YouSaid · the spoken record

Jennifer Burns

lines on the record: 240
first: 2025-01-19
most recent: 2025-01-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So, I do think it's really hard to have an original thought. You know, we are social creatures, we encounter the same situations again and again. And so it's really hard. You're born into these traditions of thinking and being and knowing. And most people are never going to question them and most people are never going to become aware of them. So again, that's some of the work of what I do as an intellectual historian is like, let's become aware. Let's realize that you're carrying a map that's orienting you to the world in a certain way, right? And so I think you have to work really, really hard to have an original idea. And even then, it's not a completely original idea. It's a reworking and a reassembling of ideas others have had. So I definitely think it's possible to create autonomy in the realm of ideas and to be an autonomous consumer of ideas. But I think on balance, most people are not. And that's fine.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think in a lot of cases, I think it's true. You know, Keynes has this famous quote, like, you know, most men are slaves of some defunct economist, you know.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some cases, that may be true, but I also, she's also unloose unloosing some of the light forces in terms of reflecting on yourself and trying to be true. But definitely there are ideas that are dangerous to play with. And there are ideas that I think give license to the darker sides of human nature. But I think you can see that in the historical record. I think that it's possible to show that. And obviously there's some places, you know, like Germany, they think the ideas are so dangerous they can't be allowed to circulate. And in some context, that may absolutely be true.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I philosophically agree with Souls and ISIN for sure. I do think some ideas pull on the good side and some ideas pull on the bad side. Like, absolutely. And I think that's probably why people dislike Rand so much is they feel like she's giving license to the bad side. And she's saying it's okay to be selfish and it's okay. You know, they feel like she's unloosing the dark forces.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, people with ideas that they spent enough time polishing up and developing that we still want to read about them 100 years later.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I'm approaching it with a sort of charity, but also I don't have huge expectations. I'm not expecting to have the light shine on me. I'm not expecting to agree. I'm like, I can be very clinical about it. So that's what's worked for me. It might not work for others. And then I just try to find the humor in it. You know, like how funny is it? Like these different aspects of them, you know, like when teaching my students about Oliver Wendell Holmes, like his dad wrote a poem about him. He called him the astronaut about how he came from outer space. He seemed like he came from outer space. I'm like, this is his dad's view of his son. Like that's how weird of a guy he was, you know? And so I try to like find that keep alert for those funny kind of human touches that like these are ultimately just people.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, even though I think the passion is important for the teaching of the ideas, like dispassion is more important for the reading and understanding of them. So a lot of people have said to me like, I could never write about Ayn Rand. Like, she makes me so angry. And I've never become, I don't get angry reading her. Like I'm like, oh, there you go again, you know, or like, well, that's going to cause trouble, you know, or.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their skills to doing that and showing them how I do it and also modeling like this is how I would read a text. This is what jumps out to me when I look at Thomas Kuhn or something like this and just show them that studying a history of ideas is really fun. I feel incredibly privileged to do it, you know. And the other thing is I think this is the time for students in college figuring out who they are. Their minds are developing and growing. They can really handle complicated hard ideas. They don't always have the context behind them. So I need to give them the hard ideas and then show them this is kind of the context of what's happening in the world. But really, I'm just showing them the landscape. I don't have time to go deep. We have a 10-week quarter, you know, giving them a flyover. And then I want them to know how to go deep and know where they want to go deep.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try to share my enthusiasm. I think that's almost the number one thing I bring is my enthusiasm. Like, look how neat and interesting these ideas are. I try to keep my own views out pretty much. I try to give the fairest possible rendition I can of each thinker. If I find someone really disturbing, I might sidebar at the end of the lecture and say this kind of, you know, I find this unsettling and this, you know, tells me something about myself. But most of the time, I'm bringing people into the like the biography of a great thinker, the context of them. And then we, in the lecture, will literally read the work together and we'll talk about it and I'll ask the students, what are you finding here? What's jumping out at you, kind of breaking down the language and really teaching them how to do deep reading. So I feel like that is my contribution right now. We're having trouble reading collectively. We're having trouble paying attention collectively. And I'm trying to cultivate.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's great. It's really inspiring. The ways the old school kind of dominating way in which Friedman taught would not fly in today's university wouldn't be permitted and also the students wouldn't respond to it, you know? So.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, in the mid 1940s in the United States. So then I can kind of take that and run with that and figure out where to go.