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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Then eventually they graduate from college and they both enroll in a graduate program in Columbia and they leave. And after they've left, Ayn Rand is just bereft. And within a few months, she packs up her home and she moves to New York. I am. I like New York better. And so that becomes the seedbed of the collective. And the Brandons, they get married. They change their name to Brandon. They've never publicly spoken on this, but many people have pointed out it has the word Rand in the name. So it's some type of acknowledgement of how important she is to them. And time goes on and romantic feelings develop between Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Brandon some 20 years or junior. They discuss them and they realize that rationality has led them to the conclusion that they should be lovers.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so after the fountain head, the fountain head is auctioned to be sold to be a film. So Ayn Rand moves to Hollywood where she's going to help in the writing of the film. She wants a lot of creative control. And she's also still working and screenwriting and things like this. And so she gets a letter from a, there's a Canadian student who's written to her several times. And then he writes again and he says, I met UCLA. And she's like, young man, you're so full of error. Why don't you come visit me and I'll straighten you out? And so he comes and they have this real meeting of the minds. They talk all night. He comes again, he brings his girlfriend. She loves him. And they start this very intense relationship of spending every weekend at her house, basically, staying up all night talking about ideas. He becomes completely converted to the objectivist worldview. Rand begins counseling him and his girlfriend about their relationship. You know, very intense thing.”
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 amazing. There's so Murray Rothbard is a famous anarchist, falls into the Ayn Rand cult. And then he disagrees and there's some type of show trial where he's told he's wrong about everything. And then he has a little sort of pseudocult of his own. And two of his cult members switch over to Ayn Rand and then one of them to show the jest to gesture their breaking of the relationship mails him a dollar bill that's been torn in half. I mean, this is high theatrics, right?”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over time, they all come to share Ayn Rand's views and opinions on everything from music to art to clothes. You know, she gets a dining room table and a bunch of them get the same dining room table. And it becomes incredibly conformist because they've all believed they're acting rationally. And they believe that to act rationally is to agree with Ayn Rand. And they believe there's no other way to make decisions than rationality. And so to disagree with her is to be irrational. They don't want to be irrational. So people get really caught up in this very damaging cult-like circle around her.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drafts of Atlas shrugged as she goes along, and one of the members of the collective, to bring all of this together is Alan Greenspan, later behead of the Federal Reserve. And he's incredibly taken with her. He's one of these people who says, I was a narrow technical thinker. I never thought about ethics or politics or anything bigger until I met Ayn Randon. She really opened my mind. He's part of this tight-knit group. But over time, in this tight-knit group, they think of themselves. We are all individualists. We're dedicated to individualism and capitalism. We're different than everybody else.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I think it's the problem of elevating rationality over any other mode of insight or thinking. And so what happens in Rand's life, and I describe this in some detail in the book, is she essentially creates a cult of reason around her. People who are drawn into this culture. She's already famous, but she's writing Atlas Shrug, and so she's sharing.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, the big flaws that it's justified through a fictional world, you know, it's not justified through reference to the real world. It's not empirical in a way. It's not, and Rand herself would say this. She's not writing about things how they are, but how they should be. And so That idealism It just really undermines. Is a mechanism to understand where we're actually living.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it's because of that purity that I'm willing to say, sort of you get what you deserve, and that kind of lack of charity. And part of that in her work is because she creates this fictional world where she can set everything up just so. And so you don't have contingency or accident or bad luck or you don't really have a lot of children. You don't have handicapped. You just have this idealized world. And I think it's really infuriating for people who feel that's so inaccurate. How can you be deriving a social theory and philosophy around this? And how can you be missing what seems to many people she's missing the kind of ethical instinct or the altruistic or charitable instinct? And so they just become enraged at that and they don't want to see anyone go that far and they're outraged that someone went that far that did the thing that Frank Knight said no one would do. Yeah, it's just, it's very unsettling.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I mean, the other thing, she knew she was doing kind of propaganda in a way. She was like, I'm doing pro-capitalist propaganda. She has a degree from the University of Londingrad. Raised it up in Soviet Russia. She said, We need to present the case for the other side in the same way. And that's what she did.