#256 – Nationalism Debate: Yaron Brook and Yoram Hazony

Yaron Brook is an objectivist. Yoram Hazony is a national conservative. This is a conversation and debate about national conservatism vs individualism. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Noom: https://trynoom.com/lex – InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex and use code Lex25 to get 25% off – SimpliSafe: https://simplisafe.com/lex and use code LEX to get a free security camera – ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod to get 3 months free – Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off premium EPISODE LINKS: Yaron’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/yaronbrook Yaron’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ybrook Yoram’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/yhazony Yoram’s Website: https://www.yoramhazony.org/ Yaron Brook’s Books: In Pursuit of Wealth: https://amzn.to/3qmXuGo Equal Is Unfair: https://amzn.to/3FopKOV Yoram Hazony’s Books: Conservatism: https://amzn.to/3sv0Nhe The Virtue of Nationalism: https://amzn.to/3mtxqs6 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/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (09:11) – Conservatism (15:07) – Importance of history (27:09) – Rationalism vs empiricism (32:39) – Communism (40:43) – Otto von Bismarck (45:04) – Edmund Burke and the French Revolution (49:52) – USA’s founding fathers (1:02:47) – Founding documents (1:24:36) – Cohesion and Individualism (1:45:29) – Love and relationships (1:53:41) – Individual freedom (2:08:08) – Having children (2:21:54) – Reason vs emotions (2:28:44) – Nationalism (2:40:56) – Finding love (2:52:44) – Hope for the future (2:58:08) – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Yaron Brook and Yoram Hazony. This is Yaron's third time on this podcast and Yoram's first time. Yaron Brook is an objectivist philosopher, chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, host of The Yaron Brook Show, and the co-author of Free Market Revolution and Equal is Unfair. Yoram Hazony is a national conservatism thinker, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, that hosted the National Conservatism Conference. He is also the host of the NatCon Talk and author of The Virtue of Nationalism and an upcoming book called Conservatism: A Rediscovery.

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  Allow me to say a few words about each part of the two-word title of this episode, nationalism debate. First, debate. I would like to have a few conversations this year that are a kind of debate with two or three people that hold differing views on a particular topic, but come to the table with respect for each other and a desire to learn and discover something interesting together through the empathetic exploration of the tension between their ideas. This is not strictly a debate. It is simply a conversation. There is no structure, there's no winners, except of course, just a bit of trash talking to keep it fun. Some of these topics will be very difficult, and I hope you can keep an open mind and

• 1:29Lex Fridman?

  have patience with me as kind of moderator who tries to bring out the best in each person and the ideas discussed. Okay, that's my comment on the word debate. Now, onto the word nationalism. This debate could have been called nationalism versus individualism, or national conservatism versus individualism, or just conservatism versus individualism. As we discuss in this episode, these words have slightly different meanings depending on who you ask. This is especially true, I think, for any word that ends in ism. I personally enjoy the discussion of the meaning of such philosophical words. I don't think it's possible to arrive at a perfect definition that everybody agrees

• 2:12Lex Fridman?

  with, but the process of trying to do so for a bit is interesting and productive, at least to me, as long as we don't get stuck there, as some folks sometimes do in these conversations.

• 2:26Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. First is Noom, a habit establishing system that helps you get fit. Second is InsideTracker, a service I use to track my biological data. Third is SimpliSafe, the home security company I use. Fourth is ExpressVPN, the VPN I've been using for many years. Fifth, and finally, is Blinkist, the app I use to read summaries of books. So the choice is habits, health, security, privacy, or wisdom. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff.

• 3:11Lex Fridman?

  Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Noom, which is a behavior and habit changing system that helps you get fit and lose weight. Go to trynoom.com/lex to take a short survey about yourself and it'll generate a custom program for you. This includes helping you find why you want to do it. The why is the important thing. The what is the small details. The why is essential. It also helps you define small goals along the way and guides you 10 minutes a day to better habits. If you want to get anything done in this world, friends, you gotta do it every day.

• 3:53Lex Fridman?

  Just do a little bit every day and never quit, because you'll be amazed at what can happen in just months and years of 10 minutes, five minutes a day. Go to trynoom.com/lex and fill out the quick survey. That's all you have to do. Also, try not to have an existential crisis while filling it out, which is what I had, because there's some profound questions about your life there. Go to trynoom.com/lex.

• 4:22Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data. They have a bunch of plans, most of which include a blood test that gives you a lot of information that you can then make decisions based on, I don't understand why we don't make medical and lifestyle decisions based on actual data from your own body. We make so many decisions based on data from the bodies of thousands, if not millions, of other humans. And we'll look at the average. We'll look at the distribution. But we are unique. The complexity of the biological system that defines who we are is incredible. And to say that there's going to be one solution that works for everybody is,

• 5:06Lex Fridman?

  well, it's a good start, I suppose. In the 21st century, we should be very customized, personalized to the actual human body. Andrew Huberman swears by it. Davis and Clara swears by it. It feels like the future. For a limited time, you can get 25% off the entire InsideTracker store if you go to insidetracker.com/lex. That's insidetracker.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by SimpliSafe, a home security company designed to be simple and effective. It takes 30 minutes to set up. You can customize the system for your needs on simplisafe.com/lex. I have it set up in my place and I love it.

• 5:50Lex Fridman?

  It is kind of the first line of defense. I take my physical and digital security very seriously, friends, especially now that I'm in Texas. But you want to make sure that all the cameras are set up, all the basic security things are set up. And SimpliSafe is that great, strong layer of security that's easy to get going, easy to monitor, easy to interact with. It's just perfect. It's perfect for most people. Of course, for me, there's extra layers. Anyway, go to simplisafe.com/lex to customize your system and get a free security camera plus a 60-day risk-free trial. Again, that's simplisafe.com/lex.

• 6:37Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. Of course, as you may know, the ISPs, even if you use incognito mode on Chrome, still can collect your data. Also, practically speaking, you can use a VPN to change your location in the world. So if there's a geo-constrained TV shows, like Netflix, that are only available to a certain location in the world, you can instantaneously travel to that location and watch the aforementioned show on Netflix. Finally, the thing I love the most is how fast ExpressVPN is.

• 7:20Lex Fridman?

  It works on any device, including my favorite operating system, Linux. And on your phone, basically anything you use, it works on. And it's fast, like I said, and the interface is super simple. Anyway, go to expressvpn.com/lexpod to get an extra three months free. That's expressvpn.com/lexpod. This show is also brought to you by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Blinkist takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. If you're anything like me, I'm just a really slow reader, and I don't think that's something you need to fix. This kind of idea of speed reading, I get it.

• 8:04Lex Fridman?

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• 8:48Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Yaram Brook and Yoram Zony.

• 9:11Lex Fridman?

  I attended the excellent debate between the two of you yesterday at UT Austin. The debate was between ideas of conservatism represented by Yoram Hazony and ideas of individualism represented by Yaron Brook. Let's start with the topics of the debate. Yoram, how do you define conservatism? Maybe in the way you were thinking about it yesterday. What do you are some principles of conservatism?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Let me define it and then we can, we can get into principles if you want. When I, when I talk about political conservatism, I'm talking about a political standpoint that regards the recovery, elaboration and restoration of tradition as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time. Okay, so this is something that if you have time to talk about it like we do on the show, it's worth emphasizing that conservatism is, is not like liberalism or Marxism. Liberalism and Marxism are both kind of universal theories and they claim to be able to tell you what's good for human beings at all times and all places.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  And conservatism is a little bit different because it's going to carry different values in every nation, in every tribe, you know, even every family you can say has somewhat different values and the, the, these loyalty groups, they compete with one another. That's the way human beings work.

• 10:39Lex Fridman?

  So it's deeply rooted in history of that particular area of land.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Well, I wouldn't necessarily say land. You're right that many forms of conservatism are tied to a particular place.

• 10:50Lex Fridman?

  So how does the implementation of conservatism to you differ from the ideal of conservatism? The implementations you've seen of political conservatism in the United States and the rest of the world, just to give some context, because it's a loaded term, like most political terms. So when people think about conservative in the United States, they think about the Republican Party. What can you kind of disambiguate some of this? What are we supposed to think?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really important question. Usually, the word conservative is associated with Edmund Burke and with the with the the English common law tradition going back, you know, centuries and centuries. There's kind of a classical English conservative tradition that goes Ford, Askew, Hooker, Coke, Selden, Hale, Burke, Blackstone before Burke. If you take that kind of as a as a as a benchmark and you compare it, then you can compare it to things like the American Federalist Party at the time of the the American founding

• 11:56Speaker 01

  is in many respects, very much, very much in keeping with that tradition. As you go forward, there's an increasing mix of liberalism into conservatism. And I think I think by the time you get to the 1960s with William Buckley and Frank Meyer, you know, the the jargon term is fusionism. By the time you get there, it's it's arguable that their conservatism isn't very conservative anymore, that it's kind of a a public liberalism mixed with a private conservatism. So a lot of the debate that we have today about, you know, what does the word conservatism actually mean?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  A lot of the confusion comes from that, comes from the fact that that on on the one hand, we have people use use the term, I think, properly historically to refer to this this common law tradition of which Burke was a spokesman. But there are lots of other people who, when they say conservative, they just mean liberal. And I think that that's a big problem. I mean, it's a it's a problem just to have an intelligent debate is difficult when when people are using the the word almost in too antithetical.

• 13:13Lex Fridman?

  What would you say the essential idea of conservatism is? Time? You mentioned your father's a physicist. So a lot of physicists, when they form models of the universe. They don't consider time, so everything is dealt with instantaneously. A particle is represented fully by its current state, velocity and position. You're saying, so you're arguing with all of physics and your father, as we always do, that their time matters in conservatism. That's the fundamental element is the full history matters and you cannot separate the individual from the history, from the roots that they come from.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  The parallel in political theory is what's called rationalism. I guess we'll probably talk about that some. Rationalism is kind of an instantaneous, timeless thing. Before I mentioned that liberalism and various enlightenment theories, they don't include time at all. Their goal is to say, look, there's such a thing as universal human reason. All human beings, if they reason properly, will come to the same conclusions. If that's true, then it removes the time consideration. It removes tradition and context because everywhere where you are at any time, you ought to be able to use reason and come to the same conclusions about politics or morals.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  So that's a, that's a theory like Immanuel Kant or John Locke is an example, Hobbes is an example. That kind of political theorizing really does say at a given instant, we can know pretty much everything that we need to know, at least the big things. And conservatism is the opposite. It's a, it's a, it's a traditionalist view, exactly as you say, that, that says that history is crucial.

• 15:07Lex Fridman?

  So Yiran, you say that history is interesting.

• 15:12Lex Fridman?

  But perhaps not crucial if in the context of individualism.

• 15:17Yaron Brook?

  No, I mean, I think I think there's a false dichotomy he presented here. And that is that one view holds that you can derive any anything from a particular historical path. And a kind of an empirical view. And if we know the history, we know where we should be tomorrow. We know what what where we should stand today. And the other path is we ignore history, we ignore facts, we ignore what's going on. We can derive from some a priori axioms, we can derive a truth right now. And both are false, both of those views in my view are false. And, you know, Ayn Rand and I reject both of those views. And I think the better thinkers of the Enlightenment did as well. Although they sometime fall into the trap of appearing like rationalists.

• 16:00Yaron Brook?

  And Yoram and I agree on one thing, and that is that Kant is is one of, you know, we've we've we've talked about this in the past, Lex. But we both hate Kant. We both think Kant is is I at least think Kant is probably the the most destructive philosopher since Plato. Who was pretty destructive himself, but and part of the problem is that Kant divorces reason from reality. That is, he divorces reason from history. He divorces reason from experience because we don't have direct experience of reality, according to Kant, right? We're we're removed from that direct experience. But I I view Kant as the anti Enlightenment. That is, I view Kant as the destroyer of good Enlightenment thinking.

• 16:45Yaron Brook?

  And and Yoram and I acknowledge a lot of history of philosophy, of people who do history of philosophy, view Kant as the embodiment of the Enlightenment, that is, the ultimate. But but I I think that's a mistake. I think both Rousseau and Kant fundamentally, their goal, their mission in life is to destroy the Enlightenment. So my view is neither of those options are the right option. That is, the true reason based, reason is not divorced from reality. It's quite the opposite. Reason is a tool. It's a faculty of identifying and integrating what? It's identifying and integrating the facts of reality as. As we know them through sense perception or through the study of history, through what actually happened.

• 17:30Yaron Brook?

  So it's the integration of those facts, it's the knowledge of that history. And then what we do is we abstract away principles based on what's worked in the past, what hasn't worked in the past, the consequences of different ideas, different past, different actions. We abstract away principles that then can be universal. Not always, we make mistakes, right? We can come up with a universal principle, it turns out that's not. But if we have the whole scope of human history, we can derive principles as we do in life, as individuals, we derive principles that are then truths that we can live by. But you don't do that by ignoring history, you do that by learning history, by understanding history, by understanding in a sense tradition and where it leads to, and then trying to do better.

• 18:14Yaron Brook?

  And I think good thinkers are constantly trying to do better based on what they know about the past and what they know about the present.

• 18:20Lex Fridman?

  What's the difference between studying history on a journey of reason and tradition? So you mentioned that Burke understood that reason begins with inherited tradition yesterday. So what's the difference between studying history, but then being free to go any way you want, and tradition where it feels more, I don't want to say a negative term like burden, but it's, there's more of a momentum that forces you to go the same way as your ancestors?

• 18:53Yaron Brook?

  It's the recognition that people are wrong, often are wrong.

• 18:57Lex Fridman?

  Including your parents?

• 18:59Yaron Brook?

  Including your parents, including your teachers, including everybody. Everybody is potentially wrong, and that you can't accept anybody just because they happen to come before you. That is, you have to evaluate and judge, and you have to have a standard by which they evaluate and judge the actions of those who came before you, whether they are your parents, whether they are the state in which you happen to be born, whether they are somebody on the other side of planet Earth. You can judge them if you have a standard. And my standard, and I think the right standard is human well-being. That is, that which is good for human beings, qua human beings, you know, is, is the standard by which we judge. I can say that certain periods of history were bad. They happened. It's important to study them.

• 19:44Yaron Brook?

  It's important to understand what they did that made them bad, so we cannot do that again. And I can say certain cultures, certain periods in time, were good. Why? Because they promoted human well-being and human flourishing. That's the standard. And then derive from that, okay, what is it that made a particular culture good? What is it that made that particular culture positive in terms of human well-being and human flourishing? What made this bad? And hopefully, from that, I can derive a principle. Okay, if I want human flourishing and human well-being in the future, I want to be more like these guys and less like those guys. I want to derive what is the principle that will guide me in the future. That's, I think, how human knowledge ultimately develops.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  I think people often make a mistake, just, I'm not saying you're wrong, but lots of people, you know, don't actually read the original sources. And so what happens is, people will attack conservatives, assuming that conservatives think that whatever comes from the past is right. And actually, it's, it's very difficult to find a thinker who actually says something like that. The Selden or Burke, the big, the, the big conservative theorist, hooker, they're, they're all people who understand that the tradition carries with it mistakes that were made in the past. And, and this is actually, I think, an important part of, of their empiricism, is that they see the search for truth as something a society does by trial and error.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  And what that means is that in any given moment, you have to be aware of the possibility that things that you've inherited are actually false. And the job of the political thinker, or the jurist, or the, the philosopher, is not to dig in and say, you know, whatever it is that we've inherited is right. The, the job is to look at the society as a whole and say, look, we, we have this job of, first of, first of all, conservation, just making sure that we don't lose good things that we've had. And second, seeing if we can repair things in order to to improve them where it's necessary or where it's possible. And that process is actually a creative process. This is a way in which I think it is similar to your own philosophy that you take the inherited

• 21:51Speaker 01

  tradition and you look for a way that you can shape it in order to make it something better than it was. That's a baseline for what we call conservatism.

• 22:03Lex Fridman?

  Just the comments of the trial and error, the errors is you're proud of the errors. It's a feature, not a bug. So you mentioned trial and error a few times yesterday. It's a really interesting kind of idea. It's basically accepting that the journey is going to have flaws as opposed to saying, I mean, the the conclusion there is the current system is flawed and it will always be flawed. And you try to improve it. When you listen to your own talk, there's much more of optimism for the system being perfect now or potentially soon or could be perfect.

• 22:43Lex Fridman?

  And to me, the way I heard it is almost like accepting that the system is flawed and through trial and error will improve. And your aunt says, no, we can have a perfection now.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  That's what it sounds to me.

• 23:01Yaron Brook?

  Yeah, and I think that's right. I think the difference is that at some point, just like in science, I think, one can stop the trial and error and say, I can now see a pattern here. I can see, you know, that that certain actions lead to bad consequences, certain actions lead to good consequences. Let me try to let me try to abstract away what is it that is good and what is it that is bad and build a system around what is good and reject what is bad. I think ultimately, if you if you read the founding fathers and whether we call them conservatives, individuals, what the founding fathers actually did, all of them, I think, is study history. They all did. They all talk about history. They all

• 23:41Yaron Brook?

  talk about examples of other cultures, whether they go back to the Republic in Venice or back to the ancient Greeks. So they studied these. They learned lessons from them. They tried to figure out what has worked in the past and what hasn't and tried to derive principles. Now, in my view, they got pretty close to what I would consider. Kind of an ideal, but they didn't get it completely right. And here we sit 200 and something years after the Declaration and after the Constitution. I think we can look back and say, okay, well, what did they get right? What did they get wrong? Based on how is it done? And where the flaws and where the and we can improve on it. I think we can get closer to perfection.

• 24:25Yaron Brook?

  And based on those kind of observations, based on that kind of abstraction, that kind of discovery of what is true, just like at some point you do the experiments, you do the trial and error, and now you come up with a scientific principle. It is true that 100 years later, you might discover that, hey, I missed something, there's something up. But to not take the full lesson, to insist on incrementalism, to insist on we're just going to tinker with the system, instead of saying, no, there's something really wrong with having a king, there's something really wrong with not having any representation, or whatever the standard needs to be.

