Michael Malice is an anarchist. Yaron Brook is an objectivist. Both are podcasters and authors. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
- Ground News: https://ground.news/lex
- Public Goods: https://publicgoods.com/lex and use code LEX to get $15 off
- Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil
- Brave: https://brave.com/lex
- Four Sigmatic: https://foursigmatic.com/lex and use code LexPod to get up to 60% off

EPISODE LINKS:
Michael's Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaelmalice
Michael's Community: https://malice.locals.com/
Michael's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5tj5QCpJKIl-KIa4Gib5Xw
Michael's Website: http://michaelmalice.com/about/
Yaron's Twitter: https://twitter.com/yaronbrook
Yaron's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/ybrook
Yaron's Website: https://yaronbrookshow.com/

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:33 - Desert island thought experiment
7:50 - Communism
11:20 - Immanuel Kant
12:29 - Donald Hoffman
23:00 - DMT elves
31:42 - Humility
48:35 - Jordan Peterson and religion
58:13 - Ben Shapiro: facts don't care about your feelings
1:12:14 - Why Ayn Rand is controversial
1:33:51 - Selfishness
1:37:33 - Communism and fascism
2:04:32 - Authoritarianism
2:12:52 - Bitcoin
2:39:03 - Anarchy debate
3:36:58 - Dangers of communism
3:42:37 - Favorite character in Ayn Rand s Atlas Shrugged
3:51:15 - Advice for young people
4:08:14 - Does love require sacrifice?
4:16:02 - Back to the island

SOCIAL:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman
- Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman
- Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman
- Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman

The following is a conversation with Michael Malice and Yaron Brook, Michael's third time on this podcast and Yaron's second, but together for the first time.

Michael is an anarchist, political thinker, host of a podcast called You're Welcome, and author of Dear Reader, The New Right, and 2 upcoming books, Anarchist Handbook and The White Pill.

Yaron is an objectivist philosopher, chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, host of the Yaron Brook Show, and co-author of The Free Market Revolution and Equal is Unfair.

Quick mention of our sponsors, Ground News, Public Goods, Athletic Greens, Brave, and 4 Sigmatic.

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that this conversation is a kind of experiment.

Both Michael and Yaron are thoughtful and passionate, united in part by an interest in the history and philosophy of Ayn Rand.

But they are also very different in style.

Good conversation, like good food, is often made delicious by pairing of contrasting elements.

For example, someone suggested I try a peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwich, which apparently is very good.

Among the 3 of us, I don't know who's the peanut butter, who's the bacon and who's the banana.

But I hope the final result, the final dish, if you will, is equally delicious.

We talked through, I think, a lot of interesting ideas, sometimes disagreeing, sometimes even, in rare cases, saying something humorous, including dark humor, especially Michael's case.

All 3 of us are sensitive to the suffering in the world today and throughout human history.

We think about it, we talk about it, and we deal with it in different ways.

Whether you agree, disagree, enjoy, or dislike the result, I hope you feel listened, you're a wiser person on the other end of it.

I know I was Mostly I really enjoyed this conversation because no matter what Michael and Yaron believe underneath it all, they're genuine, kind human beings that I'm lucky to be able to hang out with and learn from.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here's my conversation with Michael Malice and Yaron Rook.

I've been a huge fan of the 2 of you for the longest time.

Objectivists don't like charity, so don't compliment him.

So it's an incredible honor that the both of you would show up here.

If we, let me just ask the sort of profound philosophical question.

How well do you think we would get along if we were stuck in a desert island together?

I thought the original question you had, that you sent us this question, was how long would it take for us to murder 1 another, or something like that.

There was murder in the question, if I remember.

Listen, he sent us homework, right, All these questions.

I, I didn't spend 4 years at Patrick Henry University to do homework.

To answer your question, I think it would be very easy for us to live together in Desert Island in terms of interpersonal.

I know, and I say this because I know a lot of people who have been the show survivor.

