Transcript for #256 – Nationalism Debate: Yaron Brook and Yoram Hazony

No, I mean, I think there's a false dichotomy he presented here. And that is that one view holds that you can derive anything from a particular historical path and kind of an empirical view. And if we know the history, we know where we should be tomorrow, we know 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 apriere axioms we can derive a truth right now. And both of those views in my view of false. And you know, I end and I reject both of those views. And I think the better thing is of the Enlightenment did as well, although they sometimes fall into the trap of appearing like rationalists. You're a green one thing, and that is that content is one of, we've talked about this in the past. But we both hate content. We both think content is, I at least think content is probably the most destructive philosopher. since Plato, who was pretty destructive himself. And part of the problem is that kind of 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 removed from that direct experience. I view Kant as the anti-enlightment, that is, I view Kant as the destroyer of good enlightenment thinking, and acknowledge a lot of history of philosophy, people do history of philosophy, view Kant as the embodiment of the life that is the ultimate. But I think that's a mistake, I think both who's so and Kant fundamentally, the goal, the mission in life is to destroy the enlightenment. So my view is neither of those options or 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 factory reality as as we know them through a sense perception or through the study of history through what actually happened. 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 our universal principles, since 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, which leads to, and then trying to do better. And I think good thing is a constantly trying to do better based on what they know about the past and what they know about the press.

It's the recognition that people are wrong, often are wrong, and the endurance, 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 to 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 I might standard and I think the right standard is. human well-being, that which is good for human beings, poor human beings, is the standard by which we judge. So I can say that certain peers of history were bad. They happened, it's important to study them, 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 in human flourishing. That's the standard, 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 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 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.

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 that certain actions lead to bad consequences, certain actions lead to good consequences. 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 in reject what is bad. I think ultimately if you read the funny fathers and whether we call them conservatives and individuals, what the funny fathers actually did all of them I think is study history. They all did. They all talk about history. They all talk about examples of other cultures with it. whether they go back to the public in Venice or back to the ancient Greeks. They studied these, they learned lessons from them, they tried to figure out what is worked in the past and what hasn't been tried to do our principles. Now in my view, They got pretty close to what I would consider, kind of an ideal. But they didn't get a 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, OK, well, what did they get right? What did they get wrong? Based on how is it done and where the flaws and where we can improve on it. I think we can get closer to perfection. 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 experiment, you do the trial and error and now you come up with a scientific principle. It is true that a hundred years later you might discover that hey I missed something, there's something 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. Whatever the standard needs to be. In the name of, we don't want to move too fast. I think as I mistaken, 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. What we know, it's not going to work. You don't need to try it again. We've had communal arrangements throughout history. There was an experimental fascism and there being experiments with all kinds of political systems. Okay, we've done them. 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 inflation in human success and 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 happens to be a class, or whatever. Whenever we place something above the individual consequence of negative, that's one of these principles that I think we can derive from studying You know, 3,000 years of civilization. And it's tragic, I think, because we're going to keep expanding. Sadly, I see it, right? I'm not winning this battle. I'm losing the battle. We're going to keep expanding 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 in human wealth and prosperity.

Can I just agree with that? I think it's a, I think in-personism, the one thing I disagree is that I think in-personism really comes to these abstractions. I mean, they, they want more facts. It's always about collecting more evidence in the, but this is where, you know, I think I knew hand 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 I knew hand is, is something new. And she says, yes, we agree about nationalism and that it's in heavy-drawn empiricism has the problem of, okay, what is it lead? It's you never come to a conclusion. You're just accumulating evidence. There's something in addition. There's a third alternative, which she is positive, which is using empirical evidence, not denying empirical evidence. Recognizing that are some axioms, there's some axioms that we all at the base of all of our knowledge that are starting points when 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. So truth is contextual in the sense that it's contextual based on That knowledge that surrounds itself for it to change if you get new facts always is always available to change if the facts that you get and the really I mean that the burden of of of changing what you've come to a conclusion through this 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 discovered 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 ideas 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 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 humans. She's an opponent of decarts. She's certainly an opponent of cons. And you know, I think she's right. Right.

