#77 YARON BROOK - Capitalism, Egoism, Objectivism, Ayn Rand, StateControl, Freedom, Altruism

[Music] good afternoon welcome to another episode of depolarize or in Portuguese today we're going to talk about objectivism but before I introduce you to Our Guest today I want to thank our new supporters gra sah Martin Barbara Andre Costa an and thank you very much for your support if you're interested in becoming part of this community there'll be a link somewhere around me another one in the description and without further Ado let me introduce you to our to Our Guest today yaran Brook is an Israeli American objectivist writer he's the current chairman of the board

at The irand Institute where he was executive director from 2000 to 2017 prior to joining The irr Institute he was Finance professor at Santa clada University in California where he taught for seven years and he's also served in the Israeli intelligence Services welcome yon thanks for having me it's good to be here first question how do you exactly say yon how do you pronounce it in Hebrew you say yon yon that's what I thought but on other podcasts I heard people say Yun yon that was people say it in a wide variety of ways and

since uh I spent a lot of my time outside of Israel I can't hear it anymore you know I'm used to everybody mispronouncing my name and I don't really care that much thank you for for accepting the the invitation oh my pleasure and so normally the podcast starts with always with the same question which is about your social and genetic Lottery because I believe that uh the our genes and the parents that U that ended up becoming our parents have a very big influence on who we become so what was your social and genetic Lottery

um you know I was born to uh ashkanazi Jewish parents so that gives you a variety of different genetic uh in the genetic Lottery it gives you a variety of different things it it means you're susceptible to a lot of diseases nobody else is susceptible to that's part of the genetic Lottery you know but it generally it also uh on average we're supposed to be really really smart um but that's on average so who knows uh you know as as individuals father's a doctor my mother was a housewife most uh most of her life um

I come if you go back enough Generations I come from a long line of rabbis uh going back to um Lithuania to uh to the to the Jewish community in Lithuania um in terms of social I you know I grew up in Israel I was born in Israel um to as I said my my father was a doctor in those days in Israel to some extent today do doctors while you know respected and everything don't make any money so you know you kind of lower middle class U ultimately is what you achieve maybe middle class

is is what you achieved we grew up pretty poor not poor but but you know as compared to how people live today um and uh spent a lot of time outside of Israel so as a kid as my dad specialized as a physician we spent two and a half years in London we spent two years in Boston um and then even within Israel I was born in Jerusalem but we spent some time in the southern tip of Israel place called The lat and also in a in um in the North of Israel in hia where

I spent most of my time any siblings uh three other siblings uh I have uh one brother and two sisters a big gap between the brothers and sisters 10 year my my parents took a 10 year break from having kids um but yeah they're four of us okay you were the last one no I'm the oldest oh your oldest one definitely the oldest and so at one fateful day when you were 16 somebody handed you a book right how did that Happ yeah so as I was a typical Israeli 16-year-old I think in those days

this is in the 1970s I was a socialist I was a statist I was a committed altruist we'll talk about altruism later um I was very much a nationalist a Jewish nationalist I very much believed in you know very much a Zionist so you're a national socialist basically there's sense in which yes I mean uh not not that kind of National Socialist but but there's a sense in which all nationalists and all socialists ultimately National socialists um you know the the original socialists were internationalists uh what do what do we call them today globalists right

and and we don't like globalists anymore so almost all socialists are nationalists and almost all nationalist you find me a nationalist out there who's not a socialist when it comes to economic policy they all are um so it's very hard to dink socialism for Nationals very difficult um because it's both statism and and the privacy of the state at the end of the day and yes I believed in the privacy of the state in that sense um and you know in Israel in those days you grew up it was all about the state it was

all about uh the survival of the Jewish people it was all about teaching kids that their job in life was the preservation of the Jewish people and therefore you know you could say I like to say I I was waiting for the grenade on which to jump to sacrifice my life for the greater good of whatever okay so I was a pretty committed uh non objectivist if you will how were these ideas fed to you was it more through school or more through parents or was everywhere it's everywhere right I mean um if you think

about the songs that were that I grew up with the songs about heroic soldiers fighting fighting for Heroic cause the stories about the same thing um the the politics about about it there was only one political party that basically basically had ruled Israel from the founding until I read Atlas shug and everything changed but and that was the labor party uh so you know socialism was everywhere the the the largest employer in Israel the largest employer in Israel in those days was the uh was the workers union so the union owned the means of production

so uh so so you know this this was in the air it was in all our education it was for our parents it was really and but but School songs stories it was the culture the culture changed quite a bit inal since then but that's the culture that I grew up in um and then uh you know I'm arguing with a friend of mine who I'd get together periodically and we talk about different ideas and he started spouting these pro market Pro capitalist ideas and I said basically where you getting this nonsense from and he

said you have to read this book and he handed me a copy of Al shrug and uh so I took Al shrug by irand which everybody should read by the way and I I read it I read it very slowly because I really really disagreed with it right so these were new ideas and I argued with them because I they they did not seem right to me so I argued with them I I I get frustrated i' yell at IR Rand um I throw the book against the wall and by the end of the book

uh I I was convinced he was right I had been wrong basically most of the ideas I believed in most of the abstract ideas I believed in were were wrong and uh much of my value system much of the values I had held as most most important in my life were wrong and um that that process of first of all discovering that and then unwinding and changing your values is not a simple easy process yeah because the identity like identifying with ideas makes you feel like an attack upon the idea an attack upon your ego

or yourself so it's very hard to overcome that kind of phenomenon yeah but there's a reason for that to a large extent I mean you talk about the fact that you're shaped by your genes and your and you're shaped by your environment but I would argue you're shaped by your choices and and and you're shaped by your ideas because your ideas guide much of your choices so to a large extent you your character who you are how how you engage with life in reality is going to be shaped by the ideas that you have so

because of that we hold those ideas pretty pretty sacred because they shape much of how we're going to live our lives so giving up these deeply entrenched ideas and um although I was 16 so you know you know it would have been much harder if I'd been 25 or if I'd been 40 uh at 16 it's relatively easy to shed your ideas and replace them with others because you're less committed to them how I mean you you've barely been conscious um so so what was the main idea that you felt like okay this really has

Chang like was what was the the V the moral value change that you think was the strongest one yeah so the strongest there's no question what the strongest one was and that is who should you live for right that to me was the was the biggest issue I I remember having thought about myself thought to myself before I read IR you know why should I sacrifice to other people why is the happiness of other people more important than mine why is the Jewish people or whatever Israel or whatever the state more important than me and

I I dismissed it and said well what option is there I mean that's morality that's what it is and Iran comes in and says well there is an option and there is an alternative you don't have to sacrifice your life indeed you shouldn't your life is yours there is a morality of living your life for yourself that is what morality really is supposed to teach you how to do how should I live my life so I can live the best life that I can live that I can you know flourish that I can be successful

that I can prosper as an individual my life does not belong to anybody it doesn't belong to the state it doesn't belong to people I genetically am associated with it doesn't belong to uh you know the poit Terian it doesn't belong to any particular group it belongs to me and I get to make choices about that and then I need to find a way to live the best life that I can live for me so that was a revolution that that shattered my universe and it required me to really rethink my values my whole Hoke

of values my whole system of values everything I everything I loved and cherished had to be rethought okay so basically you you became uh what could be called an ethical selfish or selfish man or egoist you call ethical egoism I'd call ethical egoism or or uh a rational self-interest an ethics of rational self-interest so the question is of course okay I should live for myself well how do you do that you know what are the principles what's guiding you and and fine R it's it's quite clear what what what must guide you is is the

thing that makes you human what is it that makes you human what makes us human is our reason what makes it human is a capacity to think it's a capacity to to be rational um and uh I think it's more than that though well I think everything else that you would attribute to ultimately derice on that there's nothing else you think like writing a symphony or painting a picture is is purely rational absolutely it's not rational in a sense that it's mathematical or it's or because we have a we have a very narrow view of

rationality unfortunately which is that it has to kind of be kind of dedu deductive logic kind of a deduction but what does rationality actually mean rationality means adherence to reality it means based on facts it mean based on based on you know what actually exists and I think you cannot write a symphony unless you've studied music seriously unless you know music you know what music does you know how music functions uh if you think about a Betto and Symphony which he wrote but some of which he wrote by the way when he was deaf right

he had to know what every instrument does how every instrument interacts with another instruments how If he if he has the trumpets do one thing how that interacts with the violins doing another thing I can't think of a more rational activity than that now it comes out not as a deduction it comes out as a flow but that's a consequence of the fact that he is internalized this massive quantity of information knowledge which he has had to acquire through reason that is through the use of his senses and through a a process of of abstracting

uh the essentials from that and an understanding about all these relationships you don't get that from Instinct you don't get that from emotion you don't that get that from anyway you get it from understanding and knowledge no but when you say knowledge so you you defined reason as something as basically you said it's what life is or it's how you you're defining it almost as if it's how your brain works but you're part of the knowledge Boven had to make that work comes from things he felt sure when listening to certain sequences of notes so

emotion is there and instinct is there I'm not within your reason we could talk about Instinct I think let's put Instinct site for for minute tion but emotion is absolutely there emotion is is is super crucial and then the question is are your emotions consistent with your rational values with your reasoning faculty with your rationality or are they contradicting to them and you know much of our melted illness maybe is associated with the fact that our emotions are sometimes contradicting what they should be so um emotions though are consequences emotions are not primaries emotions come

from conclusions we've already come to so if I come to a conclusion about I don't know uh dogs will bite me right I could I I I came to that conclusion I think when I was a little boy right a dog must have you know jumped on me or something and therefore that creates an emotion every time I see a I feel fear because I came to the conclusion of dog's bite and I don't want to be bitten bit bite is is pain so you could carry that emotion into your adulthood and it's irrational because

dogs don't generally bite so and then what you you work on it right you can you can this is what uh this is what psychology should be doing right Psychotherapy should be involved in is you come to understand where the emotion comes from or what kind of conclusions would lead to the emotion and you can undo that emotion most of our emotions we can do I mean we know this everybody knows this right you fall in love uh you you're madly in love with this woman and then you discover something horrible about her but she

lies to you what if you still love her well it takes the emotion a while to go away but it will go away it you know unless you succumb to it and you give into it and you ignore reality and you ignore your conclusions and then you'll suffer the consequences of being involved with a woman who lies to you but to the extent that you discover the lie and you say you know this is unacceptable you might still feel the tug of love but over time that will go away we've all been in love and

