YouSaid · the spoken record

Yaron Brook

lines on the record: 267
first: 2021-04-24
most recent: 2021-04-24
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

“Somebody has to emerge to speak for the collective. Otherwise, everything falls apart. So it's necessary, whether it's a committee or whether it's one person, how exactly, somebody has to speak for the collective, even a committee doesn't function as a committee, right? Most committees, particularly when the committee is about dictating how people should live, somebody is going to, because now it becomes really, really important, somebody is going to dominate that committee and rule over it because you don't want independent voices because the individual doesn't matter. The individual doesn't count.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the fundamental idea is the Kantian ideas, the ideas that are behind fascism never went away. There's still this popular, if anything, more popular than they were back then. Marx is as popular. I think these ideas are prevalent. They're out there and absolutely, I think America is ready for them. Again, it won't be quite in the form that we've experienced in the past. It'll be in a uniquely American form counts to the flag. And of course, it was couched a flag before. But no, yes, an authoritarian, some form of authoritarianism is necessary because the fundamental principle behind both communism and fascism is the unimportance of the individual. The individual is nothing. The individual is a nobody and the importance of the collective. The collective will, the collective soul, the collective consciousness, but the collective has no will, has no soul, has no consciousness.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Opinion. Maybe. I think it's going to be my own view of, I think it's going to be a nationalist, religionist, environmentalist. I think somebody who can combine those three. Hitler did those. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And somebody who can combine those three and articulate the case for it. I think America is ready.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fascism, well, it could emerge because, for example, I think today in America, we're moving much more towards fascism, socialism. And at some point that'll manifest itself in some kind of dictator. And the dictator might be different than a Mussolini or Nazis. It might be couched in some kind of pseudo-constitutional American. It would be a lot easier. It would be a lot easier.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's about power and it's about control. That's the essence. It's about will. So they don't care. Fascists don't care who owns stuff, owns in quotes. Because what's important is who controls it. So you can own your home. But if I get to tell you when you can sell it, for how much you can sell it and what you can do on that home, then I'm in control of it. That's the essence of fascism. And if you think about it, we live today in a much more fascist economic context than anything else. We pretend that corporations are private. But when everything they do is regulated, who they can hire, how much they pay them, and how they can fire them, what they can do on their property. It's all control. That's the way fascists start controlling everything.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You individual don't matter, and they will dictate how you live. And, you know, so these are philosopher kings. It goes back to Plato's philosophy. But it really unifies it. Think about communism. Communism is about the sacrifice of the individual to the proletarian. Who is the proletarian? It's this collective group here. Who represents the proletarian? Well, somebody has to. Somebody has to tell the proletarian what they believe in because they don't know because there is no collective consciousness. So you need a Stalin. And this is the point about Marxism. Marxism needs a dictator because somebody has to represent the values, the public interest, what's good for the public. Nazism needs the same thing. Just Nazism replaced proletarian with Aryans, the Aryan race, and you have exactly the same thing. You need a dictator to tell us what's good for the Aryan people so we can do what's good for the Aryan people.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What unifies them is the common good, the public interest, what unifies them is this idea that there is some elite group of people who can run our lives for us for the common good, for the public interest.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Nazisms are, but I think fascism is a massive threat out there because I don't think we've learned real lessons of nobody knows what fascism is. Everybody thinks fascism is Nazism. They don't recognize that in a sense we are already fascists and that we're certainly heading in that direction. So they don't know what it is. And again, we haven't studied. And the real lesson here is we haven't studied what unifies them both because there's not a big difference between fascism and communism. There's no big difference between Nazism and communism. What does”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's almost no understanding of the evil of communism. I mean, you brought it up earlier, right? Almost nobody understands that communism is an evil ideology, that there's nothing worthwhile there, that any attempt to go in that direction in any sustainable way is destructive. There are, as you mentioned, there are economists out there claiming they are communists. I mean, I find that despicable that anybody would claim to be a communist economist or communist to anything because I think it's an ideology that has no basis. But we haven't learned that. So to me, communism is the much bigger threat because we still think it's some kind of beautiful ideal in the world around us.