Yaron Brook is a objectivist philosopher, podcaster, and author. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:39 - Principles of a life well lived
10:46 - Free will
17:01 - Nature of reality
25:39 - Ayn Rand
57:22 - Objectivism
1:22:40 - Godel Incompleteness Theorem
1:27:47 - Capitalism
1:57:33 - Virtue of selfishness
2:07:37 - Win-win
2:13:42 - Anarchy
2:32:35 - Tribalism and division
2:36:53 - Objectivism and Jordan Peterson on personal responsibility

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The following is a conversation with Yaron Brook, 1 of the best known objectivist philosophers and thinkers in the world.

Objectivism is the philosophical system developed by Ayn Rand that she first expressed in her fiction books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and later in nonfiction essays and books.

Yaron is the current chairman of the board at the Ayn Rand Institute, host of the Yaron Brook Show, and the co-author of Free Market Revolution, Equal is Unfair, and several other books where he analyzes systems of government, human behavior and the human condition from the perspective of objectivism.

Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode.

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Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that I first read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead early in college, along with many other literary and philosophical works from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, Locke, Foucault, Wittgenstein, and of course all the great existentialists, from Kierkegaard to Camus.

I always had an open mind, curious to learn and explore the ideas of thinkers throughout history, no matter how mundane or radical or even dangerous they were considered to be.

Ayn Rand was, and I think still is, a divisive figure.

Some people love her, some people dislike or even dismiss her.

I prefer to look past what some may consider to be the flaws of the person and consider with an open mind the ideas she presents and Yaron now describes and applies in his philosophical discussions.

In general, I hope that you will be patient and understanding as I venture out across the space of ideas and the ever-widening Overton window, pulling at the thread of curiosity, sometimes saying stupid things, but always striving to understand how we can better build a better world together.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.

And now, here's my conversation with Yaron Rook.

Let me ask the biggest possible question first.

What are the principles of a life well lived?

That is, to live a rational life, to think it through.

I think so many people are, in a sense, zombies out there.

They're alive, but they're not really alive because their mind is not focused.

Their mind is not focused on what do I need to do in order to live a great life?

So too many people just go through the motions of living rather than really embrace life.

So I think the secret to living a great life is to take it seriously.

And what it means to take it seriously is to use the 1 tool that makes us human, the 1 tool that provides us with all the values that we have, our mind, our reason, and to use it, apply it to living.

People apply it to their work, they apply it to their math problems, to science, to programming.

But imagine if they used that same energy, that same focus, that same concentration to actually living life and choosing values that they should pursue, that would change the world.

Yeah, actually, I wear this silly suit and tie.

It symbolizes to me always, it makes me feel like I'm taking the moment really seriously.

And each 1 of us has different ways to kind of condition our consciousness.

I'm serious now, and for you, it's a suit and tie.

It's a conditioning of your consciousness to, now I'm focused, now I'm at work, now I'm doing my thing.

And I think that's terrific, and I wish everybody took that.

Look, I mean, it's a cliche, but We only live once.

Every minute of your life, you're never gonna live again.

And when people don't have that deep respect for their own life, for their own time, for their own mind, and if they did, again, 1 can only imagine, look at how productive people are.

Look at the amazing things they produce and they do in their work.

And if they applied that to everything, wow.

Where does the kind of existentialist idea of experience maybe, fully experiencing all the moments versus fully thinking through, is there an interesting line to separate the 2?

Like why such an emphasis on reason for a life well lived versus just enjoy, like experience?

Well, because I think experience in a sense is the easy part.

I'm not saying it's how we experience the life that we live.

And yes, I'm all with the take time to value what you value, but I don't think that's the problem of people out there.

I don't think the problem is they're not taking time to appreciate where they are and what they do.

I think it's that they don't use their mind in this 1 respect, in planning their life, in thinking about how to live.

So the focus is on reason is because it's our only source of knowledge.

We don't know anything with, you know, that does not come from our senses and in our mind, the integration of the of the evidence of our senses.

And I think it's important to know oneself through introspection.

And I consider that part of reasoning is to introspect.

But I think reason is undervalued, which is funny to say, because it's our means of survival.

We cannot, see this is why I disagree with so many scientists and people like Sam Harris.