fallen out of love right uh so we know that emotions can change emotions can change based on new facts we don't like this woman anymore we stop loving her um so uh our conclusions are what lead to our emotions and when we change the conclusions it might take a little while our emotion stage I I I give you again a personal example I used to get Tu every time the Israeli flag would go up right but this is my Patriot my patriotic days uh when after I study objectivism and and the importance of the state

of Israel and my hierarchy of values went down right it's still maybe high but it's way down than what it used to be I don't feel teary eyed every time I see the F going up right or an American flag or any flag for that matter and and indeed the American flag became more important to me than Israeli flag so my emotions changed as a consequence so we have emotions but reason is our means of survival the way in which what makes us different from animals there not our emotions dogs have emotions um the the

the thing they feel something right they feel pain pleasure at the very least creativity then do dogs have creativity no they don't but but but what they don't have is abstract thought they don't have abstract thought and what reason is is our ability to observe reality integrate the facts of reality into abstract Concepts and then work with those abstract Concepts to come up with even more abstract Concepts so we have a me means by which to integrate the knowledge of our sensors and create knowledge and and to come up with if for Creative truths we

can come up to with with science we can discover the world around us but we can only Discover it through a rational reasoning faculty we can induce we can induce truths we can then deduce those are things animals cannot do and only because of that do we you know as a consequence of that do we get emotions um I don't think we have instincts in the in the typical sense but wait sorry before we get to instincts so I I I fundamentally disagree with the sentence that our emotions come from logical conclusions because first of

all they don't have to be logical sorry come from rational or no they don't even have to be rational they just have to be conclusions I so my I still disagree because if your if your dog dies yeah you feel Sadness the sadness doesn't come from any reasoning process reasoning comes later I mean there's a lot of scientific evidence that proves confirmation bias which is precisely your emotion when you feel something which disagrees with you makes you no no I ruins your re not I'm not saying that what happens so so let's get clear in

what I'm saying okay I'm not saying is what happen the dog dies I sit there and say huh this is bad for me my dog died this is bad for me and then I get the emotion that's ridiculous of course that's not true I first feel the emotion but why do I feel the emotion because before my dog died while he was alive I came to the conclusion that my dog was a huge value to me and then when my value disappears I feel the emotion but if I you know if I come to the

conclusion before my dog dies I really don't like my dog this is really a waste of time what the hell do I need a dog for and he dies my emotion is not going to be that great right so the conclusion about the value of my dog to me had to come before I feel any kind of emotion when he dies but of course you so the so what the emotion is is an automatic instant response that is that is conditioned by a whole set of evaluations I made in the past some of which I'm

conscious of and some of which I'm not I might not even be conscious of what conclusions I came to that led to this particular emotion and that's again one of the roles of uh psycho theapy is to figure those kind of things out and what about confirmation bias like there's hundreds and hundreds of studies is about this about how people first feel an emotion and then do what we call motivated reasoning so the emotion comes first and it but as I said stronger than reason even but as I said of course the emotion always comes

first and then the question is and evaluating everything am I being rational or not confirmation bias is a form of irrationality uh that a lot of people engage in so I'm not saying people are rational automatically they're not I wish the world would be completely different if people were rational they're not rationality is an achievement rationality is something you have to work for rationality requires effort it requires so for example if we know we generally have confirmation bias if that's just a a a a a a something that people are are likely to do then

we need to be aware of that and when we think about something we need to say well you know am I sure that I'm not you know what are the facts are the facts really aligning with us or am I distorting the facts in to get what I want to get right to confirm to my emotion and there are a lot of biases like that that and one of the rules of being rational one of the rules of discovering the biases is is to help us become more rational so we're aware of them we can

control for them and therefore go back to rationality but the fact is that from the from from from being you know very little babies we learn and we come to certain conclusions about the world around us that shape our behavior following that yeah it was your now it's clearer the the order with which things happen and it was very interesting what you said about the sadness coming from a previous valuation of something that was cool if if somebody else's dog dies you don't get sad because you never valued that dog right you never came to

the conclusion that dog over there is important to me so I'm not say you might become because we have an instinct for empathy so for projecting other people's feelings so it's if it's your friend's dog you might feel sad that if it's your friend dog that you feel sad for your friend you value your friend you but if know there's a doging everywhere in PTO and and a baby dying somewhere in PTO every day I'm not sad even though I know that fact it doesn't make me sad that's interesting like but the reason I think

we're not sad is because it would be too much to handle you know if you were constantly suffering the death of every baby at every moment then everything would be worse CU nobody could do anything of course be too sad it would be too sad but of course it would be it would be silly to do yeah it would be it would be and it would be anti your life so we don't do it because it's not rational to do it we we you know and and what is close to us is uh is a

value to us because it's related to our lives and but at the same time shielding ourselves from a lot of suffering that's happening in the world at this moment can also be dangerous cuz it maybe we can take part in making that better and we're not because we're used to just shielding and I just care about my friends and my family so I think if everybody cared about their friends and their family more than they actually do and did it rationally there'd be a whole lot of less suffering in the world the best thing we

can do to reduce suffering in the world is be rational and pursue our own rational long-term self-interest and there'll be a lot less suffering everywhere in the world okay we'll get there everybody should do that just focus on yourself how did it feel because there there's military like military conscription in Israel right so two years I imagine after reading that and becoming a not a Libertarian cuz you don't like to call yourself a Libertarian after becoming objective how did it feel like for someone to tell you you are going to the Army right now and

you have nothing you can do about it I mean it felt pretty horrible and I have to say you know two years afterwards I still had remnants of my old collectivistic self uh so I think it was probably uh so it felt like it's something I had to do I rebelled less against it than I would today if if that was imposed on me but yeah it felt lousy and and once you get in there it's even louser because you're basically freedom of choices taken away from you uh you follow orders you you do what

you're being told and and you know different people handle that differently um my approach to handling situations like that was there's nothing I can do about it right I'm not going to spend the next three years in jail um and uh it was three years at the time years now it's still three right I think it's still two for women maybe it's it it was two for women back then maybe it's a little shorter right now for women um three is I'm going to do the best that I can and get try to get the

most out of the experience that I can and that was my attitude uh throughout um it yeah it was it was three uh in some sense wasteful years and in some sense years that I I learned a lot about myself okay so now let's go get into the story of inand because you you headed this institute and you're still involved in it um but I actually more interested in you and in debating you so not too long but can you give us a quick biography of of inand and how she came to those ideas sure

I mean uh inand was born in St Petersburg uh 1905 uh Alicia Rosenblum so a Jewish family uh she witnessed the beginnings of the Russian Revolution uh basically right outside her do front uh in St Petersburg uh so lived under communism under under under Lenin uh her father's Pharmacy uh was taken from them obviously was a private business he couldn't own a private business there were apartment was taken from them they had to share an apartment with other families um and she she went to University in St Petersburg and it was very clear that um

she at a very young age had developed this individualistic spirit and uh she would not survive uh she would not survive communism um she would be killed prob she would be killed she she could not keep a mouth shut she she she challenged them she it went against everything she held even at that young age and so uh she found an opportunity to get out of out of Russia there was a short period in which Lenin and now allowed for some uh you know people to leave Russia for she her excuse was she was going

to do research she was working on film and she was going to do research and she had a cousin in Chicago who ran a movie theater so the excuse was she was going to go to Chicago study American Film to come back uh but everybody knew who knew her that she would never come back so she left she was so on the paper she was going for the benefit of the great nation to like to to research yes yes on paper she was doing she was going for the common good yeah exactly but it was

clearly she was going for her own good and and the family knew it and everybody knew it um and so she left and she was she was in her 20s in her early 20s she arrived in United States with nothing she spent some time with her family in Chicago then she went to Hollywood she loved movies and she wanted to get into the movie business her dream since a very very young age was to be a writer and uh she thought that you know a great place to start her writing career would be writing for

Hollywood movies first day in Hollywood I mean this is a true story she she goes to the C be demill Studio C be demill was the Steven Spielberg of his time you know the greatest director of his time and uh she goes and she had a letter of introduction and they you know they said to you know we'll call you don't call us kind of thing she walks out of the studio and there C be de Mill sitting in his big convertible you know car driving by and she stares at him this little Russian woman

and he stops and he says why are you staring at me and she tells him she's here for Russia and everything the whole story and he says get in the car I'll I'll show you the movie business and he takes it to the back lot where they're filming a movie as it turned out the movie was the King of Kings the story of Jesus Christ a silent movie and um he gave her a pass and he said um you know here's a week you could you get to spend she ended up being an extra on

the movie and uh meeting her future husband on the movie Set uh and that was a kind of entry into Hollywood she worked in all kinds of odds and ends jobs in the wardrobe and Department all kinds of places uh to kind of make ends meet and uh ultimately we married the man she met uh on the stage who was who was an actor and uh she she then in the at night she would practice English and start writing and she started writing and writing right so she wrote in English she wrote in English and

uh in um in the 1930s uh she had a play published uh and performed in Los Angeles and then New York City she published a her first novel which is called We The Living which is the most autobiographical of all her novels it's about a young woman's life in the Soviet Union very very powerful anti-communist book um but it was it was panned by the critics they didn't like it because it was anti-communist and this is 1930s America where the intellectuals were all pro communism and enamored by staling and what was going on in the