• 25:08Yaron Brook?

  In the name of we don't want to move too fast, I think is a mistake. And the problem with trial and error in politics is that we're talking about human life, right? So there was a big trial around communism. And, you know, 100 million people paid the price for the trial. I could have told them in advance, as did many people, that it would not work. There are principles of human nature, principles of that we can study from history, principles about economics and other aspects. Well, we know it's not going to work. You don't need to try it again. You know, we've had communal arrangements throughout history. There was an experiment with fascism, and there've been experiments with all kinds of political systems. Okay, we've done them.

• 25:51Yaron Brook?

  Sad that we did them because many of us knew they wouldn't work. We should learn the lesson. And I think that all of history now converges on one lesson. And that is, what we need to do is build systems that protect individual freedom. That is the core. That's what ultimately leads to human flourishing and human success and human achievement. And to the extent that we place anything above that individual, whether it's the state, whether it's the ethnicity, whether it's the race, whether it's the bourgeois, whether it's whatever it happens to be, a class or whatever. Whenever we place something above the individual, the consequence is negative. That's one of these principles that I think we can derive from studying. Two, you know, 3,000 years of civilization.

• 26:33Yaron Brook?

  And it's tragic, I think, because we're going to keep experimenting, sadly. I see it, right? I'm not winning this battle. I'm losing the battle. We're going to keep experimenting with different forms of collectivism. We're going to keep paying the price in human life and in missed opportunities for human flourishing and human success and human wealth and prosperity.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Well, look, if we, let's take communism as a good example. None of the major conservative thinkers would say, you know, what's a good idea? A good idea would be to experiment by raising everything that we've inherited and starting from scratch. I mean, that's the conservative complaint or accusation against rationalists. I mean, as opposed to empiricism, using rationalism. Let's take, you know, let's take Descartes kind of as a, as a benchmark.

• 27:21Yaron Brook?

  Can you also maybe define rationalism?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, these are two terms that are in philosophy, especially in epistemology. They're often compared to one another. Your own said that it's, that it's a false dichotomy. And maybe it is a bit exaggerated, but that doesn't mean it's not useful for conceptualizing the domain. So rationalist is somebody like Descartes, who says, I'm going to set aside, I'm going to try to set aside everything I know, everything I've inherited. I'm going to start from scratch. And he explicitly says, you know, in evaluating the inheritance of the past, he explicitly says, you take a look at the histories that we have, they're not reliable. You take a look at the moral and the scientific writings that we receive, they're not very good.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  His baseline is to look very critically at the past and say, look, I'm evaluating it. I think all in all, it's just not worth very much. And so whatever I do, going, beginning from scratch is going to be better as long as, and here's his caveat, he says, as long as I'm proceeding from. From self-evident assumptions, from self-evident premises, things that you can't argue against.

• 28:35Lex Fridman?

  I think, therefore, I am.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Right, and then from there, deducing what he calls infallible conclusions. So that model of self-evident premises to infallible conclusions, I'm calling that rationalism. I think that's kind of a standard academic jargon term. And it's opposed to empiricism, which is a thinker, I think in universities, usually the empiricist is David Hume. And David Hume will say, we can't learn anything the way that Descartes. I mean, there is nothing that's that self-evident and that infallible.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  So Hume proposes, based on Newton and Boyle and the new physical sciences. So Hume proposes a science of man. And the science of man sounds an awful lot like what Yaron just said, which is we're going to take a look at human nature, at the nature of societies. Human nature, we're going to try to abstract towards fixed principles for describing it. Human societies, we're going to try to do the same thing. And from there, we get, for example, contemporary economics. But we also get sociology and anthropology, which cut in a different direction. So that's rationalism versus empiricism.

• 29:58Yaron Brook?

  Can I just say?

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, go ahead, please.

• 29:59Yaron Brook?

  Yeah, I agree with that. I think empiricism, the one thing I disagree is that I think empiricism rarely comes to these abstractions. I mean, they want more facts. It's always about collecting more evidence. But this is where I think Ayn Rand is so unusual and where I think there's something new here, right? And that's a bold statement, given the history of philosophy. But I think Ayn Rand is something new. And so she says, yes, we agree about rationalism and that it's inherently wrong. Empiricism has the problem of, okay, where does it lead? You never come to a conclusion, you're just accumulating evidence.

• 30:40Yaron Brook?

  There's something in addition, there's a third alternative, which she is positing, which is using empirical evidence, not denying empirical evidence.

• 30:50Yaron Brook?

  Recognizing that are some axioms, there's some axioms that we all, at the base of all of our knowledge, that are starting points. We're not rejecting axiomatic knowledge. And integrating those two and identifying the fact that based on these axioms and based on these empirical evidence, we can come to truths, just again, like we do in science. We have certain axioms, scientific axioms, we have certain experiments that we want, and then we can come to some identification of a truth. And that truth is always going to be challenged by new information, by new knowledge, but as long as that's what we know, that is what truth is. The truth is contextual, in the sense that it's contextual, it's based on that knowledge that surrounds it.

• 31:33Lex Fridman?

  It's affordable to change if you get new facts.

• 31:36Yaron Brook?

  Absolutely. It's always available to change if the facts that you get, and they really are. I mean, the burden of changing what you've come to a conclusion of truth is high, so you'd have to have real evidence that it's not true, but that happens all the time. So it happens at science, right? We discover that what we thought was true is not true, and it can happen in politics and ethics even more so than in science because they're much messier fields. But the idea is that you can come to a truth, but it's not just deductive. Most truths are inductive. We learn from observing reality and, again, coming to principles about what works and what's not. And here, I think, this is, Ayn Rand is different. She doesn't

• 32:20Yaron Brook?

  fall into the, and she's different in her politics and she's different in her epistemology. She doesn't fall into the conventional view. She's an opponent of Hume, she's an opponent of de Kaat, and she's certainly an opponent of Kant. And, you know, I think she's right.

• 32:37Lex Fridman?

  If it's okay, can we walk back to criticism of communism? You're both critics of communism, socialism. Why did communism fail? You started to say that Conservatives criticizing on the basis of rationalism that you're throwing away the past, you're starting from scratch. Is that the fundamental description of why communism failed?

• 33:01Speaker 01

  I think the fundamental difference between rationalists and empiricists is the question of whether you're throwing away the past. That's the argument. And it cashes out as a distinction between abstract, universal rationalist political theories and empirical political theories. Empirical political theories are, they're always going to say something like, look, there are many different societies. We can say that some are better and some are worse, but the problem is that, you know, that there are many different ways in which

• 33:42Speaker 01

  a society can be better or worse. There's an ongoing competition. And we're learning on an ongoing basis, what are the ways in which societies can be better and worse? That creates a kind of, I'd say, a mild skepticism, a moderate skepticism among conservatives. I don't think too many conservatives have a problem looking at the Soviet Union, which is brutal and murderous, ineffective in its economics, totally ineffective, you know, spiritually, and then collapsed. Okay. So, so, so I think it's easier for us to look at a system like that and say, you know, what on earth? What should we learn from that? But the main conservative tradition is pretty tolerant of a diversity of different

• 34:27Speaker 01

  kinds of society and is slow to insist that France is so tyrannical, it just needs a revolution because what's going to come after the revolution is going to be much better. The assumption is that there's lots of things that are good about most societies and that a clean slate leads you to throw out all of the inherited things that you don't even know how to notice until they're gone.

• 34:52Lex Fridman?

  Could I actually play devil's advocate here and address something you also said? Can we, as opposed to knowing the empirical data of the 20th century that communism presented, can we go back to the beginning of the 20th century? Can you empathize or steel man or put yourself in a place of the Soviet Union where the workers are being disrespected? And can you not see that the conservatives could be pro-communism? Like communism is such a strongly negative word in modern day political discourse that you can't, like you have to put yourself in the mind of people who like red colors, who like- That's what it was.

• 35:37Lex Fridman?

  It was, it's all about the branding, I think. Just, but also like the ideas of solidarity, of nation, of togetherness, of respect for fellow man. I mean, all of these things that kind of communism represents, can you not see that this idea is actually going along with conservatism? It is in some ways respecting the, the deep ideals of the past, but proposing a new way to raise those ideals, implement those ideals in the system.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm going to try to do what you're suggesting, but historically, we actually have a more useful option, I think, for both of our positions. Instead of, you know, pretending that we like the actual communists, we have conservative statesmen like Disraeli and Bismarck, who initiated social legislation, right? The, the, the, the first step towards saying, look, we're one nation, we're undergoing industrialization. That industrialization is important and positive, but it's also doing a lot of damage to a lot of people. And in particular, it's doing damage not just to individuals and families, but it's,

• 36:54Speaker 01

  it's doing damage to the, to the social fabric, the capacity of Britain or German to remain cohesive societies is being harmed. And so it's these two conservative statesmen, Disraeli and Bismarck- Who actually take the first steps in order to legislate for, you know, for what today we would consider to be minimal social programs, pensions and disability insurance and those kinds of things. So for sure conservatives do look at industrialization as a rapid change. And they say, we do have to care about the nation as a whole and we have to care about it as a unity. And I assume that your own will say, look, that's the first step towards the catastrophe of communism.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  But before your own drives that nail into the coffin, let me try to make a distinction. Because when you read Marx, you're reading an intellectual descendant of Descartes. You're reading somebody who says, look, every society has, consists of oppressors and oppressed. Right? And that's an improvement in some ways over liberal thinking because at least he's seeing, he's seen groups as a real social phenomenon. But he says, every society has an oppressor class and oppressed class. There are different classes, there are different groups, and whenever one is stronger,

• 38:16Speaker 01

  it exploits the ones that are weaker. All right, that is the foundation of a revolutionary political theory. Why? Because the moment that you say that the only relationship between the stronger and the weaker is exploitation, the moment that you say that, then you're pushed into the position, and Marx and Engels say this explicitly, you're pushed into the position where saying, when will the exploitation end? Never until there's a revolution. What happens when there's a revolution? You eliminate the oppressor class. It's annihilationist. I mean, you can immediately, when you read it, see why it's different from Descartes or Bismarck, because they're trying to keep everybody, you know, somehow at peace with one another. And Marx is saying, there is no peace.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  That oppressor class has to be annihilated. And then they go ahead and do it. And they, and they, and they kill 100 million people. So I do think that despite the fact your question is, is good and right, there are certain similarities and concern, but still, I think you can tell the difference.

• 39:17Lex Fridman?

  That extra step of revolution to you is where the problem comes. Like that extra step of let's kill all the oppressors, that's the problem.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:27Lex Fridman?

  And then to you, your own, the whole step one is the problem.

• 39:30Yaron Brook?

  Well, it's all a problem. First, I don't view communism as.

• 39:36Yaron Brook?

  Something that radical in a sense that I think it comes from a tradition of collectivism. I think it comes from a tradition of looking at groups and measuring things in terms of groups. It comes from tradition where you expect some people to be sacrificed for the greater good of the of the whole. I think it comes from a tradition where mysticism, a revelation as the source of truth is accepted. I view Marx as in some sense very Christian. I don't think he's this radical rejecting. I think he's just reformatting Christianity in a sense. He's replacing in a sense, he's replacing God with the proletarian. Knowledge, you know, you have to, you have to get knowledge from somewhere.

• 40:20Yaron Brook?

  So you need the dictatorship of the proletarian, you need somebody, the Stalin, the Lenin, who somehow communes with the spirit, the spirit of the proletarian. There's no rationality, not rationalism, there's no rationality in Marx. There is a lot of mysticism and there is a lot of hand waving and there's a lot of sacrifice and a lot of original sin in the way he views humanity. So I view Marx as as one more collectivist in a whole string of collectivists, you know. And I think, I think the Bismarckian response, which Bismarck, I mean, I know less about Israelis, so I'll focus on Bismarck. And Bismarck is really responding to political pressures from the left

• 41:01Yaron Brook?

  and he's responding to the rise of communism, socialism. But what Bismarck is doing, he's putting something alternative. He's presenting an alternative to the proletarian as the standard by which we should, we should matter the good. And what he's replacing it is the state. He's replacing the proletarian with the state and that has exactly the same problems. That is, first, it requires sacrificing some to others, which is what the welfare state basically legitimizes. It places the state above all. So the state now becomes, I think, the biggest evil of Bismarck. And I definitely view him as a negative force in history, is public education.

• 41:43Yaron Brook?

  I mean, the Germans really dig in on public education, really develop it. And really, the American model of public education is copying. The the German, the Prussian Bismarckian public education.

• 41:55Lex Fridman?

  Can you speak to that real quick? Why the public education is such a root of moral evil for you?

• 42:02Yaron Brook?

  Well, because it now says that there's one standard, and that standard is determined by government, by by bureaucracy, by by whatever the government deems is in the national interest. And Bismarck's very explicit about this. He's training the workers of the future. You know, they they need to catch up and, you know, with England and other places, and they need to train the workers. And there's going to be a, he's going to train some people to be the managerial class, he's going to train other people to be. And he decides, right? The the government, the bureaucracy is going to decide who's who and where they go. There's no individual choice. There's no individual showing an ability to break out of what what the government has decided is their little box. There's very little freedom. There's very little, you know, ultimately, there's very little competition.

• 42:46Yaron Brook?

  There's very little innovation. And this is the problem we have today in American education, which we can get to, is there's no competition and no innovation. We have one standard, fit all. And then we have conflicts about what should be taught. And the conflicts now are not pedagogical. They're not about what works and what doesn't. Nobody cares about that. It's about political agendas, right? It's about what my group wants to be taught and what that group wants to be taught, rather than actually discovering, how do we get kids to read? I mean, we all know how to get kids to read, but there's a political agenda about not teaching phonics, for example. So a lot of schools don't teach phonics, even though the kids will never learn how to read properly. So it it becomes politics. And I I don't believe politics belongs in education. I think education is a product, it's a service.

• 43:30Yaron Brook?

  And we know how to deliver products and services really, really efficiently, at a really, really low price, at a really, really high quality. And that's leaving it to the market to do.

• 43:39Lex Fridman?

  But your fundamental criticism is that the state can use education.

• 43:44Lex Fridman?

  To further its authoritarian aims.

• 43:47Yaron Brook?

  Well, or whatever the aims, I mean, think about the conservative today. Critique of American educational system, right? It's dominated by the left. Yeah. What did you expect? Right? If you leave it, if you leave it up to the state to fund, they're going to fund the things that promote state growth and state intervention. And the left is better at that. It has been better at that than than the right. And and and they now dominate our educational institutions. But look, if we go back to Bismarck, my problem is placing the state above the individual. So if if communism places the the the class above the individual, what matters is class. Individuals are nothing. They're cogs in a machine. Bismarck, certainly the German tradition, much more than the British tradition or the American tradition, the the German tradition is to place the state above the individual.

• 44:31Yaron Brook?

  I think that's equally evil and and the outcome is fascism and the outcome is the same. The outcome is the deaths of tens of millions of people when taken to to its ultimate conclusion. Just like socialism, the ultimate conclusion of it is communism, you know, nationalism in that form, kind of the Bismarckian form, the ultimate conclusion is is Nazism or some form of fascism. Because you don't care about the individual, the individual doesn't matter. I think this is one of the differences in the Anglo, you know, Anglo American tradition, where Anglo American tradition, even the conservatives have always acknowledged, and it goes back to.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Especially the conservatives. The conservatives were there first.

• 45:14Yaron Brook?

  They they acknowledged. Well, you've you've defined conservatives to include all the good thinkers of the distant past, and they're all good thinkers. We agree on that.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  I'm defining conservatism the way that Burke does. I'm just, look, this is a very simple observation. Burke thinks, when you open Burke and you actually read him, he starts naming all of these people who he's defending. And it's bizarre, I'm sorry, it's just intellectual sloppiness for people to be publishing books called Burke, the first conservative, the founding conservative, the founder. I mean, this is nonstop. It's a it's a it's a view that says Burke reacts to the French Revolution. So conservatism has no prior tradition. It's just reacting to the French Revolution. And this is, I mean. This is just absurd.

• 45:55Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask a quick question on conservatism? Are there any conservatives that are embracing of revolutions? So are they ultimately against the concept of revolution?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Yes, Burke himself embraces the Polish Revolution, which takes place almost exactly at the same time as the French Revolution. And the argument's really interesting because there's a common mistake is assuming that Burke and conservative thinkers are always in favor of slow change. I think that's also just factually mistaken. Burke is against the French Revolution because he thinks that there are actually tried and true things that work, things that work for human flourishing and freedom included as a very important part of human flourishing.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  He, like many others, takes the the British, the English Constitution to be a a model of something that works. You know, so it has a king, it has various other things that that, you know, maybe your own will say, well, that's a mistake. But still, for centuries, it's the leader in many things that I think we can easily agree are human flourishing. And Burke says, "Look, what's wrong with the French Revolution? What's wrong with the French Revolution is that they is that they have a system that has all sorts of problems, but they could they could be repairing it. And instead, what they're doing by overthrowing everything is they're moving away from what we know is good for for human beings." Then he looks at the Polish Revolution, and he says, "The Poles do the opposite.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  The Poles have a non-functioning traditional constitution. It's too democratic. It's impossible to get to raise armies and to defend the country because of the fact that every nobleman has a veto." So the Polish Revolution moves in the direction of the British Constitution. They repair their constitution through a quick, a rapid revolution. They install a king along the model that looks a lot like Britain. And Burke supports this. He says, "This is a good revolution." So it's not the need to quickly make a change in In order to save yourself, that that's not what conservatives are objecting to.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  What they're objecting to is instead of looking at experience in order to try to make a slow or quick improvement, a measured improvement to achieve a particular goal. Instead of doing that, you say, look, the whole thing has just been wrong. And what we've really got to do is annihilate a certain part of the population and then make completely new laws and a completely new theory. That that's what he's objecting to. That's the French Revolution, and that then becomes, you know, the model for for communist revolutions.