So they, and I know a little bit about the dynamics.

So when you have people who are intelligent, who are going to have the same goals, I mean, and there's space to go away if I'm annoyed at you, I don't think it would be that hard at all.

You don't wanna stay on the desert island.

So yeah, I don't think, I think that's true of any 3, semi-rational people who basically share the goal that they want to survive, they want to thrive, they want to get off of the island, why would there be conflict?

I mean, there would be conflict, and there can be conflict, but they'd find ways to deal with it.

I don't have this negative view of human beings, particularly not as individuals.

It's when they get into mobs and groups and collectives that ideology can really motivate them to do horrible things.

1 of the things that really drives me crazy is how sinister an impact the book, Lord of the Flies, has had on our culture.

That's not even a question, but it's not accurate.

We see in many situations where people are trapped together under difficult circumstances, obviously that book's about children, that very quickly, it is not about conflict.

It very quickly becomes about cooperation.

This is not a time to worry about other things.

It really, the human beings, The animal instinct that kicks in is the social animal and I'm gonna shut up and go over there and have a, like, stomp my feet instead of arguing with your own because we're really trapped in the situation and we need to make it work.

they're bad people, bad people are dealt with, right?

So this is true of all of, you know, how did we survive as a species, right?

We've been on a desert island in a sense as a species forever.

Tribes survive, they survive by cooperation, they survive by dealing with bad people.

Civilization is created by people cooperating and working together and allowing individuals to thrive within the group.

And when bad people arise, they deal with them, right?

They now, sometimes these groups get captured by bad people, right?

And bad ideas, and probably from day 1 that was going on, right?

The whole tribe is probably a bad idea to begin with.

But underneath it all, the fact is that to survive as a species, we need to think, we need to be rational.

And if we don't have any respect for reason, then we would all die, we would die off.

So that's a hopeful message, but where does that go wrong?

We would focus on the basics of life, we have similar goals.

Once women are introduced, they're incessant irrationalism.

Look, 3 of us in a desert island would be nice, but Without women, it wouldn't be fun.

I'm gonna edit out half the things Michael said through this broadcast.

As you know, I used to run the Ayn Rand Institute.

Mises was praising Ayn Rand, and I think it was Haslund who said it to her.

He said, Ludwig von Mises said, you're the smartest man I've ever met.

And Ayn Rand said, did he say man, right?

Oh, right, but she wanted to be clear that he

I took it as her perceiving him as seeing her as a full equal.

Plus I think the perception out there, the perception and the culture of men as being rational was a compliment to her because that was affirming that he viewed her as a rational.

So he would definitely have these rigid views.

Like his wife, I read her autobiography, Marguit van Mises.

And basically he made her his secretary to the point where like if he's typing something or he had something handwritten, she had to type it out.

And if she made a typo, he would tear up the page.

She had to start from the beginning, but it's like, this is the role of the man, this is the role of the woman.

So for him to regard her, this was kind of a breaking through moment, not that she was secretly misogynist.

when people try to understand the world around them and come up with wrong ideas.

And it's natural that they would come up with wrong ideas because it's hard to figure out what's right.

So we start with trying to come up with mystical explanations for the existence of the things around us.

And that I think very quickly leads to some people being able to communicate with the mystical stuff out there and some people not being able to communicate and some people wanting to control other people and using those pseudo explanations as a way to control.

So you always have, Rand called it Attila and the witch doctor.

You always have a witch doctor, the mystic, the philosopher, the intellectual, the philosopher, king is a unity of the, and you have an Attila, you have somebody who wants control of the people, who's willing to use force to control other people.

And when those 2 get together, that's when things go bad.

And unfortunately, 95, 98% of human history is when those 2 are together.

And so, the not having them together, having the right ideas, and the right ideas are ones that are not exclusive to those guys and where we don't allow Attila to have that kind of physical power over us, that's an exception and that's rare and that's what needs to be defended.