Soviet Union uh she then wrote a small novelet called Anthem which uh was published in the UK it's a it's a very small um dystopian novel the UK was going through a dystopian kind of Novel period with with George ell is and um and she she got she got Anthem published in the UK only later on did she get it published in the US all in the meantime she's writing she's actually starting to write scripts in Hollywood and so number of her movies get made based on her script she's reviewing script she's you know really

really part of the part of Hollywood so she's she's made it by now kind of she's she's made it you know not struggling she's not struggling she's she's doing okay and then uh she she writes The Fountain Head and the Fountain Head um is published she she sends it to 12 Publishers they all turn it down um and I think it's a 12th the 12th publisher accepts it um it's uh but it you know but they're not confident in it so they only publish a few cop 2,000 copies or something like that and the novel

becomes a w of mouth bestseller it sells hundreds of thousands of copies right off the bat and and this is a huge success and and she becomes a very famous very well-known author um and that's published in 1945 and then um 12 years later she publishes a shrugg by this point the Publishers are chasing her she's not you know she's not chasing Publishers and Adas shrug does an instant bestseller and and one of the things that makes Iron Man's novels these are novels of course one of the things that makes Iron Man's novels so unique

is that they sell as many copies today as they did when they were bestsellers so uh she she has she's just publishing phenomena where the book sales have just kept um kept steady or they they go up and down but they the numbers have been substantial ever even after she she passed away does the Institute make money from that or is the family making money from those books one of her students ultimately uh received receives all the royalties those books and then after founding an at sh one of the things she said was uh her

goal in her writing was to portray what you call the ideal man right what does an ideal human being look like what what what are their values what are the thoughts what are this the philosophy guide an ideal man and one of the things she did was she tried to okay so so what a philosopher's conception of the ideal man so she went and she read a bunch of philosophers to try to figure this out because she yeah a lot a lot of philosophers had had that question before yeah so she's young and she's trying

to figure this out and and so she she goes to the experts MH and she finds all of them not just lacking but pathetic right she finds all of their answers thoroughly disappointing really really bad completely inconsistent with her vision of what this looks like and that forces her to develop her own philosophy said forces her to rethink it all the the only one she finds somewhat uh you know helpful is Aristotle she views Aristotle as as hoc here so she becomes a philosopher she says in order to solve this problem which is how to

portray the ideal man in her in her fiction she is a fiction writer first and foremost and then she becomes a philosop pher to solve this problem so from but she never wrote a philosophy book or no only later later so in so first of all Atlas Shrug has a lot of philosophy in it but then once that book is published and it's done she turns to writing philosophy so she turns she turns to writing philosophical essays through the 60s and 70s for the rest of her life that's really what she does um anywhere from

uh metaphysics epistemologies he has a whole book on epistemology uh through ethics and and and politics and even Aesthetics there there's a book called the Romantic Manifesto which is her view of Aesthetics so she died inh 1982 uh while I was in the Israeli Army and uh and it you know just just a a a curiosity she I mean it was announced on Israeli radio when when she passed away so her death uh she had by that point become such a cultural phenomena she was Jewish yeah but I don't think that was it I don't

even know people really internalized the fact cuz she went by Anand which is not a Jewish name but no she'd become a cultural phenomena she'd become a cultural phenomena in the United States and Israel was one of the places outside of the United States which he had had a real impact on people not just me but but a lot of people um and uh she had be she had become such a cultural phenomena where where her death was announced and people knew who she was and and what that was I think in the Anglo-Saxon world

I think she was a huge Name by then I think in in the rest Continental Europe less so uh but certainly in the Anglo-Saxon world and in Israel she was a she was a big name so why do people why do a lot of people um not really like her it's because she's a proponent for selfishness yeah at the end of the day because she's a proponent for ethical egoism she's a proponent of selfishness but selfishness has a very bad name particularly when articulated as selfishness um and uh and but also because of the implications

of that that that is one of the implications of that is political and the political implication of self-interest or rational egoism is capitalism is you know the the system of capitalism is the only system appropriate for human life and uh for for human life of people pursuing their own rational self-interest and of course a our world is is Thoroughly rejected capitalism and has uh an individual liberty and individual Freedom which he advocated for and so you think the world has rejected capitalism oh absolutely I mean it never really embraced it but it certainly it it

it it it uh embraced it a little bit in in parts of the 19th century and then it's reject rejected completely rejected every every single day uh right now we're rejecting capitalism um yes I mean we don't live we don't live under capitalism we live okay so let's Define capitalism capitalism is a system which the government does one thing and that is protect individual rights and otherwise leave us free it's a system of property rights where property rights are protected respected and protected and we don't live in such a place right uh you don't have

property rights you you might own you think you own a home I don't know what it's like in Portugal but in America you might think you own a home but try not paying your property taxes and suddenly you discover you're actually renting that home from the government uh you forget to pay your rents you don't pay your property taxes they'll take come and take your home away from you you don't own it um you know try starting a business without filling out a million forms and waiting for the government to approve that you started a

business and then if you're in an industry that's heavily regulated getting permission from a bunch of bureaucrats as to what you can or cannot do can or cannot produce can or cannot Market I was in the finance business we had a our our instructions for what we couldn't couldn't do Visa V marketing was 600 pages long and um no you know and and filled with regulations on just how to Market ourselves never mind how to run the business which was another few thousand pages long so no we have no capitalism there's no freedom in the

world in which we live we live in a place that is controlled controlled by government in every step of the way but don't you think don't you see things like Coca-Cola and internet being everywhere in the world as capitalism being everywhere in the world or capitalism reaching the whole world no there think you want so much capitalism that what we have now for you is not enough capitalism and for me I see the world I think I think capitalism is what took a lot of people out of poverty in the last 100 years and so

there is capitalism it's what wouldn't you want more of it if there was if if that's if it took people out of poverty there is capitalism to an extent what we have is a mixed economy uh we have a mixture we have a mixture of capitalist elements Coca-Cola you know has some property rights over the brand named Coca-Cola it has some capacity to produce the drink that it was although even early on in its history Regulators told that certain things couldn't be in the Coca-Cola and and you know wait until uh RFK in uh in

in the United States now who's just appointed the Health and Human Services secretary gets his claws into Coca-Cola right he might add to the constraints on what Coca-Cola can and cannot do um so we have some elements of cocaa of of of freedom but we have massive elements of of of controls like Coca-Cola can't hire whoever it wants and it can't fire whoever it wants there are labor regulations so to tell it who it can hire under what conditions it can hire them how much it has to pay them and then what what it can

account I put in their contract with them and when they can fire them and how to fire them and how it's not acceptable to fire them and all of this so Coca-Cola is a mixture of elements of freedom I mean they give us enough Freedom so we don't complain too much right and then a lot of controls and here in Portugal you're relatively poor because you have more controls than we do in the United States where we're relatively Rich because we have more control less controls so it is true that uh the more of this

wonderful thing called capitalism we have the wealthier we are the better off we do and the less of it the poorer we are um but that's not capitalism capitalism is the pure form I had wrote a book called no so is it anarco capitalism is that no I don't want a narco anything right you want a state but I want a state that does one thing and one thing only but it's really crucial that does it well and it's really crucial that doesn't and that is protect individual rights what does that mean it protects me

from Crooks and robbers and it protects me from uh physical Force being imposed against me it protects me from terrorist it protects me from invading Army but it also sets up a legal system where property rights are well- defined and with fraud is defined and when we discover the internet and and the new applications to property rights that the government steps in and says okay this is how we apply property rights in the internet so it sets that up and then leaves and then and then leaves it alone but it's not a government that has

warehouses full of books specifying regulations about what I can and cannot do with my life it's it's not a it's not a government that tells me what I can and can consume we we we live in a world where you know in in in europea for example if you want to eat GMO I don't know something uh genetically modified um stuff you can't right because the government decreed not because the market has decreed if the market decreed we shouldn't have GMO fine uh then there wouldn't be a market for them but the government has decreed

you can't eat certain things you can't and it's only and and you know there's a there's a tendency for this only to get worse this is why I said most nationalists are socialists because most nationalists want to dictate how people live their lives that's the authoritarian part of the this mixed economy that we live under so I want more capitalism I want freedom I want the government to be completely separate from economics the government should have no role in economics it shouldn't tell what businesses can and cannot do it shouldn't tell employees and employers what

contracts they can have between them as long as there's no cerion as long as there's not force as long as not forcing you to do something against your will Yeah by using Force it's none of the government's job to intervene so we're we're going to have that debate later on let me first ask you um so Ein Rand her idea of the ideal man and capitalism somewhere in the middle here you have a thing called objectivism which we we still haven't defined yet so why why objectivism like where does the word come from and what

are like the two or three main axioms of it well first objectivism is the whole system right so it's it's it's this idea of an ideal man it's the idea of what constitutes an ideal man it's the idea of capitalism capitalism is part of the system called objectivism okay objectivism is the philosophy of V so it's so the idea here is uh in metaphysics which is the foundational you know the nature of reality um things are what they are right reality is independent of your Consciousness uh your wishes don't make it so uh things are

what they are a is a in aristot one there is a there's a law of causality and a law of identity and existence exists what proof do you have that all of reality is not a projection of your mind because that that idea is is a silly idea right I mean the reality of course it's an argument because I I you know uh the a projection of my mind and our minds are somehow uh you know projecting the same reality no I I don't exist you don't exist it's all it's all so so that's you

know it's it's possible right it's not possible it's silliness but what what irrefutable proof do you have that that's not possible you can't prove a negative that is if you claim that reality is a all a product of my mind you the burden of proof is on you not on me to me it's just a silly it's a silly uh madeup fantasy it's it's equivalent to that Gremlin under the table is going to bite off your foot any minute now he's invisible and I can't prove that he exists down there but you prove that he's

not going to bite your foot in a minute well one proof is that he won't bite your foot in a minute it it won't happen but you know you can make up any story that you want and pretend that it's knowledge but that's not knowledge it's just it's just pretend right reality is out there it functions I don't have control over it uh you know I can I can wish I could create a fantasy in my mind that the sun will not rise tomorrow and yet it will rise in spite of that fantasy and you

could say well but the fantasy is overwritten the other fantasies overwritten that but that's that's complete [ __ ] right it's just making stuff up in order to justify so if you like reason because you like reason I think you also probably like this kind of question like what is the what are what are the what are the ideas that can stand below the idea that there is objective truth like there must be some reason otherwise it's just so you have faith no you're a man of Faith No there is a there's a there's basically

uh there's basically reality out there that what you observe there's nothing else so there's nothing underneath reality reality is exatic in that sense the facts of reality are exatic that's all we have there's nothing else so every starting point you could say oh what's beneath reality well whatever is beneath reality what's beneath it and what's beneath it and what's beneath it if there's going to be a there's only one starting point and that is this right this is the starting point otherwise all knowledge falls apart otherwise everything is unknowable nothing is knowable so and human

existence is is inexplicable you can't explain human existence if if reality isn't what it is and if it's not knowable what about a a matrix type scenario like the film Matrix again it's it's complete fantasy so you can claim that and you can create a story like they do in the Matrix where it's okay but to say that we're living in a m requires proof it requires evidence it requires a smidgen of evidence just a little tiny little bit and of course there is not so can I prove it can I prove it's not true

of course not just like you can't prove the invisible Gremlin is not under the table uh you can make you can make fantasy up you know and religion is very good at this right you can make up a fantasy about something and then say oh you can't prove my God doesn't exist my Gremlin doesn't exist therefore it must exist no the other way around you have to prove God exists so you have to prove that GRL what I'm telling you is you have to prove that there's objective reality no you don't that's the point so