You mentioned Sam Harris before the show.

We're not programmed to know how to hunt.

We're not programmed to build computers and build networks on which we can podcast and do our shows.

And once you make that choice, you have to engage that choice means that you're choosing to engage your reason in discovery, in integration, and then in work to change the world in which we live.

And human beings have to discover, figure out, solve the problem of hunting.

Hunting, Everybody thinks, oh, that's easy.

But human beings had to figure out how to do it.

You can't run down a bison and bite into it.

So the most important thing that allows human beings to survive and to thrive in every value from the most simple to the most sophisticated, from the most material to I believe the most spiritual, requires thinking.

So stopping and appreciating the moment is something that I think is relatively easy once you have a plan, once you've thought it through, once you know what your values are.

They attain their values and they just, they don't take a moment to savor that and to appreciate that and to even pat themselves on the back that they did it, right?

But that's not what's screwing up the world.

What's screwing up the world is that people have the wrong values and they don't think about them and they don't really focus on them and they don't have a plan for their own life and how to live it.

If we look at human nature, you're saying the fundamental big thing that we need to consider is our capacity, like a capability to reason.

So to me, reason is this massive evolutionary achievement, right, in quotes, right?

If you think about any other sophisticated animal, everything has to be coded.

Everything has to be written in the hard way.

And they have to have a solution for every outcome.

And if there's no solution, the animal dies, typically.

Human beings have this capacity to self-program.

It's not a tabula rasa in the sense that there's nothing there.

Obviously our minds, our brains are structured in a particular way.

But given that, we have the ability to turn it on or turn it off.

We have the ability to commit suicide, to reject our nature, to work against our interests, not to use the tool that evolution has provided us, which is this mind, which is reason.

So that choice, that fundamental choice, Hamlet says it, right?

But to be or not to be is to think or not to think, to engage or not to engage, to focus or not to focus.

In the morning when you get up, you're not really completely there, you're out of focus and stuff.

It requires an act of will to say, okay, I'm awake, I've got stuff to do.

Some people live in that haze, and they never engage that mind.

And when you're sitting and trying to solve a complex computer problem or a math problem, you have to turn something on.

You have to, in a sense, exert certain energy to focus on the problem, to do it.

And that is not determined in a sense that you have to focus.

You choose to focus, and you could choose not to focus.

And that choice is more powerful than any other parts of our brain that we've borrowed from fish and from our evolutionary origins.

Whatever this crazy little leap in evolution is that allowed us to think is more powerful than anything else.

So I think neuroscientists pretend they know a lot more about the brain than they really do.

And we don't know that much yet about how the brain functions and what's efficient, you know, all this stuff.

So I think what exists there is a lot of potentialities.

But the beauty of the human brain is it's potentialities that we have to manifest through our choices.

It's there, it's sitting there, and yes, there's certain things that are gonna evoke certain senses, certain feelings.

I'm not even saying emotions, because I think emotions are too complex to have been programmed into our mind.

But I don't think, so, you know, there's this big issue of evolutionary psychology is huge right now, and it's a big issue.

You know, I find it, to a large extent, as way too early, and storytelling about, ex-post storytelling about stuff.

We still don't, so for example, I would like to see evolutionary psychology differentiate between things like inclinations, feelings, emotions, sensations, thoughts, concepts, ideas, what of those, the programmed and what of those are developed and chosen and a product of reason?

I think anything from emotion to abstract ideas is all chosen, is all a product of reason.

And everything before that, we might've been programmed for.

But the fact is, so clearly a sensation is not a product of, you know, is something that we feel because that's how our biology works.

So until we have these categories and until we can clearly specify what is what and where did they come from, the whole discussion in evolutionary psychology seems to be rambling.

So we have to define our terms, which is the basis of science.

You have to have some clear definitions about what we're talking about.

When You ask them these questions, there's never really a coherent answer about what is it exactly.

Everybody is afraid of the issue of free will.

I think to some extent, I mean, Harris has this I don't want to misrepresent anything Harris has because I'm a fan and I like a lot of his stuff.

But on the 1 hand, he is obviously intellectually active and wants to change our minds.

So he believes that we have some capacity to choose.

