humans have the cognitive capacity to develop, abide by a rational philosophy can be construed as stereotypical? Thanks so much for your insight. As stereotypical? Stereotyping humans and assuming they all have the ability to be rational.

Well, only if you use any generalization as stereotyping. I mean, any claim about a kind in general, you can make fun of as a stereotype or say it's just a stereotype. But there are lots of things we know about human beings in general. They all need protein. Is that a stereotype?

or they all need water in order to live like all other animals do. Is that a stereotype or they have kidneys and brains and feet and so forth, except for the ones who don't, which then you understand is a special case of defect. And I want to know more about why you're deriding, what things would not count as stereotypes if the fundamental fact about how we live and survive is in your view?

Barry asks, where would you say consciousness comes from and how would you defend it? I think that's what he's writing. It seems to me a little bit like asking a question like, where would you say with comes from and how would you defend it? I've heard that everything has length, but no width.

and you seem to be a wittest who believes that things have width as well as length. Where would you say the width comes from, and how would you defend it? There's something wrong with the question. Things have width. You could see that they have width. You could tell that they have width. I don't know where it comes from. It's part of the nature of things, that things have length and width. And if we just think of it as length, we're abstracting away the other thing we know it has, which is width and depth. And it's not something that...

that needs to be defended exactly. It's not a theory that things have whips. It's something that's observable about them.

and what makes you think they don't, and what things are you taking as kind of basic that don't need defense, and you're thinking that I'm adding width to my list of things that I have to defend it. It's perceptibly obvious that things have width. You couldn't even understand what length was without contrasting it with width and so forth. And consciousness is like that. We wouldn't even be able to form a concept of matter except by contrast to consciousness.

We're directly aware of our own consciousness. You couldn't think, and if you weren't conscious, and you couldn't think about thinking and think about what views are true and false and what things need to be defended and have evidence for them or not, if you didn't already know that there's consciousness, you're kind of presupposing that in the whole way of thinking about it. And then the question is, yeah, but where does it come from? Like, how did it get to be that there's consciousness in the world? And my answer is, I don't know.

I also don't know. I don't know about a lot of things, how they got to be in the world. It seems to be a feature. I mean, it is a feature of certain living things. Presumably it came to be with them. There's evidently a lot of, a lot about matter that we don't understand such that when it's,

part of certain systems, certain kinds of living things, it comes to be conscious or consciousness arises. We don't know why that is, but there's a lot of stuff we don't know. And, you know, someday hopefully we'll figure it out. Presumably there are whatever fact it is about the things that make us up that enable us to become conscious when they're organized into the right kind of systems. Presumably there are other implications of those facts that, you know, we don't yet understand. And someday we will. At least I hope we will someday.

All right. Arum asks, I enjoy beats and sound design driven techno music and associated late night raves. These things give me spiritual fuel and optimism for my future. Is this preference immoral? P.S. I also enjoy Rachmaninoff. Okay. So what does he enjoy? Techno driven. Techno music, the sound design driven techno music and associated late night raves.

So EDM and stuff, and he's dancing around and pumping his fist in the air or whatever. No, I don't see what's immoral about that. I'm sure you could flesh it out in a way that would make it immoral, and we might, but I don't think most people who are going to raves and listening to dance music are indulging in anything immoral. And even before that, there's a question as to...

What's the aesthetic quality of this stuff? And is there some, you know, are you wrong to think this is good music or is there, you know, are you missing out or something? But even if the answer to those things is yes, this is bad music or not even music at all and you're missing out,

You're not immoral for listening to it if you like it. And maybe there are things you do to develop your taste, but maybe not. And maybe this music's great. So I gave a talk some years ago. There was an Ocon that was themed around aesthetics and the Romantic Manifesto. And I gave a talk on principles and personal values in ethics and aesthetics.

which might have been subtitled. I know it's only rock and roll, but I like it. And it was about the various things that you can get from art that, or part of it was about the various things you can get from art that aren't the kind of things

high values that are being described in the romantic manifesto and why you shouldn't try to interpret whatever you like in terms of those values directly like are getting motivation to pursue high value something which i see a little bit of in in this question and now you should just with something you value reflect on why you value it and try to articulate it to yourself and um see what you can get out of it and try to integrate it with your other values and

The more you can do so, the better. And then it's an objective value. And if you find that it clashes and, you know, then it's not an objective value. Do you know if that talk is online? I'm pretty sure it is. OK. Someone can find a link to it. You've got an army of people who do that in your comments section. Clark asks, do you see the Democrats coming back in 2028 as a more 1990s Bill Clinton-esque party?

I just don't see them moving in a free market direction. Maybe they'll drop the transgender stuff, but maintain the socialism. I don't know. I've been... So in 2016, I...

thought that the Democrats were going to get a lot worse than they did immediately in the wake of Trump. I thought we were going to get a kind of like, it was going to be all AOC and Bernie Sanders types, and it was going to be like impossible to figure out who to vote for in 2020. And I thought, you know, there was some of that, there was AOC. But I thought the Democratic Party went less off the deep end as a party than I thought they were going to. Obviously, there was all kinds of crazy stuff happening on the left.

with, um, with, uh, Black Lives Matter and, and, and, uh, you know, what's called wokeism and so forth. But it was less extreme than I expected it to be. Um, on the other hand, I think we're learning that some of the worst elements of the party, even when they weren't literally in the driver's seat, had more control over, um, over, uh,

tech policy and other things in the Biden administration than was, you know, than they were open about at the time. So it's a little hard to know how each of these parties is going to develop. The fact that the Republicans under Trump have turned so anti-capitalist against trade, for industrial planning and so forth, and that there is hardly any constituency on the left that

for being right on those things for any reason other than backing, you know, hating Trump makes me think it's unlikely that whatever things emerge on the left as a reaction to Trump are going to be organized around, you know, markets and trade. I think it's more likely that you'll get a kind of

you know, resurgent, never Trump wing of the Republicans that likes those things. But the Republicans maybe will get, the Democrats maybe will get better on some other things or less bad on some other things. But it's very hard to predict. And, you know, I wouldn't have predicted in, you know, 2014, the Republican Party having developed along the lines that it did. So who knows what changes for better or worse are possible for one of these parties in the next decade. There are some better people out there.

It's a center left economists who are not bad, you know, Inglis, Noah Smith, you know, a few others. I mean, even people like Ezra Klein, who's very bad on some things, has been pro technology, pro progress, pro getting rid of certain kinds of onerous regulations. And I mean, this is someone who I first encountered as.

you know, someone in a gross way debating John Allison and being really dishonest. But my view was in that debate, but, you know, in other ways you could see him getting better. And, you know, that happened to Christopher Hitchens. So, um, who I first encountered as someone defending socialism in a debate with Harry Binswanger, but, um, became better in his later years. So there are, there are signs of better things among some leftists. Um,

there's a book abundance that you're just come out or about to come out by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. And, you know, there are that, that looks promising. So there are factions, but I doubt there'll be as good as, you know, people were in the nineties because there's not a, I think it will be a little bit more maybe pro technology and, but I doubt it'll be against the,

central planet, which seems to be something that we're getting across the political continuum by people who are more pro-progress and anti-progress and so forth. So I just find it hard to see

where we're going to find an anti-planning intention coming from. I think the best example of that is the Yes In My Backyard, which is kind of anti-zoning, which is planning. But whether they're willing to extrapolate that to something more broader is unlikely, unfortunately. But it's not even clear to me that the YIMBYists are...

anti-zoning and planning as opposed to they want different zoning and planning that they think will result in more development they're not saying get rid of zoning codes and make every place like houston they're saying let's zone this place for higher occupancy and let's um you know make the city more walkable and let's have more mixed use facilities it's it's it's less an issue of what government should and shouldn't be doing and more an issue of what kinds of um

things should we be planning for, at least for most of them. All right. Let me quickly thank Jonathan and let's see, Tassos and Wes, of course. Thank you, Wes. Thanks guys for your stickers. All right. Let's see. Thomas asks, a number of serious people are starting to refer to Trump as a Russian asset based on trips and statements from the eighties and his actions now in Ukraine, Putin, Russia.

Conspiracy nonsense or actual plausible possibility? I mean, I haven't really followed any of that. It's the same as, you know, in his first term, there were people saying there was compromise on him and so forth. I mean, he certainly, just like he would if he were a Russian asset, but there are more ways, reasons than one why somebody could do that. And the kind of simplest explanation is that he's the kind of guy who admires brutes.

And if he's the kind of guy who admires Bruch, which I think we can tell that he is without any kind of theory, then you wouldn't need all that much to get him to... The Russians wouldn't need much to get him to act in the way that he is. Now, is it possible that, you know, someone in the KGB, you know, noticed that he's that kind of guy back then and thought, like, maybe we could help his political career or something? You know, that kind of thing could happen, but I don't know of any particular evidence that it did. There were people saying it, but you should expect...