I think what objective reality is the starting point proof the concept of proof think about what the idea of proof means the idea of proof means what what what are we proving it's a connection to reality right if there's no reality there no proof so the very concept of proof rests on the existence of reality so and that's what axioms do right when you have an axiom every subsequent concept like proof depends on that Axiom that is if the axum doesn't exist all these other Concepts disappear there's no such thing as proof without reality what

what am I where you proving in what dimension are you proving in what context are you proving it there has to be a reference point for proof and usually what we move by proof is it relates to reality it's it's it's it's over there so how do you prove how do you prove newson's laws you run experiments where do you R experiments in reality right how do I prove this is a glass yeah look people it's a glass in reality there's no other place there's no other dimension in which I can whoops sorry there's no

dimension in which I can prove anything except in reality so the the these questions come you know come from skepticism and and skepticism leads to the non-existence of proof there is no proof under skepticism everything's whatever let's not dwell too long on it I think we have more more interesting things to talk about so I inter this of course the foundation right because without this without this everything falls apart without without a without a without a being able to tith things to reality all knowledge is is is meaningless yeah I used to be more interested

in these philosophical questions now I'm more interested in in real life we can I I think this is real life but all of this is real life no I mean more the more like the consequences of of your philosophy okay so that's metaphysics so metaphysics things exist uh the epistemology the theory of knowledge is we have the tool to know it that is reason reason is our tool to to know reality our senses provided information about the real world about reality about what's there we have the capacity to integrate that knowledge and then ultimately to

test our theories out in reality so it is reason is the way in which we know reality and it's our means by which we survive uh so reason is at the at the core and then you know who reasons what is the entity that reasons well it's the individual it's man um and uh the the the individual individual survival it's is its ultimate um the ultimate purpose of the the the the individual entity is to survive is that your life objective just to survive well you added something I didn't say just oh okay you said

just um for me yes my objective is to survive but what does survival mean to me right it means to survive as a human being not as an animal not as a chimpanzee not as a cat but as a human being and that implies a lot of things it means I'm to survive as a rational being as a conceptual being as a as a you know somebody who has a Consciousness a human consciousness so uh and that means to flourish that means to to succeed as a human beings so my goal in life the goal

of every human being should be to to flourish in life to achieve the most that they can in life and that ultimately will lead to happiness so happiness is is the the purpose uh purpose of life and that's egoistic so your purpose in life is not to sacrifice to other people your purpose in life is not to ask other people to sacrifice place to you your purpose in life is to live the best life that you can live using your reason uh in order to live it and then if I'm going to do that then

to to maximize my success to achieve the most doing this I need to be able to think freely uh and I should be able to apply my thoughts freely in the world I should be able to to do what I think will lead to my happiness and the only system of government that allows me to think freely and to act freely is capitalism um and therefore capitalism is good not because it reduces poverty capitalism is good not because it maximizes GDP per capita which it does and it reduces poverty it does all these things capitalism

is good because it leaves the individual's mind free uh and and free to to think what he wants to think and then to act on those thoughts free of corosion Free of force free of an authority that's tells them what to do and you know and then we could add we could add Aesthetics as part of uh as part of Ran's philosophy if you want to get into that but but this is the core of it so where does love come into that is it just something that one more emotion or is do you think

there's a place for love for all fellow human beings and that if you feel that love you should act upon it well there's a there's a lot of questions there but uh so so love is an emotion that is um that is life affirm it is a incredibly powerful positive wonderful emotion um it is the emotion that guides much of what we doing life uh in the sense that it is an emotion that is uh that is a consequence of finding in other people uh shared values with you uh something that you share with them

that that is that unites you and therefore you feel love so you know I've often said that objectivism is the philosophy of love because at the end of the day um you should care about yourself because you love yourself you should love yourself you are you are it there's nothing else except you in a sense um and um and you love your values and you should pursue your values and should figure out what values will lead to to making you the best person that you can be and and pursue them with the kind of passion

that you pursue things that you love and you should find other human beings particularly for romantic love but also for friendship and other forms of love that that you can that you want to hang out with it you want to live your life with it you want to have sex with it you want to do wonderful things with out of a sense of of love and Shar values now can you love you know Humanity in a sense yes and in a sense no you can love Humanity in the sense that the idea of human beings

and the idea of rational human beings is a wonderful thing and and you you know you wanna you want to see Humanity succeed because you're part of it and it's part of your kind of shared uh uh presence on this planet and it's a good thing but there's in a sense no because there's a lot of really bad people out there you know there's a and and I don't love them um and there's a lot of people wasting their lives there's a lot of people inflicting harm in other people's lives really doing damage to people

I don't love them I hate them hate is a very powerful important emotion it's not one we should put aside uh it's appropriate for some people so I don't love Humanity in the sense that every human being I love Humanity in terms of the potential of every human being to be rational and to be a great a great person and to contribute to my life and to contribute to lives of the people that I love but you do see value in someone um walking on the street seeing a child beggar and worrying about them and

being kind and feeding them is there value in that sure if if it's a child yes or an adult an adult less so a lot less so because it why is the adult begging I mean you know there are lots of jobs out there why are they here on the street begging when they could be working I have very little sympathy for adult Beggars um particularly if they're young and healthy and and and uh you know I feel a little differently if they're immigrants in an environment in which they're not allowed to be immigrants that

then a low not allowed to work um but and and certainly I feel differently about children because children you know it's it's clearly not their fault whatever whatever's going on but not if e bega gets my sympathy um but do you see value in that do you think it's better for mankind that some people have that kind of kindness no I mean if if if I thought it was better if I thought it was better for mankind then I would share that kindness so no I don't I don't think it's better I don't think that

kindness leads to particularly positive things particularly if they're not willing to judge the beggar for who they are that is some beggar don't deserve our help some Biggers do and some Biggers don't and unless you're willing to differentiate between the two uh you know you're doing you could be doing harm you could be taking a very bad person you know I you know the yeah I think this is where we Clash yeah some people are wife beating drunks they go home every day and they beat their wife and they beat their kids and they're bad

bad bad people do you have hope they might become better no and and I mean hope in a very abstract very distant way but no everybody has free wills they could come better but the probability of them becoming better by you helping them by giving them money is is almost zero it is um much more likely that they become better maybe if they go to jail or maybe and spend some time in jail suffer the consequence of their actions maybe if they get therapy or or something like that but you giving them money so they

can go home get drunk before they go home and then beat their wife and kids you are facilitating the beating that their wife and kids get but you're choosing the worst scenario possible you're choosing the drunk man who beats his wife yes but that's my point my point is that you can't take you can't just assume that every begar a good person that everybody who receives help is worthy of that help I want to discriminate I want to be able to say some people are good and some people are not good and we have to

recognize that some people are not good and don't deserve our help and some people are now if I meet a stranger my assumption is that they're a good person most people are good people uh and so my assumption for every human being is that they're good people and I'm willing to help you know borrow other circumstances I'm willing to help anybody but you know once I discover that they're not good people I'm not going to help them so I I think this ability to discriminate is really important so it's not like a a Christian I

love everybody no matter what it's I I you know I'm willing to support those people who I think can become better and I'm not willing to support those people who I think are doing really really bad things and and the Chance is becoming better small okay so let me put the question differently um let's let's try and give value to two different worlds one is the world where we live in where certain percentage of the population feel inclined to help others in need and reduce their suffering and make them more free because if you're not

suffering you're become free um and another world that's not true by the way but okay suffering isn't suffering a limitation on freedom no how can you focus on doing anything if something just went in your eye freedom is not a freedom is not an issue of focus I mean we need to Define our terms right I mean it's important that we discuss we debate right someone dying in a in a in a hospital bed is as free as a healthy person maybe they might be as free as a healthy person uh freedom is not a

is not a condition of um of uh you know our our physical or our psychological State freedom is a political condition Freedom relates to politics it does not relate you know I'm not free to fly what you know because I can't jump off a tall building and fly so I'm I'm unfree in a sense that I can't fly that's ridiculous I think that's a definition that suits your your philosophy no Freedom come FKS I think I think like reality you said we know all know what reality means I think we all know what Freedom means

freedom means your ability to do stuff your ability to do things and if you're sick you're not able to do as many things no your ability to do stuff within a particular context you can't you can't say if I'm sick I'm unfree right who's causing you right Freedom what's the opposite of Freedom the opposite of freedom is not um uh uh you know death the opposite of freedom fre is cion the opposite of freedom is cion so uh so I you know being sick you can be just as Fe as being healthy now you're more

limited obviously you can't do as many things uh so put it another way is is somebody who's wealthy versus somebody middle class is the wealthy people Freer than a middle class person yeah definitely but that's that's the perversion of the concept Freedom it it it it's a perversion that Marx loves it's a pervision that comes from the left because it's trying to it's trying to say the ideal of freedom is that we could do whatever we feel like doing anything we feel like this is why I said jumping off the of the building freedom is

the ability to do whatever emotionally thing that we want to do that's not Freedom that's that's Fant again we we go back to fantasy fantasy plays a big role in bad philosophy but isn't that what you're doing with your life aren't you trying to control as much as your life as possible and not have other people tell you what to do all about you know gaining as much control over my life as possible but I don't consider that freedom I don't I don't try to make a lot of money so I can become more free

because you're you're past a certain stage if you were you if you're working a factory to eat no I mean I've been there look I I I I wasn't born rich and I and and I certainly didn't come to the United States when I immigrated to the United States I came with nothing so so I know what it's like not to have any money but that has nothing to do with freedom it has to do with choices it has to do with options but choices and options are not related to freedom freedom is about the

lack of coion freedom is a political concept and we make it anything else we pervert the concept because then it's it's problematic to say why are they unfree in Iran are they unfree in Iran because they have a regime that csses them and forces them are they unfree in Iran because they're poor I mean they have both dimensions there a lot of Dimensions there's only one dimension and the dimension is force freedom is contast Marxist that's Marxist to say everything is about Force to me everything's about power everything's about Force I never said that you