Charles Manson's not personally killing people.

Marx needs a particular line of thinkers that come before him that set him up for these kind of ideas.

So Stalin both needs his goons, even though he's somewhat of a goon, particularly Stalin.

Lenin, I think, is a better example because Lenin's more intellectual, if you will.

And we don't want to let Marx off the hook because Marx knows, I think, implicitly that his ideas have to lead to Lenin and Stalin.

I think Marx very much glorified revolution, blood and terror.

I mean, there are letters between him and Engels where they talk about which peoples will have to be eliminated because they don't have that proletarian thing.

So I think certain peoples in Southern Europe are not appropriate for the utopia to come and we'll have to be gone.

And Marx also had this concept, which we still see today in garbled ways of polylogism, which is if you're a capitalist and I'm bourgeois or I'm a worker, your logic is different than mine.

It's literally going to be impossible for us to communicate.

And at a certain point, you're going to have to be liquidated.

And they pretend that doesn't mean murdered, but it means murdered.

And very quickly, everyone becomes a capitalist or bourgeois.

And then you have the Holodomor and things like this.

No, he knows exactly where it's going to lead.

And This is why people say, oh, Marx is not evil, he just wrote books.

No, it's the people who write books who are responsible for the way history evolves.

And they know, they know, the bad guys certainly know the consequence of their ideas.

And they need to bear the moral responsibility for what happens when the idea is implemented.

Because I think I know more about Rand than Yaron does, so let's see.

Who did Ayn Rand say is the most evil man who ever lived?

I mean, it's a big deal that Immanuel Kant is, and most people don't understand why, because if you read Kant, there's certain passages in Kant that sound pretty liberal.

They sound pretty, he's for the, It sounds like he's for the individual.

He sounds like he's for the American revolution, things like that.

But when you actually read his philosophy and what he's trying to defend and what he's trying to undermine, he's trying to undermine the foundations that make the revolution possible, that make freedom and individualism possible.

He's trying to destroy the enlightenment.

And the enlightenment is, are those ideas that make freedom individualism feasible.

We're not, we can't survive as a species.

So, And that's why she thought he was the most evil person, because his ideas undermined the very foundations of what it requires to be a human being.

Reason and individualism, those are the things she's trying to eviscerate.

I know You've talked about Hoffman before.

Donald Hoffman is the University of California, O-Vine neurologist, neuroscientist, something like that.

So I met him once and we were at 1 of these conferences where you do a quick intro, you sit and you do a quick intro.

His introduction was, I've just written a book that proves that evolution has conditioned us not to see reality.

Yeah, and he is basically just presenting pseudoscience to defend Kant's position about epistemology and about metaphysics.

And he puts up a bunch of equations and he says, I ran a simulation and it proves I'm right.

So, Yaron is a little bit frustrated with Donald Hoffman's work.

I'm not frustrated, I just think it's completely wrong and it's anti-life, anti-mind, anti-evolution.

I think he's an anti-evolutionist at the end.

And I think it, you know, anytime you say, look, here's the important point.

What do you mean by, what do any of your words mean?

What does anything you say even mean if it doesn't refer to something that's actually out there in reality?

Let me try to defend this point of view because in a certain kind of sense, I hear it as being humble in the face of the uncertainty that's around us.

Sort of, you know, when you speak with the confidence of Ayn Rand and yourself, that reason can be like this weapon that cuts through all the bullshit of the world and makes us like have a ethical, moral life and all those kinds of things.

You kind of assume that reason is a superpower that has no limits.

See, this is already leading to murder by words.

And we've been only talking for 20 minutes.

together, wouldn't get along together on an island.

We're all gonna get along, he's just gonna do the work.

But I'm afraid I cannot provide any value as a slave, so this is not gonna end well for

That's the problem, I'm trying to get there.

Okay, but Donald Hoffman says that there is, He makes an argument that, exactly as you said, that what we perceive is very, very far from actual physical reality.