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you know, Rand knew that she was doing that and she knew what she was doing. This wasn't an accident. And people say, oh, she's a bad writer. Oh, her characters are so heavy-handed. She started as a screenwriter. She started as someone who analyzed films for movie studios. She knew exactly how to manipulate plot and character and drama. And she also knew that she was writing, you know, people say, oh, Rand is for, you know, adolescence, adolescent teenagers love Rand. And that's kind of who she was writing for. And she said, you know, I'm writing for people as they start out on their life and they're thinking about who they want to be. So she's not writing. Know for the weary middle age, she's writing for the young who are looking for inspiration.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Collective. And I think paradoxically, as they do that, they're drawn to this vision of someone who doesn't have to compromise at all, you know, who is leading their life exactly as they want to. You know, meanwhile, they might be sleeping on an ocean liner because they've been drafted to fight in this war. And they're reading the fountain head and they're feeling better about themselves. And so it's also really interesting. The fountain head is hugely popular in India, which is fascinating and talk to people about this and they basically say this book comes like a breath of fresh air into a very traditional and conformist culture and people just latch onto it and they love it, you know, and it gives them that feeling of freedom and possibility that they're hoping for.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I really think Rand's thinking about herself, you know, when she says that she inherits nothing. She stands at the start. But, you know, the fountain head comes out in the middle of World War II, and it's not Rand is an unknown writer. This is kind of a strange book. It's a classic story. It's turned down by 12 publishers before one takes a chance on it. And Rand really loved this story. The editor who read it said this book is great. And his boss said, no. And he said, If you don't take this book, I'm quitting. You know, and so she idolized him for doing that. So they print it and it becomes a bestseller just through word of mouth. So it's not advertised. It gets one good book review, but people tell each other how much they like this book. And it keeps printing and selling out printings. It's made into a movie. And so it lands in this time when Americans are engaged in this great collective endeavor of World War II. They're making all kinds of sacrifices for the”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I mean, you know, Rand's coming from communist Russia, but it has a bit of the don't mess with Texas flavor. You know, I might say that really resonates with this idea of anyone who's felt like they're fighting the powers that be. Yeah, it's interesting. I thought you might be going to the quote where he says something like, I inherit no tradition. You know, I stand at the beginning of one.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking of other people, you're an island unto yourself, you know, you're focused on your own goals, your own capacities, and you're not doing it to impress other people or to be better than other people or to dominate other people. You're doing it because you're sort of expressing your inner soul in a way. That has been very captivating to so many in the fountain head is one of those books we talked about that causes people read it and they make changes in their life or they feel called to their their higher self.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the fountain head is this story of a struggling architect, Howard Rourke, and she kind of follows his life and his career. And the message is really, it's a version of to thine own self be true, right? And Rourke's designs are to avant-garde. Nobody appreciates him. And he just keeps doing what he wants to do and is just focused on his own visions, his own genius. I think that's been really inspiring to kind of creators of all types. I think it's fairly unrealistic as a portrait of human achievement, but it's an aspirational idea. I mean, one phrase that comes to mind is there's a character I forget which one who is in some sort of adversarial relationship with Howard Work and says something to him like, well, Mr. Roke, what do you think of me? And Rourke says, I don't think of you. You know, and that Duran was the ideal. You're not.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You haven't read on Ranj, you know. A little too early because that's what she does. She takes the outcomes of capitalism and of market competition and says these have ethical meaning. And this is where ethical meaning inheres. And it is ethical to try to succeed and to succeed in a capitalist society. Now, what she's able to do is create a fictional world in which people succeed in her fictional capitalist world through ethical behavior. And so she doesn't really have to wrestle with a capitalist world in which people succeed through fraud and corruption and all the other things that might go into someone's success. She creates the best possible take on success under capitalism. And then she holds that up as an ideal. And I think what's important is that so few people have done that and she comes at a time when everybody is emphasizing the downsize of capitalism. And she says there's another way to look at it. Here are the good sides of capitalism.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, broadly, we could put Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand in some sort of category together, but she has this focus on ethics. Rationality and this desire to be revolutionary that's much stronger than Friedman. Friedman wanted to overthrow the economic consensus. You didn't want to overturn the moral basis of Western society. So she's also, she does something. So in one of Frank Knight's essays, he talks about the ethics of competition. And he says, you basically cannot build an ethics out of competition because it would be monstrous to do so because it would say the winner of this competition is ethically right. And that would open the door to sort of might makes right. And this is what Friedman struggles with. And he says, I can't take capitalist outcomes as ethical unto themselves. I can't do it. Doesn't feel right. And there's this line where Frank Knight says, no one would ever do this. And I was like, oh, Frank Knight.