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I agree with Michael that it's not important who's more evil because they're both evil and they're both so evil that the differences don't matter. What matters is what is the ideology? What are the consequences? What do we understand from it? What are we worried about? What are we going to avoid? I'm not worried about Nazism, qua-Nazism, because everybody hates Nazism. I mean, it's uniform that that's out. Even the people I think on the far right in America are staying away from the clich ⁇ s of Nazism. Some of them are stupid enough not to. But in the end, if the United States goes authoritarian right, it's not going to be Nazism. It'll be some other form of fascism because that is so obvious.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Implement the ideas. I know everybody should read anybody who's interested should read Marx because it's really important. It's important in the history and a lot of people were influenced by it. Why was it influential? What is it that he says that appeals to people? I find it interesting to see all the parallels with Christianity. I think that's why to a large extent it appeals to people because they got to give up the unimportant part of religion and got to keep the fun parts of religion, the important parts to them of religion, the morality, for example. No, there's not something positive to learn from everybody.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very good question. No, I get that, but in terms of ideas, why is Hitler different than Marx? Why do we have to assume there's something to learn from Marx, but we acknowledge that there's nothing positive to learn from him?”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Important part, and people buy this garbage, right? So there's nothing of value in Marx. I mean, let me be very clear, there's nothing. He gets capitalism wrong. He gets the proletarian wrong. He gets the workers wrong. He gets the labor theory of value is wrong. There is nothing of value. There's nothing of value in communism. It is a wrong, unfitted to human nature ideology from beginning to end.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The end time for Marx is you don't have to do anything. Food is just available. Wealth is just available. You can do your hobbies. You can do everything. You can do whatever you want, whatever feelings, whatever. So it's going back to Garden of Eden perspective on human. So he knows what that is going to require. It's going to require this dictatorship of the proletarian to get there. And he never tells you how we get there, right? There's no game plan. There's a dictatorship and there's utopia.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get to this utopia. And then this utopia, I mean, he's very Christian. I mean, this is the other thing about Marxism. But the end times. Marx is very Christian in everything, in his morality, in his collectivism, and in the end times for Marx is going back to the Garden of Eden.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the fact is, you have individuals. How do you convince individuals to give up their individualism, to give up the individuality? What you say is, well, we have to go through this difficult process.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See human beings, no. Communism is the reason communism is evil is it's anti-reality, anti-human nature, anti-the-individual, and therefore it is inherently evil. It cannot result in anything good coming out of it. Only bad can come of”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but then the question is can you have free will, cognitive cognition and be above? I don't think so. But maybe in another planet. You gotta take”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The bog is the bog is communist, right? The bog is a different species. It has a different biology. It has a different form of consciousness. Now whether such a being could survive evolution. A question whether such a”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But delusional and evil aren't the same. But it can be delusional. She cannot be delusional. See, I'm willing to accept her delusion before she's gone to the Soviet Union and seen it. Once she's gone to see it, I don't think that excuse holds anymore. I think now she's been confronted and she's lying to herself about the implications of it. Logically, it's inevitable that what happens in the Soviet Union has to happen in any communist context.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So evil is an extreme form of immorality. Sure. Right. So, okay. So she's immoral. The ideology she holds is still evil. She might be delusional.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I would have said, Yeah, she'd be mistaken before, and now she's confronted with reality. But if she stayed a leftist, if she stayed a leftist to that extent, not just a mild, then I think she's dishonest and therefore immoral, right? But you're using.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think she is because if she wasn't evading and with Rand, and I think in reality the essence of evil is evasion is ignoring the facts of reality. It's putting your feelings ahead of your facts. She would realize that what was going on in the Soviet Union was the inevitable consequence of her ideas. That could be just so she could have changed her mind. She could have, coming back to the Soviet Union, said, these ideas are wrong. I now repudiate my ideas, not just their implementation, but my ideas.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'm equating communism. I don't know what Stalinism is. I don't care. Stalinism is one version of communism. It's an implementation. Communism is an evil ideology no matter who practices it.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not the same because the difference between communism and fascism, but as ideologies, they're equally evil. They both view the individual as insignificant, unimportant, and they both basically want to kill any independent-minded.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a brand. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I agree. So there's a context in which I would fear Stalin more than Hitler. There's a different context in which I would fear Hitler. But as ideologies”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but you're not going to hang out with a Nazi or a communist just like they're a regular person. To me, a Nazi and a communist are the same.