Well, it's all a problem. First, I don't view communism as 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 a tradition where you expect some people to be sacrificed for the greater good of the whole. I think it comes from a tradition where mysticism or revelation as the source of truth is accepted. I view Marx's in some sense very Christian. I don't think he's this radical rejecting. I think he's just reformating Christianity in a sense. He's replacing in a sense. He's replacing God with the Politarian. knowledge you know you have to you have to get knowledge from somewhere so you need the dictatorship of the solitary need somebody the Stalin the Lenin who who somehow communes with the spirit the the spirit of the solitary and 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 used humanity Syvee Marx as one more collectivist in a whole string of collectivists. And I think the Bismarckian response, which I mean, I know less about this rarely so I'll focus on Bismarck. I mean, Bismarck is really responding to political pressures from the left 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 Palaterian as the standard by which we should, we should rather the good. And what he's replacing it is the state. He's replacing the problem 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. I mean, I mean, the Germans really dig in on public education really develop it. And really the American model of public education is is copying the German depression, the smoking public education.

Well, because it now says that there's one standard and that standard is determined by government, by bureaucracy, by whatever the government deems is in the national interest. And Bismarck is very explicit about this. He's training the workers of the future. You know, they need to catch up and you know with England and other places and they need to train the workers and it's going to be a He's going to train some people to be the managerial class is going to train other people to be and he decides right the government to bureaucracy is going to decide who's who and where they go. There's no individual choice there's no individual It's showing inability to break out of what what the government has decided is their little box There's very little freedom. There's very little Ultimately, there's very little competition, there's very little innovation, and this is the problem we have today in American education, which we can get to. There's no competition or innovation. We have one standard fit-all, and then we have conflicts about what should be taught, and the conflicts now 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 are my group ones to be taught and what that group ones 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 phoenix, for example. So a lot of schools don't teachronics even though the kids will never learn how to read properly. So it becomes politics and I don't believe politics belongs in education. I think education is a product. It's a service 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.

Well, whatever the aim is, I mean, think about the conservative today, critique of American educational system. It's dominated by the left. Yeah, what did you expect? Right? 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 the right. And they now dominate our educational institutions. But look if we'll go back to Bismarck. My problem is placing the state above the individual. So if communism places the class above the individual, what matters is class individuals are nothing that cogs in a machine. The best mark, certainly the German tradition, much more than the British tradition or the American tradition, the German tradition is to place the state above the individual. I think that equally evil 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 its ultimate conclusion, just like socialism and the ultimate conclusion of it is Communism, nationalism in that form, the ultimate conclusion is notism 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-American tradition where the Anglo-American tradition even the Conservatives have always acknowledged and goes back to especially the Conservatives.

They acknowledged. Well, you've defined Conservatives include all the good thinkers of the Distampance, and they'll all good think as we agree on that.

And for me, 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. 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 unfortunate thing is that The change was motivated by an egalitarian philosophy, not egalitarian in a sense that I think the funny father's talked about, but egalitarian in a sense of real equality, equality of outcome, motivated by a philosophy, by whose source philosophy. And inevitably, you could tell that the ideas were going to lead to this, to massive destruction and death and then annihilation of a class. You can't, annihilation is never an option. 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, liberty of the individual. And again, that goes back to, and the French Revolution denies and who sold denies really, that the incivilization there is a value and a thing called the individual.

I mean, the one thing I agree with you is the fact that, yes, the funny folks were not a monolith. I mean, they argued, they debated, they disagreed, they voted 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.

There's massive debate and discussion, but I don't agree with the characterization of pain and 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. We're happening in Europe. many of them over the religion. You know, they had seen what was going on in France and other countries where people were starving and where kings were frolicking in palaces, in spite of that. They were very aware of the relative freedom that the British tradition had 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, in that sense, I'm a huge fan of Jefferson. You know, there are two things that I think are unfortunate about Jefferson, one is that he continued to hold slaves, which is very unfortunate. And the second is, is early support for the French Revolution, which I think is a massive mistake. and they would be surprised if you were granted it later in life given the consequences. But they were trying to derive principles by which they could establish and you stayed. And yes, there was some, there was pushback by some and there was disagreement in the constitution and the end. is to some extent, a form of compromise, it's still one of the great documents of all of human history, the lack of documents, the Constitution. Although I think it's inferior to the Declaration, I'm a huge fan of the Declaration, and I think one of the mistakes the Conservatives makes, one of the mistakes it would be in court makes, and American judiciary makes is Assuming the two documents are separate, I think Lincoln is actually right, you can understand the constitution without understanding the declaration, the declaration, what's set the context and what sets everything up for the constitution, individual rights or the key concept there. And one of the challenges was that some of the compromises and compromises not necessarily between groups, but compromises that even Jefferson made and others made regarding individual rights, set American path that we're suffering from today and I mentioned three last night one was slavery obviously there was a horrific compromise one that American not just paid for with a 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 a century to this day really is a consequence of that initial compromise, who knows what would what the counterfactual is in America. If there's a civil war right at the founding, right? Because it would have been a war no matter what. But if it happened in the late 18th century, early 19th century rather than waiting till 1860s. But then second was Jefferson's embrace of public education. His founding of the University of Virginia, which I think is a great tragedy. And which nobody agrees with me on. So that's one of the areas where I'm pretty radical. and then they embrace both by Jefferson and by Hamilton. for different reasons, but in embrace by both of them, of government, world and economy. And you know, I do finance, so I know a little bit about finance, and the debate between Jefferson and Hamilton about banking is fascinating, but at the end of the day, both wanted to roll for government in banking. They both didn't trust Jefferson and trust big financial interests. Hamilton wanted to capture some of those financial interests 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 railroad. It's fine to pass antitrust laws. It's fine to then continue on the path to where we are today, which is heavy, heavy, heavy massive involvement of government, every aspect. of economy and really in every aspect of our life because of education. So I think the country was founded in a certain state 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 has 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. really is an advocate out there for individualism in politics or for true freedom in politics.