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things I found in researching and writing about her. Like, she's an incredibly unusual human being, you know? And so that was like her strength, right? Because she's so unusual. But it was also her downfall because she looked to herself. A model or to get insight about humanity. And she never quite processed how different she was from other people.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, she had a student who ended up being very close to her Nathaniel Brandon, and he was the River of Advisor. And he said, can you please not use selfishness? Like, just come up with another word. But part of her liked it. Part of her wanted to provoke and unsettle. She didn't want to give that up.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And related to Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of revaluing values or a genealogy of morals. And so she says. What's happened here is Western culture has converged on this idea of altruism as good, being selfless and altruistic is good. And this has led us to communism and has led us to devalue the individual in favor of the collective. So what we need is a new moral code which elevates selfishness, which elevates the individual, and which takes all the things that we have been told are bad and actually says their values. This is what she's trying to do with objectivism. I mean, it is about as ambitious of an intellectual project as there can be. And that's what really draws people in. Yet at the same time, she's flying in the face of the way human, morals, and ethics and societies have evolved. And she's not able to single-handedly recreate them the way she wants them to be.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you should do is pursue your interests. And so she ends up calling that selfishness. Tricky because selfishness has so many strong and negative connotations. And she meant, I think something closer to like self-actualization because she really tried to create this idea and express the idea that to be truly selfish did not mean trampling on others. It meant just being motivated by your own kind of internal measures and metrics. And so In her fiction, she tries to show this by showing the false selfishness of some Peter Keating, who's an architect who kind of steps over everybody to advance his career. And she says, that's not true selfishness because true selfishness would recognize its false to take others work and pass it off as your own. Now the other big piece of objectivism is a very approach that's really inspired”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So she called it objectivism, trying to, she used to do this thing like, I can stand on one foot and say it. So it goes something like epistemology reason, ethics, selfishness, politics, capitalism. That was kind of how she summarized it. So what she did, there's a couple things she did with objectivism. First of all, she says the key defining element of humanity is rationalism, the rational faculty. So that's what defines what a humanity is. Therefore, there is an objective reality that we can access and know with our reason. That's the objective epistemology. And the one social and economic system that lets rationality flower and is based upon rationality is capitalism. And then rationality only works, in her view, as an individual capacity and that rationality teaches that”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It. So I really had trouble finding her actual voice in the historical documents. And she didn't want to leave that behind. So it's an absolute essential piece of his success because she's the one who pushed him to do the Newsweek column, to do free to choose. And she really wrote capitalism and freedom. She took all his random notes and she put them together into a book. And that became this kind of testimony of his ideas. But she shared many of his ideas and she without when I think of Friedman, if you take away Anna Schwartz, if you take away Rose Friedman, if you take away the other woman who collaborated with him, you have a much thinner resume than the one he actually has.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I do think that a lot of that, it's not, although it feels very gendered, like, you know, he's the man out in the world and she's in private, it's interesting because her brother Aaron director was the same way. He was a very private man, very shy, very introverted, and he exerted this like quiet intellectual influence on all of his friends. So I think that was just kind of a family trait of being more quiet, preferring to be behind the scenes. It wouldn't have worked any other way because Friedman was so out there so extroverted. And there's a bit of a sad thing she said. She said, when I married Milton, I lost half of my conversations when David came along. I lost the other half. So this is a household that was just dominated by male voices in which she didn't have a lot of room. What was tricky for me in my research is she didn't leave much of a trace. She put together Milton Freeman's archive and she took herself out.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They did. I mean, they were very complimentary. They were kind of the yin and the yang. She was very introverted, somewhat suspicious of others, skeptical. And he was extremely extroverted, optimistic, high energy. And they also were at a time when it was really clear, like for broader society, these are the roles of a man, these are the roles of a woman. And they pretty much adopted those. No, no, Rose Friedman did some very important economic work. She's part of the early stages of the theory of the consumption function. She didn't complete her degree because she really knew there wasn't, if she wanted to be married and have children in the world she lived in, there wasn't a real pathway to also being an economist.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get their hands on books, and so they would come over and then they would argue and talk into the night. So I think he did need that deep focus time, but it was not like he also lived a very engaged, very embedded social life.