In fact, we're not able to perceive the physical reality at all.

And he also makes the bigger claim that evolution prefers beings who are not attached to reality.

So like evolution created creatures that are basically functioning way outside of what

Okay, because there's a lot to unpack here and I hate all of it.

First of all, when you were making that comment about how reason is a superpower beyond limit, you're being ironic, but it's true.

And I'll give you 1 example, which is astronomy.

If you look at the physical size of the universe, it's literally in 1 sense incomprehensible.

So he's right in the sense that I do not understand and none of us understand what it means for 93 million miles away for the sun to be.

That said, the fact that my mind, and I'm not 1 of the great thinkers of all time, is capable.

Is capable of appreciating what the sun means, what heliocentrism means.

The fact that we can, you're a math person, that you could look at galaxies and reduce it to 10 to the 64th power in terms of distance.

That shows the unlimited capacity of the human mind and reason, number 1.

Number 2 is if he says that evolution favors those who are not in touch with reality, and I don't know in what context he's saying that because that sentence could mean a lot of different things, Evolution is what guides, reality is what guides evolution.

Evolution works because you are fitted to the reality of the situation around you.

It's not that someone is sitting down and says, well, I'm gonna add a fin to this animal and that fin helps it swim, I engineer a check mark, it's that mutations occur.

The vast majority of these mutations are against reality.

They do not further this animal's life or this plant's life or this fungus's life.

But the ones that are in touch with reality, such as, okay, it's really cold here, there's no predators here, if I could figure out, and I'm using that term very loosely, a way where I could survive in the cold, I don't have predation.

So the fact that unconsciously and mindlessly, this process can force the mutation and evolution of the form precisely means that they're in touch with reality.

Now, if he means the consciousness is not in touch with reality, that's another thing that I really hate.

You're referring to the reality as like the biological reality of evolution, but all of that is based on many other layers of abstraction that ultimately has quantum mechanics underneath it all.

And he's saying somewhere along the layers, you start to lose more and more and more attachment to the actual.

I say despise, I'm not using this, I'm not joking.

And the idea that the reality we don't live in is somehow more real than this.

That is a very dangerous idea to say, well, quantum works in this way, and I'm sure he's correct and none of us disagree with that.

What we perceive macro works in a different way.

Well, that's the real reality and this is fake.

That is a different type of a sub-subset, but no one's living there.

It's a subset that has to integrate with this world.

There isn't 2 worlds, 1 in the quantum world and 1 here.

Now, we might not have the scientific knowledge to know how they're integrated, but so what?

We know that there's only 1 reality, and that's this 1.

He says evolution matches up to fitness, not to reality, and he creates this dichotomy between fitness and reality, but that's complete nonsense.

There is no such thing as a concept of fitness outside of fitness to what?

So the whole way he sets this up intellectually is wrong, I think to some extent dishonest and certainly philosophically corrupt.

Again, he's accepted Kant's ideas and everybody pretty much has accepted Kant's ideas for the last 200 years.

And he's giving it an evolutionary facade.

But it's just a facade for the same idea.

And that is that somehow, because we have eyes, we cannot see.

Because the light waves are going through a medium, and that medium necessarily distorted.

The medium changes the resolution at which you see, right?

Like if I take off my glasses, I'm seeing it a little differently.

But the thing is still there, and the thing is still there in the way I see it, because the handle, I'm grasping the handle, I'm lifting the cup.

That's not an illusion, that is a real cup.

So do you think some things are more real than others?

There's a bunch of things that seem real.

There's nothing as real as love, right Lex?

Love is a fundamental part of the quantum mechanics, yes.

Is there some things that have become reality because we humans, in a collective sense, believe it?

You can't believe something collectively.

See all Lex Fridman transcripts on Youtube

Michael Malice and Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand, Human Nature, and Anarchy | Lex Fridman Podcast #178