I'm over-sticking it to the church. And I'm so silly, but not when the alternative is the nation. I see, I'd rather say free educational system, you know, with freedom as an education.

We think. So I'll agree with you all. 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 enlightened thinking, of studying history, of understanding human nature, of deriving a truth from 3,000 years of historical knowledge and a better understanding of human nature and the capacity. It's using reason in some ways better than any human beings have. I mean funny for us giants historically in my view. because they came up with these truths. I do think they're truths, but there's certainly not self-evident. I mean, if they were, you're on his right, they would have discovered them thousands of years earlier, or everybody would accept them, right? I mean, how many people today think that those, what they state in the dark document is true? Pretty much, you know, five people, I don't know, it's very, it's very, it's very, your criticism of modern society.

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 truth. But I completely disagree with you all about this idea, or I'll voice my dissense as we said. Right. I'm sorry, you're this official dissent. about A, that this being two different revolutions, and B, that American revolution was at any similarity to the French Revolution.

They were waiting constantly. I mean, they were in communication with Madison.

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 that, you know, you're in his writings, lumps, who sow with luck and with Voltaire and with others, and I think I think that's wrong. I think we're so is very different than the others. I think again, we're so is an anti-enlightenment figure. We're so is in many respects hockening 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, who's so is on the premise that reason is the end of humanity, reason is the destruction of humanity, reason is how we get civilization, civilization is awful.

Yeah, but the social contract you get is similarity between others, but he takes it in a completely different direction. And we agree, social contract is a bad idea. But the gain of a contract that you don't actually voluntarily accept. But who's so is the French Revolution? Who's so is about destruction and mayhem and chaos and anarchy. He is the spirit behind the French Revolution. I think the Morgan Revolution is a complete rejection of Russo. I think Jefferson is a complete rejection of Russo. I don't think Jefferson is a fan of Russo. He has a Voltaire, he's only as a monascue. 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, is monascue. So I think that the American Revolution isn't individualistic revolution. It is a 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 the finding people in classes. And it's a rebellion against a certain class. And, yeah, kill them off, right? Off with their heads. And it is an occasion. It's about egalitarianism in the 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 it's it's it's it's it's wrong to to lump Jefferson in to the fraternity, you know, egalitarian notion of of the French, which is far more similar to to what ultimately became socialism, Marxism, and kind of that tradition. It's anti-individualistic, the French Revolution, as well as the American Revolution, the first one, is individualistic. It's all about individual rights and while the certain phrases and declarations 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 it's creator and not God or not a specific creator but just it kind 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 a document that identifies the core principles of political tourism, of truth. That is the world of government is to preserve and to protect these rights, these inalienable rights. And that is so crucial that these rights unalienable. That is, a majority can vote them out. You know, a revelation can vote them out. 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 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 essence of political philosophy. That's the beginning. You know, and it's based on just not falling into your own is going to 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 respectful individual liberty of property of freedom. Good things happened. So let's take that all the way. Let's not compromise on that. Let's be consistent with the good and reject the bad. And when England goes away, distance itself on the rights of man, from the idea of a right to property and so on. bad things happen and when they go to, let's go all in. And I'm all in 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 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 to let them figure that out. So it has this self-interested moral code kind of embedded in it. So I think it's a beautiful statement. So I think the declaration is key and I think there wasn't experiment and experiment was post in that period of before the constitution. where the experiment was, let's let the states have a kind of a loose confederation. Let's let the states experiment 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. Many of the states were starting to significantly violate rates. There was nothing to really protect the vision of the declaration. You need 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 rates. The focus was still on the protection of rights. And I agree with six of the seven. of the principles, right? And the common warfare, which, which, the general, what we're talking about, right? I think in the way the founders understood it, I think I probably agreed with it. But it's such an ambiguous, I'm sure you don't. Maybe, though.