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They didn't have phone calls were really expensive. They did have quite an extensive correspondence, but then they would do these meetings. So you would basically come in at the beginning of the summer going to Rae, stop in New York, see Schwartz, and then again on the way back to Chicago. So you'd have these deep check-ins at that point. The other thing that happened is people would come visit him in New Hampshire. And so he would have these, he had his studio separate from the house. He would go and he would work. And then at night, his friends would come. His friends are all economists. There's a whole like cluster of economists. They all clustered within driving distance of the Dartmouth Library so that they could.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he taught at the University of Chicago and he tended to teach for six months and then have six months off. And he spent the summers in New Hampshire or Vermont. He had a right near that border. They had two different houses. And that to him was the deep thinking time. And so when he's at Chicago, he's teaching, he's arguing, you know, some people love his teaching style very much in charge, very much keeping students on their toes confrontational. Others found it too much overwhelming kind of shut them down intellectually and they couldn't cope with it. And so I think it was kind of go time when he was teaching. In that case, he was, that was a lot of social time interacting, talking, other professors going out and giving papers, arguing with the people at Yale or Harvard. Then he would go and do these very deep dives over the summer. He would also regularly do these trips to New York to see Anna Schwartz, so his 12-year collapse.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number two means you were right and I was wrong. And the number system evolved in some ways to be quick and efficient, but in other ways they also really clear about it. So something like there's kind of like three reasons behind it. First is if you use a number, it reminds the listener that it's really hard to say the words. I was wrong. So you're kind of calling on their sympathy. By using number, reminding them that you're doing a hard thing. And then. It's also reminding them that you're in this family with this code. And so you're signaling your membership and your closeness and your love, really. And so it's supposed to be an easy way to disagree without breaking the relationship.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he will, in some ways, turn his back on Knight's approach and knight's pessimism, even while it's like a foundation of his thinking.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A general equilibrium system where you like had to know all the parts and then all of a sudden it all fit together in a whole so if we step back what they were doing was getting inside the mind of a great thinker and understanding the ways it all fit together and then kind of testing their ideas against knights and what's fascinating is one of the first papers that Freeman publishes in statistics is a rebuttal of Frank Knight He publishes a rebuttal of Frank Knight's ideas about risk and uncertainty and Frank Knight he kind of took a black swan argument you know he said risk you can calculate uncertainty you can't like existentially philosophically you can't get your hands around it it is the black swan and Friedman publishes this statistical paper and he says I can put uncertainty on a graph you know and so there's that sort of Freudian killing of the father element when he comes back”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, more arguing over beers, and in this case, there's several people who say it was all about Frank Knight. What did he say? What did he mean when he said it? Is he right? And so Knight was very, he would say one thing and then say another. If you read him, it's very hard to follow what he's actually saying because he's full of qualifications and ironies and blends. And so he would throw out these pieces and then the students would kind of clutch at them and then they would come back together and try to assemble this sort of worldview. And then Frank Knight fell into this terrible depression and to cheer him up, they planned a big party and they went back through all of his previous writings and they assembled them into a book that was published. This is the ethics of competition. And you can read the introduction written in part by Milton Friedman. So not only were they talking about Knight and what he said, but then they started pouring over his work. And one of them described it as like,”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about a lot is Freeman was a collaborator, an open-minded collaborator, and he had incredible connections with economists who were women. And he basically found first in the figure of Anna Schwartz, later in the figure of this group of women who were his wife's friends, this kind of untapped pool of talent. And so he immersed himself in this whole other world of consumption economics. And that resulted in his more technical work on a theory of the consumption function, which is the theory of permanent income. So for Friedman, intellectual work and intellectual production was always done in this very social context, in a context that blended like friendship and intellectual partnership. And he really, he only had a handful of friends who were not also economists interested in the same questions he was. So he just lived and breathed.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Syllabi, you know, that he had from non economics courses, lists of books, and he'd written the prices of different ones he wanted to read. So he had John Stuart Mill on Liberty, like 50 cents written in the margin. So he began to educate himself. He gave himself a parallel curriculum alongside this very formal economics curriculum. He started reading, you know, the traditions of political liberalism. And then chalking them through with friends and then developing like a shared sense of mission. And that the incredible thing is of those friends in the group, you know, they scattered for like 10 years and then they all came back together. You know, George Stigler, his great friend, was hired at Chicago, Aaron Director, who was his wife's brother, was at Chicago. So many of these people continued. He became Frank Knight's colleague. So that was the base. That was what really grew him. That really profound peer group. Now, the other piece I just...”