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I won't name names because I said at some point to them if somebody walks into a room and says, I'm an Azi. You just treat him as okay, let's go hang out and get some drinks. I do. I don't.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm like, this guy has the blood of 100 million people on his hands. I'm not letting him off the hook. So I get, I engage with this guy. And literally, we get into this, you know, I'm telling him what I think of his ideas and therefore what I think of him. The people from the wardrobe department come out and their chairs are put aside and this little gladiator ring. It's like the libertarians are like sitting there amused because to them it's just, you know, and I don't, you know, I'm not going to name names, but to them it's just like, yeah, he's a communist. And I said at some point to them.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not even at the time, and we need to get back to the selfishness stuff, but it's not even at the time. So I was once, I think I've told this story, I was in the green room going on John Stassel show, and saw a bunch of libertarians, right, in the green room all hanging out. And this guy walks in, this young guy walks in. And somebody says to me, you know, he's a communist. I said, what do you mean? Said, they said, no, no, he's a card carrying member of the Communist Party. He's a communist. And I said, and that's okay with you guys? And they go, Yeah, yeah, it's a nice guy. And I'm like, no, this is not acceptable. Hold on.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time of the year. It's a joke, Michael. Man of the year is now representative good. It represents the most influential person of that year. And Hitler was. Absolutely. Wait, wait.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's perfect Ellsworth Tui, and he knows Ayn Rand. He's read Ayn Rand. And he knows she's the enemy in some sense. Check out our...”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, sure, but the caricature is a defense mechanism. Okay. Not to have to deal with the ideas. So they create the caricature in order to ignore the ideas. And some of them do it consciously. Like when people like Krugman and others do this, they know exactly what they're doing.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I'm open to that idea, but I don't think that's right. When you actually dig deeper into what people object to, they're not objecting to the word. They're objecting to the ideas. And she addresses this explicitly in the virtue of selfishness in, I think, the introduction. Hold on.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he's selfish in the old, but even there, it's not as if he has some passion and he's going after a passion no matter what. I'm going to light sheet steal. His passion is painting, right? And he doesn't pursue his passion. He pursues what his mother wants him to pursue. And he pursues money, and he pursues. Completely second handed in the sense that he follows other people's values, not his own.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're too invested in the culprit to invest in comfort. And they know that they shouldn't be. They know they should change. And these young people are challenging that. And that is really, really scary for them. And that's why they reject it without even too much consideration.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is horrible. All adults, almost all adults out there are cynical. And that has failed. Idealism. And they look at the young people, they see their idealism, oh, well, I was idealistic too. And they don't question the idea, well, they're good ideals and they're bad ideals, the right ideals and the wrong ideals. And that's why they attributed to youth. So it's a threat to a lot of people. A lot of people who it's too late for. For some people, it's too late to change their minds. And they know it. And they're too invested in the job, in the wife, in the compromises.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is why so many people say that Ayn Rand is for 14 year old boys. Right? And there's a reason why it appeals to 14 is a little young, but 16, 18, it's because those are the ages where we're still open to idealism. Idealism in the positive sense, right? To beautiful things, to ideals, to seeking perfection, difficult seeking a great life. My parents were socialists when they were young. Those ideas failed. So, where do you go from socialism if your ideals fail?”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought you were Israeli. When I read Atlas Shrugged, I identified with Eddie Willers. When I read the font head, I didn't identify with how it worked”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're going to be pooped and put down and so on. So, yeah, I agree. I mean, in my generation, when I read Ayn Rand, there was no internet. And I was in Israel. So we were isolated and there was nobody else who has shared their ideas. And he did feel that kind of isolation, but Rock gave you, to me, he didn't teach me about, you know, you're going to be isolated because”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it depends on your profession, right? I mean, parts of the world are better than others. Of course, if you're an artist, at least the way I conceive of art, and you want to go study art today,”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you don't have the experience. So it took me, I don't know, 10, 20 years, probably 20, to figure out that I really do think what she said was true, right? But I didn't know when I was 16. When I was 16, I just absorbed these ideas and accepted them in a sense with some connection to reality, but in a sense on faith, right, at least presented it that way. And as a consequence, you come off as a detached from reality, obnoxious human being. And I think a lot of young objectivists are, and it's hard not to be because you are. You're confronted with genius. And you're not a genius. I certainly am not a genius. And I'm confronted with just genius and have all this information in my head now. I cannot articulate it. And it's hard to deal with yourself. There's an inside joke.