Well, the idea that part of the world of government is to secure the general wealth.

So that's right. 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 of common people are just collection of individuals. So what's good for the individual is good for the common welfare. But I understand that that is something that is hard for people to grasp and not the common understanding. So 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 I would have wanted to have skipped that completely. So I think the constitution is because it's really consistent with the declaration, with a few exceptions, the general welfare. perfection is 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 between the English constitution here's here's what I see as the difference The difference is that 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 does 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, about protecting, you know, peace within the country. They're about preserving this protection of rights. And why do we have this separation? So that we make sure that no one of those entities, the executive or the legislature, judicial confiliate rights, because there's always somebody looking over this shoulder. There's always somebody who can veto their power, but there's a purpose to it. And that purpose is clearly signified in character. 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 of purpose is to preserve rights. And that's why we need to elaborate what those rights. And Madison's objection to the Bill of Rights was to say, not the object that they're having protection of rights. But to listing them because he was worried that other rights are 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 a new 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 there was that was not listed as a right in the bill even though I think it's clearly covered under the Constitution and suddenly under the declaration. So there was a massive stake down in the bill of rights. They tried to cover it just a ninth amendment, but it never really stuck this idea that they're not in numerated rights that they're still in place. So I don't see this the second revolution. I think it's a it's a 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 in a sense of constitution sets in motion. the declaration and then the constitution said emotion, 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. What's more of a violation of rights in slavery and some states that recognize it's not, it inevitably leads to the civil war.

Well, 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 context that is a thinking that they can't write everything down, right? And which is sad because I wish they had. What's the purpose of a more perfect union? The purpose of a more perfect union is to preserve the liberty of the individuals within that union. Well, how do you look? Because if you look, what's the rest? So what is the common defense? The common defense is to protect us from found 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 fine ways to limit the ability of government to violate the rights of individuals. that the beauty of this Constitution. And again, it's connection to the Declaration and tradition, right? What came before it? What came before it 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 it was about. To protect us from peace, to establish peace and justice within the country, that's based on law, the rule of law, and again, individual liberty. To me, when you read the founders, when you read the federal 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 not all of them had a from my perspective, perfect understanding what those liberties entailed, but they were all even no conservatives that you call conservatives. Well, all in generally, in agreement about the importance of individual liberty and the puts of individual.

affect that. It's trying to take the British system and perfect it. And what?

the purpose is to protect individual rights. And it's not collective rights.

a great good so we clearly disagree on this because I don't think the independence of the nation is a good in our itself because it's and this is way think it was 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 when you many of them struggled really really struggled with having a revolution because England was pretty good, right? English was the England was the best and this is where we should get to the universality of these things because it do think England was the best and universally and absolutely was the best system out there and what they struggle 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 there are only option in order to secure these rights is to break away from England and secure nation. Now, I am not an anarchist as an anarchist because we've discussed it. I believe you need nations. You need nations to secure those rights. That is the rights or 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.

So, yes, so the basic unit, the basic model unit, the basic ethical unit in society is the individual. And yeah, of course, we form groups. 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 politically from 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 a goal is ultimately. So in the pursuit of happiness, there are lots of groups that want once the form, whether it's marriage, whether it's businesses, whether it sports teams, whether it's lots of different groups want once the form, but the question is what is the standard of what be? Is it the standard of what being some algorithm that maximizes the or being of a group, some utility and function. 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 the group to function well, we don't really care about whether the individuals are So to me, the goal of creating groups is the war 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 those. Sometimes it's costly. It's not a cheap out. That's why you should really think about what groups 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 of free immigration is because that's another group that I would like people to be able to voluntarily choose both in and out, and I'd like to see people be able to go and join that group that they believe will allow for the pursuit of happiness. But let me say that that's a description of an idea of what I'm just saying. I recognize that that's not the reality in which we live. I recognize that that's not the reality in which history, recognizing that such as the individual exists in a sense philosophically is a massive achievement. You know, human beings, however they evolved, it's clearly we started out in a tribal context in which the individual didn't matter. We followed the leader, the competition was 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 their evolution. And then we evolve from tribes into nations, and then empires, and conflicts between nations, and conflicts between empires, and we tried a lot of different things, if you will. I don't think we always did it on purpose, but we kind of different philosophies, different sets of ideas drove us towards different collectives different groupings and different ways in which the structure. And after, I don't know, 3,000 years of kind of known 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 is done in the enlightenment. And you sit back and suddenly we can do it today. We can sit back and evaluate what promote 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-some world and the world is not zero-some, we can see that. It's empirically possible to show that the world is not a zero-some game. My thought, you know, fatherishing doesn't come into your expense. So I, you know, I can show that a system that promotes my fatherishing will probably promote your fatherishing as well and promotes the general welfare in that sense because it promotes individuals of flourishing. And we can look at all these examples of how we've evolved and what leads to bloodshed and what doesn't and what promotes this ability to flourish as an individual, again, an achievement, the idea of individual flourishing. And then 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. You can be forced into a four-mego 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.