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So he gets to University of Chicago. He makes fast friends and in his third and fourth year they become what I call them the room seven gang. So room seven is they find an old storeroom in the basement. They take it over. And that's where they have their jam sessions. And what made this world come together was Frank Knight. There was a charismatic leader and there were a bunch of acolytes who clustered around him. That, I think, was a key piece of the ingredient. And then there was a sense that they were onto something that the rest of the economics field had forgotten or was rejecting. So there was like that sense of mission. So that seems to have been, there was a formal education piece. And then there was a parallel education piece rooted in admiration for a thinker, a shared admiration. And then what that led Friedman to do, you know, what I found.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Countries where the state is not controlling the money well, right? That's when people are more turning to crypto. But he says, because money is so fundamental, there are going to be so much political pressure on any country that gets the currency profoundly wrong, that the government will fall and another one will replace it, right? So if you look at episodes of hyperinflation, they don't go on very long because they're so upsetting to people.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of competing currencies eventually society would converge on one. And that's because people just want one currency that they know. They don't want a bunch of different options. Even in places where there have been options to do that, they've been used very minimally. And then he says, secondly, the state always steps in. He says, technically, theoretically, it doesn't have to. I could draw you a model. I could tell you about how it could work without the state. But in actual reality, all human societies through time and space. The state eventually becomes involved in the provision of money because it has so many knock-on effects to so many people. So sure, I think he would, again, find a use case for crypto, think it's interesting, but I don't.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a clip, I think it's in 1992, where people say, Oh, Friedman predicted cryptocurrencies because he's talking about how payments will eventually be electronic. So in some ways, he definitely, as he was looking at the computer and money, he knew these would come together in some way. You know, I think he probably would see a use case for crypto. He definitely would not buy the stronger forms, I think, of crypto ideology in which we could be heading towards a future in which there's many different currencies that compete or that are distributed or there's a stateless currency. And he addresses this very, very clearly because a Hayek's denationalization of money is a paper in the late 70s. You know, Hayek argues for this kind of competing currency model or regime. And so he's responding to that. He's responding to people writing about free banking. And he basically says, look, even if you develop a variety”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Friedman will never give Vulcan credit for this policy, but he will give Reagan credit for this policy. But he owes credit himself for keeping Reagan from wobbling on this policy and just pushing it through. And he also tells Reagan very pragmatically, you better do this now. You've got a four-year term. Do this in the first two years of your term. Things will have turned around by 1984 when you run for re-election and you'll benefit from it. And that's absolutely what happens.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The specific policy Friedman recommends Vulcan tries it for a year or so doesn't work super well. But what does work is letting interest rates go high, go above inflation to a point where both the general citizensry and the financial markets believe like, oh, they're actually serious about inflation. And because we've had a decade of inflation with all these presidencing, you know Ford, we're going to whip inflation now, that monetary policy has lost credibility. This is why people focus so much on credibility today, because once it's lost, it's really hard to get it back. And one way Vulker gets it back is interest rates over 20%. Unemployment, very high as high as 25% in like construction sectors. And as this is happening, Milton Friedman is whispering in Reagan's ear, this is the right thing. Stay the course. This is going to work. Now, interestingly, he hates Volker or Volker hates him.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dynamic. The only way to end inflation is by really showing and signaling that government policy has changed. And when you do that, it's very painful for a short amount of time. People will suffer. But then you will come out on the other side into stable prices, and this is what you need for economic prosperity. The man who implements this policy, Paul Volcker, He's definitely influenced by Friedman. Buys a big picture of Friedman. He even buys Friedman's specific technique of the monetary growth rule and of the focus on monetary aggregates, which Friedman has said, right, money matters. Aggregates matter. And that's what money is. Pretty quickly, Volcker finds that because of inflation and the financial deregulation in response to it, the aggregates don't work the way Friedman said they would. And so”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inflation is quite considerable over the 70s. I mean, we were all spooked by what did it get to 6%, something like that recently for a very short time. This is inflation going over 10%, hovering in 8% for basically the whole decade of the 70s, going up and down with extremely elevated rates. And so the Carter presidency largely foreign policy is a big part of it, but the failure to tame inflation is part of it. And then Reagan comes in. And now Reagan loves