• 48:36Yaron Brook?

  And for me, the I mean, the French Revolution is clearly a real evil and wrong. But it's not that it was a revolution and it's not that it tried to change everything. I mean, let's remember what was going on in France at the time. And people were starving and the monarchy in particular was completely detached, completely detached from the suffering of the people and something needed to change. The the unfortunate thing is that that the change was motivated by a an egalitarian philosophy, not egalitarian in a sense that I think the founding fathers talked about, but egalitarian in a sense of real equality, equality of outcome, motivated by a philosophy, by Rousseau's philosophy. And inevitably led, you could tell that the ideas were going to lead to this, to massive

• 49:19Yaron Brook?

  destruction and death and and the annihilation of a class. You can't annihilation is never an option. That is, it's not true that a good revolution never leads to mass death of just whole groups of people, because a good revolution is about the sanctity of the individual. It's about preservation of liberty of the individual. And and again, that that goes back to and and the French Revolution denies and Rousseau denies really that in civilization, there is a value in a thing called the individual.

• 49:48Lex Fridman?

  I think this is a good place to have this discussion. The founding fathers of the United States, are they individualists or are they conservatives? So in this particular revolution that founded this country, at the core of which are some fascinating, some powerful ideas.

• 50:09Lex Fridman?

  Were those founding fathers, were those ideas coming from a place of conservatism? Or did they put primary value into the freedom and the power of the individual? What do you think?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  There were both. I mean, this is, this is something that's a little bit difficult for, sometimes for, for, for Americans. I mean, even very educated Americans, they, they talk about the founding fathers as though it's kind of like this.

• 50:33Yaron Brook?

  Monolith.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, this, this collective, you know, entity with, with a single brain and a single, single value system. But I, I think at the time, that's not the way they, not the way any of them saw it. So roughly, there's two camps and they map onto the rationalist versus traditionalist empiricist dichotomy that I proposed earlier. And the, so on the one hand, you have real revolutionaries like Jefferson and Paine. These are the people who Burke was writing against. These are the people who supported the French Revolution.

• 51:08Lex Fridman?

  So when you say real, so when you say Paine, you're referring to revolutionaries in a bad way? Like, this is a problem.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  These are people who will say, history up until now has, has, has been, you know, with, with Descartes, but applied to politics, history up until now has been, you know, just a story of ugliness, foolishness, stupidity and evil. And if you apply reason, we'll all come to roughly, we'll all come to the same conclusions, you know? And Paine writes a book called The Age of Reason. And The Age of Reason is a manifesto for, here is the answer to political and moral problems throughout history. We have the answers and it's in the same school as Rousseau's, the social, no, you don't like that?

• 51:55Yaron Brook?

  Not at all.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought it was.

• 51:56Yaron Brook?

  I think they're the opposites.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Okay, so let me.

• 51:58Lex Fridman?

  Just to throw in a quick question on Jefferson and Paine. Do you think America would exist without those two figures? So like, how important is spice in the flavor of the dish you're making?

• 52:13Speaker 01

  I don't want to try to run the counterfactual. I don't have confidence that I know the answer to the question.

• 52:18Lex Fridman?

  But it's so much fun.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  You know what? I'm gonna offer something that I think is more fun. More fun than the counterfactual is, America had two revolutions, not one, okay? At first, there is a revolution that is strongly spiced with this kind of rationalism. And then there's a 10-year period after the Declaration of Independence. There's a 10-year period under which America has a constitution, its first constitution, which today they call the Articles of the Confederation. But there's a constitution from 1777. And that constitution is based on, in a lot of ways, on the hottest new ideas. It has, instead of the traditional British system with a division of powers between,

• 53:05Speaker 01

  you know, an executive and a bicameral legislature, instead of that traditional English model which most of the states had as their governments, instead of that, they say, no, we're gonna have one elected body. Okay, and that body, that Congress, it's going to be the executive. It's going to be the legislative. It's going to be, it's going to be everything. And it's gonna run as a big committee. These are the ideas of the French Revolution. You get to actually see them implemented in Pennsylvania, in the Pennsylvania Constitution, and then later in the National Assembly in France. It's a disaster. The thing doesn't work. It's completely made up. It's not based on any kind, it's neither based on historical experience,

• 53:48Speaker 01

  nor is it based on historical custom, on what people are used to. And what they succeed in creating with this first constitution is it's wonderfully rational, but it's a complete disaster. It doesn't allow the raising of taxes. It doesn't allow the mustering of troops. It doesn't allow giving orders to soldiers to fight a war. And if that had continued, if that had continued to be the American constitution, America never would have been an independent country. They aren't willing to do that counterfactual. What happens during those years where Washington and Jay and Knox and Hamilton and Morris,

• 54:30Speaker 01

  there's like this group of conservatives, they're mostly soldiers and lawyers, other than Washington, most of them are from northern cities. And this group is much more conservative than the Tom Paine and Jefferson School. Some historians call them the nationalist party. Historically, they give up the word nationalism and they call themselves the federalists. But they're basically the nationalist party. What does that mean? It means, on the one hand, that their goal is to create an independent nation, independent from Britain, but on the other hand, they believe that they already have national legal

• 55:14Speaker 01

  traditions, the common law, the forms of government that have been imported from Britain, and of course, Christianity, which they consider to be part of their inheritance. This federalist party is the conservative party. These are people who are extremely close in ideas to Burke, and these are people who wrote the Constitution of the United States, the second Constitution, the second revolution in 1787, when Washington leads the establishment of a new constitution, which maybe technically, legally, it wasn't even legal under the old constitution, but it was democratic. And what it did is it said, "We're going to take what we know about English government,

• 55:58Speaker 01

  what we've learned by applying English government in the States, we're going to create a national government, a unified national government, that's going to muster power in its hands, enough power to be able to do things like fighting wars to defend a unified people." Those are conservatives. Now, it's reasonable to say, "Well, look, there was no king, so how conservative could they be?" But I think that's a reasonable question. But don't forget that the American colonies, the English colonies in America by that point had been around for 150 years. They had written constitutions. They had already adapted, for an entire century, adapted the English constitution to local conditions where there's no aristocracy and there's no king. You know, I think you can see that

• 56:41Speaker 01

  as a positive thing. On the other hand, they have slavery. That's an innovation. That's not English. So it's a little bit different from the English constitution, but those men are conservatives. They make the minimum changes that they need to the English constitution and they largely replicate it, which is why the Jeffersonians hated them so much. They called them apostates. They say they've betrayed equality and liberty and fraternity by adopting an English-style constitution.

• 57:12Lex Fridman?

  So I would imagine, Yaron, you would put emphasis of the success of the key ideas at the founding of this country elsewhere, at the freedom of the individual. So the supposed to the tradition of the British Empire.

• 57:24Yaron Brook?

  I mean, the one thing I agree with, Yaron, is the fact that, yes, the founding fathers were not a monolith. I mean, they argued, they debated, they disagreed, they wrote against each other. I mean, Jefferson and Adams for decades didn't even speak to each other, though they did make up and had a fascinating relationship afterwards.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  You and I are making up too.

• 57:43Yaron Brook?

  There you go.

• 57:45Lex Fridman?

  It's like the founding fathers.

• 57:47Yaron Brook?

  You know, there's massive debate and discussion, but I don't agree with the characterization of pain in Jefferson. I don't think it's just to call them rationalists because I don't think they're rationalists. People who've looked at history, at the problems in history, and remember, this is the 18th century, and they were coming out of 100 years earlier, some of the bloodiest wars in all of human history were happening in Europe, many of them over religion. You know, they'd seen what was going on in France and other countries where people were starving and where kings were frolicking in palaces

• 58:26Yaron Brook?

  in spite of that. They were very aware of the relative freedom that the British tradition had given Englishmen. I think they knew that, they understood that, and I think they were building on that. They were taking the observation of the past and trying to come up with a more perfect system. And I think they did. And in that sense, I'm a huge fan of Jefferson. You know, there are two things that I'm, I think, unfortunate about Jefferson. One is that he continued to hold slaves, which is, which is, which is very unfortunate. And the second is, is early support for the French Revolution, which I think is a massive mistake. And, and I wouldn't be surprised if you regretted it later in life, given the consequences.

• 59:11Yaron Brook?

  But, you know, they were trying to derive principles by which they could establish a new state. And yes, there were some, there was pushback by, by some, and there was disagreements. And the, and the Constitution in the end is, is to some extent a form of compromise. It's still one of the great documents of all of human history, political documents. The Constitution, although I think it's inferior to the Declaration. I, I'm a huge fan of the Declaration, and I think one of the mistakes the conservatives makes, one of the mistakes the Supreme Court makes and American judiciary makes is assuming the two documents are separate. I think Lincoln is actually right. You can't understand the Constitution without understanding the Declaration. The Declaration, what set the context and what sets everything up for the Constitution. Individual rights are the key concept there.

• 59:57Yaron Brook?

  And, and, and one of the challenges was that some of the compromises and, and compromises, not necessarily between groups, but compromises that even Jefferson made and others made regarding individual rights, set America on a path that we're suffering from today. And, and I mentioned three last night. One was slavery. Obviously, there was a horrific compromise, one that America not just paid for with the Civil War. 600,000 young men died because of it, but the suffering of black slaves for all those years. But then the whole issue of racial tensions in this country for, for, for a century, and to this day, really, is a consequence of that initial compromise.

• 1:00:42Yaron Brook?

  Who knows what would have, what the counterfactual is in America? If, if there's a civil war right at the founding, right? Because there would have been a war, no matter what. But if it had happened in the late 18th century, early 19th century, rather than waiting till, till, till 1860s. But then, second was Jefferson's embrace of, of public education. His founding of the University of Virginia, which, which I think is, is a great tragedy. And which nobody agrees with me on, so, so that's one of the areas where I'm, I'm pretty radical. And then the embrace. Both by Jefferson and by Hamilton, for different reasons, but embraced by both of them, of government role in the economy. And, you know, I'm, I do finance, so I know a little bit about finance.

• 1:01:27Yaron Brook?

  And the debate between Jefferson and Hamilton about banking is fascinating, but at the end of the day, both wanted a role for government in banking. They both didn't trust, Jefferson didn't trust big financial interests. Hamilton wanted to capture some of those financial issues for the state. And as a consequence, we set America on a path where, you know, in my view, regulation always leads to more regulation. There's never, never a case where regulation decreases. And we started out with a certain regulatory body around banks and a recognition that was okay to regulate the economy. So, once we get into the late 19th century, it's fine to regulate the railroads, it's fine to pass antitrust laws, it's fine to then continue on the path of where we are today, which is heavy, heavy, heavy, massive involvement of government in every aspect

• 1:02:12Yaron Brook?

  of our economy and really in every aspect of our life because of education. So, I, I think the country was founded in certain mistakes and we haven't been willing to question those mistakes. And in a sense, that we've only moved in the opposite direction. And now, America's become, whereas I think it was founded in the idea of the primacy of the individual, the sanctity of the individual, at least as an idea, even if not fully implemented, I think now that's completely lost. I don't think anybody, it really is an advocate out there for individualism in politics or for true freedom in politics.

• 1:02:46Lex Fridman?

  We'll get to individualism, but let me ask the Beatles and the Rolling Stones question about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

• 1:02:53Yaron Brook?

  Stone.

• 1:02:54Lex Fridman?

  Well, because it's like which document, Beatles or Rolling, which document is more important and so on.

• 1:02:59Yaron Brook?

  It's obvious the Beatles, right?

• 1:03:00Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:03:00Yaron Brook?

  It's a question.

• 1:03:01Lex Fridman?

  Is there even a question? But let me, then even zoom in further and ask you to pick your favorite song. So what ideas in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence do you think are the most important to the success of the United States of America?

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  I'll answer the question, but before answering the question, I want to dissent from registered dissent from your own.

• 1:03:23Lex Fridman?

  Is it the public education? Is it which?

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  No, no, no, actually, we're not so, look, we're not so far apart on, on, on, on public education. I'm actually kind of, I'm actually kind of surprised that you're so anti Bismarck because his public school system was, his national public school system was created in order to stick it to the church. It was the church that ran the schools before then. And okay, but so that's a different.

• 1:03:45Yaron Brook?

  I'm all for sticking it to the church. Any opportunity, but not, now when the alternative is the nation.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Right, I see.

• 1:03:51Yaron Brook?

  I'd rather see, I'd rather see free educational system, you know, where freedom is in education.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  Okay, so, so I want to register a dissent about Lincoln. Look, Lincoln is an important figure and a great man, and he was presiding over a country, which at that point was pretty Jeffersonian in terms of its self-perception. He said what he needed to say. I'm not going to criticize him, but I don't accept the idea that the, that the Declaration of Independence, which starts one revolution, is, is of a piece with the Constitution, the second Constitution, the Constitution of 1787, the nationalist Constitution, which is effectively a counter-revolution. What happens is there is a revolution. It's based on certain principles.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  There are a lot, not exactly, but in many ways resemble the, the later ideas of the French Revolution. And what the Federalist Party does, the National, Nationalist Conservative Party does, is a counter-revolution to reinstate the Old English Constitution. So these documents are, if you're willing to accept the evidence of history, they are in many respects contrary to one another. And so if if I'm asked what's the most important values that are handed down by these documents, I don't have an objection to, you know, to life, liberty and property, all of which are really important things. I do have an objection to the pompous overreach

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  of these are self evident, which is absurd. They can't be self evident. If they were self evident, then somebody would have come up with them, you know, like, like 2000 years before. It's not, it's not self evident. And, and so that's damaging. I, I like the conservative preamble of the constitution, which describes the purposes of the, of the national government that's being established. There, there are seven, seven purposes, a more perfect union, which is the principle, the principle of cohesion, justice, domestic peace, common defense, the general welfare, which is, is the welfare of the public as a, as a thing that's not only individuals, but there is such a thing as a general welfare.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Liberty, which we agree is absolutely crucial, and posterity, the idea that the purpose of the government is to be able to sustain and grow this independent nation, and not only to guarantee rights, no matter what happens.

• 1:06:20Lex Fridman?

  But you don't like the, we hold these truths to be self evident. So you're definitely Beatles guy. You don't want the, you don't want the pompous, you don't need that revolutionary strength.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  Look, I, I just, I think that that expression, self evident truths, it does tremendous damage because it, it, it, instead of a moderate skepticism, which says, look, we may not know everything. It says, look, we know everything. Here it is. Here's what we know. We know.

• 1:06:48Lex Fridman?

  We don't know everything, but we think.

• 1:06:51Yaron Brook?

  So, so I, you know, I'll agree with you, Om. I don't like self evident. I don't like self evident because he's absolutely right. It's not self evident. These are massive achievements. These are massive achievements of, of enlightened thinking, of studying history, of understanding human nature, of deriving a truth from.

• 1:07:11Yaron Brook?

  Three thousand years of historical knowledge and a better understanding of human nature and a capacity, it's using reason in some ways better than any human beings have. I mean, the founding fathers are giants historically, in my view, because they came up with these truths. I do think they're truths, but they're certainly not self-evident. I mean, if they were, Yoram is right, they would have discovered them thousands of years earlier, or everybody would accept them, right? I mean, how many people today think that what they state in that document is true? Pretty much, you know, five people? I don't know. It's very, it's very-

• 1:07:48Lex Fridman?

  That's your criticism of modern society. Yes, we'll get there.

• 1:07:50Yaron Brook?

  It's very, very few people recognize that if they were self-evident, bam, everybody would have become, you know, would have accepted the American Revolution as truth, and that was it. A lot of work has to go into understanding and describing and convincing people about those truths. But I completely disagree with Yoram about this idea, or I'll voice my dissent, as we said.

• 1:08:14Lex Fridman?

  Register your official dissent.

• 1:08:16Yaron Brook?

  About, A, that this being two different revolutions, and B, that the American Revolution was at any similarity to the French Revolution.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  You know that Jefferson and Paine were, they were in France, running a different revolution.

• 1:08:30Yaron Brook?

  I know, but they were writing constantly. I mean, they were in communication with Madison. There was a lot of input going on.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  I know, and Jefferson's sitting there in Paris pulling his hair out because Madison, Madison has come under the influence of these nationalists and he can't believe it.

• 1:08:44Yaron Brook?

  The reality is that the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution is vast, and it is a deep philosophical difference. And it's a difference that expressed, I think, between the differences. You know, Yoram, in his writings, lumps Rousseau with Locke and with Voltaire and with others. And I think- I think that's wrong. I think Rousseau is very different than the others. I think, again, Rousseau is an anti-enlightenment figure. Rousseau is in many respects harkening back to a past, an ancient past, and I think a completely distorted view of human nature, of human mind. He ejects reason. I mean, Rousseau is on the premise that reason is

• 1:09:27Yaron Brook?

  the end of humanity. Reason is the destruction of humanity. Reason is how we get civilization. And civilization is awful.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  I don't disagree. We're only talking about different texts. When I say, I'm just talking about the social contract.

• 1:09:41Yaron Brook?