Well, because what do we mean by freedom? Freedom doesn't mean and the negation of the laws of physics, right? Freedom doesn't mean ignoring freedom means the ability within the scope of what's available for you to choose, being able to choose those things. So in a political context, freedom means, you know, then the absence of corrosion. So once you're an adult, You know, your arms says you're born with a particular inter-particular religious context. Absolutely, but once you're an adult, I think it's incumbent on you to evaluate that religious context and look at different religions or non-religion or whatever and choose your philosophy of life, choose your values, choose how you want to live your life. That's the freedom. The freedom is one system says you either cursed by the state or cursed by the group or cursed by society around you to follow a particular path. Oh, you're... the expectation as the demand is, the pressure is to conform to a particular path. And my view is, no, you should be in a position to be able to choose your path. And that choice means you look around. You evaluate, you evaluate the history based on knowledge based on all of these things. And you choose what that path would be. That's fundamentally what freedom means. Yes, you cannot choose your parents. But of course not. Nobody would claim that that's within the scope of what is possible.

But I'm saying that's wrong. And I'm saying that's dangerous because that could easily be used. For bad traditions. But that's what's the standard by which we know what a good tradition is.

No, I don't think all societies work like this. 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 19th century, some extent globally, but certainly in the United States didn't work that way. It broke tradition. I think all innovation breaks tradition. And I think that's what the genius of this country is and the post-enlightenment world is. I think pre that tradition, they work that way. And then the question is, did people understand why they do what they do? That is, I don't want people doing what I think is right, just because I think it's right and I've created a society in which, yeah, okay, you know, somebody founded this country in a particular way, so we're just gonna follow, I want people to understand what they're doing. So I want people to have respect for property, not because it's a tradition, but because they understand the value of a respect for property. I want people not to murder one another, not because there's a commandment. That's how now murder. But because they have an understanding of why murdering is bad and wrong and bad for them and bad for the kind of world that they want to live in. And I think that's what we achieve through enlightenment, through education, and where we don't treat people just as a blob. try that you follow orders. But we now treat individuals as capable of thinking for themselves, capable for discovering truth, capable of figuring out their own values. And that's the big break between. And this is the break I think that the declaration represents. The break between society, there's based on tradition, following commandments, following rules, because 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 respect the individual, to respect property rates. But they're not following it because it's a tradition. They were following it because they understand what it is about it that makes it good. So that's the world I think that we were on the process of evolving towards and that is what got destroyed in the 20th century and is certainly disappeared today. And I think that's the great tragedy is that we were evolving to a place where people understood the values that represent it. Of course, the danger with tradition is I mean, well, agree, right? It's, it's, yeah, it's okay to kill the Jew, right? Or it's okay to steal people's property if there are certain color of it. Okay, 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.

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 11 out of five, right? So I'm a huge believer in love. It's all 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. 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. It should be consciously chosen. And this is, I'm, put aside the state, forget the state for a minute, forget, forget corrosion, 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 or the way I sense the talk most about that. I'm primarily interested in human beings and how they live in a sense in morality, and what I would urge individuals to do is to think about their relationships, to choose the best relationships possible, but to seek our great relationships, because other human beings are an immense value to us. And you know, when I write, you know, maybe you're on court of this or not, but I write that, you know, about the trade principle and trading. 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 chose this day and my wife does the chose 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 trading in emotions, it's about the way one sees each other, it's what 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 think it's of trade as a material thing. But friendship is incredibly important in life. Love is incredibly important in life. Having a group of friends is incredibly important in life. All of these are sticky and important.