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, correspondence is really, really helpful. Drafts, correspondence. And, you know, someone this famous, they have oral histories, other people write about them. So you're reading all these different things and kind of triangulating and trying to sort of put them together and then think about how do I present this in a compelling story and what do I need to explain? And then also for me, what was really helpful was that because I teach and I am explaining the kind of broad sweep of 20th century history. you know, I know that Rand's involved in a labor action at Warner Brothers, but through my teaching, I realized, oh, yes, this is a moment of labor strikes across the country. And so then that really changes the origin story of Atlas Shrugged because she's looking at labor actions and she originally thinking of the book as being called The Strike. So she's really responding in real time and being inspired by what's happening.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uncovered this world of kind of nascent conservatism. And I'm kind of putting that together. And once I have enough, I say, well, that's a chapter. I'm going to cover that chapter. And then there's going to be the book has come out. And so now I need to start a different chapter. What's her life like after the book has been published? And then I look for that. But I'm really, although I have this very high level structure, it's coming out of the archive, the material I'm finding. And if I'm not finding the material there, I won't cover it in great detail. Or if I've decided it's outside my ambit, I'm not going to go into great depth on it.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I know with the biography of a person, I am already given a start and an end date and a rough narrative of what happens. So I have a kind of structure. And then both with Rand and Friedman, I started by reading their major books before I really read anything about them because I wanted my own experience of the material to be fresh. And I had read some Ayn Rand, but not a lot. Similarly, I had read some Friedman, but not a lot. So at first is like, let me read the major stuff, get oriented. And then just dive into the archive and see what's there. Who are they talking to? What's going on? In Rand's case, you know, I was interested in her in the United States, not her in Russia. I didn't have the language skills to do that. So I start her in the United States and I start when she publishes her first book and she starts getting letters. And who is she writing to? Who's writing to her? And then I start to.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I called her the gateway drug In that people start with Rand, they're taken by her. In some ways, she takes the worldview of Milton Friedman in terms of what capitalism can accomplish economically. And then she puts it in this mytho poetic register and she fictionalizes it. So once people have absorbed that, they want more. They go on to learning more of the ideas behind that vision. Or they have become true believers. They've converted. And so then they head off to work for a politician, to work for a think tank, to work for parties, absolute traffic. Now, not everyone. There's plenty of people who read Ayn Rand who don't take the politics in. It's a nice story. It's interesting. Just an episode in their life. But for others, it's really foundational. It really, really changes them. So those were the people I wanted to track very deliberately. I wasn't trying to do in the round everything about Ayn Rand. I was like, Ayn Rand and the American right, you know, goddess of the market, Ayn Rand and the American Right is the title. So where do”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I did have a friendly critic who took it upon himself to throw at me everything he thought the outside world would throw at me. I think maybe five or ten years earlier, it wouldn't have been possible. But the most important thing I had to, the person I really had to convince this was worth doing was myself, you know, because I knew it was unconventional and unconventional choice for the field and for a dissertation. Once I convinced myself, I just said, well, we're going to do this and see. And because it was unconventional, it ended up standing out. And it really was the time. There was, I started it during Second Bush administration, second George W. Bush, second term. People were interested in just conservatism in general and felt no matter where they stood on the political spectrum, felt like objectively we don't know enough about this. And this is a problem. And so they were open to learning more. So I really kind of caught that caught.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just like to go deep. It's really interesting to me. And I should say in both of these cases, I've done it in an institutional structure. I don't know that I would do it independently. So the first was a graduate program in history. I was at UC Berkeley. And so I had coursework and then I had structures. And I did have people to check in with and read. But I had a great deal of latitude. I'm very grateful for people are like, you wrote a dissertation on Ayn Rand at Berkeley. I'm like, yeah, hell I did. You know, Berkeley's like, it's a great place. The time I was there, there was absolute room for free inquiry.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, I go to the archive. That's where I feel like I'm communing with the dead in some ways. I'm seeing what they saw in some ways, reading what they felt. And I tell my doctoral students, it's got to be something that gets you out of bed in the morning because there comes a point in your doctoral career when nobody's, there's nowhere to go. There's nowhere to be, you got to be getting up because you're interested in what you want to study. And so with Rand, it was this real sense of discovery. Like I am discovering, I want to know about this woman. I want to know where she fits. And the only way to find out is to do the research. You know, and so.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then how it gets politicized or mobilized in different ways. And behind it, all I think is this human longing for meaning and the inadequacy of the traditional ways that need was met at this point in time.