guys can check me out you can rewind if you want I said Freedom contrasted with Force that's the concept that we're talking about and when we make Freedom about not being able to do whims whatever we feel like doing we pervert the concept we make it difficult to talk like we're talking about what what is really what the issue can be there's an issue of poverty but that's not an issue of Freedom there's an issue of Oppression Iran that is an issue of Freedom when when when people say you know uh you know when when

when the founders of America say they're fighting for for Freedom what are they talking about they talking about they want more choices no they're talking about they want political Freedom they want political Liberty they want to get rid of cion from from a king right that's the concept in which Freedom has come about if you go back to the Enlightenment and think about what the thinkers in the enlightenment were talking about when they talk about Freedom they're talking about freedom from the authority of a king from the aristocrats from a particular political system um it's

you know I think that the idea that freedom is freedom to do whatever the hell you want well you're never going to have that right you can never do everything you want because you can't jump off the off off the building and fly right because you know because there's such a thing in spite of what you said earlier there is such a thing is reality and you will fall down and there gravity and kill you so you'll never have the freedom to do that so you could say I'll never be free because no but that's

a bit absurd like within not within non-flying within a normal life people have more freedom than others no I don't I don't think that's true people have more choices than others people have more options than others I would not categorize that in terms of more freedom than others I do consider people having more freedom than others depending on the political system in which they live some political systems are more free than others okay so I'm not saying I'm right and you're wrong but what I think we can move on no no no we're not moving

on we're not moving on what what what I think might be happening is the following and this is why I said that that that definition of freedom kind of serves your purpose which is if you start admitting that someone with less education and and worse health and and and so so forth and so on is in a way less free than someone with all those privileges then it kind of ruins this idea that freedom comes from this capitalism and not from helping people become more free by giving them education by giving them Health by giving

them everything which will make their mind and their movements and everything about them more free look if you take a concept and distort its meaning then yeah it becomes useless so let's put aside Freedom Let's ignore Freedom let's make Freedom go away I don't want to talk about Freedom okay so do poor people have fewer options than wealthy people absolutely no question about that but it but but it's not Freedom so so what do you mean by Freedom so freedom for you is just political freedom for me is having more okay so so why is

freedom important why is why is having more options important so you know so in in your context if we accept your definition of freedom freedom just becomes a a you know an unimportant idea so some people have more options some people have few options some people are born uh with a higher intelligence some people are born with a lower intelligence they the ones with a higher intelligence will have more options and the one with the low intelligence there's nothing I can do about that these people are going to be more free than those people for

the rest of their lives is that a is that is that a useful concept to have no it's a useless concept to have so I want to I want to deal with something I can control what can I control I can control the political situation in which people are are presentent and if you say okay but poor people have too few options I don't like how many options they have I want them to have more options then we can talk about how do we get poor people to have more options but if you if you

start inflicting if you start using the term Freedom you you basically wiping out the concept of political Freedom it it becomes irrelevant so so if if I uh if I take from these people political freedom is one of the freedoms I'm not taking it away but but you see any attempt to to increase their freedom um any attempt to increase their freedom in a sense artificially the way you would want to have them is going to reduce political Freedom so then Freedom becomes a trade-off so now we trading off freedoms what maybe by by definition

you're trading off freedoms and and I find that not a useful concept I'm willing to to say there's political freedom I recognize that poor people suffer let's deal with how to deal with poor people suffering I think one of the solutions to dealing with poor people suffering is freedom that is political Freedom political Freedom minimizes the suffering of poor people it gives them the most opportunities not to be poor that's what political Freedom does but it doesn't change the level of Freedom that they have they have the level of freedom in in in the political

situation that they have so I was in the middle of a question so the world we have now where some people are inclined to help others in need and therefore there is kindness and altruism and another world where there's no altruism which world do you think is a better place to live in from a utilitarian perspective so where are people on average better off so first of all I I don't like utilitarianism I don't believe in utilitarianism but but I'll answer the question in spite of that but before I do that we're going to have

to have a debate about another concept and its definition and that is altruism um I don't believe that helping people is necessarily altruistic it might be it might not be altruism is a particular concept used in a again it was by the way invented by by a French philosopher Augustine compt uh in the 19th century and he had a particular meaning in which he used it and that means altruism is the sacrifice of your individual interest for the sake of somebody else it is uh it is where you are worse off by helping somebody else

if you're better off by helping somebody else cuz you enjoy it cuz you're having fun cuz then it's not altruism according to comp that's not my that's not how I use it helping somebody opening up a door for somebody and helping them you helping a old lady with a grocery bags might be altruism if if you're delaying taking your kid to the emergency room and you're helping the old lady instead but it might just be an act of kindness which has nothing to do with altruism altruism again is the sacrifice of your own just for

the sake of others and I know it's not how you use it because it's not how anybody uses it but but but that's the way that's sneaky way in which concepts are used in order to undermine you know undermine reason and undermine rationality like you use the word Freedom no like you use the word freedom and you undermine the ability to actually have a concept that relates to political Freedom political Freedom you just said it it's that's what's yeah but okay sorry let's move on so okay so forget the word altruism kindness so yeah world

with kindness is better than the world without kindness there's no question about that but indiscriminate kindness that's altruism and I'm against that I'm mean I'm against indiscriminate kindness I'm for kindness now would I do I prefer a world in which people are sacrificing for other people versus a world where they're not I prefer a world where they're not I prefer a world in which people are pursuing their own rational self-interest kindness is part of pursuing your own self- interest you want to live in that kind of world where people are nice to each other unless

the guy over there doesn't deserve my kindness and then I'm not going to be kind to so basically let me know if I'm wrong but you're saying that someone with less kindness in them is not necessarily less moral yeah I no kindness is not an important part of morality at all yeah that's that's what's mind-blowing for most people about this philosophy that is that kindness is doesn't matter because it's the whole West has a different idea as I'm sure you know that kindness is important taking care of we're in deep deep deep doooo because of

that we're in deep crisis and and and we we we're going to have a hard time getting out of this crisis without it as long as we stick to this altruistic view of morality so the view of morality is again kindness is is not a bad thing it's not but it's not a a super good thing it's it's okay right and it's but it shouldn't be our primary focus our primary focus should be as individuals on our own lives and pursuing our own lives using reason and that requires that requires doing a lot of things

and and part of that might be include kindness towards other people but towards some people not towards everybody and the closer the people are to you the more kind you'll be to them the further they are the less kind you'll be to them because it relates to you your own life your own happiness and if we focused it on that the state of the world would be a lot better and people would be a lot happier with their lives don't you think we got to where we are today which is basically the West are the

countries where where capitalism I'd say you'd probably agree capitalism is most free right in the US especially don't you think that's precisely because we had these myths and these these moral Frameworks which were about cooperation and kindness and sacrifice don't you think it's because of these winning stories that we got here no it's exact opposite so uh those myths and those stories are what held us back for 2,000 years uh they're what made us poor after the fall of Rome they kept us poor for a long long time how do they keep us poor because

you know uh Innovation science creativity require egoism they require people thinking for themselves about themselves in order to pursue their values the things that they love when you're told don't love yourself don't love the thing things that you think are not that important what's important is what Society thinks the myths tell us you should sacrifice to a being up there you should sacrifice to your fellow man you should sacrifice to your state you should sacrifice to whatever don't think about yourself you can't get a Leonardo da Vinci from that kind of philosophy you can't get

a Michelangelo from that kind of philosophy right um and you can't get ultimately capitalism out of that philosophy so what happens is the m start shattering and the myths start shattering around the Renaissance with the discovery of a different vision of man suddenly a different set of myths was was discovered and that's Greeks Greek philosophy Greek sculpture and Greek art and suddenly there's this view of whoa we don't have to be this groeling you know gring uh uh multitude uh worshiping uh you know at an altar of sacrifice we can be heroic look at these

sculptures whoa people once once thought this was possible to be great as a human being as an individual but that never went away oh of course it went away have you seen the gooy of the dark ages of you but there were always great people there are great nuns who are great inventors like Hildegard Von bingan like there there's a lot of Crea there was almost no creativity for a thousand years in the west I mean really for a thousand years you know there was no astronomical observation no astronom from 400 ad to 1400 about

there was no astronomical observations in the west no astronomical observations in the Muslim World there was for for a short period of time there astronomical observations even in in India and China but there was no obser astronomic observations in the Western World there was almost no there was no science science was reading the Ancients and following them there was no there was no creativity there was no new discovery thousand years you know yes there were little things and and one of the reasons you know her name is cuz they because there were there were these

you know you know once in a while there was somebody who was unusual but there was basically Western Civilization declined with the fall of Rome and stagnated until the Renaissance and again there was you know starting in 100 there was a little bit Char the main wakes the West up a little bit but nothing we're talking about a thousand years and the entire like the entire Humanity during those thousand years of course there were a lot of creative people there was very little creativity because the fact is again you have to read what life was

like during those thousand years it was a it was a life of drudgery it was a life where you had to you had to work every day your life in order just to survive you had to work from sunrise to sunset just to feed your family there some people still do that very few people today do that and and that's true and that's sad it's very very sad that those people have to do that given that we're in the 21st century and not in the in the in the 9th century but in the 9th century

people didn't have time to be creative you need time to be creative you need wealth to be creative you you you you there's no creativity in Africa and the reason there's no creativity in Africa because they're too poor to be creative again a generalization I'm sure there some creative people in Africa but overall Africa is not where you get entrepreneurs and new innovation why because they don't have the time for it they don't have the wealth for it they don't have the resources for it the West went through a thousand years where these myths were

dominant and these myths kept people poor and only with the shadowing of the myths and which happened even more so during the Enlightenment did we and and the and the marginalization of religion the marginalization of Christianity and the taking the Christian and marginalizing and putting them to the side and saying they're not that important and raising to the Forefront what what do we call the enlightenment the Age of Reason bringing back reason after it Slumber for a thousand years only then do you get this explosion and and explosion is an understatement right of creativity and