There'd be a lot of noise. And the way I think about processing information is in a world where there's so much communication as we have now and so much access to any idea anybody spread, you should expect, even if there's no evidence for something, certain kind of ideas you should expect to get a kind of audience and to have some people who seem pretty smart or

advocating for them and to have things that it's hard to tell whether they're really evidence or not because your ability to detect and tell what counts as evidence in a certain domain isn't that good unless you're knowledgeable in that domain. And so

The theory that Trump is a Russian asset or that Obama is secretly gay or that there are kinds of theories that you should expect are going to come up and there's going to be something to be said for them in people's in social media, whether they're true or false. And the whole trick of thinking about this stuff is to set your threshold such that you have a sense of when when is there enough smoke here that there's a reason to think there's a fire and when is it smokeless?

the kind of thing that you'd expect just as the noise of how the debate goes. And I haven't seen anything that takes these theories above the threshold where I'd expect there to be stuff like this, even if it wasn't true being said. Dave says, do you find a distinction between an ideological pragmatist who is driven to action with a pragmatic vision of reality and someone who acts, produces pragmatic effects in reality accidentally or without intent?

I don't know what pragmatic means are, the kind of effects a pragmatist would produce. I mean, insofar as I think there's a distinction like that, I would put, say, you know, JFK on the first side of it and Richard Nixon on the second side of it. But if somebody's acting in a brutish manner, I think that's just a simpler phenomenon. It's not, and they're not specifically pragmatic effects, they're irrational effects. And pragmatism is in effect a kind of

rationalization of irrationalism, right? And there's complicated, sophisticated rationalizations of irrationalism, and there are ones that are like simpler, you know, layman's versions of that. But there's such a thing as just being so irrational and undeveloped intellectually that you don't feel the need for a rationalization of it, at least not anything that's systematic and thoughtful as a rationalization. Like thinking is sort of unreal to you.

And principles are sort of unreal to you. Pragmatism is what you have when principles, the need for principles is something that you're aware of, and it's a rationalization for rebelling against it. But if you're totally amoral, you're totally, you have no compunctions about having no principles, then you have no need for pragmatism.

Adam says, Greg, does Putin's brain Dugin, Alexander Dugin, have a philosophy of his own or does he mainly pick and choose whatever will please Putin? I don't know that much about him. I mean, I've seen the one or two interviews that most people have seen, but I've not read him and I don't know much about the guy. So I don't know. I mean, I think he's he's yeah, I don't think he picks and chooses. I think I'm not even sure how close they are. That is, in spite of the fact that he's called Putin's brain Dugin.

Okay. Evan says, great to see Greg back on the show. It is. Thanks, Evan. Dave, if a creditor makes an accounting error, doesn't charge an individual for product service that they received, does that individual have a moral ethical duty to disclose the error to the creditor? I mean, I don't think in terms of duties, I think he should, but he shouldn't try too hard to. That is, um,

If if it's like a store clerk and you're at the store and the person, you know, not shortchanges you, but what's the opposite over, you know, whatever makes an error in your favor and you're right there and you see it and you notice it. Then I think, you know, out of general goodwill and not wanting the unearned and not wanting this person to get hurt. But you should just say, you know.

However, you get home and you were given $2 extra and now you're going to drive across town back to the place to correct the error. I don't think you have any responsibility to do that. And I think it would be, in a lot of contexts, a sacrifice to do it. Likewise, your bank does it. Now you're going to call the bank and get on tech support with them. It's going to take you an hour and a half. And I wouldn't do that. But if there's a cliff here to report and it's easy to do, then I would do it. And I think you should do it.

Richard says, assuming Ayn Rand developed objectivism to provide a philosophical foundation for Atlas Shrugged, has a novel become a means for introducing the world to objectivism? Has it become a means to it? So in other words, the idea is the philosophy was a means to the novel, but then now the novel's become a means to the philosophy. Well, if your goal is

is to introduce somebody to atlas to to objectivism but i think atlas shrugged is a fantastic means to do it regardless of whether it is itself the means that i don't think it exists as a means to that it exists as a novel created for an aesthetic purpose but it is a fantastic means of introducing someone to this philosophy if you want to

And there are lots of things like that. Like, for example, I often teach the movie 12 Angry Men, and I teach it in a class on philosophy as a means to introducing certain points in philosophy. That's my reason for assigning the students to watch this movie and giving a lecture on it. But it's not like the movie as such isn't a means to that. The movie is a movie. And it's a means to, you know, the aesthetic enjoyment that it is. So something...

can be used as a means to something, and it's fine to use it as a means to something without that being the essence of what the thing is. Justin says, just locked in, watching from the beginning rather than live. I'm sure there's a bunch of value coming at me. Thank you both. Thanks, Justin. Appreciate it. All right. Let's see. Liam says, did the Nazis...

pass tariffs rapidly and aggressively like Trump. I've been watching some of Hitler's speeches and he constantly self-aggrandizes like Trump. I don't know about their economic policies with respect to tariffs. Neither do I. Yeah.

I mean, they definitely had an economic agenda and you can read a bunch of Hitler's speeches. And I've assigned some in courses on political philosophy because I want people to get a sense of like, well, what were Nazis actually like? And they definitely had the idea of aggressive authoritarian control of the economy.

and made what they regarded as bold moves that Hitler regarded as, you know, claimed really helped the German economy, although the German economy was never doing really well. So I don't think they did, but, or could have. But what particular moves and whether it was tariffs and on what and at what times, that I don't know. Lucinda says, thoughts on Plato's Ion. I read it recently and reminded me a lot of the inspirationalism Rand criticizes. Did Plato originate that view?

the inspirationalism random criticizes. Um, I'm not sure we, in other words, do you think you're just a conduit for some, um, uh, you don't write by reason. Yeah. Okay. So in that sense, yes. So, um,

So the Ion is one of these early Socratic dialogues by Plato where he's interviewing a kind of a Rhapsode, Ion, a kind of poet and Rhapsode, or Socrates is. And it turns out the guy doesn't understand his poems or any other poems or Homer's poems, and he reads Homer's poems, but he doesn't understand them. And this view emerges where...

The muses are like a magnet and the great poets are like iron rings hanging off that magnet and then other people are hanging off it or whatever. And it's like all the kind of stuff is coming down from the muses through the great poets to the rest of us. And it's coming down to us generally without the people who are conduits of this stuff understanding it. And you get that idea in a number of the early works.

platonic works you get it certainly in the apology and in the mino of that um there are people who who speak true things uh by inspiration without understanding them and uh i don't know if plato is the first to think that he couldn't have been because all the um

Like the Greek poems typically start with a invocation to the muse to speak through the poet. Like, you know, think of the beginning of the Iliad, like sing goddess of the wrath of Achilles or in the Odyssey, tell me of the man of many turns or whatever you want to call it. So this idea that, you know, God speak to you, you're inspired when you're doing poetry is older than Plato. But he's probably the first articulate philosophical defense of it. The first time I knew him.

Thanks, Lucinda. Jason, movie spinoffs, franchises, and sequels have made some of the planet's best billionaires. I don't know what that means. Yet, Iran thinks we need more original characters. Correct me if I'm wrong. Discuss, if longevity permits, do you look forward to well-done Atlas Shrug miniseries, movie, and musical, and if it maintains...

I've got a story on that one. I mean, they almost made a musical about Atlas Shook. And if it maintains popularity, Atlas spinoffs, new adventures and backstories. So correct me if I'm wrong, discuss. I don't know. This is movie spinoffs, franchises, sequels. This is the superhuman movies, I guess. Yeah, they make billions. I mean, a lot of people like them. I don't. And I think aesthetically, they're just not that meaningful or enjoyable or

I'd like some original scripts. Yeah, I am with you on this. I'm bored by these superhero franchises. I don't remember the last one I've seen, but there were just so many. And I don't, in general, like superhero-type stories. Some of them are really good, but it's not... If that's all I know about a story, that's a point against it rather than for it. And I don't love these...

universe building. We have to set something else in the universe of Star Wars or whatever. A few of the things that have been set in that universe turned out to be really good. I thought Andor, for example, was really good. But I had to be talked into watching it by a bunch of people telling me it was good. What if we get another thing set in this galaxy? What I like about the ones I liked aren't that they're set in this fictional universe. There's something that feels tired and uncreative to me and that we're just...

and more than angry of failing to appreciate what it is. That's good about the, the good stories. It's not that they're set in this world. They have this bit of IP that we could then, um, you know, spin some franchise off on, uh, again, there, there have been good works made that way, but it's not, um, I don't know. It feels, um, tired, uninspired. I tie it in and inspire it as good. I think. Yeah. And then his suggestion asks, continues, he says, uh,

Do you look forward to a well-done Adler-Schwagg miniseries movie musical? And would you like to see spinoffs and new adventures and backstories? I would not like to see spinoffs, new adventures, and backstories. In general, I don't like things like that for other works of art. Like, you know, you can imagine, you know, what Cassette does when she's a mother. You know, the spinoff of Victor Hugo or, you know, Moby Dick Part 3 or something. It just feels like...