On the other hand, he's undermining that capacity to choose by saying it's just determinants, you're gonna choose what you choose.

So it's, you know, so that, and that's to me completely unscientific.

That's completely him, you know, pulling it out of nowhere.

We all experienced the fact that we have an eye.

That kind of certainty, saying that we do not have that fundamental choice that reason provides is unfounded currently.

Look, there's a sense in which it can never be contradicted because it's a product of your experience.

So no science will ever prove that this table isn't here.

I know I have free will because I can introspect it.

And that is as valid as the evidence of my senses.

Now I can't point at it so that you can see the same thing I'm seeing, but you can do the same thing in your own consciousness and you can identify the same thing.

And to deny that in the name of science is to get things upside down.

You start with that And that's the beginning of science.

The beginning of science is the identification that I choose and that I can reason and now I need to figure out the mechanism, the rules of reasoning, the rules of logic, how does this work?

Of course, it's possible that science, like from my place of AI, would be able to, if we were able to engineer consciousness or understand, I mean, it's very difficult to, because we're so far away from it now, but understand how the actual mechanism of that consciousness emerges, that in fact this table is not real, that we can determine that it, exactly how our mind constructs the reality that we perceive, then you can start to make interesting.

But our mind doesn't construct the reality that we perceive.

Now, we perceive it in particular ways given the nature of our senses, right?

A bat perceives this table differently, but it's still the same table with the same characteristics and the same identity.

It's just a matter of We use eyes, they use a radar system, they use sound waves to perceive it.

But it's still there, existence exists whether we exist or not.

And so you could create, I mean, I don't know how, and I don't know if it's possible, but let's say you could create a consciousness, right?

And I suspect that to do that, you would have to use biology, not just electronics, but way outside my expertise.

Because consciousness, as far as we know, is a phenomenon of life, and you would have to figure out how to create life before you created consciousness, I think.

But if you did that, then that wouldn't change anything.

All it would say is we have another conscious being, cool.

That's great, but it wouldn't change the nature of our consciousness.

I think this is a good way to set the table for discussion of objectivism is, let me at least challenge a thought experiment, which is, I don't know if you're familiar with Donald Hoffman's work about reality.

So his idea is that we're just, our perception is just an interface to reality.

So Donald Hoffman is the guy, you see Owein?

Yes, I've met Donald and I've seen his video.

And look, Donald has not invented anything new.

I mean, it's a fascinating thought experiment to me, like of out of the box thinking, perhaps literally, is that there's a gap between the world as we perceive it and the world as it actually exists.

And I think that's, for the philosophy of objectivism, is a really important gap to close.

So Can you maybe at least try to entertain the idea that there is more to reality than our minds can

Well, I don't understand what more means, right?

Of course there's more to reality than what our senses perceive.

That is, for example, I don't know, certain elements have radiation, right?

The beauty of human reason is, I can, through experimentation, discover the phenomena of radiation, then actually measure radiation, and I don't worry about it.

I can't perceive the world the way a bat perceives the world, and I might not be able to see certain things, but I can, we've created radar, so A, we understand how a bat perceives the world, and I can mimic it through a radar screen and create an images like the bat, its consciousness somehow perceives it, right?

So the beauty of human reason is our capacity to understand the world beyond what our senses give us directly.

At the end, everything comes in through our senses.

But we can understand things that our senses don't provide us.

But what he's doing is he's doing something very different.

He is saying what our senses provides us might have nothing to do with the reality out there.

That is just a random, arbitrary, nonsensical statement.

And he actually has a whole evolutionary explanation for it.

The simulations seem, I mean, I'm not an expert in this field, but they seem silly to me, they don't seem to reflect.

And look, all he's doing is taking Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which articulate exactly the same cause, and he's giving it a veneer of evolutionary ideas.

I'm not an expert on evolution and I'm not an expert on epistemology, which is what this is.

So to me, as a semi-layman, it doesn't make any sense.

And I'm actually, I have this Yaron Brook show, I don't know if I'm allowed to pitch it, but I've got the Yaron Brook Show on.

As a small aside, The cool thing about reason, which you practice, is you have a systematic way of thinking through basically anything.

I mean, it's rare that I think there's flaws in your logic.