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now it's really interesting. And then I also thought, you know, well, at the same time, this is clearly a structure of meaning. And they actually think it's followed the same path of objectivism, which is turning into its opposite, like distilled down and then turning into its opposite. So if objectivism was a group of people who considered themselves individualists who ended up deeply conforming to the dictates of a charismatic leader, you know, postmodernism started about disrupting binaries. We're going to be fluid. We're going to go beyond the border. We're going to disrupt the binary. And it's devolved in its popular forms to the reinscribing of many different binaries. Oppressor and oppressed, you know, has become this like paradigmatic set of glasses you put on to understand the world. So I think it is the dynamics are very, very similar. So I think it's something in the traffic of the idea from its pure form to its popular form.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I sort of realized like, oh, this has happened with postmodernism. It's followed the same path, you know, that say from Milton Friedman's economic theory to, you know, free to choose on YouTube. We've had a similar path of high French theory down to Tumblr. And I, you know, sexually identify as an attack helicopter or whatever it is. You know, and so”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People take economics as a theory of the world that almost you can almost believe in it, right? It can almost take that place. And in both cases, how do those ideas travel? When I think about postmodernism, it first struck me, you know, if you read the original postmodern thinkers, it's really tough going. I mean, I make my students do it and they suffer. I think they see it's worthwhile, but it's no fun to read Derrida, you know. But somehow it's trickled down into how do we go from like dairy dot to Tumblr.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think in the broadest sense, what I'm interested in, kind of two dimensions that guide me in doing intellectual history. One is what I talked about. Like, how does an idea go from a book, an elite space, out to more popular dimensions? Like, how does that happen? What happens to the idea along the way? How is it distorted or changed? And the other is just search for meaning in a post-Christian era or secular era. Like what are people coming up with? And I think to replace that void in their religious or spiritual lives, I think both Rand and Friedman offered these sort of alternatives, right? Objectivism, quasi-rationalist religion.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it seems like communism is more animated by this idea of injustice. You know, the world is unjust. It should be different. And fascism seems like the process of scapegoating, right? We've identified the source of the problem. And it's this group. And they need to be punished for what they've done to the rest of us.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world was becoming more interconnected in those differences were becoming more obvious. You know, fascism to me is unleashing more something primal, something sort of dark and primal within people. And it's more of a permission structure to indulge in that that is normally not there, those impulses are normally channeled or held down. And it seems that when the fascist regimes come into power, they give people permission to let those forces out.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into political allegiance. I think in the case of communism, it's this dream of a more ethical world, you know, dream of equality, dream of the powerless rising up against the powerful. I mean, that's very, that's drawn in so many. And then you had the whole addition of Leninism, which gave a kind of international cast to that and helped people think about what are the relations between poorer and richer countries and what can we expect out of them and what might happen, gave us sort of a framework for thinking about that in a time when those”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I think about this sort of Historical path of communism and the kind of logics and dynamics of communism. I mean, in many ways it has some echoes with Rand in that, you know, the ideology in its purest form is almost a rationalist ideology of some ways. It's an analysis of history and how things are supposed to be. And I think you mentioned Hannah Arendt. I think she is one of the most kind of penetrating analyses of communism, which she really puts in the category of like it's a logical ideology. Logic leads inexorably to its conclusions and then experience crops up and experience is different. And what is a sort of cult of rationality do when it hits experience? Well, it tries to bend experience to its will. And that, I think, is really the story of communism writ large. So the question, though, is why, you know, why does it catch fire? Why does it draw people?”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Discourse of economics. And so I think they kind of go top down and bottom up and then they hit the events, right? Friedman's ideas wouldn't have gone anywhere without that episode of stagflation that really made people think they proved out. And I think Rand's ideas really caught fire in Cold War America that's looking for a statement of like what does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to live in this mass society? Because it's also a time of great social conformity and where people are suddenly, you know, they're working for large corporations. They've been served in a large military. The United States is stepping out onto the world stage. Everything is bigger. What does it mean to be an individual in that world? And that's where RAN's ideas catch fire. So I think a lot about that, about how they trickle through different levels of society than how ideas collide with experience, I think, is critical.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around these ideas. So a bunch of people started calling themselves objectivists and getting together to read Rand's work. That was spontaneous and ground up and wasn't supported by any money nobody planned it. It just happened. Friedman's a different case in that he joins an established tradition of thought that's been institutionalized in universities. So people are signing up and paying money and getting credential to learn these ideas. So to my mind, these are two different ways, but really emblematic ways of how ideas spread. So Rand, I think of the more bottom-up, like people encounter the idea in a book. They're kind of blown away by it, or they imbibe it without even realizing they're imbibing it. And then they're like, well, maybe I don't like. Franklin Roosevelt so much. Or maybe I'll look another time at Barry Goldwater. And then whereas Friedman, you get the idea more top-down. I know I'm getting the idea. I know I'm being positioned within a sort of elite.