Friedman and Friedman loves Reagan. Very mutual feeling. The Reagan administration creates like an advisory economic board. Friedman's on it. He's retired now. He's entering his kind of golden years. He really has Reagan's ear. And here what he does is he convinces Reagan of his theory of inflation, which is inflation has been caused. It's a monetary phenomenon that has been caused by bad monetary policy. Inflation has an accelerating”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Friedman is right there. Now, he's very ambivalent about Nixon. I mean, he sees that Nixon is not an honest person. He thinks he's very intelligent. And Nixon's dream is to create a new centrist majority. So he does many things to go back on his supposed economic principles and ideas. So Friedman does not like this. He doesn't like the price controls. He's in communication with his old mentor, Arthur Burns, who's now the chair of the Federal Reserve. And Burns is basically doing everything wrong in monetary policy. And I describe this in the book in some detail, these anguished letters back and forth. And basically, as I see it, Burnis doesn't have a solid theory of inflation. And the more Friedman pushes him, it's almost like Burns is willfully ignoring Friedman and kind of doing the opposite of what Friedman says. So Burns is running a very loose monetary policy.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's Bretton Woods fade away. He doesn't make grand pronouncements, it just slowly the world shifts to a regime of, for a while it was like a regime of steady prices and then they call it a steady regime of changing prices or whatever. The language changes, the reality changes, and it kind of end up where they are. That's a real measure of Friedman's influence. If there had been another economist in Schulz's ear that said, no catastrophe is imminent. We have to go back to Bretton Woods. He probably would have worked harder. The US government would have worked harder. And so that becomes one of these pieces of globalization. And, you know, what people don't realize is there used to be, in addition to these floating set capital ratios, you couldn't bring capital in and out of different countries. You had to register. You couldn't invest where all these rules and strictures and the falling of Bretton Woods really blows that all open. It's a precursor to globalization.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Convertibility, possibility, the United States at the core, the financial system kind of hem and haw. But at this point, Friedman has a very close relationship with George Schultz. And George Schultz is a high-level appointee who will eventually over the course of Nick's administrations become the Treasury Secretary. And so Friedman is feeding Schultz all his ideas about how we should move to floating exchange rates, how we shouldn't try to reconstruct Bretton Woods. And the people in Treasury, it's funny because I read some of their accounts and actually Paul Volcker is in the Treasury Department at this time, and he can kind of sense that Friedman is in here somewhere, you know, like feeding his boss ideas. He doesn't quite know. And, you know, then.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then comes the moment where the U.S. Treasury Department realizes we're going to run out of gold. What should we do? And everybody decamps to Camp David. And Nixon decides, we're just going to stop redeeming currency for gold. It's called slamming the gold window shut. Done. And he also at that same meeting decides to institute price controls. He does a whole bunch of stuff. It's an emergency. He calls it the new economic plan, which is an unconscious echo of the Soviet new economic plan. So a problematic name, a problematic policy. And Freeman is livid at the price controls, but he's like, actually, it's great that you close the gold window. Let's go all the way to floating exchange rates. And this idea was heresy within the Treasury Department. Everyone's very committed to the idea of the gold standard.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Metaphor. Otherwise, it's going to, you know, it's going to explode. And Nixon just files the memo away. Nixon loved people to think he was influenced by and following the wisdom of Milton Friedman, but he didn't actually want to do that. He just wanted the political benefit that came from it.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is going to be a real problem. He says something like this is a running sore and you have to lance it right away. You know, some very graphic.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he was pinpointing the fact that Bretton Woods had an instability and that instability began to emerge in the time of inflation. So you have more and more dollars being printed. They're worth less and less. If European nations keep trading their currency for dollars, they're going to be importing inflation into their own economies. So they say we don't want these dollars. We'd like some gold instead. And they have the right to go to the treasury, send in an order, and get gold out. And so they start doing this more and more and it becomes, it's called the gold drain. And the United States starts running out of gold. They're aware this is happening through the 60s. They're trying various things to fix it. And when Nixon comes into office, In 68, Friedman sends him a memo and it says.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the system was set up and very quickly most countries where the dollar was at the heart of it in that converting into an out-of-dollars was really the mechanism of trade for many of these countries. So Friedman said, you know, what we should have is floating exchange rates. This is an idea, again, of instead of having a top-down design of policy, an administered policy, we will have policy set by prices and usually be able to trade currencies on an open market. They should trade and they should fluctuate and that would be fine. Totally outlandish idea.”
2025-01-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #457 – Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Economics, Capitalism, Freedom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source