Innovation and wealth creation and capitalism what you do is you liberate the human mind and what you see is incomes which are stagnant for 100,000 th000 years if you look at graphs of income it's stagnant for 100,000 years wealth 100,000 years 100,000 years this very little change in human income and that's just factual and the same with wealth yeah I mean a little blimp up in Greece and Rome and then it goes back down and little bit up into Renaissance and then it goes like that I mean I mean we're so much richer today than

those people you talked about I have I have a I have that graph here cuz I wanted to ask you a question about yeah it was and when does the flection point happen right the inflection point happens in the enlightment and it happens Industrial Revolution also well but the Industrial Revolution is caused by something it's caused by the enlightment so the inflection point is 1776 according to me right um just because it's a nice round number right it's the founding it's the it's the publication of wealth of nation by Adam Smith it's the commerci first

commercial use of the steam engine and it's the Declaration of Independence of America which defines what the Rights of Man individual rights the right to life liberty in the pursuit of happiness the first political document to articulate a a a a strategy for Freedom a strategy for Liberty a strategy for capitalism and that's what sets off human creativity and and creates the wealth that we have today why do you think it happened in Europe though well it happened in Europe because Europe was the one who kept a hold of the tradition of Greece so it

happened for a little bit in the Muslim World from between about 900 ad to to about 1200 ad there was a there was the equivalent of a Islamic Renaissance called it and what happened was that the Muslims in there when they were invading all these territories they're invading territories that have these magnificent libraries of Greek work and one of the things they do is they translate it all into Arabic and suddenly they start studying Aristotle and they start looking at Aristotle logic and and metaphysics of reality and um and they embraced that and they start

the biggest question philosophers have during this period is Faith versus reason Faith versus how do how do we how do we combine the two and you can't so they have a really hard time doing it um but during this period where reason is being elevated they flourish science and algebra and Mathematics all these things do really really well under the Muslims during this period and then at some point they make a crucial decision they make a decision to turn their back on reason and to embrace Faith uh you know you some have argued it's one

particular philosopher Al gazali in the 12th century who basically says forget reason it's all about faith but as a culture particularly outside of the Iberian Peninsula particularly in in the Middle East they reject reason and once they reject reason they go back to being the barbarians they were before and The Barbarians we in the west were at the same time uh a little bit of it that remains in Spain right and in uh in in southern Spain with the Moors and of course when the Christian Ians conquer Spain what did they find they find libraries

libraries filled with writings of philosophers including Aristotle including the Arab and Jewish philosophers who had being inspired by aristot they bring that back to the west and that is what creates the Renaissance that is what revitalizes the West so it's it's the impact of those ideas brought into the west by people like Thomas aquinus that resulted in uh it happening in Europe uh by the way why doesn't it happen in China in my view and this is pure speculation whereas everything else is truth this is speculation um I think China never had an Aristotle I

I think Aristotle is the key figure in in western civilization China never had him and never really imported his ideas so they never had a metaphysic and epistemology of reason and therefore they they Advanced and then they reached a cap and then they declined and they rise and declined because there are periods in which China's civilization is much more advanced than the wests than than Europe's but Europe had Aristotle so it's it basically goes down to Greek philosophy primarily artian philosophy G but the tradition of Greece is what makes the West unique nothing else so

you think it comes from Aristotle more than Jesus or any other thing that later I Think Jesus is the force dragging us down wow so so that will be the thumbnail Jesus is the force you I'm happy to be an with that the Antichrist I mean in my view yes Christian it is an anti-western Force Christianity is an anti-progressive Force it's it's it's trying to drag us backwards whereas uh Greek ideas Greek philosophy science and the enlightenment are what are moving us forward and and when when Christianity dominates any culture where Christianity dominates deeply is

a is a culture that does not advance and does not progress and that's a thousand years of of the dark to Middle Ages all right so let's get into more practical stuff so let's start with the following um let's say you live in a village and you're a good neighbor you live Everyone's an objectivist it's your your dream uh but there's only one River and the river flows through the village it's the river that that everyone is quenching their thirst from and you in pursuit of your self-interest you decide to make a small Factory a

bit Upstream which pollutes everyone's water don't you think that the government has a role in regulating what you can and cannot put in the river which belongs to everyone well there's no such thing as a river belonging to everybody belongs to the country the country can't own rivers in my world right how come so the the country owns nothing um capitalism is a system in which the government has no property owns no property the river should be owned by somebody it might be owned uh through a corporation by various members of The Village it might

be owned by one guy in the village it might be owned by the guy who's polluting The Village but it has to be owned by somebody somebody's going to own the river um I think I think that is true of beaches that is true of uh the the uh you know the the so many miles out into the sea that is supposedly part of this country all of that should be privatized every last inch of Portugal should be owned by somebody um and uh I think it will all be taken care of much better it

will be all be prettier it be all be nicer it be all be cleaner because you know you can pollute quote public property because nobody owns it that's the whole point about public property nobody owns it we all own it there's no such thing right if anything that's owned by everybody is owned by nobody and it's treated that way and we treat it that way if it's two people or three people like when when in your mind it start to be nobody what's the number well as soon as you by any kind of uh legal

means don't have any control over it so do you have any control over the rivers in Portugal of course I you you don't vote for the rivers in Portugal yeah of course you do some political parties are more interested in preserving others are less interested in preserving you're voting for a political party that represents a variety of different interest in which the this river is one if if we had a corporation that included all the citizens of Portugal who own that River then yes then then you would have a private ownership and and it would

be owned by a private entity but right now it's not owned by anybody because there is no private property all there is is private property there's no such thing is collective property uh so if you if you have a million people who all have a share a private ownership and therefore have control of it then it's private even though it's a million people but if you have a political system it's owned by nobody and it's treated as if it's owned by nobody right it it it's it's a it's a secondary thought nobody nobody cares about

it but that's why I'm saying shouldn't there be someone regulating no you should pollute it or not the private property owner should be regulating it and of course the users now what usually happens is is there people who own the water Downstream who are using it and the people who own the water upstream and they might be polluting it and the people upstream and the people Downstream need to come to some agreement about how they're going to use the water and you have a legal system in order to arbitrate disputes like that that's why we

have a a Tor system a a common law system it's worked it it's worked in the past it can work in the future um instead of the government coming in and giving one uh you know uh uh one standard system by which everything functions different rivers are going to be dealt with in different ways depending on the needs and concerns of the different stakeholders of those Rivers that's what private ownership provides so if the if the guy who owns the factory also owns the river then he can pollute it well not if the not if

the people Downstream have been using have have a have a use right to that River they've been using that water that River for for water then they they going to sue the guy Upstream for for polluting their water they need a contract with they need to have a contract need a contract they can go to the courts and say our water used to be clean and we we've been using this water forever and now it's dirty stop the guy from doing it I mean this is this was done in the in the west in the

United States uh a whole legal theories arose out of how do we deal with private water rights this is not Science Fiction it's not that complicated and it works a thousand times better than the system we have today where the guy Upstream is going to bribe the right politicians and and they we don't bribe them anymore with suitcases full of cash although sometimes that happens we bribe them through campaign contributions and taking over a political party or whatever and he gets The Regulators to write regulations that in his favor all the town's people have the

regulations right in favor that wipes out the guy on top even though he's not really polluting the river so it's what we have today is a non-f fact-based political pressure group system that is the worst the worst of all worlds a private system would work a lot better in cleaning up the rivers we'd have much cleaner rivers in my world than what you do in your world but isn't his decision to make a huge contribution to a political party also a decision in his own self-interest so no objectivist no not really not not in a

not if he understands the fact that uh a political system in which people in which the government is doing the bidding of business is bad for everybody but isn't that a bit naive no it's not naive at all it reminds me a bit and this is going to sound really offensive to you of Communists because sometimes Communists are naive they think that everyone will share everything and it will be utopian I think you're naive in a similar way is that you think there will be no villains you think there will be no un no I

think they're going to be lots of villains I I want to build a system to prevent those villains from Ever Getting power I think that the system you have today that you love today is I don't love it is a is a particularly villainous system because it gives the government power over our lives and then all kinds of people who it it the government has not power over them are going to get together raise money and form all kinds of coalitions in order to influence the government and and that's what we have today what we

have today is what I call pressure group warfare that's what politics is in the United States that's what politics is it's Warfare It's it's I want to and and if if you're somebody stuck in the middle then you've got coion on this side you got coion on that everybody's trying to screw you I want a system where politicians have no impact on economy so nobody has an interest in lobbying them nobody has an interest in giving them money because they can't do anything with that money right so if if if the politicians cannot decide what

will happen to this River then why would the businessman give them any money you'd give them no money gon I understand what you're saying I I agree with nearly everything you're saying but imagine you live in that Village right and suddenly your water is polluted you have nowhere else to drink let's say you put that man in court yeah what are you going to drink for the two three years that that's in court oh come on I mean there there's a there's a variety of ways in which we can drink to survive the the trials

in court we we can bring in bottled water but do you think that's ideal who who yes it's of course it's ideal but but but but again you're you're trusting you're you're I'm not trusting anybody because you're trusting the the capitalist making the factory too much no our our our our our ability to drink water from the river is dependent on that guy having uh a sense that if he pays the government that will be worse for everyone that's that's a long shot because in my world he can't pay the government that's my point I

made earlier right in my world he cannot pay the government he's not going to be kind maybe maybe he has to be kind towards the people maybe he can be kind maybe maybe the people down river are buying his products and he should be kind to them because they future humor maybe just should be kind because because they're going to sue him and he's going to spend three years in court having to fight with them and he's probably going to lose because the fact is he's polluting the water so the likelihood that somebody up river

is actually going to pollute the river is close to zero and I'm not saying it's close to zero because he's a good guy but because he does the analysis and he sees that these people down here have a real claim to the to to to the water they have a real claim to it and they will sue him and he's going to lose the law lawsuit and he's just going to have to pay them a bunch of money for all the bottled water they spent three years drinking and he's ultimately going to have to clean

the river himself anyway so what I'm saying is the the capitalism and the system of property rights is a system that basically aligns people interest it doesn't put them in Conflict whereas the system today he pays the politicians and the village is screwed that's exactly how it works today and in capitalism that's not how it works cuz he cannot pay the politician because the politician has no power over the Village all over him so he has to go to court and he's probably going to lose in court 99% he's going to lose in court so

he doesn't pollute to begin with why would a businessman want to waste his time in court when he's got a lot of things to do to make a lot of money for himself I mean there are a lot of stories of big Pharma and other companies who know that they're going to be in court for a lot of stuff but it's part of the business cost but let's move on no but you see again it's it's all perversion and distortions because we live in a mixed economy we live in a system in which uh first

of all uh where it's it's not that clear who's at fault it's not clear that they're to blame or not to blame and look yeah are they going to be businesses in some circumstances take on some risk legal risk sure legal risk sure but if you didn't portray this as maybe he's polluting the water maybe he's not you portrayed is polluting the water right so there's not a lot of legal risk there right these people are clearly damaged there's clearly this is not about legal risk this is about he's going to lose right so yes