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's a couple different ways I think it happens. I really am interested in the relationship between the thinker and then the reader and the interpreter of the ideas and then the conditions on the ground that make that idea resonate or not resonate. And so I think a lot, so as an intellectual historian, I'm studying ideas. I'm always putting them in their historical context. Like what is happening is making these things resonate, that is making them people seek them out. So for Rand's case, she has this credibility because of her experience of communism, which is one of these defining moments of the time. And then I think the idea comes out in a sort of purer form. And then other people rework it and reshape it as they read it. And I'm really interested in how people form communities.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really dislike her work and they think it's shallow because. They find her fiction overdrawn. They find her work in the mythic register simple, and she's also a grand systematic thinker in an age that's over systems. You know, she's almost, she's creating an inverse Marxism, right? Marx was writing in 1848. You know, it's not a thinker of the mid-20th century. I think that's part of it. The lack of a legacy and the dislike of what she had to say and the feeling that she's too detached. Her insights are not insights because they're too idealized rather than being rooted in a theory of human nature that people find plausible.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These ideas are very provocative and they're very deep because she's not taking anything for granted and she's flipping everything around and forcing you to really think to a lot of other readers, to her critics. They just look absurd. Like how could you even make these contentions? And I think that because she's not without precedence and she's not without followers, but she doesn't knit herself into an intellectual community the way that these other thinkers do very naturally that can you can see who they influence, you can see who they're in dialogue with. I think my book was one of the first to really take Rand and say she's a figure in American history. Here's who she's connected to. Here's who she's influenced. And I got a lot of pushback for that, you know. I think now people are more open to it. But I think the people who compile these lists.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, a lot of people just deeply dislike RAN. They deeply dislike her ideas. They don't think they're profound because their disconnection from other ideas and other understandings of human society, I think, Anik, where you could look at them and say”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this kind of lack of ability to introspect in herself and to was probably too painful to introspect and to think about that. So she just tried to rationalize her way through it and it came out in these very strange theories.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fair to women in her life promoted them in her life, but did not, I mean, she was very negative about feminism. And then because like they dress terribly, you know. And then the other thing is really interesting. There's all these kind of Homo erotic themes in her writing. And for that reason, many gay men were drawn to her writing. And then she would say like, homosexuals are dirty, terrible people. You know, she would denounce people for being homosexual. So there's a whole actual literature of like gay men wrestling with Rand and how she says about gay people. So yeah, it's hard to make sense of. And I just, I just think of the enormous pressures. If I want to be charitable, I just think of the enormous pressures she was under in the culture she was raised in, the expectations that were placed upon her and her just utter inability to meet any of them. And it came out in this very tortured set of ideals that she tried to promote.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She represents. I mean, she lived the ideals of individualism in her life and set aside gender norms in her own life, but she did not see herself as part of any for the benefit of other women or to change society's views about women. There was no collective essence to it. So if feminism has some sort of collective Aspect to it, or at least some identification one needs to identify with a broader category of women and feel they're acting on behalf of that. She's definitely not doing that. And she did, you know, she was.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, she's almost an anti-feminist because she then goes on and someone writes her letter about like should there be a female president or something. This is like the beginning of feminism. And she says, no, no woman should ever be president because if she's president, she wouldn't be able to look up to any man because she would be so powerful. And therefore she would be like corrupt and like rotten in the soul and like unfit to be a leader. And it just makes no sense.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, but that is a huge part of this appeal at the time. There's this feminist who hates rant, Susan Brownmeller, and she wants to write an angry denunciation of the rape scene. So she goes to get the fountain head and she's wondering, how is she ever going to find the scene in this 800-page book? It's a library copy because she doesn't want to buy it. And it just falls open to the rape scene because everybody's gone and read it because it's very racy and explicit for that time. So I'm almost positive she also knew that like if I put in this kind of taboo breaking sex scene, that's also going to probably be why people tell their friends about it. So I just think it's a mess. I think all of the gender and sexuality stuff is that she states is just a total mess.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hero rapes the heroine, and then they fall in love. That's just the trope of how it works. So it's crazy when you read it. But if you were reading a bunch of novels in this genre, you would find this is like very standard.