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, your free go do whatever the hell you want. Just use your emotions. Just go where you want to go. You know, in the spur of the moment. Think sure, too. Don't think long term or don't think. Why think? One has to provide moral guidance. 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. And what does it mean to live a good life? I mean, that's much more important in the sense of a question. And it is, it is my belief that people can do that. They can find and choose The values necessarily 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, you know, I went called religion a primitive form 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 and sometimes you know because when they do good stuff it gets reinforced that we survive in spite of that but ideas like content haigle and in marks 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, a lot of bad stuff going on. In my view is going the wrong way. In my view, a product of set of ideas. On the one hand, 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. And this is why I do what I do because I think at the core of it the only way to change it. is not imposed and you set of ideas from the top because I worry about who is going to be doing the imposition plus I don't believe you can you can force people to be good. It's the challenge the ideas it's the question the ideas it's to present an alternative view of morality and alternative set of mob principles and alternative ultimately and alternative view of political principles. But it has to start with morality. If you don't, and my morality centered on the individual, what the individual should do with this life in order to attain a good life, I believe that leads to happiness, but the good life, that's why it's good. 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 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, on 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, they're important. to help guide us towards a good life, not all of us are philosophers. But what I do demand, if you will, of individuals. So 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 embrace it. Don't embrace a moral teaching just because your teachers are teaching it. challenge it, think about it, embrace it because you, you might be wrong, you might be the wrong one, but take more responsibility, take responsibility over your life by evaluating, testing, challenging what you have received and choosing what you're going to pursue. And I acknowledge, empirically, the most people don't do that, And this is why intellectual leadership is so important. This is why you want the voices and the 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 shake society, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no Yes, I don't want to sound like Plato, but in a sense that the ones you shape, who land up shaping the world, they're the ones who land up shaping how the will 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 that sense again, I do, and this is an interesting point where 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 I think we agree on that. And there are systems we agree that the communism and fascism are evil. Well, I think we should be able to agree that some things are some political systems are good. And maybe there's this middle ground where we both think that they're not particularly bad, but not particularly good in your might think they're better than I think they are. But if we can agree, and this is good, and this is evil, right? Then the system is the tend towards the good, and the system's the tend towards the evil, but that's universal, right? You know, I look at places like South Korea, Japan, Asia, cultures that are very, very different in many respects in the West, and yet when they adopt, certain Western ideas 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 you put it in there. But to some extent adopted that, and there are successful places today, those societies in Asia that didn't adopt these values are not successful societies today.

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

We enter into his hierarchy. That's it. We talk about hierarchy.

So I don't think anybody should have children. It's a goal. It's a goal. There's a good, there's a good tweet clip that out. You can make. I 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 beauty, that experience, that amazing, very, very hard, very, very difficult experience in life. 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-interest thing. And by the way, not everybody should have children. I think way too many people have children. You know, there's some awful parents out there that I wish would stop. I mean, no, you know, life is precious and life of suffering is sad. It's sad to see people suffer and a lot of people are bored into situations and bored into parents that destroy their capacity to ever live a good life. And that's a tragic and sad thing. So I don't measure the health of a society in how many children they're having a health of a couple of 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. Now, when you look at a society overall, I do think having children and 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 long term investment. They require real planning and real effort and real thinking about the long term. But those are my all issues. And again, we're confusing or mixing. When I say Japan, look how well Japan is 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, the day face. They tried empire. They tried nationalistic empire. 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 been Cambodia and seen the kind of poverty. And yes, maybe Cambodia has several lots of children. But God, I'd rather be in Japan any day than have children in the kind of poverty and horrific circumstances they have. But in the context of their available regimes that they were possible, post-World War II for the Japanese Temporary, the embraced one, the generally led to prosperity, to freedom, to individuals pursuing values. Not perfectly, because they didn't implement the philosophical foundation, the more foundation that I would like them to have. They're still being impacted by content, egalion, whatever philosophy that's out there in the West that's destroying the better parts. 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. You can get free societies with a rotten philosophy, but they don't stay free for very long.

But the way to pass it on to the next generations, to ideas and not to having children, having children is an individual choice that some people are going to make and some people are not. But they fund a manal that presents what the good life. What does that even have?

You get defeated. In the case of spotted, it's a good thing, not a bad thing.

Who makes these kind of conclusions? What is about how many you make it as an individual?