  Yeah, but the social contract, there's similarity between others, but he takes it in a completely different direction. And we agree, social contract is a bad idea. But you can't have a contract that you don't actually voluntarily accept. But Rousseau is the French Revolution. Rousseau is about destruction and mayhem and chaos and anarchy. He is the spirit behind the French Revolution. I think the American Revolution is a complete rejection of Rousseau. I think Jefferson is a complete rejection of Rousseau. I don't think Jefferson is a fan of Rousseau. He is of Voltaire, and he certainly is of Montesquieu. If you look at any, if you look at the Federalist Papers, the intellectual most cited in the Federalist Papers, I think, in terms of this, the number of times it's cited, is Montesquieu, you know. So I think that the American Revolution is an individualistic revolution. It is a

• 1:10:26Yaron Brook?

  revolution about the rights of the individual. The French Revolution is a negation of the rights of the individual. It's a collectivistic revolution. It's not quite the Marxist revolution of the proletarian, but it's defining people in classes, and it's a rebellion against a certain class, and yeah, kill them all, right? Off with their heads. And it is a negation. It's about egalitarianism in a sense of equality of outcome, not in a sense of equality before the law, or equality of rights, which is the Jeffersonian sense. So I think it's wrong to lump Jefferson in to the fraternity, you know, egalitarian notion

• 1:11:06Yaron Brook?

  of the French, which is far more similar to what ultimately became socialism and Marxism and kind of that tradition. It's anti-individualistic, the French Revolution is, whereas the American Revolution, the first one, is individualistic. It's all about individual rights. And while there's certain phrases in the Declaration of Independence that I don't Agree with, you know, it's beautifully written and it's a magnificent document. So it's hard for me to say I don't agree. Who am I, right? These were, these were giants. Self-evident is one of them. You know, I'm not particularly crazy about endowed by the Creator. But I like the fact that it's Creator and not God or not a specific Creator, but just it kind

• 1:11:50Yaron Brook?

  of a more general thing. But putting those two ashes aside, it's the greatest political document in all of human history, in my view, by far. Nothing comes close. It is, it is a document that identifies the core principles of political truism, of truth. That is, the role of government is to preserve and to protect these rights, these inalienable rights. And that is so crucial that these rights are inalienable. That is, a majority can't vote them out, you know, Revelation can't vote them out. This is, this is what is required for human liberty and human freedom. The right, that is, the sanction, the freedom to act on your own behalf, to act based on

• 1:12:32Yaron Brook?

  your own judgment, and as long as you're not, you know, interfering with other people's rights, you are free to do so. That is such a profound truth. And that, to me, is the, is the, is the essence of political philosophy. That's the beginning, you know, and, and it's, it's based on, just, just to not fall into, you know, I'm just gonna say it's a rationalist. It's based on a whole history of what happens when we negate that. It's based on looking at England and seeing to the extent that they practiced a respect for individual liberty, of property, of, of, of freedom, good things happened. So let's take that all the way. Let's not compromise on that. Let's, let's be consistent with the good and reject the bad.

• 1:13:14Yaron Brook?

  And when England goes away, distanced itself from the rights of man, from the idea of, of a right to property and so on, bad things happen. And when they go to, let's go all in. And I'm, I'm all in on, on the right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. And I think the idea of pursuit of happiness is profound because it's a moral statement. It's a statement that says, that sanctions and, and, and says that ultimately people should be allowed to Make their own judgments and live their lives as they see fit based on how they view happiness. They might be right, they might be wrong, but we're not going to dictate what happiness entails and dictate to people how they should live their lives. We're going

• 1:13:55Yaron Brook?

  to let them, let them figure that out. So it has this self-interested moral code kind of embedded in it. So I think it's a, it's a beautiful statement. So I think the declaration is key. And I, I, I think there was an experiment and the experiment was post, in that period of, of, before the constitution, where the experiment was, let's let the states, let's have a kind of a loose confederation. Let's, the states experiment with, with setting up their own constitutions and role of government, and we won't have any kind of unity. And I think what they realized, and I think even Jefferson realized, is that that was not workable because many of the states were starting to significantly violate rights.

• 1:14:39Yaron Brook?

  There was nothing to unify, there was nothing to really protect the, the vision of the declaration. You needed to establish a nation, which is what the constitution does. It establishes a nation. But the purpose of that was to put everybody under one set of laws that protected rights. The, the, the focus was still on the protection of rights. And I agree with six of the seven of the principles, right? And I, and

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Which, which did disagree?

• 1:15:08Yaron Brook?

  The common welfare, which, which, the general welfare, which I worry about, right? I think in the way the founders understood it, I think I probably agreed with it. But it's such an ambiguous

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  I'm sure you don't agree.

• 1:15:18Yaron Brook?

  Maybe don't, maybe I don't. Can you state the general welfare principle? Well, the idea that part of the role of government is to secure the general welfare is something, is something

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  Look, this is something we, we didn't get to it in the debate. We really should have, is the question of whether there is such a thing as a, a common good or a public interest or a national interest or a general welfare. Do these words, do these terms mean anything other than the good of all of the individuals in the country? That, that's an, sorry.

• 1:15:48Yaron Brook?

  Yeah. So, so, so that's right. So that's why, so I object to it because I think it's too easy to interpret it as. So I interpret it as Well, what's good for, you know, a general, a group, a common, uh, uh, uh, people are just a collection of individuals. So what's good for the individual is good for the common welfare. But I understand that that is a, that's something that is hard for people to grasp and, and not the common understanding. So I, so I, I would have skipped the general welfare in order to avoid the fact that now the general welfare includes the government telling you what gender you should be assigned. So, so I would have, I would have wanted to have skipped that completely. Um, so I think the, the constitution is completely consistent with the, the declaration with a few exceptions, the general welfare, but you know, perfection

• 1:16:32Yaron Brook?

  is, uh, is, is a difficult thing to find, particularly for me, right? Politically. But it's, it's a magnificent document, the, the constitution. It doesn't quite rise to the level, I think, of the declaration, but it's a magnificent document. Because, you know, and this is the difference, I think, with, between the English constitution. Here's, here's what I see as the difference. The difference is that the, the constitution is written in the context of why do we have a separation of powers, for example? We have a separation of powers in order to make sure that the government only does what the government is supposed to do. And what is the government supposed to do? Well, fundamentally, it's supposed to protect rights. I mean, all of those seven, or at least six of the seven, are about protecting rights. They're about protecting us from foreign invaders, they're

• 1:17:14Yaron Brook?

  about protecting, uh, you know, peace within the country. They're about preserving this protection of rights. And why do we have this separation to, so, so that we make sure that no one of those entities, the executive or the legislature judicial, can violate rights? Because there's always somebody looking over their shoulder. There's always somebody who can veto their power. But there's a purpose to it. And that purpose is clearly, uh, uh, signified and characterized. And that's why I think the Bill of Rights was written in order to add to the clarification of what exactly we mean. What is the purpose? The purpose is to preserve rights. Um, and that's why we need to, to elaborate what those rights. And, and Madison's objection to the Bill of Rights was to say, not that he objected to having, uh, uh, protection of rights.

• 1:17:58Yaron Brook?

  But to listing them because he was worried that other rights that were not listed would not be, and his worry was completely justified because it's exactly what's happened. It's like, the only reason we have free speech in America is we've got it in writing as a First Amendment. If we didn't have it in writing, it would have been gone a long time ago. And the reason we don't have, for example, the freedom to negotiate a contract, you know, independent government regulation is that was not listed as a right in the bill, even though I think it's clearly covered under the Constitution and certainly under the Declaration. So there was a massive mistake done in the Bill of Rights. They tried to cover it with the Ninth Amendment, but it never really stuck, this idea that non-enumerated rights that are still in place. So I don't see this as a second revolution.

• 1:18:43Yaron Brook?

  I think it's a fix to a flaw that happened. It's a fix that allowed the expansion of the protection of rights to all states by creating a national entity to protect those rights. And that's what ultimately led to slavery going away. You know, under the initial agreement, slavery would have been there in perpetuity because states were sovereign in a way that, under the new Constitution, they were not. And in a sense, the Constitution sets in motion, the Declaration and then the Constitution set in motion, the civil war. The civil war has to happen because at the end of the day, you cannot have some states with a massive violation of rights.

• 1:19:27Yaron Brook?

  What's more of a violation of rights than slavery? And some states that recognize it's not, it inevitably leads to the civil war.

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  Yorin was just saying that, you know, other than the general welfare, these principles are about individual liberties. I just don't think you can read it that way. The first stated purpose of the Constitution of 1787 is in order to form a more perfect union. A more perfect union, it's describing a characteristic of the whole. It is not a characteristic of any individual. If you look at how the individuals are doing, you don't know whether their union is more or less perfect. So what they're doing is they're looking at the condition in which, in order to be able to fight the Battle of Yorktown, they have to, somebody has to write a personal check in order to be able to move armies. A more perfect union is a more cohesive union.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  It's the ability to get all of these different individuals to do one focused thing when it's necessary to do it.

• 1:20:27Yaron Brook?

  Well, it's it's more than that, right? So I agree with that. But for what purpose? That is, and this is why, you know, this is why it's so hard with these historical documents. Because there's a, there's a context and there's a thinking that they can't write everything down, right? Which is sad, because I wish they had. What's the purpose of a more perfect union? The purpose of the more perfect war union is to preserve the liberty of the individuals within that union.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  But how do you know?

• 1:20:51Yaron Brook?

  And because, because if you look, what's the rest? So what is the common defense? The common defense is, is to protect us from foreign invaders who would now disrupt what the rest of the constitution is all about. All of the constitution is written in a way as to preserve, find ways to limit the ability of government to violate the rights of individuals. That, the, the, the beauty of this constitution, and again, its connection to the declaration and, and tradition, right? What came before it? What came before it was a, was a document which they all respected, which was the declaration, which set the context for this. And now the union is there in order to provide for the common defense. Great, because we know that foreign invaders can violate our rights. That's what war is about.

• 1:21:33Yaron Brook?

  To, to protect us from peace, to establish peace and justice within the country. That's based on law, the rule of law, and, and again, uh, uh, individual liberty. So, to me, when you read the founders, when you read the Federalist Papers, when you read what they wrote, what they're trying to do is figure out the right kind of political system, the right kind of structure to be able to preserve these liberties. And, and not all of them had a, from my perspective, a perfect understanding what those liberties entailed. But they were all, even the conservatives that you call conservatives, were all in generally in agreement about the importance of individual liberty and the importance of individual.

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  Of course, because almost all of these rights are traditional English rights. They exist in the English Bill of Rights and the English Petition of Rights. They exist in.

• 1:22:22Yaron Brook?

  Of course, of course.

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  All of these are.

• 1:22:23Yaron Brook?

  And what they're trying to do is perfect that. They're trying to take the British system and perfect it. And what

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  But you you keep leaving out that that they want to be like England in that they want to have an independent nation. An independent nation is is not a collection of individual liberties. An independent nation, the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence is the Declaration that there is a collective right, that we as a people are breaking the bonds with another people, and we're going to take our place, our equal station among the nations of the earth.

• 1:22:53Yaron Brook?

  That for what purpose? The purpose is to protect individual rights, and there's no collective rights.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  No, your your your argument is completely circular. You're not allowing the possibility that there could be that there could be great and decent men that you and I both admire, who wanted the independence of their nation, not not because that would give individuals liberty, but because the independence of their nation was itself a great good.

• 1:23:19Yaron Brook?

  So we clearly disagree on this, because I I don't think the independence of the nation is a good in of itself, because it's and and this is what

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  But did they think it was?

• 1:23:27Yaron Brook?

  I don't think they did. I and this is why they tried so hard not to break from England, and and why many of them, many of them, uh, struggled, really, really struggled with with having a revolution, because England was pretty good, right? English was the England was the best. And this is where I, you know, we should get to the universality of these things, because I I do think England was the best, and universally and and and absolutely was the best system out there. And what they were, they struggled to break from England, because they didn't view the value of having a nation as the primary. But what they identified in England is certain flaws in the system that created situations in which their rights were being violated. So they figured the only option in order to secure these rights is to break away from

• 1:24:12Yaron Brook?

  England and secure a nation. Now, I am not an anarchist, as Michael Malice. Because we've discussed it. I believe you need nations. You need nations to secure those rights. That is, the rights are not, you can't secure those rights without having a nation. But the nation is just a means to an end. The end is the rights, and I think that's how the founders understood it, and that's why they created this kind of country.

• 1:24:36Lex Fridman?

  I think this is a good place to ask about common welfare and cohesion.

• 1:24:41Lex Fridman?

  Let me say what John Donne wrote, that quote, "No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." He went on, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore, never sent to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee." So, let's talk about individualism and cohesion, not just at the political level, but at a philosophical level, for the human condition. What is central? What is the role of other humans in our lives? What's the importance of cohesion? This is something you've talked

• 1:25:26Lex Fridman?

  about. So, Yaron said that the beauty of the founding documents is that they create a cohesive union that protects the individual freedoms. But you have spoken about the value of the union, the common welfare, the cohesion in itself. So, can you maybe elaborate on what is the role of cohesion and the collective, not to use that term, but multiple humans together, connected in the human condition?

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  Sure. I keep getting the feeling that Yaron and I are actually having a disagreement about empirical reality, because I think that Enlightenment rationalist political thought features the individual, it features the state. There isn't really a nation other than the nation, the people is, as a collective, is created by the state. And when the state disappears, then the collective disappears. Now, I think that when conservatives of all stripes look at this kind of thinking, that there's the individuals, and then there's the state, and there really isn't anything else. When they look at that, they say, even

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  before you get to consequences, it's a terrible theory, because when we try to understand any field of inquiry, any domain, any subject area, when you try to understand it... We try to come up with a small number of concepts and of relations among the concepts, which is supposed to be able to explain, to illuminate as much as possible the important things that are taking place in the domain. And conservatives look at this, individuals and the state, and they say, "You're missing most of what's going on in politics, also in personal human relations as well."

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  But it just doesn't look like a description of human beings. It looks like a completely artificial thing. And then conservatives say, "Well, look, when you adopt this artificial thing, then the consequences are horrific because you're not describing reality." So a conservative reality begins with an empirical view of what are human beings like. And the first thing you notice about human beings, or at least the first thing I think conservatives notice, is that they're sticky, is that they clump, they turn into groups. And you take any arbitrary collection of human beings and set them to a task, or even just leave them alone, and they quickly form into groups, and those groups are always structured as hierarchies.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  There's this competition within the hierarchy, who's going to be the leader, who's going to be number two. But everywhere you look in human societies, universally, there are groups, the groups compete, and they're structured internally as hierarchies, and then there are internal competitions for who leads the different groups. And when we think about scientific explanation, we allow that there are different levels of explanation, that a macroscopic object like a table, it doesn't have properties that can be directly derived from the properties of the atoms, or the molecules, or the microfibers that make up the table.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  And that's understood, that there's what academic philosophers call emergent properties, that when you get up to the level of the table, it has properties like that you can't put your fist through it, which you can't necessarily know just by looking at the atoms alone. And I think conservatives say the same thing is true for political theory, for social theory, that looking at an individual human being and thinking about what does that individual human being need, which Euron does very eloquently in his writings. But that doesn't tell you what the characteristics are of this hierarchically structured group. As soon as you have that, it has its own qualities. So, an example, the question of what holds these groups together.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  And we need to answer that question. I try to answer it by saying there's such a thing as mutual loyalty. Mutual loyalty is shorthand for human beings. Individuals have the capacity to include another individual within their self, within their conception of their self. When two people do it, it creates a bond, like a bond between two atoms creates a molecule. That doesn't mean that they lose their individuality. Within the group, they may still continue competing with one another. But that doesn't mean that there isn't, in reality, a bond. And that real bond is the stuff of which political events and political history are

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  made, is the coming together, the cohesion, and the dissolution of these bonded loyalty groups. That's the reality of politics. And so, when I hear these discussions about individuals in the state, I feel like we're missing most of the reality. And in order to understand the political reality, we need to understand what makes human beings coherent to groups, what makes them dissolve, what makes the groups come apart and end up creating civil wars and that kind of thing. I think we also need to know, in practice, rival groups do come together and bond.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  I mean, basically, when we think about democratic society, we're talking about different groups. We can call them tribes, or you can come up with a different name. But different tribal groupings with different views, they come together to form a nation. And they're able to do that even though, you know, often they hate each other. You know, like, like we were talking about the, the American Revolution and often they hate each other. And nevertheless, they're able to come together. Why, how? And that leads us into questions like, how does honor, the giving of honor by one group to another? How does that increase the, the mutual loyalty between groups that, that are still competing with one another?

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  All of these questions, I think we have to answer them in, in order to be able to talk about politics. And, and, and I think the reason, the first reason why, why, why one should approach politics as a conservative rather than as an individualist is because it gives us, gives us these, these theoretical tools to be able to talk about reality, which we don't have as long as we keep within the individualist framework.

• 1:32:08Lex Fridman?

  As, as you're talking, the metaphor that's popping up into my mind, and this is also something that bothers me with theoretical physics. The metaphor is, there's some sense in which there's things called theories of everything. We try to describe the basic laws of physics, how they interact together. And once you do, you have a sense that you understand all of reality. In, in a sense, you do. And that to me, when you, that, that to me is understanding the individual, like how the individual behaves in this world. But then you're saying that they're, hey, hey, you're also forgetting chemistry, biology, how all of that actually comes together, the stickiness, the stickiness of molecules

• 1:32:52Lex Fridman?

  and how they build different systems and they, some systems can kill each other, some systems can flourish, some can make pancakes and bananas and some can make poison and all those kinds of things. And we need to be able to, we need to consider the, the full stack of things that are constructed from the fundamental basics. And I guess you're on, you're saying that, no, you.

• 1:33:19Lex Fridman?

  You're just like the theoretical physicist. It's all starts at the body. Like if you need to preserve the fundamentals of reality, which is the individual, like the the basic atom of human society is the individual to you.

• 1:33:35Yaron Brook?

  So, yes, so the the basic unit, the basic moral unit, the basic ethical unit in society is the individual. And yeah, of course, we form groups. And and you can't understand history unless you understand group formation and group motivation. And and and I have a view about what kind of groups should be formed. And and politically, from a political perspective, voluntary ones, ones in which we we join when we want to join and we can leave when we want to leave. And ones that help us, and clearly groups help us, pursue whatever it is our goal is ultimately. So so in the pursuit of happiness, there are lots of groups that one wants to form, whether it's marriage, whether it's businesses,

• 1:34:20Yaron Brook?

  whether it's sports teams, whether it's lots of there are lots of different groups we want to form. But they but the the question is, what is the standard of well being? Is it the standard well being some algorithm that maximizes the well being of a group? You know, some utilitarian function, you know? Is it? Is it something that's inherent in the group that we can measure as goodness and to help with the individuals within? As long as we can get that that the group to function well, we don't really care about where the individuals are. So to me, the the the the goal of creating groups is the well being of the individual. And that's why it needs to be voluntary. And that's why there has to be a way out of of those. Sometimes it's costly. It's not a cheap out.