The story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It functions as it functions. It feels like, why would you do that? I think it's doing a disservice to a well-written story to add sequels to it unless you have a really good and strong idea for why to do it. And in general, again, there have been occasions where somebody's created something with real artistic merit that way, but I think in general, it's not good.

particularly when the original author is not there to do it. And if you really love a work and you love it for what it is, and what it is is something that's self-contained and draws an end to its story, there's something...

unpleasant about the idea of somebody going in and trying to tamper with that. I would really like to see a well-done Atlas Shrugged miniseries. None of the... I've seen people who had scripts, and some of them I thought were very earnest in what they were trying to do with it and so forth, and well-motivated, but I haven't seen anything that I think would make... I haven't seen anything that makes me think any good Atlas Shrugged miniseries is likely to be on the horizon anytime soon.

You may know more than I do, Euron. No, I agree with you. I think that's right. There was an attempt at a musical. It almost got made, but it was nixed by Leonard at the last minute. This I've never heard of. Early, not at the very last minute. It was nixed when the guy wrote the music and the music was just not up to... The script wasn't bad, but...

If you're going to condense Atlas Shrugged into a two-hour musical, it wasn't bad. But the music just didn't live up to what it needs to be to be a good musical. I can't imagine it as a musical. I don't think it lends itself to that. Although I wouldn't have thought Les Miserables did either in the musical. That is good. It needed that quality, and it didn't have the quality of Les Miserables musically.

uh james if the united states collapses into fascism would you say einrand was wrong was has failed has failed um it's the rest of us it would have failed yep um she did her part um and you could quibble about whether she could have done something a little better you know back uh 40 or 50 years ago but um she did so much yeah she did so much and it's you know

uh in somewhat you might say we've failed as objectivists who've been trying to avert it but i think it's a bigger failing of the culture in general and there are lots of respects in which the culture in general has failed uh whether or not we fall into a dictatorship there are you know we could be so much better so much happier so much freer than we are um if more people rose to the occasion if the people among us who are uh trying to fight for the good we're we're we're better at it and better at spreading our ideas yeah but you can't blame um

you know, any one person and certainly not anyone who has been dead for that long for the fate of a country, particularly when they've done more than can be expected of anyone to write it. Andrew, what do you think motivates objectivism historically? Is it merely a failure of philosophers to recognize the individuals as a metaphysical unit or means to collectivist ethical aims or something else?

What is it that motivates objectivism? Oh, no, collectivism. God. What is it that motivates collectivism historically? Is it merely a failure of philosophers to recognize the individual as a metaphysical unit or means to a collective ethical aims or something else? I mean, I think we have to think about in what period, because it's not like there was just one collectivist movement at one time. I don't mean like we have to mint it super fine and say like, well, in 1932, but like

The Republic is collectivist and a lot of classical political philosophy is collectivist. I think that has a somewhat different motivation than the collectivism of the 19th century, which is into the 20th century, which is coming out of kind of individualistic liberal movement. And so, you know, which collect and then the rise of collectivism, the resurgence of it recently. So which one are we talking about? I mean, I think in general, I,

individualism goes with an acceptance of reason and collectivism with a rejection of reason. But very early on, before there's much understanding of how reason functions in a human life and a society, there are cases where enthusiasm about reason goes with a kind of

by default. Like, I have a good idea for how people can conduct things and it doesn't occur to me that I can't, you know, organize everybody in accordance with it. And, you know, so there's a kind of comparative innocence to the ancient forms of collectivism that I don't think are coming from a rejection or antipathy towards reason. But the more post-Enlightenment collectivism, I think, is coming out of a...

turn against reason and self-esteem, basically. A kind of loss of confidence in the ability of the mind. Michael says, do you see Austin, Texas as the next Silicon Valley? It seems like blue cities and red states are the place to be. I don't know how to make those kind of, you know,

economic um predictions i mean the silicon valley seems for now like it's the next silicon valley i mean that is um all of the um the major um uh ai tech stuff and so forth seems to be happening there even after people thought um it was over um i doubt that that industry will all move to austin um austin does seem to have a kind of scene developing for kind of

of heterodox political thought and commentary. We'll see where that goes and if it gets better or worse. A lot of the people who seemed good on that, a lot of the people, whether they seemed good or not, who were in the ascendancy in that space, people like Joe Rogan and so forth, I think have become more and more transparently foolish or bad such that I doubt that there'll be

assets in the nucleation of a better culture of discussion here. But, you know, with what some of the stuff that's going on at the University of Texas, with the foundation of the University of Austin, with a few other think tanks that are operating here, it seems like there is a kind of

gathering discussion of ideas here that it could become in the next years more of a center for that. It's hard to predict because the whole cultural political landscape right now is a very unstable position, which I think creates opportunities for good things to emerge, but also makes it very hard to predict. Michael asks, is what separates Trump from Hitler that Trump cares more about prestige than power?

He doesn't have an ideology like Hitler and Putin. He just wants recognition as an end in itself. I mean, I don't think it's good to take Hitler always as your paradigm of a bad guy or a villain that anyone you think is bad, you know, or even of a dictator, anyone you think is bad, how do they relate to him? Are they less bad? Are they the same bad? How much more bad? And in what way? Like Hitler is fairly atypical, right?

Um, he was in some ways more ideological. Um, he, he was more the, the, the head of a kind of movement that like the, the typical kind of dictator is, um, much more like a mob boss type person. Um, much more like the kind of, you know, people who rule, um, you know, Latin American, like banana Republic kind of dictatorships or, or, um, um, uh, the kind of African dictators and, and, and so forth. The, the, that's the more typical case. And, um,

One should, if one sees dictators rising, think more about Trump's not a dictator yet, although I think he wants to be. He's the kind of person who wants to be. But there are always, there are tons of people like that. The causes are in the world, but the causes of their coming to power when they do aren't them. They're opportunistic infections, in effect, on the world. And the question is less about this guy versus what's making him

and his style of politics palatable to so many people or indeed really exciting to so many people and especially to good people or the better people who are attracted to him because it's very much always an issue of the better people who are attracted to something having an outsized influence on it being powerful.

And that's, you know, something you want to understand with. But, yeah, I don't think Hitler was certainly more ideological than Putin, than Erdogan, than Trump, than Franco, you know, and then all the sundry, you know, dictatorial leaders in different countries around the world. So he's and he and Lenin are kind of unusual cases in that respect. Even Mussolini was more intellectual. Yeah.

Yeah, than most. Now, all of these people are cases of a country descending from a better form of government into a worse. But I don't know how much more to say about that. I don't think that the comparisons to Hitler are...

that useful for bad leaders if they're the one comparison one has. It's got to be a, you have a wide matrix of what authoritarian leaders look like. And then Hitler's one point within that. Richard says, congratulations, Iran. You just raised the super chat goal in the show. Greg, what do you think about moving goalposts? This question shows I'm for it. You got to keep the incentives alive.

I mean, I think actually when you're playing a game, don't you sometimes move the goalposts to make it like literal goalposts can get moved. Sometimes it's whether they're in, uh, it's whether it's, uh, that's cheating with the general rule of the game or whether it's cheating. And I don't think it's cheating here. Here. I don't think it's cheating since I set the rules, I could set them as not cheating. Um, listen to asks, what are your favorite movies, Greg? My favorite movies. Um, I'm bad at this. I don't really have lifts, um, like that. Um,

I was just watching with my son the movie Ratatouille, and I really love that movie. It's probably the best animated movie, I think, of all time, and just really strikingly good. I've talked a lot about it with my friend...

Pouya, who wrote a fantastic blog post on it, a Substack post, How This Movie Saved My Life. You guys can find it. It's in the Substack, Outliving Iran. There's a lot of great content by Pouya on the Substack. So that's one really great movie. If anyone hasn't seen, I recommend. I really like... My list now is going to be skewed towards

Things that I might consider showing a five-year-old because I have a five-year-old. But I really like the, and I've always liked the version of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn in it from the, maybe the thirties. Yep. And I like that, that, that Robin Hood movie as a kind of classic adventure film. For more modern, not, not very recent, but modern films, the Godfather, Godfather, I think is fantastic at what it does and is a,

a really high quality film. Others aren't coming to mind now. All right, that doodle bunny. Greg, what are your thoughts on gun rights? Iran doesn't seem to have much respect for them, which is not a good representation of my view, but yes. Yeah, I think I'm pretty aligned with what Iran's actual views on gun rights are.

One, I don't think it's that important an issue. I think you have a right to self-defense and you have a right to the weapons or tools you need for self-defense. And therefore, I think there's a right in most contexts to have a handgun. But I think since it's specifically a tool of killing, it's reasonable that there are registration requirements and other kinds of background checks or other kind of requirements on it. I don't think

I don't have strong opinions on exactly what they should be, and I think it's the kind of thing that would likely differ from one just, well-ruled country to another, and within a just, well-ruled country, you know, from one municipality to another. So I think basically we are in the range of... America's gun laws are in the range of what's reasonable, and they could change quite a bit in one direction or another and still be within the range of what's reasonable. I think there's a kind of...

over-concern with guns among some people that comes from a kind of mistaken view of what political change would look like. But I do think there's a right to them. I think it's not, however, mostly for political reasons that you rebel against the government, but for reasons of like, what if someone breaks into my house? What if, you know, I feel like I'm under threat and so forth, and I should have the means to protect myself. Yeah.