there's always going to be things that you do that might be ambiguous in a lawsuit but so let's go back to the property thing why why do they have the right to drink the water from the other man's River if it's if it belongs to no one cuz that's the thing you would say they would go to court and complain about we used to have water we don't have water anymore hey the the river doesn't belong to the country because there is there is a concept called uh you know the right of use so just

like you can't you know I have a home here you buy all the homes all the property around it and don't let me pass and I starve to death in my property you can't do that right there is there is a right to access there's a right to to to to to use something that you have used in the past and to expect a certain quality of it but why if it belongs to you why should I have that right to drink from that water because because of the fact that we live in a social

context in which you know you had you've you are using that water that use has given you the right to it's not just water running through your village you're actually using it that gives you a property Rate Property rats come from use where do property rats come from I mean I mean John Lo talks about this property rights comes from fencing off a particular area and actually cultivating and actually doing something the Right comes from the use right doesn't come from God doesn't come it doesn't give to you by the state it comes from actually

creating something we still have a law here where if you occupy an abandoned land for 20 years or something it becomes yours I I don't think that's completely first of all I think that should definitely apply to public land so-called government land right um then if you occupy government land and and uh and you have it for 20 years it should be yours it should be yours five minutes into occupying it never mind 20 years but even private property if private property is abandoned if somebody owns a piece of property and then they abandon it

they leave and they don't do anything to it for a certain number of years how many years the courts can decide let's say it's 20 and after 20 years the property is abandoned anybody could take it so yes I think the idea of Abandonment and idea of use is where the idea of use is where rights come from so it's not that suddenly they get rights it's the fact that they used it it gives them the right yeah that raises another question which is if they had started using it yesterday would they have that right

they started drinking from the river the day before it was polluted maybe I mean again these are tricky legal questions we'd have to figure out if they what if they didn't use it and then after it's polluted they decided they want to use it no then they don't have the right to it but you know again can can you come to some arrangement and look I'm not saying that it sounds quite complicated rights over water are not simple but they're not impossible either so here in Portugal we have a a law where you if you

have a car which is older than 5 years old or so every year you have to go to a government certified private company which checks if the car is okay and I think this is a good thing because it protects us from irresponsible car owners and it reduces the likelihood that me and my child will die on the highway what do you think about this regulation I hate it like I hate all regulations um it's it's terrible you know it's not as as bad as many other laws that are much much worse uh but it's

like seat belt laws you know grow a spine become an adult and wear a seat belt and if you don't wear a seat belt suffer the consequences now it's different seat belt protects you the car inspection protects elction is the same way unless you can unless you can say again objectively in law that um running a certain level of decrepit car poses a objective risk to other people um so here's what would happen in a in you know this law doesn't exist in the United States by the way there's no such law I don't have

to take my client an inspection ever I I get it authorized once a year I get it renewed but it does it's not an inspection that says with the was running or not uh and but you know what if I if I uh in a in a free Society if I get in an accident and I caused the accident I'm liable so yeah but my me and my wife and my son died that's and we'd rather not die yeah that's very sad but isn't isn't it better for everyone to protect no because because You' created

responsibility an entire bureaucracy I'm going to say it costs 5,000 you know 5 million EUR a year to run this bureaucracy and people have to spend time which they could be productive doing other things in order to do that so let's say with the time and with everything let's I'm making up a number let's say it's 10 10 million euros the 10 million euros that could be put to productive use that uh you know a bunch of poor people could not be poor now instead and you know but I don't do these utilitarian calculations generally

not life is worth infinite right life is worth infinite dollars to the person dying sure yeah but he doesn't have an infinite number so he can't he can't he can't pay it no but the thing is I life is your life is not worth an infinite amount of dollars to me if you get sick now of cancer and somebody comes to me you are you could save you can save his life and it's not even finite right it's not even high right youan you could save his life we need $100,000 from you it's unlikely I

would give them $100,000 now if they said $1,000 I might say yes but and I know you and I like you and I'm not willing to give you a huge amount of money so your life is not infinite to me it's not even that high in terms of the value posted to it I'll call you when I get cancer for the I'm happy to happy to write you a$1 th check um but it it's it's not the case right it's not the case that there's a social value in things so no but I want to

protect my my my family from the irresponsible car owner the best way for you to protect your family not from the responsible car owner that's who we're let let me just let me just finish because you want to you want to take reality and break it up into little scenarios and I don't because I know the solution how to protect your family best overall how to give your family the best life possible not just to live but to flourish and be successful and that's to establish Freedom political freedom but I'm doing that at the same

time no you're not because what you're not because you violated political Freedom by requiring people to get the cause checked and that's a little violation of freedom but that's a little violation of Freedom that's going to lead to a bigger violation of Freedom which because slippy slopes happen everywhere as soon as you're willing to use coion you're willing to use coion and I can think of a million scenarios where regulating the guy's car is small relative to you know I I don't know I won't use a personal example um I've got the solution to rape

I know how to reduce rape in our society to zero I mean it's fairly easy you have a curfew on all men starting at 6:00 p.m. at night until 8:00 am in the morning and it won't be zero but it's going to be very close to zero we reduce rape that's worth infinite amount of money it's infinite so why can't we just do a curfew on a men now some men will never rape granted but we can't really differentiate we don't have the tool to tell who can and can so we're just going to make

sure that all men stay inside you know during the times of day when usually rape happens why is that illegitimate so as soon as you're willing to violate people's freedom there's no limit to how much you're willing to violate people's freedom and I'm saying I'm never willing to violate people's freedom even though even when I can't you know can't give you the exact answer why this particular regulation you know is more harmful than good because the fact that it's a regulation is more harmful than good the fact that it's a violation of somebody's freedom is

more harmful than good but you do believe in punishment through taking people's freedom yes after the fact after they've committed a crime but then you're child's already dead that's true so you'd prefer to live in that world yes because I don't want men to be incarcerated uh for 14 hours a day in order to prevent harm from happening hey let's move on this is uh the Antichrist like I said before um food so I think it's a good thing that uh people can't just put any substance in children's food that will make it super tasteful

and addictive and and so on so forth what about you I think I think it's a good thing that they don't do that yes no but there are laws that prevent people from being villains you know again I I think those those are the same laws that prevent a lot of progress in society and I would rather those laws didn't exist and that you as a parent paid for your kid and don't buy those goods yeah but once hard to figure out what's good and what's not no you're assuming that everyone has information about not

everybody some kids will be harmed by it that absolutely there's no question about that but more kids are harmed by the fact that there's not absolute freedom in the world in which we live how are they harmed in the in the arena of food by not having that freedom in or option sorry in the arita of food there are a lot of people in the world starving to death today there are a lot of people in the world that don't have access to food because of lack of Freedom um and but what what harm is

it to to restrict what substances can put into can be put into food nothing specifically for that assuming you know what substances are good and what substance are and you don't uh you don't no you're based on reason based reason knowledge of nutrition is very limited but uh it's a much broader argument that is again I'll go to same argument I made before right uh the job is not to prevent harm the job is to protect people's rights the job is to protect our freedom it's not to prevent harm the job of government is not

harm protection and if it is harm protection you cannot make an argument about why we cannot incarcerate men for for 15 hours every day to prevent rape and indeed murder murder would go down dramatically if all men just stayed home if they never went outside they might kill their wives but you know but but you know aot are being utilitarian though because you are comparing that restriction on on freedom with potential benefits no I'm not I'm I'm using your framework what I'm saying is I I'm not weighing goods and benefits what I'm saying is the

ultimate good is political Freedom the ultimate good is the government doesn't tell companies what they can or cannot do that that politically that is the good and I believe that the outcome for food would be better under a scenario like that than it is today I think we you know you might say um look let's be clear if you're putting poison into the food and we have to Define what poison means right if it's killing people literally eat it and I die right then of course that's wrong right that's that's and if you're putting what

if you where did you draw the line then if it's making cancer again well what causes cancer do we know what causes cancer a human once we absolutely Ely know that X chemical causes cancer yes then you ban that chemical but we don't know that okay so the government can ban chemicals in food of course it can if it's violating rights if it's doing harm but if it's addictive let's say they put cocaine in chips in children's chips if they put cocain and children chips God I've never heard that question before this is why I'm

here no I I I I I don't think the government should get involved in that but um they'll become addicted to junk food MSG mg already are because of sometimes they already are addicted junk food if you haven't noticed um MSG is not addicted that's complete nonsense and junk food is not addictive and chocolate's not addictive do you know what addiction if you dopamine is not addictive this is nonsense it's again taking a concept of addiction and expanding it so broadly that it becomes meaningless have you ever seen somebody try to get off heroin yeah

yeah that's addiction I give them money that's addiction to get heroin to get heroin yeah so that they don't no because I uh this has happened to me at least two or three times I see them in a state of so much suffering yes that I I really think when they get off of him yeah I know yeah so give a little I give it to reduce their suffering I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing but we talk about we can talk about that separately but the point is this that's

addiction right you are biologically fighting against getting off of of of her and you know I'm addicted to chocolate every day I go home I like to take a little bit of chocolate I'm not addict tomorrow I could stop nothing would happen if I stopped so the idea people use the word Addiction we're not addicted dopamine that's complete nonsense uh we're addict the substances that really cause addiction the substance that don't look if you can show clear unmitigated harm by a substance right that I am it it goes back to the water right you're polluting

the water how do we know it's polluted maybe I can just drink it right if that water is clearly causing the village harm then they can sue or the government can if there's a clearly if sinite in the water people are dropping dead they can ban but where that line is has to be really really clear for example um for a long time we thought that eating cholesterol causes heart disease so you would have banned cholesterol which means banned meat all meat has cholesterol in it so nobody can eat meat because it causes a heart

disease yeah there a lot of dangers in in the in the so the point is that we have to be able to say no it causes real harm documented today we know that eating cholesterol doesn't cause cholesterol that is it doesn't cause heart disease eating saturated fat does but even there we don't know maybe we'll soon Discover it we were right before if there if there is clear-cut poison then yes the government can ban a poison okay Victory um let's move on to companies it's it's all part of protecting individual rights yeah so what do

you think about cartels so a few companies in their own self-interest and then each one of them is manifesting themselves trying to create a lot of win-win transactions in the world they decide to get together and and and benefit each other and you mean like you mean like OPC like what like OPEC oh what do you think of cartels I I think uh good for them it won't last it never does and uh it should not be illegal they've done nothing to harm anybody so so companies should be regulated in that sense no they shouldn't