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rape scene to some degree embodies that idea that the woman should worship the man, I tend to read it more in terms of literary genre. So Rand is a screenwriter, you know, a consumer of movies. And that rape scene is like paradigmatic for the romance genre, in other words, these like pulpy romance novels.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet she writes in all her fiction about strong manly heroes. So this seems to be like a projection. The man she's actually with is not a strong manly hero, the hero she writes about she probably wouldn't be able to be in the same room with them for more than one minute before they got in a raging argument, right? And then... Then she develops this theory about women and men in that a woman should worship her man and a woman finds her true expression in worshiping the man she's with. So again, this is not at all how Ayn Rand lives her life. This is like this, I would say, compensatory theory for her lack of ability to conform to the gender norms of her day. She then articulates them in a very strong and almost distorted and exaggerated way to compensate for the fact that she doesn't actually meet them and can't actually enact them.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But was beautiful caused him deep anguish and guilt for being non objectivist. So this is the objectivist theory. Then the gender politics are just crazy. And we have to kind of back up and think, okay, who is Ayn Rand? She's born Elisa Rosenbaum in Russia. She is someone who stands out from the crowd from the beginning. She never really fits in. She's not conventionally beautiful by any stretch of the imagination. She struggles with her weight and she doesn't consider herself to have a beautiful face. She's very independent. She meets none of the metrics of traditional femininity at all. She finds love with a man who is very handsome but very passive.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's also an objectivist theory of sexuality that probably the least convincing of all the parts of objectivism. And it goes something like your sexual desires express your highest values. And they are related in some ways to your rationality, right? Which is also related to your highest value. So for her, that explained Her attraction to Nathaniel Brandon and Nathaniel Brandon's attraction to her was a function of their highest values. And in fact, Brandon imbibed this so deeply that the fact that he was later drawn sexually to a woman who was not particularly accomplished.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whole thing breaks up, but what I argue in my book is actually this is to the benefit of Rand's ideas because Rand herself was so controlling over her ideas. And now that she steps back from a public role, objectivism flows into the student libertarian movement. Some objectivists become conservatives. It just kind of spreads out more generally and you don't have to drink the Kool-Aid. You don't have to take the official course. Nathaniel Brandon goes on to be part of the self-esteem movement, you know. human potential movement, California. And Ayn Rand lives, you know, another 10 years or so, but she doesn't do major work after that.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How could Ayn Rand do anything wrong? And other people say, what is this letter all about? And what did Nathaniel Brandon do? And I'm not just going to take her word for it. I need more information. And then a bunch of people, I read all the accounts of this. A bunch of people are like, okay, they were having an affair. And a bunch of other people are like, no, that couldn't possibly be happening, you know. And so.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Ayn Rand knows something is going on, but she can't quite figure it out. And finally, Barbara Brandon says, to Nathaniel Brandon, you know, you have to tell her. This is just gone, gone on too long. So she finds out and the whole thing blows up and she exiles him and she breaks off contact with him. And nobody has ever told what happens. It's called the objective schism. You know, objectivism breaks in two because some people say,”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Supported it. And at first, it was to help her in her depression because he said the world needs to recognize your genius. They missed Atlas shrugged, but I'm going to teach them. I will bring the message. And it's very successful. It becomes its own business. It has a newsletter. It's a whole world. So that small cult around Ayn Rand expands to this whole social network. And it's very much a piece with this burgeoning conservative movement, objectivists or involved in criticizing the draft. there's kind of a libertarian objectivist world going on. All of this is happening. In the meantime, Nathaniel Brandon has found a new partner and he does, but he doesn't tell Ayn Rand this because he knows she'll be upset. And so it goes on for years.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing leads to another, it becomes a full romantic and sexual relationship. And although it's open within these four people, it is not open more broadly. And so in all these meetings of the collective, Alan Greenspan, all these other people coming up, you know, drinking coffee all night, talking, talking, they all know that Nathaniel Brandon is objectivist number one. They don't know that there's a romantic and sexual relationship happening. It's kept a secret. And then when Atlas Shrugged comes out, It's panned by reviewers. People absolutely hate this book. And Rand is not Howard Rourke. She falls into a deep depression. Because her masterpiece has been rejected. And so then the romantic relationship ends, but the close personal relationship continues. And then over time, Brandon, who's still married to his wife, begins an affair with another young woman. And at this point, he has started the Nathaniel Brandon.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're both married. So they call a meeting and they Obtain the consent, or maybe simply inform the others of the rationality of the choice. And then they say, but this is only going to be an intellectual relationship, but we'd like a few hours alone each week. And we don't want to be deceptive. So we want you to know and approve of this. So the spouse is bought into rationality, know and approve.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. They rationally decided this. But because they're rational, they need the consent, or at least to inform their partners.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source