You know who's actually very good on guns is Sam Harris. He is. He's excellent. Really good. Yeah, he's got a podcast. He really breaks it down nicely and in a very rational way. Nathan, would a digital universal taxonomy using objectivism be an effective tool for thinkers, assuming it could be automated for ease of use purposes?

in that you could see explicitly the inner workings of your mind. Yes. I think, uh, there are projects like that. I'm actually a bit involved with one, um, that people trying to, um, I don't know how publicly to say, I don't know if I could say any more about that. It's very early days, but, um, there's a computer scientist, um, who's interested in building this kind of thing. And we've talked about it a lot over the years and have, uh, dabbled in it. Cool. Uh,

Rob, how did Hegelian Max Steiner derive a narco-egoism? Derive seems a little, I don't know that I would use that word. I mean, I'm not, I've read The Ego and Its Own, you know, quite a while ago, and I don't have it well enough in mind to reproduce all the arguments from it. But I think the basic idea is a kind of rejection of any kind of authority and any kind of

on what one wants, and that gives you that kind of a view. Robos asks, thoughts on Herbert Spencer and Marshall McLuhan? Well, those are people who are two pretty different. I don't know any kind of connection between them. You know, I don't know that much Spencer. I've read a little of him. Most of what I've read I haven't liked, but it feels like, to me, the kind of...

social Darwinist view misses what is distinctive about human beings, which is that human relationships, for all other animals, the fundamental relationship among members of the species is one of competition. And any cooperation that there might be, say, between the parents raising young or one hive of bees or whatever, is set in a context of the species members are competing with another for resources.

Whereas for human beings, I think the fundamental relation is win-win because we don't compete for resources because we don't have any fixed inputs to our life process. We produce resources and we can find ways to make resources for us, things that otherwise would have been useless. And then once you, once you notice that about human beings, um,

The whole way in which evolutionary theory and other things apply to us, that is, apply to societies and so forth, I think looks, and people within a society, looks very, very different today.

But you can, you know, the Spencer social Darwinism is a little bit of a too reductive reading of what he's done about. And I don't feel like I have enough command of everything he thought to give a verdict on him as a whole as a thinker. The other one he asked about was Marshall McLuhan. He's the media is the message or massage guy who who wrote a lot about hot versus cold media and stuff like that. But I don't.

Actually, in high school, I had a teacher who was into him, and we read some stuff by him, and it's like a television production class I was taking, but I don't have enough of a sense of him to really say anything intelligent. Okay. Jacob asks, regarding Catholicism, what do you think is the worst part of it for kids, adults? For me, it was duty ethics or misintegration of pride, original sin. Well...

I wasn't raised Catholic or in any particular religion. My parents are kind of... My father's from a Catholic family and my mother's from a Jewish family, and they were sort of

hand wavy kind of agnostics they'd say things like well there there's got to be something which at some level surely is true there are many things um but uh so i don't have a like i had a catholic upbringing and i can reflect on you know what was good or bad about it um and i think more at the level of what is the effect of religion in general and then christianity

rather than the effects of, you know, Roman Catholic Catholicism as opposed to being a Lutheran or an Episcopalian or a, or a Eastern Orthodox or something. So I don't have any opinions at that level of resolution that you're asking, but definitely the doctrine of original sin. Um, the idea that you should be oriented around the meek. Um, and in general, I think of Christianity, if you want to think about what its essence is as a religion, um,

is I think it's an attack on self-esteem. I think the fundamental message of Jesus is that you shouldn't have self-esteem. And there are ways to dress it up more nicely. But if you think about what the Sermon on the Mount is about, that's what I think, in the end, the message is. And some denominations in some areas stress that stuff more than others. But that's what I think is the idea that your life, that you're not competent and you're not worthy.

Caleb asks, Peacock once got a letter from a Greek historian on a show on the rise of ancient Greece. The idea was an intersection of selfish high barbarians with intellectual exchange of global trade. Always wanted to hear Greg's thoughts.

I wonder if he's talking about Steve Jolivet. Yeah, I think so. I think so. Some communications with Leonard about that. Yeah. I'm not enough of a historian and particularly of the period of sort of, you know, archaic Greece to have well-developed opinions on just, you know, why it happened when it didn't, particularly if we're talking about, you know, why Homer happened as opposed to why...

happened or why Plato happened or why they were able to develop there. Jason Ryans is someone who knows a lot more about this and would have a lot more thoughts about it. And indeed, he's teaching a course for the Ayn Rand University now on, I think he's going to do a series of courses on Greek culture and history, but he started with this early period. So I'd really recommend, I haven't heard the course actually, but Jason

told me much about what he wanted to cover, and we talked about some of his notes for tonight. I'd really recommend looking to that. I do think that the being at nexus of trade is really important for the development of ideas. And if you think about where the kind of Greek ideas develop and when, including when the center of where the intellectual hubs were shifted, it had a lot to do with where were the loci of trade.

Lucinda, any advice on how to best approach learning music theory? That's an interesting question for me. So I have not had...

kind of formal education in music theory like you get if you go to a conservatory and i always uh or take music theory classes and i always kind of wonder a bit how much music theory i know when i talk to people who know what i i seem to know a lot to me but there are other things i don't or i don't have the the terms for it the you what i care about and would care about in learning music

is to have a conceptual understanding of what I'm doing in playing music or writing it so that it's not an issue of, you know, I hit these two notes and I don't know why they go together and I don't know what I'm doing and I don't understand what a key is or what a chord is or what a resolution is. But I think if you learn, I don't know, because I don't really, I mean, I had guitar lessons from a jazz kind of guitar player when I was first learning guitar and he talked a lot about chords and there's just, I don't have enough

separated out about the different ways you could learn it and the different approaches to to have once i have how i explain it to people when they ask me about different things when they don't know anything about music but that's different than advice on how to learn it and then i don't know that everything john asks did rand ever read an entire book of cons or even an entire essay well he's not really an essayist unless you're thinking of things like what is the what is enlightenment

I don't... If you're asking me as like a historian of her, a scholar of her, we don't have direct documentary evidence. We don't have like whole books that are marked up. So I don't know. What's your evaluation of her evaluation of Kant? It's accurate, but at a very high level. So it's not an evaluation of this bit of this argument at this place, but kind of what's in general going on in this work and what's its historical significance. And I think people...

underestimate the value of that kind of thinking and of tertiary works in history. Nobody understands the history of philosophy by having read all the books in it one by one.

and thought about them just on their own. And, and, and like, even if you've done that and I've read, you know, a lot of them, oh, certainly not everything. Right. Your ability to do that and to integrate them and think about how they relate to each other is depending a lot on scaffolding that you're getting from secondary and tertiary sources that try to integrate it all. And you're thinking about, is this integration right or wrong? And a lot of the work is this kind of big picture, putting things together and then checking it with spot,

readings of particular things and things that you, you know, picking a few things that you go deep on. Leonard Peikoff certainly went deep on a lot of these particular texts and arguments. And Rand was kind of talking to him throughout his doing that. And like, I'm sure she worked through things like, I'm pretty confident that she worked through particular arguments in the first critique with Leonard when he was writing lectures on them. But whether she ever sat down and read the whole thing, you know, cover to cover, I don't know.

Justin asks, what is your evaluation of the first 50 days of the Trump administration? Bad, but it's hard to tell how much on the specifics because we're in a kind of fog of war situation where

For example, it's hard to actually know what Dodge is doing and Doge or whatever you call it, and what's going to come out of it. Will they save any money at all? How much disruption is being caused by their acting in erratic ways? How much of that would be necessary to accomplish some good ends if they had them?

or if they have them. So there's a lot that it's hard to rely on the reporting about the details of things. And I don't think it's that good to think in terms of 10 days, 20 days, 30 days, second week, first month, whatever. The essential of Trump is that his whole person and his political career is an attack on rationality, on principle and on morality. And we're seeing that kind of

in the way the administration conducts itself in a lot of fields. But also, I think there's a lot to be desired in the kind of reporting that's happening. And so it's just hard to know too much of the detail, or I don't. Dr. Samiri, what do you think about the trend of tech embracing MAGA? It's a little hard to know how real it is. So we are in the period where

that's analogous to just after George Floyd for wokeism, right? There's a kind of a sense that this is what we're supposed to say. There's a fear of, uh,

certain belligerent and outspoken people who will kind of push back on you in various ways and maybe harm you electorally or harm you through the power of government or through mob action if you say too much of the wrong things. And there are a lot of people for certain party lines, and there are a lot of people who would have seen themselves as generally aligned with something.

Like, you know, I'm generally supportive of minority rights or, or, or, or disenfranchised. I think of myself as generally on the left, somebody would think, but like what's going on now is crazy and I'm not comfortable with it, but I'm afraid to say it. And I think a lot of people had that feeling, um, in the wake of the George Floyd and the rioting and the white fragility becoming a, um, you know, a big bestseller and all of that. And I think we're, we're in a similar space with people who see themselves as, um,

anti-left, unhappy with the left, looking for something new, and Macca-ism. There are a lot of people who I think, this isn't what I was looking for, this isn't what I signed up for, I was curious about another option, but I'm not sure this is it, I was always kind of lukewarm on it, but they're, I think, not, you know, they're not in a place where those opinions, are they ready to voice.