• 1:35:04Yaron Brook?

  That's why you should really think about what groups you you you. And this, you know, on an issue that's very controversial, maybe we can discuss, maybe not. This is why, to me, immigration is so important, right? Open immigration or freer immigration is because that's another group that I would like people to be able to voluntarily choose, both in and out. And and I'd like to see people be able to go and join that group that, you know, that they believe will will allow for the pursuit of happiness. But let me say that, you know. That's a description of an ideal, what I'm just saying, right? I recognize that that's not the reality in which we live. I recognize that that's not the reality in which history, history. You know, recognizing that such as that the individual exists in a sense philosophically is a massive achievement.

• 1:35:48Yaron Brook?

  Right? You know, human beings, however they evolved, clearly we started out in a tribal context in which individual did matter. We followed the leader, the competition was for power, power over the group and dictates how the group should work. You know, the history of human beings is a history of gaining knowledge and part of the knowledge is the value of an individual and you can see that in religion, you can see that in philosophy, you can see that through the evolution and then, you know, we evolved from tribes into nations and then empires and conflicts between nations and conflict between empires and we tried a lot of different things, if you will, I don't think we always did on purpose, but

• 1:36:32Yaron Brook?

  we kind of did different philosophies, different sets of ideas drove us towards different collectives, different groupings and different ways in which to structure. And after, I don't know, 3,000 years of kind of known history, it's history before that, but we don't know much about it. 3,000 years of known history, you can sit back and evaluate. And I think that's what that's what is done in the Enlightenment and you sit back and suddenly we can do it today. We can sit back and evaluate what promotes human flourishing and what doesn't. And what do we mean by human flourishing? Who's flourishing? Well, individual human beings. Now, since I don't believe in a zero sum world and the world is not zero sum, we can see that. It's empirically possible to show that the world is not a zero sum game.

• 1:37:17Yaron Brook?

  My flourishing doesn't come at your expense. So I, you know, I can show that a system that promotes my flourishing will probably promote your flourishing as well and promotes the general welfare in that sense because it promotes individuals flourishing. And we can, we can look at all these. Examples of how we evolved and what leads to bloodshed and what doesn't and and and and what promotes this ability to flourish as an individual, again, an achievement, the idea of individual flourishing. And then we we can think about how to create a political system around that, a political system that recognizes and allows for the formation of groups, but just under the principle of voluntary. You can't be forced to join a group.

• 1:38:00Yaron Brook?

  You you can't be coerced into forming a group other than the fact that you're born in a particular place, in a particular, you know, that in a sense, but that's not forced. That's, there's a difference between metaphysics and between choices.

• 1:38:12Lex Fridman?

  So this is something that came up in the debate, that Yoram said that not all human relations are voluntary, and you kind of emphasized that a lot of where we are is not voluntary. We're grounded, we're connected in so much. So how, how can a human be free in the way you're describing, individual be free if some part of who we are is not voluntary, some part of who we are is other people?

• 1:38:38Yaron Brook?

  Well, because what do we mean by freedom? Freedom doesn't mean the negation of the laws of physics, right? Freedom doesn't mean ignoring, freedom means the the ability within the scope of what's available for you to choose, being able to choose those things. So, and in in in a political context, freedom means, you know, the negate, the the absence of coercion. So once you're an adult, you know, Yoram says, you're born with a particular, into a particular religious context. Absolutely, but once you're an adult, I think it's incumbent on you to evaluate that religious context and and and and look at different religions or non-religion or whatever, and

• 1:39:19Yaron Brook?

  choose your philosophy of life, choose your values, choose how you want to live your life. That's the freedom. The freedom is, one, one system says, you're either coerced by the state or coerced by the group or coerced by society around you to follow a particular path. Or your, your, um, the expectation is, the demand is, the, the pressure is to conform to a particular path. And my view is, no, you, you should be in a position to be able to choose your path. And, and that choice means you look around, you, you, you, you evaluate, you evaluate based on history, based on knowledge, based on, on all of these things, and you choose what that path would be. That's fundamentally what, what freedom means.

• 1:40:03Yaron Brook?

  Yes, you cannot choose your parents, but of course not. No, nobody would claim that that's within the scope of what is possible.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  I, I think that, I think the coercion, freedom dichotomy, these are too few concepts. Coercion and freedom, it's too simplistic to be able to describe what we're actually dealing with. The traditional Anglo conservative view is that society has to be, it, it has to be ordered, it has to be disciplined. And there are two choices for how it can, can be ordered. One is that a people is, uh, by its own traditions, you would say voluntarily, but these are mostly inherited traditions, by its own traditions, it is, uh, it, it is ordered.

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  For example, people just in general will not go into somebody else's yard because that's, that's the custom here is we don't go into somebody else's yard without their permission. And so Fortescue, we're talking about, you know, 500 years ago already. So Fortescue says that the genius of the English people is that our government can be mild and apply very little coercion because the people are so disciplined. Now, when, when he says the people are so disciplined, what he's saying is, is that, that our, our, our nation, our tribes, we have strong traditions which channel people, you know, through, through tools of being honored and dishonored.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  Now, that's a reality that exists in every society, and it's, it's not captured by your distinction between coercion and lack of coercion. When, when, when, when I'm going to be dishonored if, if I don't, if I don't care for, for, for, for my aging mother, I'm not being coerced like the state comes and puts a gun to my head, but, but I am being pressured and being given guidelines.

• 1:41:57Yaron Brook?

  But I'm saying that's wrong, and I'm saying that's dangerous because, because that could easily be used. For bad traditions.

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  No, of course it is.

• 1:42:07Yaron Brook?

  Well, but that's, but what's the standard by which we evaluate what a good tradition is a bad tradition?

• 1:42:11Speaker 01

  You're, you're.

• 1:42:12Yaron Brook?

  The English.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  You're getting to the standard too fa- wait, wait. You're getting to the standard too fast. First, I want to know factually, is it true that all societies work like this? Because if it's true that all societies work like this, then saying, saying we should be free from it is, is just a fantasy.

• 1:42:26Yaron Brook?

  No, I say, so A, I don't think all societies work like this. I, I think much of what happened in America post founding in the 19th century didn't work like that. I think that's the genius of America. And I think what happened during the 19th century in the industrial revolution, what happened in the, in, in the 19th century, to some extent globally, but certainly in the United States, didn't work that way. It broke tradition. I think, I think all innovation breaks tradition. And I think that's what the genius of, of this country is and, and the post enlightenment world is. Uh, I think pre that tradition, they worked that way. And then the question is, do people understand why they do what they do? That is, I don't want people doing what I think is right.

• 1:43:07Yaron Brook?

  Just because I think it's right and I've, I, you know, and I've created a, a society in which, again, you know, yeah, okay. You, you know, somebody founded this country in a particular way, so we're just going to follow. I want people to understand what they're doing. So I want people to have a respect for property, not because it's a tradition, but because they understand the value of a respect for property. Um, I, I want people not to murder one another, not because it's a commandment, thou shall not murder, but because they have an understanding of why murdering is bad and wrong and, and bad for them and bad for the kind of world that they want to live in. That's, and I think that's what we achieve through enlightenment, through education, through, through,

• 1:43:46Yaron Brook?

  and where we don't treat people just as a, a blob, a tribe that just follows orders. But we now treat individuals as capable of thinking for themselves, capable for discovering truths, capable of, of, of figuring out their own values. And, and that's the big break between, and this is why, you know, this is the break, I think, that the declaration represents. The break between society that is based on tradition, following commandments, following rules.

• 1:44:15Yaron Brook?

  They are the rules because they are the commandments and a society where individuals understand those rules, understand, yes, it's now become a tradition, let's say, to to respect individual right, to respect property rights. But it's they're not following it because it's a tradition. They're following it because they understand what it is about it that that that makes it good. So that's the world, I think, that that we were on the process of evolving towards. And that is what got destroyed in the 20th century and and is certainly disappeared today. And I think that's a great tragedy is that we're evolving to a place where people understood the values that that that represent. And of course, the the danger with tradition is, it it, I mean, we'll agree, right? It's it's it's, yeah, it's it's OK to kill the Jew, right?

• 1:45:00Yaron Brook?

  Or it's OK to steal people's property if they are of a certain color of it, or it's OK to enslave. Those are all traditions. And yet, once you stop and say, but what are they based on? What is this right? Is this just based on some moral law? No, it's not. There's something wrong here. We can't achieve happiness and success if we follow these.

• 1:45:20Lex Fridman?

  You're talking about reason and tradition, but I think I would love to sort of linger on the on the stickiness of humans that you describe. Uh, so you kind of said this primary, the individuals is is is primary now is a great invention. But to me, it's not at all obvious that somehow that uh, the invention that humans have been practicing for very long time of the stickiness of uh, of community, of family, of love, it's that's that's not obvious to me that's that's not also fundamental to human flourishing and should be celebrated and protected.

• 1:46:04Yaron Brook?

  Of course.

• 1:46:04Lex Fridman?

  Now, the I suppose the argument you're making is when you start to let the state define what the stickiness, how the stickiness looks between humans. So you're really like the voluntary aspect. But I just want to sort of the the the observation is humans seem to be pretty happy when they form communities, uh, however you define that. So romantic partnership, family.

• 1:46:32Yaron Brook?

  Some communities. Some communities, people are miserable in other communities. So the nature of the community matters, right? We know this. We know that that some bondings are not healthy and not good for the individuals involved and they don't thrive. So I absolutely, I mean, I'm a lover, not a fighter, right? So I'm a huge believer in love. The whole philosophy, I think, is a love-based philosophy. I fight in order to love, right? So it's, love is at the core of all of this. And it's a love of life. It's a love of the world out there and it's a love of other people because they represent a value to you. So the stickiness is there. It's, you know, my point is, A, it should be chosen.

• 1:47:17Yaron Brook?

  It should be consciously chosen. And this is, I'm, put aside the state. Forget the state for a minute. Forget, forget coercion, forget all that. What I would encourage individuals to do, and this is where, you know, I'm not primarily a political, you know, interested in politics of the way I tend to talk most about that. I'm primarily interested in human beings and how they live, in a sense, and morality. And what I would urge individuals to do is to think about their relationships, to choose the best relationships possible, but to seek out great relationships because other human beings are an immense value to us. And, and, you know, when I write, you know, maybe you unquoted this or not, but I write that, you know, about the trader principle and trading.

• 1:48:03Yaron Brook?

  You know, it's easy and obvious to think of it as a materialistic kind of thing, you know, I get, you know, I do the chores this day and my wife does the chores the other day and we're trading. But trading is much more subtle than that and much more, can be much more spiritual than that. It's about the, the, the, the, the trading in, in emotions. It's about, it's about the, the way one sees each other, it's what one gets from one another. I think friendship is a form of trade. Now, I know that that seems to make it material, but I don't, I don't think it's of trade as a material thing. But friendship is incredibly important in life. Love is incredibly important in life. You know, having, having a group of friends is incredibly important in life. All of these are sticky and important.

• 1:48:46Lex Fridman?

  Okay. How can I try to be eloquent on this? So if you give people freedom. If you give people. Politics, yeah. Well, not politics, relations, relations. Relationships. So this is interesting because we have an interesting dynamic going on here in terms of beliefs. They're differing and there was interesting overlaps. But there is a worry, if you look at human history and you study the lessons of history and you look at modern society. If you give people freedom in terms of stickiness and human relations and so on, full. Like if you not give people freedom, emphasize freedom as the highest ideal.

• 1:49:28Lex Fridman?

  You start getting more Tinder, online dating, the sticking is dissolved, just like in chemistry. You start to have a gas versus a liquid, right? That that's the worry. So you have to, what you have to study what actually happens. If you emphasize that the stickiness, the bonds of humans is holding you back. The exercise of voluntary choice is the highest ideal. The danger of that is for that to be implemented or interpreted in certain kinds of ways by us flawed humans. That are not, I mean, you could say we're perfectly reasonable and rational, we can think through all of our decisions.

• 1:50:10Lex Fridman?

  But really, I mean, especially you're young, you get horny, you make decisions that are suboptimal, perhaps. So the the point is you have to look at reality of when you emphasize different things. So when you, when you talk about what is the ideal life, what is the ideal relations? You have to also think like, what are you emphasizing? I think you both agree on what's important, that community can be important, that freedom is important. But what are you emphasizing? And you're really emphasizing the individual and you're emphasizing, you're, you're emphasizing.

• 1:50:47Lex Fridman?

  More of the community, of the family, of the stickiness of the nation.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  Well, look, I don't want to deny the place of the individual. I think that that there really is a very great change in civilization when the books of Moses announce that the individual is created in the image of God. That's a step that's, as far as we know, without precedent before that in history. And to a very large degree, I mean, one of the kind of unspoken things going on is that Yaron and I really do agree on all sorts of things, I think, in part because we're both Jewish.

• 1:51:33Lex Fridman?

  You did say Yaron is basically Moses, yes.

• 1:51:39Speaker 01

  No, I said he was channeling Moses, but that's still, in my book, you know, that's still.

• 1:51:44Lex Fridman?

  Pretty impressive.

• 1:51:44Speaker 01

  That's a compliment. That's pretty. I took it as one.

• 1:51:48Speaker 01

  For me, that's a compliment.

• 1:51:49Lex Fridman?

  And we'll talk about this a little bit, just for the listeners, just so they know, Yaron, amongst many things, we'll talk about the virtue of nationalism. But you're also a religious scholar of sorts, or at least leverage the Bible for much, not much, but some of the wisdom in your life.

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  Look, the way that Yaron looks at enlightenment, or maybe at Ayn Rand, that's the way that I see the Hebrew scripture and the tradition that comes from it. It has the same kind of place in my life. And I just, I don't know how much we want to explore it, but I think that that the agreement that we do have about the positive value of the creative individual, the positive value of the individual's desire to improve the world. And in my book, that means including his or her desire to improve his family,

• 1:52:51Speaker 01

  his tribe, his congregation, his nation. But it still comes from this kind of, for what Yaron calls selfishness, the desire to make things better for yourself. In Hebrew Bible and in Judaism, That just is a positive thing. Of course, it can be taken too far, but it just is positive. And it doesn't carry these kinds of, you know, you should turn the other cheek, you should give away your cloak, you should love your enemy. These kinds of Christian tropes do not exist in Judaism. And so it just, I like listening to your answer. I do feel like he goes too far on various things, but, but I also hear, you know, underneath it, I can sort of, you know, hear, hear, hear the Jewish current and the resistance to, you

• 1:53:36Speaker 01

  know, to, to things that, about Christianity, the Jews often find.

• 1:53:41Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you a question there? Can you make an argument for turn the other cheek?

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:53:47Lex Fridman?

  I, I tend to, I guess you would equate that with altruism. I tend to.

• 1:53:54Yaron Brook?

  It's injustice. It's unjust to turn the other cheek.

• 1:53:57Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:53:58Lex Fridman?

  Hmm. Okay.

• 1:54:00Yaron Brook?

  You don't love yourself if you're turning the other cheek. It's, it's a lack of love, lack of self-respect.

• 1:54:04Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me push back on that because I'm, I, I like turn the other cheek, especially on Twitter. So.

• 1:54:13Speaker 01

  I like, I like block the offender on Twitter.

• 1:54:18Lex Fridman?

  No, what, so Twitter aside is more like you're, you, you're investing in the long-term version of yourself versus the short term. So that, that's the way I think about it's like the energy you put onto the world. The turning of the cheek philosophy allows you to walk through the fire gracefully. It's some sense. I mean, perhaps you would reframe that as not a, then that's not being altruistic or whatever, but there, there is something pragmatic about that kind of approach to life.

• 1:54:52Speaker 01

  Disciplining yourself so that you become a better version of yourself. I mean, I, not not only do we agree, but you know, I think, I think every religious and philosophical tradition probably has a version of that, even, even Kant, who we join together in finding to be terrible. Even Kant makes that distinction between the short-term interest and the long-term interest. So I, I think that's universal. I don't know. Of anybody who's really disagreeing about that. The thing that we were talking about a couple of minutes ago, before we got onto this tangent, is the relationship between the the individual who is in the image of God and is of

• 1:55:33Speaker 01

  of value as an individual. Nevertheless, there's this question about what is what is good for that person? And and also what makes him happy? I'm not sure that those are exactly the same things, but they're they're both certainly relevant and important. And I feel like, I mean, I think we're beginning to uncover this empirical disagreement about what it is that's good for the individual and what it is that makes them happy. And I'll go back to something I raised. I raised in the debate, which is this this theory of Durkheim that now has been popularized by by Jordan Peterson. But Durkheim argues that

• 1:56:17Speaker 01

  that the he's writing a book on suicide. He's trying to understand what what brings individuals to suicide. And he coins this term, anomie, lack of law. And the argument is that that individuals basically are healthy and happy when they find their place in in a hierarchy, within a loyalty group, in a certain place in a hierarchy. They they compete and struggle in order to rise in the hierarchy, but they know where they are. They know who they are. The kids today like to say they know what their identity is because they associate themselves. They're self expansive to take on, you know, the leadership, the different layers, the past and the future

• 1:57:02Speaker 01

  of this this particular hierarchy. And I completely agree with Yaron that some of these hierarchies are pernicious and oppressive and terrible, and some of them are better. What we might disagree about is that that you can find human beings who are capable of becoming healthy and happy off by themselves without participating in in this kind of structure. The minute that you accept, if you accept. That this is empirical reality about human beings. It's an iron law. You can't do anything. You can tell human beings that they can be free of all constraints all you want,

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  and you can get them to do things that, as you say, dissolve their... They can have contempt for hierarchies. They can say, "I'm not going to serve the man. I'm just going to burn them all down." You can get them to say all... Get kids to say all of these things. You can get them either to be Marxists, who are actively trying to overthrow and destroy the existing hierarchies, or you can make them some kind of liberal, where they basically pretend the hierarchies don't exist. They just act like they're not there. In both cases, and it's not a coincidence that that's what universities teach, is your choice is either Marxist revolution or liberal ignoring of the hierarchies. In both cases, what you've done is you've eliminated

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  the possibility that the young person will be able to find his or her place in a way that allows them to grow and exercise their love, their drive, their creativity in order to advance something constructive. You've eliminated it, and you've put the burden on them, you know, kind of a Nietzschean burden, to just be the fountain of all values yourself, which, you know, maybe some people can do it, but almost no one can do it. And I think that's empirically true. And so I think by telling them about their freedom, rather than telling them about the need

• 1:59:14Speaker 01

  to join into some traditionalist hierarchy that can be good and healthy for them, I think we're destroying them. I think we're destroying this generation, and the last one, and the next.