I said oh I said nobody's harmed by it um it wants survive isn't it a distortion of the Le leir capitalism leir capitalism doesn't view uh it's distorting the fair price no what's a fair price there's no such thing as a fair price a fair price from supply and demand fair price comes from supply and demand and if somebody can Corner Supply then the supply is supply and demand is demand nothing's changed the laws of Economics still apply prices might be higher but there's no right price there's no you know you study economics you study

the stupidity of perfect competition which is which is this uh platonic mythology about what you know competitive firms that all look alike and do exactly the same and and have the same everything and they compete and therefore there's it's complete nonsense it happens in Telcom it happens here in Portugal between telcoms they all have the same products and services and they I'm not saying they do have and they don't innovate very much and they don't do very much because they all look exactly the same and all regulated the same and they're all controlled by the

government and they don't really have any freedom so you get almost no innovation they buy their Innovation from places that are a little Freer than Portugal like the United States so where we have a little bit more freedom you that's where the Innovation happens so um I don't believe in government regulating business in any respect except when they produce poison so if if a cartel forms then a cartel forms that's part of life but it won't my point is it won't survive because it a competitor will arise and break them up one of the companies

in the cartel will cheat and the cartel always always it's always happened there's not an example in history of a cartel surviving more than a short period of time because somebody will always cheat or some competitor will arise to destroy them there no such thing in a free market as monopolies because there's always competition don't you think that some companies get so big that they're of course they're not strictly mythological Monopoly but they're almost a monopoly like what give me an example um meta Amazon on meta is a monopoly on what no social media after

you have a large enough market share so you can't use Twitter you can't use uh no of course you can't so so so how they Monopoly I don't use Facebook I almost never use Facebook Instagram okay so so what so you got Tik Tok yeah I'm not saying they're they're other companies that's why I said there sometimes they how much how much does Facebook and Instagram charge you for using them a bit nothing zero exactly zero your time is your choice you control your time so zero so how's it what so what so so they're

big why is big bad yeah I'm actually more interested in what you said about you don't believe in this theoretical idea of the fair price and that's maybe why cartels aren't very there's no such thing as a fair price so do you do you do you think it's morally correct for a company is let's say there's one company which has a warehouse with a lot of wheat inside and there's a famine going on and the owner of that company he decides to artificially suppress the supply side to make prices go up to make more profit

no the supply side is already is already suppressed because there's other people don't you know somehow weed is not coming to Market so the supply side is already suppressed so he's raising the prices no but let's say he's purposefully um lying about how much wheat he has why does he need to lot why does he need because he wants to make more profit he wants there to be so he doesn't have I can just release the wheat slowly he doesn't have to lie why would he have to lie about it yeah he's not okay but

do do you think that's moral I think I I think it's absolutely in a famine not only do I think it's moral I think it's I think it's a good thing in a famine where people are yeah because that's the only way that's the only way you'll actually get a lot more wheat into production right what is what is there will be a right amount to put out there what is prices going I mean let's not create fiction let's talk about reality right what did price is going up signal to the marketplace but on the

on the famine side it signifies I won't have food for my kids on the other side it's an opportunity yes so what what happens during that opportunity wheat would flood the market from all other places which is exactly what happens so hoarding or not hoarding uh what do you call it I think hoarding is good no raising prices during a let's say let's take a realistic scenario masks in covid masks during covid yeah masks during Co so masks during Co there's a shortage of masks objectively there not enough masks so I could sell them for

$1 each or I could sell them for $5 each what do you think is the moral thing to do that's not food though people are dying people are getting sick let's say so so what do you think the M thing to do what do you think the good thing to do from a utilitarian perspective I think it if there's a famine you'd find a way for forget about the famine we got Co and we got masks what do you think the no but I I started with the famine I want the famine okay so let's

let's Okay so so so let's do the famine I have I have wheat in my warehouse and it cost you $1 for each1 and I you can sell it for $110 make 10% I don't have to sell it I can be a philanthropist I can give it away to everybody there and what happens when all the wheat from the warehouse is gone you saved about A Million Lives no I haven't because the famine is still going on and my weed has run out it's zero yeah but it's like the drug addict you reduced their suffering

when they needed it instead of focusing on profit but but I reduced their suffering but they're still suffering right they've eaten the wheat that I gave them and now they're still famine so now they all die because the the warehouse is empty and there's no new wheat coming in yeah that's why I said 10% margin on your weats no forget about the margin I gave it to them for free right but now let's say I increased the margin by 300% and I sell the wheat for $4 instead of $1 and now less you know the

wheat goes out but what happens what happens instantaneously as I'm doing that everybody else in the economy looks at that and say oh wheat prices are gone up they'll buy wheat from Brazil and they buy wheat from everywhere else and they bring it to Market and what happens to famine it goes away it goes to zero so I'll save a lot more no I'm not kidding you you're laughing as if as if this is you know I literally the famine goes away because I raised the price and therefore created a market for Wheats where a

market didn't exist for wheat see as long as the price is zero I might be a philanthropist and give it the wheat to them and some people won't die but the famine will continue but if you raise the price other people will step in with their Wheats and the famine will disappear and philanthropist can buy the wheat for $4 and hand it out and when the all the wheat comes in what will happen to the price of wheat it'll come down go back down to Z to one so you know dur during hurricanes for example

there's this idea that people want to flee the hurricane right so the gas station is not allowed to raise their price so I've got a gas station I could I could raise the price to $4 a gallon instead of $1 a gallon um so but I'm to I have to I have to sell at $1 gallon so what happens everybody comes in right all these people fleeing the hurricane coming in they fill up their tank and then they leave and within a few hours I have no gas to sell to anybody so all these other

people want to flee the hurricane they get to my gas station sorry there's no gas but imagine I rais the price to $4 I raised the price to $4 now people say okay I'm not going to fill up my gas I'm only going to buy enough to get out of here small amount maybe I still fill it up no I mean so I would raise it to $10 a gallon yeah and understand a lot of if it was $10 a lot of people would want gas at the margin at the margin you're going to have

more gas over longer period of time not that other people will bring gas just that my gas station will last for longer and therefore allow more people to flee the hocane I don't know I think most people would still fill up because it's a it's a fight ORF flight situation that's cuz because I'm I'm that might just be me but I no it's just you but it's not even just you it's just you depends on how much money you have right so some people might fill up but other people will not because they don't have

that kind of money and the re and and they might think I'll get to the next town and get get a cheaper gas over there the point is that the gas station has gas for longer and therefore more people get out of it price gouging is a benefit not a cost it it contributes it doesn't retract so final question because you have other stuff to do here in Portugal um what do you think about casinos and uh and no I have two more questions quickly what do you think about casinos which ruin ruin lives and

ruin families and what do you think are the best arguments against objectivism yeah I I don't think casinos will lives I think gamblers ruin lives that's an addiction you can call that an add not an addiction I've seen people who gamble I've gambled periodically and stopped it's not a problem to stop gambling uh like it is again compare it to heroin compare it to heroin and heroin as you said God the suffering they go through in order to get off of nobody goes through suffering to get off of gambling gambling is a psychological thing but

they lose all their money they steal from their parents sometimes okay people are crazy and people people are horrible if they steal they should go to jail uh so there are lots of irresponsible people in the world and you don't you don't um encourage the irresponsibility by shielding them and protecting them by passing laws that shield and protect them and cter them as if they're infants people are not infants they need to be treated as adults and some adults do bad things and they should be treated as bad people not and so the government has

no business to stopping casinos uh I'm not a fan of casinos casinos make a lot of money over people's irrationality and and I think in the in a more rational world and the more rational we become the fewer casinos there will be because people won't be attracted to that kind of entertainment but you know it's uh it's it's up to the individual to make a life for himself again it's not Society or the government's or your neighbor's job to take care of you it's your job to take care of yourself and uh people everybody has

the ability to do that nobody is born with a gene that makes it impossible possible for them to resist casinos yeah so this final question is something I do with all the guests it's I'm going to invite you to steal man the position of someone who's against objectivism what would you say are the best arguments against objectivism so so I don't think any of the arguments that kind of you're making on on the Practical how does capitalism work none of them are good arguments there no good I mean literally there're no good arguments and I'm

and I'm not the best at this the economists out there who have answers to every single one of these because every single one of these arguments would be made there's no argument in the realm of Economics that hasn't been made and there answers to all of them and they're really good answers to them and and a system that adopted freedom I me if you're gonna if you're going to actually argue against objectivism you're GNA have to argue at the foundation you going have to argue what you were implying so you'd have to argue that look

people can't resist gambling it just it just is and uh and a significant number of them and we have to protect them from it it's it's a it's so you have to argue against reason the only argument against objectivism that could that that has any chance of successful I still think it's unsuccessful is to argue that human beings are not capable of being rational that they're not capable of reason they're not capable of rationality or at least let's say 50% of humanity is not capable of rationality some of us are but 50% is not and

therefore they need to be taken care of in some way now you still have to argue why I need to take care of them um and uh and and and what kind of what's in it for me but but you'd have to argue against human reason in order to challenge objectivism I don't think there's any argument about the economics of it that has that stands any you know any ground so that's why you'd probably agree that you can you can be peral paternalistic in relation to small children who are not yet capable of Reason absolutely

absolutely and look anybody who's not capable of Reason needs to be taken care of uh the elderly in some cases dementia which is horrible I mean if if you if you got relatives who've lost their mind I mean there's nothing worse than seeing somebody who had the capacity to reason lose the capacity to reason they need to be taken care of somebody has to take care of them and and this is hopefully their children take care of them their neighbors take care of them somebody who loved them who who who cares about them we'll take

care of them but yes we you know objectivism ultimately boils down to we are rational animal we have that capacity and we should be left free to live that kind of life thank thank you so much Shon it was a pleasure this was fun yeah we we could have had two more hours at least debating but i' I've done that so one day thank you very much and to everyone who followed us at home thank you for being there uh like comment subscribe well that helps if you're feeling a bit more generous and want to

support the project there's a link in the description thank you very much and see you next time thanks Heron excellent oh it was very nice man very fun yeah that was F