And it's hard to tell of the people who are tech people who are more enthusiastic about Trump, how many of them are really bought into Mavis in the same way that it was hard to tell how many of the businesses that put up BLM signs, you know, that was really what they were about or was it a kind of bandwagon or fear or capitulation. So I don't think we'll know yet what to make of this for a few months or a few years.

What do you think of René Girard, whom Peter Thiel considers his favorite philosopher? I've never read him. I've heard Thiel talk about him. I was at a conference once where Thiel was speaking, and I've read some secondary articles on the connection, but I've never read him himself. Wyatt says, if Elon Musk is supposedly not an Ayn Rand hero, I challenge you to name...

better, you name somebody, real-life example who's better, who are more consistent than Elon Musk? Well, right now, I think Jeff Bezos, even prior to the recent thing with the Post, has always struck me as a better example of an Iran hero than Musk. Steve Jobs. But none of these people are perfect embodiments of a fictional character. Fictional characters are idealized. And

Um, just like you can't, you know, point to someone who is a Jean Valjean or, or, or, um,

a, um, uh, Hester Prynne or whatever, like exactly, uh, real people aren't exactly like any fictional characters and the fictional characters are, are heightened and, and exaggerated. And Elon Musk is like an Ayn Rand hero in certain respects, in certain areas of his life at certain times, and like an Ayn Rand villain in other respects, in other areas of his time, as a lot of people are right now, if one wants to think about, um,

The implication is that either these people are great all around or Ayn Rand's novels are unrealistic. And there's a respect in which they are unrealistic and are meant to be. They're stylized and dramatized and they're calling attention to some of the real causal forces at work in human life and in the human mind. But by showing them in a pure, higher relief form than you normally see them or maybe almost ever see them,

So, you know, they just are different than the people you meet, even if in essentials, sometimes they're the same. And if you want to think about how is Atlas maybe a little, one of the respects in which Atlas is unrealistic, and I think intentionally so, is that the heroes of it, even though they, in various senses, sanction the bad regime and need to learn to withdraw their sanction from it, are

you don't see like, you know, Hank really Reardon, you know, really being in favor of Clifton Losey as opposed to, you know, not Clifton Losey, sorry, of, of, of Mr. Thompson as opposed to his political rival. And where you, you can't imagine, you know, Dagny and Hank having an argument where one of them is, is supporting, you know, one party and the other, the other there, they have a kind of contempt and disinterest in what's going on in politics. They,

They view a lot of them as bad and they're not. There are factional rivalries, you can tell in the politics of Atlas Trunk. But it's such a remove from the what any of the heroes are thinking about that they couldn't imagine being aligned with with one or the other. And in fact, what happens is that, you know, many of the great business people and great people in general get caught up in the.

the factional rivalries among, um, status politicians. You know, there are some who are, uh, uh, astute enough to see, um, to not do that, but in general, that's what happens. And, um, that's part of why it's so much harder to, um, to turn a society around than it would be if, if all the best people in proportion to how good they were, were, um, you know, not on the side of, um,

Joe Biden or Donald Trump or, you know, some other grifter. Dave asks, as a professor, do you consider students using AI to whole cloth develop their homework assignments to be a form of cheating, a form of intellectual secondhandness? Whole cloth? Like they just put the thing in and yeah, that's then just not doing the assignment.

I think, you know, there are good ways to use AI in your thinking and your research. And I think teachers need to and need to more frankly than I have think about what good kind of assignments that make good use of AI is or what such good assignments would be and how you can use it in the writing and editing process and so forth. And in part because the technology is developing so quickly and it can do different things this year than it can do last year. It's it's

It's hard to develop those kind of assignments and so forth. So I don't think no one should use it. It shouldn't be used anywhere to do with anything in school. But if what you're doing is using it to do your homework for you, then yeah, it's cheating. Do you agree with Richard Hanania that the right has a low human capital problem? In a way, but I don't think that's the deepest or right way to put it. How would you put it? I mean, I think there's...

It's right now appealing to and trying to appeal differentially to uneducated people. And there's, I think, reasons why it's been that way for some time, but they're somewhat ideological. Like if essentially nobody's ready to reject Christianity root and branch, and if you're not ready to reject Christianity root and branch, you should be a socialist.

That's the political implication of Christianity. So if you're going to have an anti-socialist party in a country that's like that,

Either it's got to be really radical and trying to uproot altruism and religion, you know, from the basis. It's got to be a party driven by Enlightenment ideas. And even if it's not going to say, you know, we're anti-Christian in every respect, it's going to have to be pro-individualism and pro-reason and et cetera, in a way that no party has been in quite a long time. Or it's going to have to be selling kind of obvious versions of having your cake and eating it too.

And it's going to have to be distracting people from the ways in which their ideas are inconsistent. And I think both of our parties do that in different ways. But the fact that the right has been associated or the Republicans, I don't think it's an accident to the party that's associated with capitalism in a culture that's unwilling to break with the

bad ideas that are inimical to capitalism in it, that that party has become kind of religious and more anti-intellectual. Justin says, you said Trump was evil in the Iran book show last year. Do you still stand by that? Yeah. Absolutely. Lucinda, a German intellectual recently argued that Plato would look positively upon Germany's democracy. To me, the whole approach seems anachronistic and not very convincing. Any thoughts?

Yeah, I agree. You can't that this kind of thing is anachronistic unless you're using Plato as a kind of symbol of something very abstract. Like, you know, he was for principle or something like that, or he was for this or that. But like if you're trying to think about how somebody would think about a particular political development, you have to think not just about what were their views very abstractly, but how did they understand the world they were in in their time?

And that's why they viewed things the way they did. Like if you're trying to think about why does one person among people who think that there's, you know, a lot wrong with Trump and a lot wrong with the Democrats among people who think of themselves as objectivist, why are some of them regard one as the lesser of two evils and others as the other, other of the other lesser of two evil. Like it's not always and only about differences at the level of philosophy. It's also about like differences at the level of like, how do you understand the,

where we are in history and what kind of world we're like are we you know 10 minutes away from a barbarian horde invading or are we like you know where are we how do we understand like where we are now in history and what's going on in history and you need to think about that think about how people would understand

specific political developments. Even what would Ayn Rand think about this election or that election or whatever 40 years after she died or 50? You have to kind of project, well, how would she understand all the things that happened in between her time and then and then apply it to now? Well, if you're talking about somebody who lived in ancient Greece, there wasn't industry, there weren't machines, the only kind of democracy there was didn't, you know, was in small cities

where people could practically all know each other. So many things. You have to kind of... Plato's view of any particular current development, unless, again, we're just taking him as a symbol for somebody who believed this very abstract thing. But if you're taking him as a person with a whole lot of thoughts, you have to think about how would he have processed...

you know 150 totally world-changing things that have happened between his time and now to think like you know what do you think german unification was a good or bad thing or what would he think about you know afd or this is like it's just you know it's that's the anachronism in it justin uh do you have any theory on what's happening to elon musk he seems to be spiraling out of control no i don't know that much about him personally and there's not that much information available um

And it's hard to know when someone acts in a way that's surprising for the bad or surprising for the good, it then makes you think about reinterpret his earlier actions. Maybe at times when he seemed better, less of it was really him and more of it was someone handling him. I don't know. I don't know enough about... I don't think any... Well, someone might, but I don't think that much is publicly known about the facts of his life and what's going on that...

I don't think most people should be speculating about him. I don't certainly am not in a position to except to say that he's obviously his businesses have obviously accomplished a lot. He seems to have a lot to do with that. It doesn't seem accidental, like he was just a figurehead as far as I can tell.

And he's now acting in some ways that are really disturbing and wrong. And more than any particular thing he's doing politically or which candidates he's supporting, it's the kind of thing that actually Hanania has been very eloquent on, the kind of spreading on acts of, not even what the content policy act, but his personal spreading on acts of all kinds of irrational viciousness and the

enforcing a very low epistemic standard through his own conduct and what he praises that I think is the most troubling thing about Musk. Why? I mean, we'll discuss, but I think there are real challenges in being an exceptional person for the good and having contrary opinions to the people around you and being a strong personality who's able to get a lot done and by force of will and perseverance accomplish things. There are...

If you're that kind of person, and in general, if you're any good kind of person, if you're unusual in any respect for the good, a lot of the kind of standard ways of acting or typical behaviors or things everybody learns when they're young that help them to be

not stand out in bad ways. Like, don't work for you. You have to kind of re-engineer those things for yourself, given what's distinctive about you. Maybe it serves you not to care too much about what other people think in some situations where maybe you should listen to more other people if you're like way more often writing them on certain things. So there are certain kinds of habits or abilities, exceptional kinds of people often have to re-engineer for themselves. And there are failure modes of

people who are really good at certain things that come about by failures to do that, particularly when they get into new and different kinds of situations. And you could guess that something in that genre is, you know, to do with what's going on with Musk. But any more than that, I think, would just be going way beyond what certainly I can know. Justin asked, any thoughts on Curtis Yavin's philosophy? What I know of it is...

you know strikes me as juvenile and sophomoric but that's the kind of thing people say about ayn rand who don't know her well and um i think there's real reasons to think that it is juvenile and stuff work in this case but i've not done a real uh deep dive into him uh matt my brother believes we can only ever asim asymptotically approach absolute truth

with there always being some room for uncertainty. Can you try to steal man and then argue against this position? So this is the classic kind of pragmatist view. So truth is the ideal end of inquiry. And we can approach it, but never reach it. So there's a kind of wrong...