• 1:59:25Lex Fridman?

  Yaron, is the burden of freedom destroying mankind?

• 1:59:32Yaron Brook?

  What freedom? I mean, how many people are indeed free? Look, the problem is that we're caught up on political concepts, and we're moving into ethical issues. And I don't think it's right to tell people, "You're free, go do whatever the hell you want." Just, just use your emotions, you know, just, just go where you wanna go. Well, you know, in the spur of the moment, think short term, don't think long term, or don't think. Why think? One has to provide moral guidance. And, and, and morality here is crucial and crucially important. And part of taking responsibility for your own life is establishing a moral framework for your life.

• 2:00:15Yaron Brook?

  And, and, and what does it mean to live a good life? I mean, that's much more important in a sense of, of a question. And it is, it is my belief that people can do that. They can find and choose the values necessary to achieve a good life, but they need guidance. They need guidance. This is why religion evolved, in my view, because people need guidance. So, so, so it says, you know, I had called religion a primitive form of philosophy. It was the original philosophy that provided people with some guidance about what to do and what not to do. And secular philosophy is supposed to do the same. And the problem is that I think religion and 99% of secular philosophy give people bad advice about what to do, and therefore they do bad stuff.

• 2:00:59Yaron Brook?

  And, and so that sometimes, you know, because when they do good stuff, it gets reinforced that we survive in spite of that. But ideas like Kant and Hegel and Marx and so on, give young people awful advice about how to live and what to do. And as a consequence, really bad stuff happens. And the world in which we exist today, which we agree, there are a lot of pathologies to it, there are a lot of bad stuff going on. In my view, is going the wrong way, in my view, are products of, of, of a set of ideas. You know, on the one hand, I think, I think Christian ideas, on the other hand, I think secular philosophical ideas, that have driven this country and the world more generally in a really, really bad direction.

• 2:01:44Yaron Brook?

  And this is why the, this is why what I do, what I do, because I think at the, at the core of it, the only way to change it is not to impose a new set of ideas from the top, because I worry about who's gonna be doing, doing the imposition. Plus, I don't believe you can, you can force people to be good. It's to challenge the ideas, it's to question the ideas, it's to present an alternative view of morality, an alternative set of moral principles, an alternative, ultimately, an alternative view of political principles. But it has to start with morality. If you don't, and my morality centered on the individual and what the individual should do with his life in order to attain a good life. I believe that leads to happiness, but the good life, that's why it's good, right?

• 2:02:27Yaron Brook?

  The goal is survival and thriving and flourishing and happiness ultimately. But politics is a servant of that in the end. It's not an end in itself. So the real issue is, you know, you asked before, what is the value of relationship? There's an almost value in relationship because we get values from other people. We don't produce all our values. We don't produce all our spiritual values and we don't produce all our material values. Other people are a massive benefit to us because they produce values. We can't, there's a massive division of labor in terms of values, not just in economics, but also in philosophy and elsewhere. It's why we have teachers, it's why we have moral teachers. Moral teachers are important to help guide us towards a good life. Not all of us are philosophers.

• 2:03:10Yaron Brook?

  But what I do demand, if you will, of individuals, this is where I put a burden on people, right? Understand what you're doing, right? You know, don't embrace a moral teaching because it was tradition. Don't embrace a moral teaching because your parents embraced it. Don't embrace a moral teaching just because your teachers are teaching it. Challenge it, think about it, embrace it because you embrace it. You might be wrong, you might embrace the wrong one, but take moral responsibility. Take responsibility over your life by evaluating, testing, challenging what you have received and choosing what you're, what you're going to pursue.

• 2:03:52Yaron Brook?

  And I acknowledge empirically that most people don't do that. And this is why intellectual leadership is so important. This is why you want to get, you want the voices in a culture to be good voices so that those people who don't think for themselves land up being followers, but they end up being followers of somebody good versus followers of somebody bad. For the thinkers in the world out there, who I think are the people who count, who the people who shape society. Oh, boy. No, no. Shape society. Wait a minute, not not count in a sense that you can dismiss the lives of others and, you know, because I'm, you know, obviously I'm anti-coercion and anti-violence. They sound like Plato. But, yes, I don't want to sound like Plato.

• 2:04:34Yaron Brook?

  But in a sense that that they're the ones who shape, who who land up shaping the world, they're the ones who who land up shaping how how the world be is. I want those people to make choices about their values and not to just accept them based on tradition or based on commandment or based on where they happen to grow up. And in that sense, again, you know, I I do, and this is, this is an interesting point where I we disagree, but I'm not exactly sure what your own position is. I do believe in universal values. That is, there are things that are good and there are things that are evil. And and I think we'd agree on that. And and there are systems, we agree that that communism and fascism are evil. Well, I think we should be able to agree that some things, that some political systems are good.

• 2:05:15Yaron Brook?

  And maybe there's this middle ground where we both think that they're not particularly bad, but not particularly good, and you might think that better than I think they are. But if we can agree, and this is good, and this is evil, right? Then the systems that tend towards the good are good, and the systems that tend towards the evil are evil. And and but that's universal, right? You know, I I I look at places like South Korea, Japan, Asia, you know, cultures that are very, very different in many respects in the West. And yet, when they adopt certain Western ideas, right, about freedom, about liberty, about individualism, I mean, the Japanese constitution, because MacArthur forced it in there, has the pursuit of happiness in the constitution, not because they chose it, because he put it in there.

• 2:06:00Yaron Brook?

  But they, to some extent, adopted that, and and they're they're successful, they're successful places today. Those societies in Asia that didn't adopt these values are not successful societies today.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  Japan has a birth rate of, what is it? 1.1, 1.2 children per woman? I mean, look, there are some things, there are some places where you give people freedom. This is also biblical, right? The idea that everyone did what's right in his own eyes. Okay, right, this is a refrain in the Book of Judges. And the Bible is not an anti-freedom book. I mean, there's many, many, look, I... No, we're not, fine.

• 2:06:48Lex Fridman?

  We'll get there. Okay. He's gonna guide this.

• 2:06:51Speaker 01

  Okay, look, just as an asterisk, I'm not asking you because, you know, because the Bible is such a great authoritarian book. It's not that at all. In my view, if you want to know where, you know, where this, what you call the sanctity of property, where does the sanctity of property comes from? It comes from the Ten Commandments. It comes from Moses saying, "I haven't taken anything from anyone." It comes from Samuel saying, "I haven't taken anything from anyone." It's the condemnation of Ahav, of the unjust kings, who steal the property of their subjects. So I'm not, so I'm, property and freedom, I think there's great basis for it in the Bible.

• 2:07:31Speaker 01

  But right now, I'm focusing on this other question, which is, what happens when everyone does what's right in his own eyes? That's the Book of Judges, and that's this civil war, moral corruption, theft, idolatry, murder, rape. I mean, that's what happens when everyone does whatever's right in his own eyes. Well, no, that's what it says in the text. I'm not, okay, so when I look at, you're right, there are things that I think are objectively true. I think it's really hard to get people to agree to them, almost impossible. But when I look at a country which is approaching one birth per...

• 2:08:17Speaker 01

  Woman, in other words, half of the minimum necessary for for for replacement. You can say whatever you want, whatever you want about immigration, we can have that discussion. But the point is that when when when your values are such that you're not even capable of of doing the most basic techniques that human beings need in order to be able to propagate themselves and their values and the way they see things, then I I look, you're you're finished. You can't say that you you can't.

• 2:08:46Yaron Brook?

  So if I implied that Japan is an ideal society, I I take that back.

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  But no, I just think that.

• 2:08:51Yaron Brook?

  But let's think about Japan for a minute.

• 2:08:52Speaker 01

  I just think we're in trouble and and we're in trouble.

• 2:08:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me a second. Hold up, hold you that.

• 2:08:58Yaron Brook?

  Being tutorial.

• 2:08:59Lex Fridman?

  No, I'm sorry.

• 2:09:00Speaker 01

  It's his show, man. We enter into his hierarchy and that's it.

• 2:09:04Yaron Brook?

  It's a we should talk about hierarchy.

• 2:09:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But no, um, just just to clarify, do you? How do you explain the situation in Japan? Is it the decrease in value in family, like some of the? Just expand on that. Like, how do you explain that situation? You you're saying that that society is in trouble in a certain way. Can you kind of describe the nature of that trouble?

• 2:09:27Speaker 01

  I'm saying that when the individual is part of a social group, this can be a family, a congregation, a community, a tribe, a nation. When the individual feels that the things that are happening to the society are things that are happening to him or to her. And I want to emphasize, this is not the standard view of collectivism that, you know, that Mussolini will Mussolini will say, you know, the glory of the individual is in totally immersing himself in, you know, in in in the organic whole. That that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that human beings have and are both.

• 2:10:06Speaker 01

  They enter into a society to which they are loyal and they compete with one another with uh uh in in the terms that that society allows competition, but also sometimes by bending the rules and by shaping them and by by by changing them. What you see in many societies, certainly throughout the liberal West, but also in countries that have been affected by the liberal West, by industrialization and ideas of individualism, what you see is a collapse of a willingness of the individual to look at what is needed by the whole and to make choices that are, as Yaron would call them selfish,

• 2:10:51Speaker 01

  because the purpose of them is self-expression, competition, self-assertion, moving up in the hierarchy, achieving honor or wealth in order to do those things. But when you stop being able to look at the framework of a particular society and identify with it, you cease to understand what it is that you need to do. Not every single person, but I'm talking about society-wide. So there are few individuals who are just going to have a fantastic time and live the kind of life that Yaron is describing. And the great majority, they stop being willing to take risks. They stop being willing to get married. They stop being willing to have children.

• 2:11:35Speaker 01

  They stop being willing to start companies. They stop being willing to put themselves out to do great things. Because the guide rails that told them what kinds of things and the social feedback that honored them when they did things like getting married and having children, they've been crushed. And what have they been crushed by? They've been crushed by the false view that if you tell the individual, "Be free, make all your own decisions," that they will then be free and make all their own decisions. They don't. They just stop. They stop being human.

• 2:12:08Lex Fridman?

  That's powerful. Do you want to respond to that?

• 2:12:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:12:12Speaker 01

  So I don't think anybody should have children. If the goal...

• 2:12:16Yaron Brook?

  There's a good tweet clip that you can make.

• 2:12:23Yaron Brook?

  I don't think anybody should have children for the goal of perpetuating their nation or expanding their society or for some, I think they'd make horrible parents if that was the goal, the purpose of doing it. I think people should have children because they want to embrace that challenge, that, that, that beauty, that experience, that amazing, very, very hard, very, very difficult experience in life. It's, it's, it's about being able to project a long term, but also being able to enjoy and love the creation of another human being, that process of creation. It is a beautiful, self-interested thing. And by the way, not everybody should have children. I think way too many people have

• 2:13:07Yaron Brook?

  children. You know, there's some awful parents out there that I wish would stop. I mean, there are, you know, life is precious and life of suffering is sad. It's sad to see people suffer and a lot of people are born into situations and are born into parents that destroy their capacity to ever live a good life. And that's, that's a tragic and sad thing. And so, so I don't measure the health of a society in how many children they're having or a health of a couple, whether they have children or not. Those are individual choices. Some people make a choice not to have children, which is completely rational and consistent with their values. And now, when you look at a society overall, I do

• 2:13:50Yaron Brook?

  think having children or not having children is a reflection of something. I think it's a reflection of a certain optimism about the future. I think it's a reflection of thinking long-term versus short-term. I think a short-term society doesn't have children. People don't have children there because children are a long-term investment. They require real planning and real effort and real thinking about the long-term. But those are moral issues. And again, we're confusing or mixing. When I say Japan, look how well Japan has done. I don't mean the specific Japanese people and how many kids they're having and what kind of life they're having, you know, in terms of these kind of particulars. But think about the alternatives Japan faces. If you look around the options, right, that they face.

• 2:14:35Yaron Brook?

  They tried empire, they tried nationalistic empire. It didn't turn out too well for them or anybody who they interacted with. They could have become North Korea. We know how that turned out. We know what that is. They could have been Cambodia. If you've ever been to Cambodia and seen the kind of poverty. And yes, maybe Cambodia has lots of children. But God, I'd rather be in Japan any day than have children in a kind of poverty and horrific circumstances they have. But in the context of the available regimes that were possible post-World War II for the Japanese embrace, they embraced one that generally led to prosperity, to freedom, to individuals pursuing values. Not perfectly, because they didn't implement the philosophical foundation,

• 2:15:20Yaron Brook?

  the moral foundation that I would like them to have. They're still being impacted by Kantian, Hegelian, whatever philosophy that's out there in the West that's destroying the better part. So you give people freedom, now what do they do with it? And if they have a bad philosophy, they're going to do bad things with that freedom. Right? You tell people to do whatever they choose to do. But if they have bad ideas, they will choose to do bad things. So it is true that the primacy of morality and the primacy of philosophy has to be recognized. It's not the primacy of politics. And indeed, you don't get free societies unless you have some elements of decent philosophy.

• 2:16:03Yaron Brook?

  But you can get free societies with a rotten philosophy, but they don't stay free for very long.

• 2:16:08Speaker 01

  I don't understand. How can it be a decent philosophy if it doesn't care about posterity? If you're willing to say, I'm offering guidance. I think you should live as a traitor. All relationships should be voluntary. Those are interesting things. But the moment that it comes to posterity, to the future, to there being a future. Let's say that there were a society that lived the way, you know, in general, according to your view. Let's say there was such a society. How can you not care whether that society is capable of passing it on to the next generation or not?

• 2:16:41Yaron Brook?

  But the way to pass it on to the next generation is through ideas and not through... Through having children, having children is an individual choice that some people are going to make and some people are not, but they're fundamental, that preserves the good life.

• 2:16:53Speaker 01

  What does that even mean?

• 2:16:55Yaron Brook?

  There's a sense in which.

• 2:16:56Speaker 01

  If, if, if, if every generation from now on, your, your, your society that was good at a certain point, has half as many people in it, it's going to, very quickly, it's just going to be overrun.

• 2:17:08Yaron Brook?

  Overrun by whom?

• 2:17:09Speaker 01

  What do you mean overrun by whom? Are we just totally ahistorical? If you're the Spartans and you have all of these, you know, like, like warrior values, but you stop having children, you get overrun, you get defeated.

• 2:17:20Yaron Brook?

  Well, in the case of Sparta, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. But I get it.

• 2:17:23Speaker 01

  That's not my point. You have to have the ability to have enough children to create enough wealth and enough power, enough strength.

• 2:17:30Yaron Brook?

  Who makes these kind of conclusions and decisions about how many? You make it as an individual and you decide that in order to.

• 2:17:37Speaker 01

  No, we're not talking about, we're talking about what kind of intellectual, cultural, religious inheritance you give your children.

• 2:17:44Yaron Brook?

  Yeah. And those are the ideas that I give my children. And those ideas are going to perpetuate because they're good ideas. If they're bad ideas.

• 2:17:51Speaker 01

  No, they're not going to perpetuate. They can be, they can't be good ideas if they don't produce future generations. What are you talking about?

• 2:17:58Yaron Brook?

  Why would they not produce future generations? I mean, as I said.

• 2:18:01Speaker 01

  Because look at every liberal, every liberal society on earth is in democratic collapse.

• 2:18:06Yaron Brook?

  There's not a single liberal society on earth today that I'm willing to defend.

• 2:18:10Speaker 01

  But.

• 2:18:11Yaron Brook?

  Because they're not living by my philosophy.

• 2:18:13Speaker 01

  Okay, so, okay, so.

• 2:18:13Yaron Brook?

  They've not accepted my ideas. They have a semblance, they have a semblance of a political system that is a little bit like what I would like, far from what I would ideal.

• 2:18:23Speaker 01

  I know all of this.

• 2:18:24Yaron Brook?

  But they certainly don't have a moral foundation. I believe that people who have the right moral foundation, most of them, not all of them, but most of them will have children, most of them will continue into the future, most of them will fight for a future, but not because they care what happens in 200 years, but because they care about their lifetime and part of having fun and enjoying one's lifetime is having kids, is projecting into the future.

• 2:18:49Speaker 01

  Are you really going to tell me that, that people have children because it's fun? They're fun when they're four years old. They're not fun when they're when they're fifteen.

• 2:18:57Yaron Brook?

  When they're fifteen, they're not fun.

• 2:18:58Speaker 01

  No, they're just not fun. Look, you don't do this.

• 2:19:01Lex Fridman?

  I'm learning so much today.

• 2:19:02Speaker 01

  You don't you don't do this for fun. You marriage also you don't do for fun. There are times that are fun and there are times that are not fun. Look.

• 2:19:10Yaron Brook?