And those are the ideas that I can propose. And those ideas are going to perpetuate because they're good ideas.

They can't be good ideas if they don't produce future generations. What are you talking about? What are you talking about?

What are you talking about? What are you talking about? What are you talking about? What are you talking about? What are you talking about? What are you talking about Because they're not living well.

So they're not accepted. OK. So they have no semblance. I am a semblance of a political system. It is a little bit like what I would like far from what I would. I know. 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 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.

No, when they're for 15, they're not fun.

you know, part of it is fun, part of it is hard work, but you do it because it's, it makes your life a better life.

So, 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 the grandchildren to the side, but it ends there. I can't project 300 years in the future. It's ridiculous to try to think about 300 years in the future, things change so much and in the founding fathers.

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

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 it's goes to I think conventional morality's Christian morality is 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 an essential for people to have a mall code and to have a mall code. Well, reality is a set of guidelines to live your life. It is a set of values to guide you to help you identify what is good for you.

There's nothing else.

This is the whole discussion about whether there is such a thing as artificial intelligence, whether that is what it is.

So there's a strong man in going on here. Yeah. Oh, my position. Right. Yeah. Of course. I think to do. You don't do it and you do it, well, politely, then 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 100%, 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. 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 in Aristotle's I see him of course not I I'm a much better think and Aristotle's I see him or in 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? So this is why I'm not a philosopher. I'm certainly not an original thinker in that sense. You know, I recognized the fact that there are geniuses that are much smarter than me with Aristotle, I'm random people that inspire me. I study the 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 on your hands, but it won't be mine unless I've done the thinking to integrate it into my soul, into my consciousness, into my mind. But it's totally 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 we have a chance something there is because probably clearly truth is taken clearly it was misunderstood I didn't make myself clear enough in in the book in terms of what I'm at 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 a trajectory or a collectivist. 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. It's interesting. You know, the fact that a lot of people going to watch this, plays into it as well, but I would probably enjoy engaging with you in conversation recordings. Yeah, there would be. I would enjoy engaging with you with your 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 away from the conversation because because they're harmful to you. And this is where choice comes in. I want to be able to choose who I engage with. I don't always have that choice because as a public intellectual, 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 form in which you engage and how you engage and the standard for me is reason there is no other stance you ask the deep question to start off the why reason right 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 war is right. It's valuable. 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 two emotions. Emotions are not tools of cognition.

But there's a difference in experiencing the world. and evaluating the world in terms of what it's trying to say. 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.

You can fall out of love with somebody. Why? Because you learn something new because you've discovered something new about the person. Now you don't love them.

You guys are making love this primary, which I don't think it is. Are there lots of people in the world that they who don't love the 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. I lived through this experience in my own life. 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 as everything and you should sacrifice and you know when they flag went up I got to a ride. I mean, I bought into it completely. And at some point I rejected that and I changed and I changed my alliance and I rejected my lover visual. It's not that they don't love it anymore. It's certainly not my top love and it's certainly not looking for the grenade to jump on and another one to go fight the war there. And I fell in love with a distance with with the idea of America. I love the idea of America more than I love America. And I could see myself falling in love out of love with America, given what it's heading. It's not automatic. It's conditioned on what it is that it represents and what it is, what valued represents for me. And I think that's always the case with love. It's not true that children have to love their parents. That's the ideal and hopefully most children love their parents because they're parents, but some children fall out of love with their parents because their parents don't deserve their love. And the same with the other way around, I think parents are capable of not loving their children. So it's love is a conditional thing. It's not automatic. But let me let me put out a agreement with you.

But I got none of that for my man. I got none of that from my friend. You know, the books were not about a family. You could write a book in an Iron Man style about what people have a family, but the goal, the purpose, it's an awful, it's not. It's a novel, which is delimited, particularly story. There's one family in Golds Golds, and there's a little passage about raising children and the value of that, because it's not court to what she is writing about. But that doesn't exclude it. When I read, I read out, let's show it going on with 16. And I read it over the years several times more. It never occurred to me. Oh, I know hands, I didn't take family. I shouldn't have a family. That thought never came into my mind. I always wanted to have children. I continue to want to have children. 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.

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

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

Yes, it's a real problem because, yes, there is a, you're on talked about honoring your spouse in this real truth. And I, 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 in. Okay, now we're going to, we're just going to cruise. It's just, right, Hollywood, that's the Hollywood.