In my view, there's a wrong view of consciousness behind this. I'm not going to quite treat it as steel man and then attack because I don't think that's actually the right method for dealing with ideas. But what is this view and what's its nature? And the nature of the view is you have the idea, you find this in the Popperians a lot, and you find it in pragmatists, that in effect, we have a kind of mental model or mental picture of reality. And it never perfectly matches reality.

But we don't ask where it came from or how it got there. It's just everyone's got a mental picture somewhere. And then the work of knowing and inquiry is trying to gradually make that closer and closer to reality. And you can never achieve it. And notice that the way this works is it's sort of like treating your whole picture of reality as the unit.

And you're modifying it to get there. And what is the kind of absolute truth? What is the idea of absolute truth? Like, isn't two plus two? Absolutely. That two plus two is four. Absolutely true. Well, yeah, but it's not a, it's a limited thing. It's just one fact. And we're, but we're thinking about, we're thinking about the absolute truth is the whole. And so it's this kind of Hegelian pragmatist notion that we're judging your whole kind of mental set, your whole view of reality. And that thing can only get closer and closer to the truth, but can never be absolutely true. But,

In fact, what truth and falsehood apply to, as I understand it, is not the whole of your cognition, but particular claims. And if you think about particular claims as being true or false, they can be true or false. Two plus two is four. You know, Biden did win the 2020 election and Trump won, did win the 2024 election. And we could think about how we know these things.

And there are other things that are mere approximations. We don't know the answer to this, but we know it's somewhere in this range. What's going on in this way of looking at it is the real crux or the focal point you have to think about is can we know specific things and then have other things we don't know? You think, well, I'm certain of this. I know that. I don't know that.

And some things are known and they're true, and other things you don't know what's true and so forth. Or is the unit of judgment, in effect, omniscience? So to have the truth would be to know everything about everything, in which case nobody could do it. You could only approach it. And not knowing about one thing counts as being less sure or less fully knowing about something else. That's, I think, the kind of view of knowledge that's in the background behind the asymptotically approaching truth model. Let's see.

P. Gupta, some of my friends think Trump isn't any worse than recent presidents overall, but just unwilling or unable to hide it. He's only more obvious. What would you say makes him essentially more bad? So first of all, I think that's the best case one can make for him. So the best thing one could say about Trump and the best case for him is, yeah, this was all going on the whole time. He's just bringing it out in the open. And maybe it's better to have it out in the open.

and to have it crafty and hidden, everybody can see what it is, and so forth. But I don't think that's true. I think what a society accepts in its leaders matters for who it is and how it's going to develop. There's a difference between... There's that old line that... What's the line? Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice plays to virtue or something like that. There's a difference between...

down with standards and trying to cheat on the standards. And I don't think it's true that everybody in the government and the government as a whole has been entirely non-objective and driven by caprice and arbitrariness. There's been way too much of that. But a big part of what makes America function is that America, I think, has a kind of immune system of objectivity in our political lives. Americans, including American bureaucrats,

are by and large not power lusters. There are power lusters among them, but there's a culture of when people are given too much power, when they're given arbitrary caprice, they try to come up with ways of rationalizing and justifying what they're doing and giving themselves standards to which they're accountable for, that even if they fudge and twist them and so forth along the borderline, they have a sense of there's controls on what I can do.

I'm not a dictator. I'm not a king. And I'm thinking about like people at all the various environmental agencies and drug regulatory agencies and all these people who have powers they shouldn't have and who our lives are too much in their hands, given how much power they've been granted by Congress and granted by the voters in different ways. Like, why aren't things worse than they are?

They're pretty bad, but they're way better than they are in most places at most times. And I think a reason for that is there's a wanting to have procedures, a wanting to have standards, a wanting to be able to justify what you're doing to impartial parties that is imperfectly there, but really there in a lot of the culture of America and in American government. And it's to not see that and to kind of attack

All elements of the bureaucracy, without noticing where there's presences of that and where that's helping us, I think is destructive. So Justin asks, are you optimistic about the progress movement led by individuals like Jason Crawford? Very much so. So Jason is a particular bright spot in it, and he's working on a book called

Tech Optimist Manifesto, I think he's calling it, or Techno-Optimist or Techno-Humanist Manifesto. But he's writing a book. It's coming out in little installments on his sub-stack. And I think after that, it'll be published just as a whole book. I'm one of a number of people who's giving him comments on the chapters as he writes it, and they're very good, I think.

So I'm particularly bullish about Jason's work and have been since the beginning, since he started his blog, Roots of Progress, when it was just a blog. There are other people in this field who are good. I'm forgetting his name, but the guy who's at Kato who does their progress stuff is good. Marion Topin McBean. They put out some fairly good stuff on iPhone. Yeah.

I'm impressed by some of the work that Derek Thompson has done, who's a kind of more left-aligned guy but writes on progress stuff for The Atlantic, and he's the one who's doing a book with Derek Thompson now. The essay by Tyler Cowen and Collison on the need for a science of progress was a really good essay. And I've been to a number of the events that Jason's organized or co-organized, and I've co-organized some with him myself at Texas, and most of them have been good. Yeah.

Justin, what makes The Godfather a great film, in your opinion? Everything that happens happens for a reason that advances the plot and the theme. And it's not just from the perspective of the script, the way the shots are composed, the music, everything about it just is well and deliberately chosen to convey what it conveys. And it creates a world which is not a pleasant world, but it's a world in which choices have consequences, in which you could see the way people develop.

And certain moral facts are highlighted. Frank says, how can New Zealand give personhood to a mountain, an inanimate, insatiate object? What is the rationale? Also, can you explain Karl Popper's falsification? Wow, that's a big question. And they're very disparate. I didn't know that New Zealand gave personhood to a mountain. I don't know anything about this. Do you, Jeroen? No, I don't. Somebody...

Somebody mentioned it in my show earlier, but I don't know anything about it. So this is the first I'm hearing of that. Good luck to the Aussies if they think you can make him out to the person. It's the New Zealand. Don't blame the Aussies for this one. Okay. And the Kiwis. Kiwis. The Kiwis. Yeah. Good luck to the Kiwis. Now, what does he want me to explain about Karl Popper? His view of falsification? Explain Karl Popper's falsification. Okay.

I mean, what's more interesting about Popper than the falsificationism is the stuff I was talking about before you get that in Conjectures and Reputations and other books. But falsificationism is what people tend to learn about in a philosophy of science first-year class where Popper's taught. And it's the idea that, in effect, Hume is right. You can never prove something by induction. And indeed, not only can't you prove it, but you can't get any evidence for it at all.

So all that we can do in science, thinks Popper, is either falsify a theory or fail to falsify it. What science does is it puts forth theories. And there's no kind of... It's not a rational thing or a matter of reason where the theory came from or why you thought it in the first place. It's just whatever you come up with. And then what you do is you use reason to...

try to find the ideas or theories that have um make predictions that uh could be falsified make predictions that could turn out to be false and then you test them and you have a a position where different people advance different theories and they try to falsify them and you hold on to the ones that have thus far not been falsified and if you have a kind of um

system whereby you're doing that and it's vigorous enough and there are enough different people doing it with enough different theories and so forth and you're distinguishing between the enterprise of testing falsifiable theories and other things people do where they're expounding things but they're not falsifiable and they're not testing them um then you have reason to think that over time the the batteries battery of theories held by people who are doing this will you know get closer to the truth

Justin, Hanania still believes in race realism. He doesn't believe it has anything to do with policy anymore. Is that still an immoral position to hold? I don't necessarily think so. It depends on why he thinks it and what the issues are. I don't think it's true, and I don't think there's good evidence for it. I think the reasons people think it have to do with pretty...

wrong views of humanity and thinking and bad method and philosophy of science. But if someone and a kind of failure to understand evolution and there are a number of issues I think are just wrong with the reason why so many people believe some version, a kind of loose or soft version of race realism or what they might call race realism. The idea that we can detect in the data of what people are good or bad at cognitively

um, things that we can tell are results of genetic differences. That's what I, and that those map onto ancestral populations, roughly what we call races. That's what I would take to be the theory. And I don't think there's evidence for that, but it's, I think, I think a lot of people believe and a lot of people who are, um, reasonably good on other things, but have too conventional a view of science. And I think that most of the better people who believe it

or at least suspect that it might be true. I think, as Hanania has come to think, that it doesn't have any of the political consequences that a lot of the racists think that it has. And that the tendency of people to seize on this and get excited about it and talk about it has to do with them wanting those kind of political consequences. So it's something that we, you know, it's reasonably viewed as impolite to focus on or attend to.