  Fun is not exactly the right word, but you certainly do it for you do it for happiness. You do it for fulfillment. You do it as a challenge. You do it for making for making your life better. For making your life interesting, for making your life challenging, for embracing, you know, part of it is fun, part of it is hard work, but you do it because it's it it it's it makes your life a better life.

• 2:19:36Lex Fridman?

  It's very interesting. So empirically speaking, if you dissolve the cultural backbone where everybody comes up, like the background, the moral ideas that everybody is raised with, if you dissolve that and if you truly emphasize the individual. Uh, I think Yoram is saying it's going to naturally lead to the dissolution of marriage and all these concepts. So you're not so like everything, well, basically saying you're not going to choose some of these things. You're not you're going to more and more choose the short term optimization versus the long term optimization. Beyond your own life, like posterity. So.

• 2:20:15Yaron Brook?

  So I don't think about posterity. I don't know what posterity means, right? I can project into my children's life, maybe when I have grandchildren to grandchildren's life, but it ends there. I I can't project 300 years in the future. It it's ridiculous to try to think about 300 years into the future. Things change so much and and and.

• 2:20:31Speaker 01

  But that's the founding fathers. That's the conservative founding fathers.

• 2:20:34Yaron Brook?

  Well, no, I I don't think I think they set up a system. I think the whole idea was to set up a system that was self perpetuating that would it would if people lived up to it, right?

• 2:20:44Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 2:20:45Yaron Brook?

  Would perpetuate the self.

• 2:20:46Speaker 01

  No, no, systems are self perpetuating. Things rise and fall and it's.

• 2:20:50Yaron Brook?

  They don't necessarily rise and fall. I don't believe in that.

• 2:20:52Speaker 01

  Let me speak to your heart for a second. The the great the great individuals in societies are the people who have seen the decline, understood it. And provided resources in order to redirect and bring it back up. You can't agree to that?

• 2:21:08Yaron Brook?

  I don't see it that way at all. Yes, I want people out there to rebel against conventional morality. I think conventional morality is destructive to their own lives and broadly to posterity, because I think it's unsustainable, it's not good, and this goes to, I think, conventional morality is Christian morality. It's a morality that's been secularized through Christian lens, and I think it's destructive. But I don't want them to dump that and not replace it with something. I want, and I think it's necessary and essential for people to have a moral code. And to have a moral code, morality is a set of guidelines that live your life. It is a set of values to guide you, to help you identify what is good for you, what is bad for you.

• 2:21:50Lex Fridman?

  Here's the thing, let me argue against you, let me, hold on a second. You're saying central to this morality that people should have is reason.

• 2:22:00Yaron Brook?

  Yes.

• 2:22:00Lex Fridman?

  Okay. You're not saying other things, you're basically saying reason will arrive a lot of things. Why are you so sure that reason is so important?

• 2:22:10Yaron Brook?

  There's nothing else.

• 2:22:11Lex Fridman?

  No, hold on a second, but like, it seems like obvious to you. So first of all, humans have limited cognitive capacity. So even to assume the reason can actually function that well from an artificial intelligence researcher perspective.

• 2:22:26Yaron Brook?

  There's a whole discussion about whether there is such a thing as artificial intelligence, whether that is what it is.

• 2:22:32Lex Fridman?

  But see, here's the thing, I mean, you're very confident about this particular thing, but not about other aspects of human nature that seems to be obviously present. So yes, human relations, love, connection between us. So it's very possible to argue that all of the accomplishments of reason would not exist without the connection of other humans.

• 2:22:54Yaron Brook?

  But of course, that's true.

• 2:22:55Lex Fridman?

  It's not obvious, though. It's possible that reason is a property of the collective, of multiple people interacting with each other. When you look at the greatest inventions of human history, some people tell that story by individual inventors, you could argue that's true. Some people say that it's a bunch of people in a room together, the idea is bubbling. And if you're saying individual is primary, and they have the full power and the capacity to make choices, I don't know if that's necessarily obviously true.

• 2:23:27Yaron Brook?

  So there's a straw manning going on here of my position, right?

• 2:23:30Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 2:23:31Yaron Brook?

  Of course.

• 2:23:31Lex Fridman?

  My favorite thing to do.

• 2:23:34Yaron Brook?

  You don't do it and you do it more politely than anybody else I know when you do it. Of course, we all stand on the shoulders of giants. Of course, invention and science is collaborative. Not always, not a hundred percent. Newton stood on the shoulders of giants. I don't know how collaborative he was. He wasn't exactly known as a bubbling up and testing ideas out with other people. But this is a metaphysical fact. You can't eat for me. There's no collective stomach. You can't eat for me. You know, you can provide me with food, but I need to do the eating. You can't think for me. You can help stimulate my thought. You can challenge my thinking. You can add to it. But in the end of the day, only I can either do my thinking or not do my thinking, but I need to think.

• 2:24:19Yaron Brook?

  But you can think all by yourself alone. But what does that mean, all by yourself, right? Can I think on a desert island? Yes, I can think on a desert island. Can I think as big and as broad and as deep as I can in Aristotle's Lyceum? Of course not. I'm a much better thinker in Aristotle's Lyceum. Or in any kind of situation like this where you're going to challenge me and I have to come back and I have to think deeply about what it is you said and why I'm not communicating very effectively and why you're not understanding me. Of course, now you're causing me to think much more deeply and to challenge me. But it's still true that I have to think. And if I don't think for myself, who's going to think for me, right?

• 2:25:02Yaron Brook?

  So this is why, I'm not a philosopher. I'm certainly not an original thinker in that sense. You know, I recognize the fact that there are geniuses that are much smarter than me, whether it's Aristotle, Ayn Rand, or people that inspire me. I study their work. I try to understand it to the best of my ability, but I don't take it as gospel. I take it as, you know, this is something I need to figure out. I need to learn it. I need to understand it because it's good for my life. It's important to me. But I have to do the thinking. It won't be mine. It'll be behind me, but it won't be mine unless I've done the thinking to integrate it into my soul, into my consciousness, into my mind.

• 2:25:44Yaron Brook?

  But it's still true that I have to think for myself, not on a desert island. You know, and I now regret ever using a desert island in the book as an example because you because. We've achieved something. We've achieved something. There is progress. Progress towards truth is taking place. Clearly it was misunderstood. I didn't make myself clear enough in the book in terms of what I meant. But you know, I do not advocate for thinking alone in a dark room, not engaging with reality, not studying history, not knowing about the world, or on a desert island, not interacting with other people. No, I'm a trader. So I enjoy what we're doing right now because you're challenging me. You make me a better thinker.

• 2:26:29Yaron Brook?

  It's interesting, you know, the fact that a lot of people are going to watch this plays into it as well. But I would probably enjoy engaging with you in conversation.

• 2:26:38Lex Fridman?

  It's not even recording, so.

• 2:26:39Yaron Brook?

  Yeah, there you go. I would enjoy engaging with you or with you in conversation, even if it wasn't being recorded and even if it was because, you know, that kind of conversation makes me better. There's some people who I wouldn't. There's some people who make it worse, right? That you want to walk, that you walk away from the conversation because, because they're harmful to you. And this is where choice comes in. It's, I want to be able to choose who I engage with. I don't always have that choice because as a public intellect, you go in front of audiences, you don't always choose who it is. But you want to choose who you engage with and who you don't. You want to choose the forum in which you engage and how you engage. And the standard for me is reason. There is no other standard. So you asked a deep question to start off, why reason, right?

• 2:27:22Yaron Brook?

  Because that's where the values come from. That's the only tool we have to discover truth. Yes, you know, reason is something that it doesn't guarantee truth. It doesn't guarantee the world is right. It's fallible. But it's all we have. It's the tool in which we evaluate the world around us and we come to conclusions about it. There is, there just isn't other tool. Emotions, emotions are not tools of cognition.

• 2:27:48Lex Fridman?

  Consciousness is a tool. Emotion, like love, all of these things are ways to experience the world. To say that reason is the best tool.

• 2:27:58Yaron Brook?

  But there's a difference between experiencing the world. And evaluating the world in terms of what is truth or what is not.

• 2:28:04Lex Fridman?

  As a scientist, I appreciate the value of reason.

• 2:28:07Yaron Brook?

  And emotions and love are consequences. They're not primary. Emotions are consequences of conclusions you've come to. Your emotions will change very quickly, relatively speaking, when your evaluations of a situation will change. Different people can see exactly the same scene and have completely different emotions because they're bringing different value systems and they're bringing different thoughts to the process.

• 2:28:30Lex Fridman?

  Maybe love is primary, but let me ask.

• 2:28:33Yaron Brook?

  Love is the same thing. You can fall out of love with somebody. Why? Because you learned something new. Because you've discovered something new about the person. Now you don't love them anymore.

• 2:28:40Lex Fridman?

  This is the wrong podcast to bring up love. We'll talk forever about it. So, Yoram, you wrote the book, The Virtue of Nationalism, contrasting nation-states with empires and with global governance, like United Nations and so on. So you argue that nationalism uniquely provides the, quote, "the collective right of a free people to rule themselves." So continuing our conversation, why is this particular collection of humans, we call a nation, a uniquely powerful way to preserve the freedom of a people, to have people rule themselves?

• 2:29:18Speaker 01

  Before I say anything on the subject, I should emphasize that I'm not a rationalist. I'm an empiricist and I'm offering what I think is a valid observation of human history. I don't have some kind of deductive framework for proving that, you know, that the nation is the best. And empirically, we know something about the way systems of national states work and about the way empires work and the way tribal societies work. What we don't know is, you know, is it possible to invent something else? Or, I mean, there's a lot of things we don't know here. So. With the caveat that I'm making an empirical observation, the basic argument is

• 2:29:59Speaker 01

  human beings form collectives naturally, loyalty groups, and for most of human history and prehistory, as far as we know, human beings lived in tribal societies. Tribal societies are societies in which there's constant friction and constant warfare among very small groups, among families and clans. And we reach a turning point in human history with the invention of large-scale agriculture, which allows the creation of vast wealth. It allows the establishment of standing armies instead of militias. Sargon of Akkad says, "I can pay 5,000 men to do nothing other than to drill in the arts of war, and then

• 2:30:44Speaker 01

  I'm going to send them out to conquer the neighboring city-states, and there you have empire." The Bible, which is the source of our image, our conception of a world of independent nations that are not constantly trying to conquer one another, the source of that is the Bible. And the biblical world is one in which Israel and various other small nations are trying to fight for their independence against world empires, against empires Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, which aspire to rule the world.

• 2:31:25Speaker 01

  My claim is fundamentally twofold. It's moral that whenever you conquer a foreign nation, you're murdering and you're stealing, you're destroying. As your own would say, you're using force to cause people to submit. So there is something in the prophets that rebels against this ongoing atrocity and carnage of trying to take over the whole world. And there's a prudential, practical argument, which is that the world is governed best.

• 2:32:04Speaker 01

  When there are multiple nations, when they're free to experiment and chart their own courses, that means they have their own route to God, they have their own moralities, they have their own forms of economy and government. And what tends to happen in history is that when something is successful, when something looks like, when people, a different nation looks at it and say, while those people are, they're flourishing, they're succeeding, then it's imitated. And, you know, in the way that, you know, the Dutch invented the stock market, and the English said, look, that makes them powerful, so we'll adopt it. So that there's endless examples of that. So that's the argument for it. The argument

• 2:32:45Speaker 01

  is, since we don't know a priori, deductively from self-evident principles, what is best? It's best to have a world in which people are trying different things.

• 2:32:59Lex Fridman?

  So, a quick question, because the word nationalism sometimes is presented in a negative light in connection to the nationalism of Nazi Germany, for example. So, you're looking empirically at a world of nations that respect each other?

• 2:33:18Speaker 01

  I use the word nationalism the way that I inherited it in my tradition, which is, it's a principled standpoint that says that the world is governed best when many nations are able to be independent and chart their own course. That's nationalism as far as the Nazis. Hitler's an imperialist. He hated nation-states. His whole theory, if you pick up, I don't recommend doing this, but if you do-

• 2:33:43Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for reading it right now, Mein Kampf?

• 2:33:44Speaker 01

  Right. If you do read Mein Kampf, then you'll see that he says explicitly that the goal is for Germany to be the lord of the earth and mistress of the globe. And he detests the idea of the independent nation-state because he sees it as weak and effete. He might as well have said it's Jewish.

• 2:34:03Lex Fridman?

  So, let me ask, from the individual perspective, for nationalism, what do you make of the value of the love of country? The reason I connect that, so I, I personally, uh, what would you say, a patriot? I, I love the love of country. Or I am susceptible, or how should, in Iranian way, I enjoy, I in a self Love is good. Love is a good word. But well, well, I love a lot of things, but I'm saying this particular love is a little bit contentious, which is loving your country. That's an interesting love that some people are a little uncomfortable with.

• 2:34:45Lex Fridman?

  Uh, even when, especially when that love, you know, I grew up in the Soviet Union to say, you, you know, I, you, you just love the country. It represents a certain thing to you. And it's not, you don't think like philosophically, like I was, uh, marching around with, with like marks under my arm or something like that. It's just loving, uh, community

• 2:35:06Lex Fridman?

  at the level of nation. It's very interesting. I don't know if that's an artifact of the past that we're going to have to strip away. Um, I don't know if I was just raised in that kind of community, but I appreciate that. But my, I guess the thing I'm torn about is that love of country that I have in my heart, that I now love America and I consider myself an American. That would have easily, if I was born earlier, been used by Stalin. And I would have proudly died on the battlefield. I would have proudly died if I was in Nazi Germany as a German. And I would proudly die as an American.

• 2:35:44Speaker 01

  Are you sure about these things?

• 2:35:45Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:35:46Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 2:35:47Lex Fridman?

  No, I think about this a lot.

• 2:35:49Speaker 01

  It's interesting to run a radical counterfactual and be sure of the answer. I mean,

• 2:35:53Lex Fridman?

  Not sure.

• 2:35:54Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 2:35:54Lex Fridman?

  But I think about this a lot because obviously I'm really interested in history and I put my, this is the way I think about most situations is I empathize. I really try to do hard work of placing myself in that moment and thinking through it. I'm just, okay, I just know myself psychologically, what,

• 2:36:14Lex Fridman?

  what I'm susceptible to, uh, that's a negative way to phrase it, but what I would love doing. And so I'm just saying, my question is, um, is the love of nation a useful or a powerful moral?

• 2:36:31Lex Fridman?

  Sort of from a moral philosophy perspective, a good thing.

• 2:36:35Speaker 01

  I think it is a good thing, but before we ask whether it's a good thing, I think it's worth asking whether there's any way to live without it. The idea of national independence, of a world or a continent which politically is governed by multiple independent national states, that is a political theory. Somebody came up with that, you know, in the Bible or elsewhere. Someone came up with this idea and sold it and a lot of people like it. But the nation is not an invention. It, every place in human history that we have any record of, there are nations.

• 2:37:12Speaker 01

  And so the, the, the fact of people creating families, families creating an alliance of, of, of clans, clans creating alliances of tribes, tribes creating alliances of, and, and an alliance that becomes the nation, we see that everywhere in human history, everywhere we look. And the love of a group of tribes that have come together in order to fight opponents that are trying to destroy your way of life and, you know, and steal your land and, and, and harm your women and children.

• 2:37:52Speaker 01

  The, the, the love of, of the leadership that brings it together here, this is, you know, a George Washington type figure, or an Alfred the Great type figure, or, or Saul, the biblical Saul, somebody who has the, the wisdom, the daring to unite the tribes, overcome their, their, you know, their, their, their internal mutual hatreds and grievances, and rally them around a set of ideas, a language, a tradition, a, a, an identity, as people say today. That love is iradicable from human beings. Maybe we'll have a brave new world, people will take drugs in order to get rid of it.

• 2:38:34Lex Fridman?

  The problem is that could be leveraged by authoritarian or.

• 2:38:37Speaker 01

  Yes, but that's true of everything. It's like saying, you know. You can have children and you can teach them to be evil. You can make a lot of money, it can use it for evil. You can have a gun for self-defense, but you can use it for evil. Come on, that's human, that's being human.

• 2:38:51Yaron Brook?

  But you guys are making love this primary, which I don't think it is. There are lots of people. How dare you, you're on. I know, there are lots of people in the world out there who don't love their nation. Because the nation is not worth loving. That is, love is conditional. It's not unconditional. Love is conditioned on the value that's presented to you. You know, so I lived through this experience in my own life. I was, I grew up in Israel at a time of everything was geared towards patriotism and the state. I would say I was trained to, when I saw a grenade, to jump on it. Because that was, you know, every song and every story and everything was about the state is everything and you should sacrifice.

• 2:39:36Yaron Brook?

  And you know, when the flag went up, I got teary eyed. I mean, I bought into it completely.

• 2:39:44Yaron Brook?

  And at some point, I rejected that. And I changed, and I changed my alliance. And I rejected my love of Israel. It's not that I don't love it anymore, but it's certainly not my top love. And it's certainly, I'm certainly not looking for the grenade to jump on. And I'm not volunteering to go fight the war there. And I fell in love from a distance with the idea of America. I love the idea of America more than I love America, right? And I could see myself falling in love, out of love with America, given where it's heading, right? It's not automatic. It's conditioned on what it is that it represents and what it is, what value it represents for me. You know, and I think that's always the case with love. You know, it's not true that children have to love their parents.

• 2:40:29Yaron Brook?

  That's the ideal, and hopefully, most children love their parents because their parents. But some children fall out of love with their parents because their parents don't deserve their love. And the same with this, the same with the other way around. I think, I think parents are capable of not loving their children. So it's, it's, love is a, is a conditional thing. It's not automatic, but, but let me, let me point out an agreement with, let me say something of an agreement.

• 2:40:51Speaker 01

  You're trying to bribe me with an agreement. Okay. To soften the blow. Mostly I like to talk to Yaron about his ideas and I don't want to talk about Ayn Rand, but I want to say something. Just, just one, one thing about Ayn Rand. Uh, all my kids, all my kids read Ayn Rand's books. My father read The Fountainhead. I don't know, like, you know, like, we, we know Ayn Rand and um, I, I'll tell you, it is incredibly difficult reading for me. It's, it's, it's painful. It's painful to read. Why is it painful? Not because I disagree with the, with, with the view of, of trading and business and the creativity of it.