Marriage is work. Like all values. It's work. It's something you have to reignite every day. You have to challenge the real disagreements, the things you fight about, you disagree about. And there's real, if it's a value, you work it out, you struggle through it. And sometimes you struggle through it and you come to a conclusion, nah, this is not going to work. And you dissolve the 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's easy. No human relationship is like that enough friendship, not love, not raising children, not being a child. You know, they have a choir, work and they were quite thinking and they were choir, 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's it's it's 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 don't need place people seem to work is it work And then they take the rest of their life as I'm going to 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 there because there is no such thing as the intrinsic.

So it's a good point you're making, but it's something just came to me that I've never thought of before. So that's always good. This is where conversation is good. It takes the Talmud and I can't remember how many years after the Bible, the Talmud is written, how many over how long of a period is written, how many people participating in writing it. Iron Rand was one individual. She wrote a series of books in philosophy, which I think are true and 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 in relationships. And there'll be somebody who writes a book on developing a political theory in greater detail. And who ethics, she's got a few writings on ethics, and it's in the novels. But there's a lot of work to be done, fleshing it out, what does it mean, how do you, so to say I made it and do everything is a truth. She didn't do everything. Okay, so what? But she laid this amazing philosophical foundation that Allah allows us to take those principles and to apply them to all these realms of human life. And she does it on a scope, the 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 think on each one of those things. And she might be wrong and certain aspects of it. always happy to have a debate about where she's wrong and where she's not. But there's a lot of work to be done, right? It's not like, and if there were objectives out there who presented as, okay, human knowledge is over, because I'm in wrote these books, that's absurd, right? There's huge amount of work to be done in applying these particular ideas, just like they was for any philosophy. take these ideas and 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 objectiveism is taken off is because there's all this work still to be done that allows it to be relatable to people and if you expect after

I'm sure.

I mean, I agree about nations. So I don't like to term nationalism because I fear of what happens when you put anism at the end of any word. Anything. But the nation is a good thing. And having a diversity of nations in a sense is a good thing. And in this sense, In this sense, I don't think one can come up. So look, I said, and I hold that the ideal nation is a nation that protects individual rights. How do you do that? What are the details? How do we define property rights exactly in an internet world? This is going to be disagreement, rational, reasonable disagreement. They're going to be in my future, in the 300 years from now, in my ideas for one 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 will negate to states and they can try different things in learn. Because there is a huge value in empirical knowledge comes, you can just do it all and figure it all out. You have to experiment. So I hate the idea of a one-world government because experimentation has gone and if you make them stake 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, this is, you need a principle. So I don't like the idea of nations. If all the nations are going to be bad, right? If all the nations are going to 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.

two things for me. One is history. So in a very long run, good ideas we know. I think in a very long run, you can go through a dog ages, but you come out of a dog ages. 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 and fortunately about the short run, I am ultimately optimistic that in the long run, good ideas win and the 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 the capable of reasoning, the capable of figuring out the truth, the capable of learning from experience. They don't always do it. It's an achievement to do it, but over time they do. And if you create the right circumstances, they will. And when things get bad enough, they look for way out they look at maybe it 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 and capacity to think in our capacity to love. And 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, short term in any point in history, short term, it doesn't right now, it doesn't look to good.

Well, I mean, I don't believe in God, so it God doesn't play a role in my view of the meaning of life. 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 I go with your own innocence. We'll born into a world and as human beings, one of the things that makes us very different in 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 there. We can change it spiritually, through changing the ideas of people. We can change the direction to which humanity works. We can create a little universe 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 around us that's part of the joy. And there is joy and family as I make it all about difficulty and how I agree. Part of the idea of getting married is to create a little world in which you and your spouse are creating something that didn't exist before and building something, building a universe. But it's really to live. One of the things that I see and that saddens me is wasted lives. People who just, just cruise through life, they just, they get bored, they get born 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 in their larger sense. So to me, it's an every aspect of life. You know, as you know, because you've listened to my show, I love art. I love aesthetics. I love the experience of great art. You know, I love relationships. I, you know, I love producing. I'm, you know, I like business. I like that aspect of it. And I think, I think people, people are shallow in so many parts of their lives, which sands me. I mean, if we, if you had eight billion people in this planet, even if it never grew, even if we just stayed at E. Billy. But the 8 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 that you have a short period of time on earth. And it's it, this is it, 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. Despite 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 the people you talk to about artificial intelligence and about new ideas and about pushing the boundaries of science. Those things are exciting and it's terrific to see a world that I think generally is in decline yet that these pockets in which people are still creating new adventures and new ideas and new things. 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 alive and well.