And I don't regard that position as necessarily immoral in someone who holds it, but I do think it's mistaken. Why do you use the word evade to explain evil? Why do I? I mean, I got the word from Ayn Rand who uses it, but I think it's a good word. It's meaning avoid. And there's a mental action that her view is, and I think it's right at the root of evil, which is trying to avoid seeing certain things, trying to...

put certain things out of mind when you suspect that they're true trying to avoid certain knowledge and evade seems like a good word for that it's a word that means avoid uh get away from and if if there is that mental act as I think we can tell that there is and if it is generative of um of the kinds of motives that um lead people to take the various actions which are the symptoms of evil

Then evasion is the root of evil. That's a good way to formulate that point. I have a whole talk on this. I think it's up on ARI's internet on the nature of evil. Frankie, Ayn Rand once noted that she knew of a stronger argument for the existence of God that was better than the existing arguments. Does anyone in the Institute have an inkling of what that argument would be? No, not really. I mean, I'm not even positive about

that she said that. I think she said it in, if she did, in some kind of offhand context, like there are better arguments than any of these. I think the best argument for the existence of God or what it's worth that I know of is the one Locke makes in book four of his essay, I Need My Understanding, which I don't think is ultimately a good argument. I don't want to go into it all now, but for anyone who wants what I think is the best argument, read Locke. Ian says, do you think Elon Musk is more like Gail Winant or Robert Stadler?

I don't know exactly what's going on with him. And so it's hard to tell. And he's not, we're not at the end of his story yet. Justin, what is a rational non-racist explanation for why African American communities still struggle with poverty and crime? Well, I gave a talk on this at, at Ocon in effect on racism. So you can look up that talk and see, but it's why the community still struggle with poverty and crime. Well,

One way of thinking about it is why do problems persist in these communities rather than getting solved, right? And some of them have festered and gotten worse. First of all, they've festered and gotten worse. They weren't always crime-ridden communities. And there were a series of government policies that have institutionalized certain communities, not just black communities, I think some Appalachian communities too and so forth, into dependency and poverty.

That's one thing that's happening on the one hand, right? So think about the war on poverty and the Great Society programs, basically. That's what they've done, right? They've institutionalized people who are in poverty into poverty. When you already have existing racism that's causing people to read these things through a racial lens, and then one of the communities that this is happening to is people that people already have a racial prejudice against, and that's going to reinforce it and make it harder for people to escape out of that because it's going to reinforce the

the racism and the racial associations. Then you think, what is the process by which racism is overcome in a society? And the process by which it's overcome involves the free market, but involves in particular real market innovations that need to happen. When there's a prejudice against something, say against a certain kind of product, let's say, right? It's not just somebody notices something

Some entrepreneur notices this product is good, but people don't think it's good. So I'm going to open a store selling it and make a billion dollars. Well, if nobody thinks it's good and there are reasons they don't think it could, even if they're prejudices or whatever against the product, he's not going to make a billion dollars. He has to figure out there's a business problem of how do I market this thing? How do I overcome the prejudice? How do I do it right? And,

So if there are hiring practices, training differentials, all kinds of things against a certain population that's making it harder for them to find certain work and there are kind of cultural issues in their community and in other communities that are making barriers to create, there's entrepreneurial work that needs to be done to overcome that. Racism doesn't end just by a law.

that's enforcing racism disappearing. There's the phrase affirmative action, which is bad and what it's come to mean, but there's something people have to do to overcome it, just like there's something people have to do to overcome any other problem. Again, if you know that, you know, whatever, the magnetic properties of Betamax tapes are better than the magnetic properties of VHS tapes or whatever, that doesn't mean that those tapes will sell better unless you figure out how to market it, how to build a whole business around it, how to correct its imbalance. And what we've had since the Civil Rights Act, basically,

is it's been illegal to have any kind of innovation in hiring practices, employment practices around race issues. You have to show that you're not racist by meeting quotas and so forth. You can't quite have a people. So it's made everything to do with race and employment law, a covering your ass and box checking exercise. It's totally paralyzed thought in this field for the

50 years. And then on top of that, uh, education, education is controlled by the government in a way that's, um,

rules out innovation in the education system, right? And then it's made racially sensitive in ways that makes it look away from any different rentals because they don't know anything they can do to fix them. They have to try to cover them up and there's no kind of innovation. So you have every kind of incentive in the welfare state, in the state control of education, and then affirmative action, kind of hiring laws, the Civil Rights Act and the affirmative action regime that would freeze all the kinds of thinking that would be needed to solve this problem.

The anti-racist, real anti-racist thinking, including thinking about how to overcome these things, not as some kind of duty to society, but as selfishly trying to get the best employees, trying to get the best market share, trying to get the best school, etc., has been made illegal effectively.

for half a century. And for that reason, you'd expect communities that were hardest hit by this kind of thing to begin with to mire and wallow in that kind of situation. And that's, I think, what we've had. And that's why it's hit the African-American community particularly badly, although there are a few other communities that are hit badly by it.

And then you therefore get a kind of culture of dependency and a culture of racism and a culture of not expecting other people, not expecting black people to do well and black people not expecting it. And and and it's not like people say it's a cultural problem. The problem isn't black culture. That's bad, although there are bad things in it. But the black culture is a part of the American culture and it's all set up in a way that enforces racism.

enforces racial thinking and lower expectations and etc. And that's the explanation of it. Yeah, that's good. Okay, Justin, would Jeff Bezos have done what he did with the Washington Post if Kamala had been elected? Who knows? I don't know. We don't know what he's done with it yet. He posted one really good message.

And he hasn't done much since. So so, you know, we'll know what he's done when we see how the editorial policy evolves over the next year. And if what he's doing is kissing up to the new regime and using language that's respectable to himself or some other people to do it. But the real motive is toadying favor with the new regime. Then, yeah, he probably would have done that.

With the old regime, with another regime, he would have toted up to them and he's just, you know, bootlicking and being a toady. If what he's doing is actually coming out for his own values, then I think, yeah, he would have done it in either case. Because if you think about what happened with the kind of better tech people who either supported the Republicans in this election or.

or didn't support Democrats as they had previously supported, there was a real kind of breaking with the past in that. And they came out publicly and took a stand in not doing what they did before. And I think they had reasons for it. I think tech in particular was really badly treated by the Biden administration. And I think something broke in the relationship a lot of those people and a lot of that industry had to the Democratic Party. And I don't think that

break was immediately repairable. And I think they were, you know, publicly distanced from the administration, from the Democratic Party. So I don't think they would have or could have or would have had any motivation to kind of crawl back and into their holes. And I suspect actually that we would have gotten more good content

from this demographic of people so not just bezos but mark and treason and mark zuckerberg and all of those kind of people if harris had won because i don't think they would have liked harris i don't think they would have been inspired by her i think they would have felt um like we've already come out some distance against her and there's not much more to lose in saying a bit more and they wouldn't have been in a situation of having to be afraid of um

The current regime which agrees with them about some of what was bad about the past regime and that fact the the existence of the current regime and the fact that all these people are obviously afraid of it whether they're saying they are or not they weren't saying they were afraid of Biden when he was in power right when someone's actually Holding a gun over you and your your speech is curtailed by it. You don't say that right and that's what we didn't see much of it before I

I think they're intimidated now. They were intimidated then. I think we saw them breaking from the people they were intimidated by before. And I think they have more reason to be more intimidated by this regime. And the fact that they've already publicly broken with the past regime and supported to some extent, even if it's only by not supporting the Democrats in the last election, the current one makes them associated with it. And then the fact that you have so much support

indefensible garbage coming out on the right these days makes it harder for people who want to be putting forth a positive rational message to do it and get oxygen for it. So I suspect that if there wasn't a, if Trump wasn't empowered culturally, if he was defeated badly, for example,

that there be more creativity, more independent voices, just less groupthink on the anti-left side, and that some of these people, Bezos, maybe Musk, Andreessen and so forth, would be part of that. But now they're trying to curry favor with the party that's in power to some extent, even if that's not what's primarily driving them. And that is, I think, having an impact on what kind of ideas we're seeing.

Hyper Reason asks, have you read the Corpus Hermetica? That is, reason lets us understand all things. If not, keen to explore how its ancient Egyptian Greek origins and influence on Enlightenment thinkers. Thoughts? No, I haven't. And I don't have much to say about it. All right. Lucinda, AI has been very useful for finding relevant secondary texts or relevant essays on things I'm looking into.

also been useful for structuring my day, which has greatly helped me deal with sleep problems. AI is incredibly valuable. Yeah, you have to look and find the uses for it. And I've often thought it would be useful for one thing and then it wasn't, and then tried it for something else I didn't think it would be too useful for and found that it was useful. But it's really developing quickly. And then different AIs are different in their strengths and weaknesses. Yeah.

So you've got to just try it out. You can't trust it, I think, what it says too often. But for finding resources, who would be an example of someone who thinks such and such and where could I find it? So long as you can check at the end of the session that what it's saying is true and you generally can, I think it's really, really useful. I use it a lot.

For what I'm doing, translating, reading Greek texts, what are five other ways I might translate this word and why is it in this voice or mood and so forth. And it's just a great conversation partner. In general, what it's really useful for is where there's a resource that's or set of resources that's available to it.

it can make that research conversational resource conversational with you. So, because all the books on Greek grammar and Greek, whatever are all, you know, in the public domain. And so in, in these databases, because they're all 19th century works, you can in fact talk with all of them. And that's really useful. That's cool. All right. Thank you. All right. Last question. Yeah.