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's more than that. It's so, I completely agree with that, but it's even broader than that. So here is, in my view, one of the geniuses of the millennium presenting a philosophy. And she's got not just the questions. In my view, she's got the answers. And you're reading them at 16 and you're reading the answers. You don't know at 16 that this is true. Yeah, yeah. You might have a sense that it's true, but you don't have the life experience, the learned experience. You don't have the facts. You don't have the knowledge. You're picking up truth, it's just being absorbed. You're accepting it as true, but you don't know it's true. And then you go out into the world advocating for it, right? Which we all did, or at least I did, when I was 16. And you're obnoxious. You can't prove what you're arguing for.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The female, you know, absolutely just to say, so you go and you try to make them as credible as possible to as many people as possible over time. It takes time. And ultimately, I don't think the culture will have this response to her. They might still disagree with her. But I think over time, and already you're seeing it, younger people, I think, today are far less. There was a generation who never read Ayn Rand.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That people have at the end of the day, if you talk about the ideas and the ideas make sense and people attracted to the ideas and you say, oh, by the way, and this came from Ayn Rand, that's how you deprogram them, right? If you make the ideas prevalent in the culture, if people start viewing self-interest as something that's interesting and worthwhile and something with investigating, and they said, oh, that came from Ayn Rand, then I think then we'll deprogram them and get them changing their minds about these things. And also, you know, going on shows where people are going to watch your show no matter who you bring on, right? Even though now you do, if you put on Ayn Rand in the title, that immediately reduces the number of people who watch. So in the future, you put Michael.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's before she's super famous and before this is the found heads been published. But she's trying to work with others and they are disappointing her left and right.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, and I read Ayn Rand. It just all made sense. It all clicked and it made clear that everything I believed to that point was just wrong. It just didn't integrate. And I always knew to some extent it didn't integrate, but there was no alternative. So I believed it. What else was there? I remember saying to myself as a kid, probably 15, why should morality all about other people? Why is that? Well, that's just the way it is, right? And I couldn't come up with an explanation. She gave me the explanation and she gave me the explanation why it's wrong to do that. And I think, so I think that's why people respond. It's just too radical. It can't fit into their cognitive framework that they have been brought up on, that they've been educated on, that just their whole life revolves around.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some people. So, you know, a lot of you got some positives, right? And I got a lot of positives from that appearance. So I know a lot of people came to my podcast because I appeared on your show. Why? Because they hear something that's completely fresh, new, different they've never heard before. It appeals to something in them that maybe, you know, a lot of people say I read Ayn Rand and it confirmed everything I believed. Now, for me, it didn't. It was the opposite. It turned upside down everything I believed. But there are a lot of people out there that who have a sense that something's wrong in the world, that altruism is wrong, that socialism, that just the stuff and religion is wrong, but they don't have an alternative. It hasn't coalesced. And they listen to a lot of podcasts because they're trying to get ideas of what is it that I'm sensing that's wrong out there. And suddenly somebody comes out and gives them some clear explanation of things and they go, wow, that's what I've been looking for my whole life. So that's the positive for people.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the ethic is right here. It's living for other people. And when you challenge that, they have no way cognitive to go with that. And the only place they can go with that cognitively is to the Joker. It's to the evil guy. It's the somebody who wants to smash everything and destroy because they don't have this alternative conception of, oh no, you can be rationally self-interested and that does not involve destruction and that does not involve exploiting other people. They can't conceptualize that. It's not in their framework. So it's the fact that she so consistently on the side of self-interest, for example, on the side of capitalism, on the side of freedom, it's the fact that she dismisses faith to the extent that she does or to the extent that I do that alienates people because that is completely different from what they brought up. Now, the flip side of that is it's also really interesting to”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, no, I Well, I think on the negative side, and both on the positive and the negative side, I think it's because she's radical. She's consistently radical. She upends the premises, the ideas that are prevalent in the culture, that were brought up on, that are like milk and the basic stuff that we're growing up. You have to be altruistic. You have to live for other people. That's just basic stuff. Nobody challenges that. Nobody questions it. And if they do question it, they usually question it from the perspective of a cynic or a bad guy, right? You mentioned the joker before we started, right? You know, I'm going to upend the world because I don't care about other people, right? So the presenter with these two alternatives, and it's real in people's lives, right? You either live for other people or you're an evil SOB. And yeah, most people in either one of those.”
2021-04-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #178 – Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source