• 2:41:33Speaker 01

  And, and you know, and, and reardon metal. I mean, I, you know, that stuff, that stuff uh, moves me and, and, and, and, and I, I do admire it. But to read, you know, a, a book that's a thousand pages long in which nobody, nobody is having children. Nobody is having a stable marriage. No one is running a, uh, an admirable government that's fighting for a just cause. Anywhere, anywhere. Yaron, I, I, it, I feel, I just, I feel like, like it's focusing on one aspect of what it is to be human and to flourish. And that everything else is just erased and thrown out as though it's just not part of reality.

• 2:42:16Speaker 01

  And I'm scared. I'm scared of what happens to, to, to teenagers who hormonally are in any case, no, that, that's their, they're programmed to, to, uh, to pull away from their, their parents and experiment with things. They're, they're, they're biologically programmed to do that. And you give them a book which says, look, you, you don't, you don't have to have a family. You don't have to raise children. You don't have to have a country. You don't have to fight for any, all you have to do is assert yourself and trade. I think it's destructive because it's not realistic. It's just not real.

• 2:42:51Yaron Brook?

  But I got none of that from Ayn Rand. I got none of that from Ayn Rand. You know, the books were not about a family. You could write a book in Ayn Rand's style about where people have a family, but the goal, the purpose, it's a novel. It's not, it's a novel which is delimited with a particular story. There's one family in Gulch Gulch and there's a little passage about raising children and the value of that because it's not core to what she is writing about. But that doesn't exclude it. I, when I read Ayn Rand, I read Atlas Shrugged when I was 16 and I read it over, over the years, several times more. It never occurred to me, oh, Ayn Rand's anti-family, I shouldn't have a family. It, that, that thought never came into my mind.

• 2:43:35Yaron Brook?

  I, I always wanted to have children. I continue to want to have children. I, I thought of it a little differently. I thought of how I would find a partner a little bit differently. I thought about what I would look for in a partner differently, but not that I wouldn't want to get married.

• 2:43:50Lex Fridman?

  One question I, I have is what effect it has on society, so outside of you. So for example, you mentioned love should be conditional. I think-

• 2:43:57Yaron Brook?

  Well, it is. Whether you like it or not, it is. You might pretend that it isn't, but it's always conditional.

• 2:44:02Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me try to say something and see if it makes any sense. So could there be things that are true, like love is conditional, is always conditional, that if you say it often, it has a negative effect on society? So for example, I mean, so maybe I'm just a romantic, but good luck saying love is conditional to a romantic partner. I mean, you could, I would argue, en masse, that would deteriorate the quality of relationships. If you remind the partner of that truth that is universal. Like you, you have to, the, the, I mean, okay, maybe it's just me. I'll just speak to myself.

• 2:44:46Lex Fridman?

  It's like there is a certain romantic notion of unconditional love. It's part of why-

• 2:44:52Yaron Brook?

  You have so many destructive marriages. It's part of why.

• 2:44:55Lex Fridman?

  You would say that's a problem.

• 2:44:56Yaron Brook?

  Yes, it's a real problem because, because, yes, there is a, you all talked about honoring your spouse and there's a real truth there and I respect that. Yes, you have to do certain things. Love is not, you marry somebody and there's a real attitude out there in the culture. You marry somebody and, okay, now we're gonna, we're just gonna cruise. It's just. Right. Hollywood. That's the Hollywood marriage. You know, marriage is work. It, it, it, like all values, it's work. It's something you have to reignite every day. You have to, you have to, the challenges, the real disagreements, the, the, the, the things you, you, you fight about, you disagree about. And, and there's real, if it's a value, you work it out. You, you, you, you, you struggle through it. You,

• 2:45:40Yaron Brook?

  you, and, and sometimes you struggle through it and you come to a conclusion, no, this is not gonna work. And, and you dissolve a marriage. And I'm, I'm all for dissolving after really, really fighting for it because if it's an important value and if you fell in love with this person for a reason, then that's something worth fighting for. I have a feeling that Hollywood goes the other way, but it's not this cruising along and everything, everything is easy. No human relationship is like that. Not friendship, not love, not, not, not, not raising children, not being a child. Um, you know, they require work and, and they require thinking and they require creating the conditions to thrive. And that's the sense in which it's, it's conditional. You, you have to work at it. And it, it's,

• 2:46:24Yaron Brook?

  and, and it's very easy not to do the work and it's very easy to drift away. And I think most people don't do the work. Most people take it, and, and generally in life, they, the only place people seem to work is at work. And then they take the rest of their life as I'm gonna cruise. And yet, every aspect of your life, the art you choose, the friends you choose, the lovers you choose, all require real thinking and real work to be successful at them. None of them are just. Just there, because there is no such thing as the intrinsic.

• 2:46:58Speaker 01

  Right, I agree with all of that. I was gonna say before that the rabbis have this sort of shocking expression, the pain of raising children. And I find when I speak to audiences about relationships, I find that in general, and this is cross-cultural, different countries, different religious backgrounds, that in general, young people do not know that the only way to make a marriage work is through a lot of pain and overcoming. They don't know that raising children involves

• 2:47:38Speaker 01

  a great deal of pain. They don't know that caring for and helping your parents approach the end of their lives causes a great deal of pain. And everything is kind of this sketchy, very sketchy, glimpsy kind of, and I mentioned Hollywood just because everything is made to look easy, except you know, there's kind of a funny breakdown of something, but then it, you know, maybe there's a divorce, they shoot one another, so then they should get divorced. But the reality of how hard it is to do, and how heroic it is to do it and then overcome,

• 2:48:17Speaker 01

  and then actually in the end achieve something, create something, that was really, it's almost, it's almost not discussed. And so, look, to me, it's just not surprising that if there's no parallel to Ayn Rand about, you know, the heroic saving of a marriage that was on the rocks, how does it actually happen?

• 2:48:40Yaron Brook?

  So, it's a good point you're making, but it's something that just came to me that I've never thought of before. So, that's always good. This is where conversation is good. Look, take the Talmud in the Bible. I can't remember how many years after the Bible the Talmud is written, how many, over how long of a period it's written, how many people participating in writing it. Ayn Rand was one individual. She wrote a series of books on philosophy, which I think are true, but they're the beginning. There is a lot of work to be done to apply this. So, hopefully, there will be one of her students who writes a book on relationships. And there'll be a somebody who writes a book on on developing a political theory

• 2:49:24Yaron Brook?

  in greater detail and and develop her ethic she's got like she's got she's got a few writings on ethics and it's in the novels but but there's a lot of work to be done fleshing it out what does it mean how do you so to to say Eintracht didn't do everything is a truism she didn't do everything okay so what but she laid this amazing philosophical foundation that allows us to take those principles and to apply them to all these realms of human life and she does it on a scope that few philosophers in human history have done because she does goes from metaphysics all the way to aesthetics hitting the key and she's an original thinker on each one of those things and she might be right she might be wrong on certain aspects of it always happy to have a debate about where where

• 2:50:07Yaron Brook?

  she's wrong or where she's not but there's a lot of work to be done right it it's not like and and if if there were objectivists out there who presented as okay human knowledge is over because Eintracht wrote these books that's absurd right this huge amount of work to be done in applying these particular ideas just like they was for any philosophy take these ideas and now apply them to all these realms in human experience that flesh it out and make it and one of the reasons I don't think objectivism has taken off is because there's all this work still to be done that allows it to be relatable to to people in every aspect of it.

• 2:50:42Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask a hard question here we've we've got we've taken.

• 2:50:45Yaron Brook?

  Can I say what I agreed with you Omar?

• 2:50:47Lex Fridman?

  Sure sure this is good this will be a good transition.

• 2:50:50Speaker 01

  Here this is the clip this is this is the clip.

• 2:50:53Yaron Brook?

  I mean I agree about nations so I I don't like the term nationalism because I I fear of what happens when you put an ism at the end of.

• 2:51:01Speaker 01

  Anything.

• 2:51:02Yaron Brook?

  Any word.

• 2:51:03Speaker 01

  Anything yes.

• 2:51:04Yaron Brook?

  But the nation is is a good thing then and and having a diversity of nations in a sense it's a good thing and in this sense in this sense I don't think one can come up so look I I said I hold that the ideal nation is a nation that protects individual rights.

• 2:51:21Yaron Brook?

  How do you do that? What are the details? How do we define property rights exactly in an internet world? There's gonna be disagreement, rational, reasonable disagreement. They're gonna be, in my future, in the 300 years from now, when my ideas are won finally, there will be multiple nations trying to apply the principle of applying individual rights, and they'll do it differently. One of the benefits of federalism is that while you have a national government, there are certain issues that you relegate to states, and they can try different things and learn, because there is a huge value in empirical knowledge comes, you can't just deduce it all and figure it all out, you have to experiment.

• 2:52:01Yaron Brook?

  So I do, I hate the idea of a one world government, because experimentation is gone, and if you make a mistake, everybody suffers. I like the idea, and then I like the idea of people being able to choose where they live, but this notion of experimentation, I think, is crucial, but you need a principle, you need a principle. So I don't like the idea of nations, if all the nations are gonna be bad, right? If all the nations are gonna be horrible, then I don't like it. What I like is a variety of nations, all practicing basically good ideas, and then we try to figure out, okay, what works better than other things, and what is sustainable and what is not.

• 2:52:44Lex Fridman?

  Given how many difficult aspects of history and society we talked about, let me ask a hard question of both of you.

• 2:52:51Yaron Brook?

  Breeze up until now.

• 2:52:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What gives you hope about the future? So we've been describing reasons to maybe not have hope. What gives you hope? When you look at the world, what gives you hope that in 200 years, and 300 years, and 500 years, like the founders look into the future, that human civilization will be all right? And more than that, it would flourish?

• 2:53:21Yaron Brook?

  Two things for me. One is history. So in the very long run, good ideas win out. I think in the very long run, you can go through a dark ages, but you come out of a dark ages.

• 2:53:35Yaron Brook?

  You know, the good and the just does win in the end, even if it is bloody and difficult and hard to get there. So while I am quite pessimistic, unfortunately, about the short run, I'm ultimately optimistic that in the long run, good ideas win and they're justified. And I think the fundamental behind that is, I think is that I'm fundamentally positive about human nature. I think human beings can think, they're capable of reasoning, they're capable of figuring out the truth, they're capable of learning from experience. They don't always do it, it's an achievement to do it, but over time they do.

• 2:54:19Yaron Brook?

  And if you create the right circumstances, they will. And when things get bad enough, they look for a way out. They look at maybe at history, if the history is available to them, maybe at just learning from what's around them to find better ways of doing things, and that reinforces itself. But human beings are an amazing creature, right? We're just amazing in our capacity to be creative, in our capacity to think, in our capacity to love, in our capacity to change our environment to fit our needs and to fit our requirements for survival and to learn and to grow and to progress. And, you know, so again, long term, I think all that wins out.

• 2:55:03Yaron Brook?

  Short term, in any point in history, short term,

• 2:55:08Yaron Brook?

  it doesn't, right now, it doesn't look too good.

• 2:55:12Lex Fridman?

  What about you?

• 2:55:14Speaker 01

  Well, as usual, I moved by what Euron says and I hear scripture. And the source for Euron's hope is the Book of Exodus, which is the first place in human history where we are presented with the possibility that

• 2:55:39Speaker 01

  And enslaved people that's being persecuted and murdered and living under the worst possible regime can free itself and have a shot at a life of independence and worth. And it's another inherited Jewish idea in the, in, in the tradition. The way that we express this is by saying that, that there is a God who judges. The, the Israelis in Egypt were, were enslaved for hundreds of years, according to the Exodus story, hundreds of years before God wakes up and, and, and hears them. And he doesn't do anything until, until, you know, Moses kills the oppressor and, and goes out into the desert.

• 2:56:24Speaker 01

  So, um, so I think it's pretty realistic that, you know, there is a God, that God judges and acts, but probably, you know, often not for a very, very long time and not until there's, there's a human being who, who gets up and says enough. I know that today people don't want to read the Bible. They don't like reading the Bible, but I always hear in my ear, uh, this, uh, cry of the prophet, uh, Jeremiah, who saw his, his nation destroyed and, and his people exiled. And he says, um, in, in God's name, he says, "Is not my word like fire, like the hammer

• 2:57:07Speaker 01

  that shatters rock, a patishim and a petzela." Hammer, my, my word is like fire, like the hammer that shatters rock. And this is actually, this is the traditional way of saying something like what Yaron is saying, that it may take a long, long time, but that, but there, there is a truth and it has its own strength and it will, in the end, shatter the things that are opposing it. That's, that's our traditional hope. We, we, we grow up like that and.

• 2:57:39Speaker 01

  You know, so I do have hope. I see the trends. The trends are terrible right now. And it's frightening and it's hard, but we are terrible at seeing the future. And it is very possible that an unexpected turn of events is going to appear, you know, maybe soon, maybe much later, and the possibility of a redemption is there.

• 2:58:08Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask, given that long arc of history, given that you do study the Bible, what is the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life?

• 2:58:19Speaker 01

  Wow, that's beautiful. I think that the meaning of life is, is in part, what Yaron touches on when he says that, that productive work, labor, creativity, is at the heart of what it is to be human. I just think that there are some more arenas, and maybe we even agree with a lot of them, and I, on a lot of them. To be human is to inherit a world which is imperfect, terribly imperfect, imperfect in many ways. And, and God created it that way.

• 2:59:01Speaker 01

  He created a world which is terribly lacking. And He created us with the ability to stand up and to say, "I can change the direction of this. I can do something to change the direction of this. I can take the time and the abilities that are given to me to be a partner with God in creating the world. It's not going to stay the way it was before me. It'll be something different, maybe a little bit, maybe a lot. But that's, that is, that is the heart. That is the key. That is the meaningful life, is to be a partner with God in creating the world so that it is moving that much more in the right direction, rather than the way we found it.

• 2:59:46Lex Fridman?

  So nudge, even if a little bit, the direction of the world? Well, Yaron, you've actually been talking on your program about life quite a bit. So let me ask the same question, and I never tire of you asking this question.

• 3:00:06Lex Fridman?

  What do you think is the, is the meaning of this?

• 3:00:09Yaron Brook?

  Well, I mean, I don't believe in God, so God doesn't play a role in, in, in my view of, of the meaning of life. I, I think the meaning of life is to live. I like to say to live with a capital L. It's to embrace it and, and I agree with you, I'm in a sense, we're born into a world and as human beings, one of the things that makes us very different than other animals is our capacity to change that world. We can actually go out there and change the world around us. We can change it materially through production and through, we can change it spiritually through changing the ideas of, of people. We can, we can change the direction it to which humanity works. We can, um, we can create a little universe.

• 3:00:53Yaron Brook?

  Part of the, I think part of the joy of creating a family is to create a little universe, right? We're creating a little world, uh, around us. That's part of the, the joy. And there is joy in family, let's not make it all about difficulty and hard work.

• 3:01:07Lex Fridman?

  I, I agree, I agree.

• 3:01:08Yaron Brook?

  Uh, you know, but part of the, part of the, the idea of getting married is, is to create a little world in which you and your spouse are, are creating something that didn't exist before and, and, and, and building something, building a universe. But it's really to live. I mean, one of the things that I, I see and, and that saddens me is, is wasted lives. It's people who just, just cruise through life. They just, they just, they, they get bored in, they get bored in a particular place. They never challenge it, they never question. They just, you know, they live, die and nothing really happened, nothing really changed. They didn't produce, they didn't make anything of their life and produce here again, again, in the, in the larger sense. So to me, it's, it's, and every aspect of life, you know, as you know, cause you've listened to my show, I love art. I love, I love aesthetics.

• 3:01:53Yaron Brook?

  I, I love the experience of great art. You know, I love relationships, I, you know, I, I love producing, um, you know, I like business. I like that, that aspect of it. Um, and, and I think, I think people, people are shallow in, in so many parts of their lives, which saddens me. I mean, if, if we, if you had eight billion people on this planet. Even if it never grew, even if we just stayed at eight billion, but the eight billion all lived fully. Wow. I mean, what an amazing place this would be. What an amazing experience we would have. So to me, that is, the meaning is just make the most. You have a short period of time on earth. And that's it. This is it.

• 3:02:34Yaron Brook?

  And live it, experience it fully and challenge yourself and push yourself. And let me just say something about optimism. You know, one source of hope for me in the world in which we live right now is that there are people who do that, at least in certain realms of their lives. Right. And I'm inspired. And I know a lot of people don't like me for this, but I'm inspired, for example, by Silicon Valley, in spite of all the political disagreements I have with them and all of that, I'm inspired by people inventing new technologies and building. I'm inspired by, by the people you talk to about artificial intelligence and about, about new ideas and about pushing the boundaries of science. Those things are exciting and it's terrific to see a world

• 3:03:16Yaron Brook?

  that I think generally is in decline, yet there are these pockets in which people are still creating new, new ventures and new ideas and new things. That, that inspires me and it gives me hope that that is not dead. That in spite of the decay that's in our culture, there's still pockets where that spirit of being human is still, is still alive and well.

• 3:03:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, they inspire me as well. Yeah, and they truly live with a capital L. And maybe I can do on a star. Maybe we can also put a little bit of love with a capital L out there as well. Yaron, you knew I would end it that way, wouldn't you? Yaron, Yoram, thank you so much. This is a huge honor. I really enjoyed the debate yesterday. I really enjoyed the conversation today that you would spend your valuable time with me. It just means a lot. Thank you so much. This is amazing. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Yaron Brook and Yoram Hazony. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Edmund Burke.

• 3:04:20Lex Fridman?

  The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

• 3:04:47Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.