Thoughts on kind of the young objectivist intellectuals in the kind of AI orbit movement? I'm pleased with them. And everyone's different. I don't want to go through person by person. But there are a lot of young people now who are just starting to do things.

that's publicly available that I think is very good, that I've been working with in one capacity or another or friendly with for years now. And we'll, I think, have a real kind of

first-handed grasp of objectivism and first-handed grasp of whatever field they're working in and abilities to combine them um in ways that i think are you know that's what you really want in the intellectual you had um muhammadana a couple of weeks ago a week or two ago um he's someone i've i've worked with and i think he's developing really nice and what he had to say on your show i thought was insightful and his piece on um on uh on the american revolution i thought was um

very good as a kind of popular work of history, but also there was a fair amount of philosophy of history in there that is a little bit below the surface and related to themes in philosophy of science. And, um, I'm really proud of him that he was able to do that. Um,

Stephen Wharton, who's a graduate student in philosophy at St. Andrews and has been visiting here at Texas and working with me on some projects, just gave his first talk at the Ayn Rand Con here in Austin, a talk on rights that I thought was really, really fantastic. Nekhmad, I mentioned earlier, who's writing this sub stack out, Living Iran, on his experiences in Iran and since is...

you know, what he's writing is a memoir, but there's a real, I think, deep thinking going on in it about the nature of freedom, the nature of dictatorship, what kind of a universe it is, is it benevolent or not, and what does that mean, that he's really grappling with issues deeply and using what he's learned from objectivism well in doing that, and I think eventually there'll be a really fantastic book out of that, and in the meantime, it's just what he has to say now is fascinating and harrowing, and

Everybody should be reading that blog if they're not out living in Iran. You'll learn a lot from it about the world. I'm pleased by the way Ibis, who's also been on your show, Ibis Slade is thinking about history, particularly Black American history, but 19th century history generally in a way that I think is very reality-oriented and philosophically deep, and he's avoiding...

kind of obvious um i don't want to say he's only avoiding things that are obvious but there are kind of ways that people tend to do cartoon history um that that's too reductive um they're too quickly looking for who the good guys and the bad guys are which which you should be doing but they're not um they're getting stereotypes of the characters too quickly and not um not um

thinking enough deeply about them and about you know why movements that were largely for the good failed when they did and so forth and i think um ibis has got a really good orientation towards that work and uh particularly uh that he's come to so much of it on his own without um without uh much training either in universities or um although he's getting it now from from objectivists um so these are just a a bunch of people several of them here in austin um that i'm working with there's um

There's a graduate student at Princeton who I'm not sure if I should be naming, but who is, yeah, I think just really sharp and doing a lot of, you know, earlier in her studies, but doing a lot of, I think, fresh thinking about issues in the foundation of ethics that I think is going to pay off in really high quality work in the future. And all of these people, I think, have, you know,

done a lot of thinking about objectivism in a way that's connected to their thinking about their own lives and the issues that are happening in the world today and that are happening in their own fields. And they're doing, I think, the kind of work you need to do to really understand and integrate this philosophy and use it as a lens to understand the world. So I'm really pleased to see this happening. And for me,

the other person who i'll mention who's not anymore young and up and coming in the same way but to me is connected to all of these people um because um i knew her when she was um so new at this is gina and gina is um writing a book um i'm also giving feedback as she you know reading uh drafts of it as she writes that i think is really going to be fantastic she has a um

a uh a contract with a major publisher that i expect will get uh help get the book a lot of attention the publish is obviously a very bullish yeah bullish on the book they gave her you know an advance and are pushing it um i i'm the the young people who i'm seeing now and talking to a lot now i see very much taking the kind of trajectory i saw gina take in terms of how they're thinking about their work how they're thinking about objectivism how they're thinking about their lives and i'm

that we're on a pathway of having, Gina have a huge impact on the world and having more people who are having it, you know, five, 10, 20 years from now than are now. That's great. So three questions snuck in while you were answering that. So we'll do these quickly if you're okay with that. What about, this is analytic synthetic dichotomy. What about Eric Arends? He's on the right, a feminist, anti-reactionary, supports Ukraine and is science-based.

I don't know him in particular. Okay. Do you? No. I have to look him up. Let's see. Lucinda says, AI also has been very, very helpful for learning ancient Greek, although I still have to compare it with my textbook sometimes. Lucinda is studying philosophy, studying objectivism pretty deeply, and studying ancient Greek. We had some good email exchanges, actually. Good, good. I'm glad. I'm glad.

And Frank says, as a guitarist, did you like the Dylan movie? The guitarist? Well, I guess as a guitarist, I should be thinking about how did they play the guitarist. And what's his name? The guy who was playing Dylan and also the woman who was playing Joan Baez did a really good job learning and impersonating both of their performance styles.

And that was really impressive. In addition to everything else that was impressive about the acting, the acting was very good in the movie. But that's not a really impression of the movie more generally, other than that aspect of it was really good. I was positive but mixed on the Dylan movie. This is No Direction Home, which is a movie based on the book Dylan Goes Electric that's about the climax of it. This is plugging in electric guitar at the 1965

Newport Folk Festival. The book frames a lot of the story here through the contrast between Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger as people who represented different things artistically and culturally. And the movie does a very good job picking up on that. It

It is not, you know, in good ways here, it's not historically accurate. It makes Seeger play a larger personal role in Dylan's life than he did. It combines other characters and gives things roles to Seeger in a way that I think really does nicely capture two visions of what this kind of music can be and what music's role in culture is and what the kind of folk music movement was about and why Dylan was this kind of strange person.

fit with it or creature that kind of came through it and had a big influence on it. It had an influence on him, but it all blew up. And I think that story, the movie tells well. I think the romantic subplot of the movie doesn't really work for me. If I thought that his actual love life

was like the thing in the movie. I would think, well, it's a biographical movie. They're working what they have to work with. And so, you know, whatever. It doesn't quite integrate that well, but that's, you know, life's messy. But in fact, they really changed his romantic story. The relationship with, I forget what they called her in the movie, but Suze Rotello is the actual woman. They stretch out like two or three years longer than he was with her so that there could constantly be this love triangle between her and Joan Baez. And, um...

it doesn't really make sense of, it doesn't integrate well with the other thematic and plot conflicts in the movies. And it's not true to his life. So I sort of don't know. They did it to have fewer characters, I'm sure, but it just didn't kind of add up to me aesthetically. Um, so in that respect, I thought the movie didn't, didn't quite integrate and hang together. Well, what it is good at though, I think is, is two things. Um,

It portrays a kind of intelligence very well and people's reaction to intelligence. So Dylan was very much, I should say I'm a big fan of his and I've read a lot about him. He was someone who I don't think

he was very good at picking up on certain ideas and certain moods and noticing things and then finding very eloquent ways to articulate them in song. And you see him doing that in the film and they portray that and people's reaction to that very well. And that's a nice thing to see, like someone appreciating intelligence and skill and dramatizing people's response to it well. So that was a really nice feature of the film. And also the kind of

of an artist who doesn't want to be constrained and boxed in. And some of it's good and some of it's a little bit dysfunctional. And I think that they also portrayed well. So that's, you know, something to look for in the movie. And again, it's good at portraying that. Good. All right. Lucinda says, I'm also studying French now. Good for you, Lucinda. That's great. And Justin asks, is the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu

a pro-liberty thinker? I don't know enough to really say. I don't think in that time, and I don't think there was a kind of pro-liberty movement. It was part of a pro-liberty development in a way that, at least to my understanding, that I could say he was

You know, in a way that you could say John Locke was or, you know, Grossius and Pufendorfer or anybody like that in the kind of early Enlightenment tradition. So I don't see him as part of a movement for liberty, although I don't know that much about Chinese history and I could be missing something. Then there's the question of are there things in his ideas that...

are true and conducive to liberty and you could adapt them. And there, I don't know. I would worry about anachronism and people reading him that way, but there might be things. Yeah, I don't know either, but I will say that the people in China who were pro-liberty, pro-freedom that I met over the years, all thought very highly of him. But I think part of it was they were looking for someone

who is Chinese that they could latch onto in a sense as part of their, in a sense, tradition or something like that. So I don't know how objective they were about it. And there is something healthy about that. I mean, so I was looking for someone in your own tradition insofar as you're looking for the things that have currency in your culture. Mm-hmm.

you think are good about your culture and are pulling you in the direction you want to go that you can build on. So it's not just sort of tribal if you're looking for who are our, you know, figures. But again, I don't, it's not something. They thought very, very highly of them. But I found, I found as I traveled around the world and in a lot of countries, they have some figure in their past that they say, oh, he's our Ayn Rand or Hayek or something that represents to them something different.

something important and i'm sure you know in a lot of these places there were there were better people in the past but i think i think they make too much for the most part they make too much of them this has been great as always so we've reached the end of our list yes yes we've caught up thank you we've gone almost three hours so what's that thanks for having me on of course it's always a pleasure some some funds yes and we did well we did well

Excellent. Then I'll speak to you soon. Absolutely. Bye. Bye, everybody. Thanks to all the super chatters. You guys were great. Bye.