Because I'm like disagreeing with the screen.

And it's great when somebody disagrees with me and they give good arguments because that makes it challenging.

You know, so 1 of the shows I want to do in the next few weeks is bring 1 of my philosopher friends to discuss the video that Hoffman, where he presents his theory, because it surprises me how seductive it is.

And it seems to be so, first of all, completely counterintuitive.

Because somehow we managed to cross the road and not get hit by the car, and if our senses did not provide us any information about what's actually going on in reality, how do we do that?

Not to mention build computers, not to mention fly to the moon and actually land on the moon.

If reality is not giving us information about the moon, if our senses are not giving us information about the moon, how did we get there?

And it's a very bad place philosophically because it basically says there is no objective standard for anything, there's no objective reality.

You can come up with anything, you could argue anything and there's no methodology, right?

I believe that at the end of the day, what reason allows us to do is provides us with a methodology for truth.

And at the end of the day, for every claim that I make, I should be able to boil it down to see, look, the evidence of the census is right there.

And Once you take that away, knowledge is gone and truth is gone and that opens it up to complete disaster.

So to me, why it's compelling to at least entertain this idea, first of all, it shakes up the mind a little bit to force you to go back to first principles and ask the question, what do I really know?

And the second part of that that I really enjoy is it's a reminder that we know very little, to be a little bit more humble.

So if reality doesn't exist at all, before you start thinking about it, I think it's a really nice wake up call to think, wait a minute, I don't really know much about this universe, that humbleness.

I think something I'd like to ask you about in terms of reason, when you, you can become very confident in your ability to understand the world if you practice reason often.

And I feel like it can lead you astray because you can start to think, so I love psychology, and psychologists have this certainty about understanding the human condition, which is undeserved.

You know, you run a study with 50 people and you think you could understand the source of all these psychiatric disorders, all these kinds of things.

That's similar kind of trouble I feel like you can get into when you overreach with reason.

So I don't think there is such a thing as overreaching with reason, but there are bad applications of reason.

There are bad uses of reason, or the pretense of using reason.

I think a lot of these psychological studies are pretense of using reason.

And these psychologists have never really taken a serious stat class or a serious econometrics class, so they use statistics in weird ways that just don't make any sense.

So I don't think you can do too much good thinking.

The fact that you try to use reason does not guarantee you won't make mistakes.

It doesn't guarantee you won't go down a rabbit hole and completely get it wrong.

But it does give you the only existing mechanism to fix it, which is going back to reality, going back to facts, going back to reason, and getting out of the rabbit hole and getting back to reality.

So I agree with you that it's interesting to think about these, what I consider crazy ideas, because it, oh wait, what is my argument about them?

If I don't really have a good argument about them, then do I know what I know?

So in that sense, it's always nice to be challenged and pushed and oriented.

You know, the nice thing about objectivism is everybody's doing that to me all the time, right?

Because nobody agrees with me on anything.

So I'm constantly being challenged, whether it's by Hoffman on metaphysics and epistemology, on the very foundations of analogy, in ethics, everybody constantly, and in politics all the time.

So I find that it's part of, you know, I prefer that everybody, there's a sense in which I prefer that everybody agreed with me, right?

Because I think we'd live in a better world.

But there's a sense in which that disagreement makes it, at least up to a point, makes it interesting and challenging and forces you to be able to rethink or to confirm your own thinking and to challenge that thinking.

Can you try to do the impossible task and give a whirlwind introduction to Ayn Rand, the many sides of Ayn Rand.

So Ayn Rand, the human being, Ayn Rand, the novelist, and Ayn Rand, the philosopher.

Sure, so her life story is 1 that I think is fascinating, but it also lends itself to this integration of all of these things.

Petersburg, Russia in 1905 to kind of a middle class family, Jewish family.

They owned a pharmacy, her father owned a pharmacy.

And she grew up, she was a very, she knew what she wanted to do and what she wanted to be from a very young age.

I think from the age of 9, she knew she wanted to be a writer.

And she focused her life after that on this goal of I wanna be a novelist, I wanna write.

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Yaron Brook: Ayn Rand and the Philosophy of Objectivism | Lex Fridman Podcast #138