1170: Happiness & Objectivism from Tal Tsfany, Ayn Rand Institute & Dot Com Bubble 2.0?

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You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors. Welcome to episode 1170. 1170. Thank you so much for joining me today. This is a 10th episode show where we discuss something of general interest. And I think you will like our talk a lot today about happiness and fulfillment in life. So we will get to that in a few minutes. Adam is here with me and we want to talk about bubbles before we start. Adam, are we in a bubble in the stock market? Now we're talking about the stock market mostly because we have some parallels to draw for you. Are we in a bubble? What do you think?

Are we in a bubble? I think we're getting close to it. I don't know if I can say we're exactly in a bubble yet, but I think there's definitely some areas of our society that are reaching bubble status potentially.

Well, I would agree that we are very close to bubble status in many things. That's what the doom and gloomers are always saying. But there's this interesting Invest A Piece article that I posted in our content group, seven ways that 2019 mirrors the dot com Bubble. Now, Adam, you were pretty young during the dot com bubble. I was not as young and I remember it well. Folks, I want you to go back to 1999, 2000, 2001, and try to remember how the world was. There's the old saying, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. It's pretty interesting because there were so many shows, there was such a gold rush, such a mania mindset where all of these incredibly silly ideas were getting massive amounts of funding from venture capitalists, from angel investors, and an angel investor is just a private investor. Basically the ideas were just stupid. Some of them, some of them very, very heavily funded. You know, Small and large. And you could attract money if you just put.com after your name.

Yeah, it was like, it was like ICOs this past year or two years.

That is a great comparison from about two years ago. The ICO market, in other words, the cryptocurrency world, the initial coin offering. And you know that that's a fad I did not fall for. I many times said I would love to be wrong about it because I would love nothing more than to see a sort of a private money alternative that is not controlled by central banks and governments, but the powers. Yeah. And it's probably never going to happen because the powers that be are just too powerful. So when we look at the ICO market, the stock market in general, now, every company is a tech company, every company is a dot com company, if you will. But back in 1999 and 2000, that was sort of a thing. I remember what was the company? I don't remember. But the first super bowl ad to feature a dot com, it was GoDaddy. I don't know if it was GoDaddy, but maybe I do remember there was.

A book published then that was, I think it was Dow 30,000.

Oh, well, Harry Dent, he was out with some of those predictions and There were several Dow 30,000, 35,000 books.

Still waiting on that one.

Yeah, yeah, we'll see. It's only 20 years, Adam. Come on, be patient. Yeah, I know it's crazy, these predictions, but is there a parallel? So they say in the article they talk about seven signs of a new bubble. And the first one being that venture capital investments in tech companies are, are at excessive levels. And I would agree these tech IPOs, initial public offerings are absolutely crazy. We saw Lyft, we saw Snap from a little over a year ago that up down looks like it may be coming back. Uber is coming and that's the most valuable private company in the world. We'll see what happens with that one. But Adam, there's some other bullet points here. Why don't you share a couple of them?

First off, I was going to say about the venture capital and tech companies, you have to look, I know back in the 90s, late 90s, early 2000s, this kind of tech companies were just on the, in their infancy. I know now they're a little bit more tech savvy, but some of the money is going into things that may actually work now as opposed to back then where it was just, you know, dogs.com and saying that. So it, it may be a little different just because they're actually creating technology. Like Uber is at least a thing.

Yeah, it's a real thing. And same with Lyft.

It might be losing money left and right, but it's at least a thing. And you can tweak a thing to make money. Some of the things back in the dot com bubble were not really things. They were retail businesses that put a.com and.

Absolutely. And you know what's interesting about that? The ICO world had the same exact thing a couple of years ago and we profiled the stories. I did some of that on my Cryptocast show, which, by the way, I have another podcast on this. I've interviewed many of these people. But you can sell iced tea, make it an ico, and suddenly there's all this money chasing you. It's just the capacity for otherwise seemingly sophisticated investors to do just dumb things is absolutely crazy. It is amazing to me how this happens and history repeats itself over and over and over again. I would say that the one trait that was the thinking behind the crazy dot com boom and bust of the late 90s is the idea that, well, investors would throw money at these companies because they had infinite scale. Right. You could reach the whole world on the Internet with your thing with your business. But what they didn't realize is that so could the competition. It's not like any profitable thing is going to be left alone. There's always going to be a competitor that springs up. And yes, the whole world is just a mouse click away, but it's easy for them to click their mouse to your competitor as well. It is different this time. These businesses are much more sensible this time around, but still, it's just far too heady. The other parallel they talk about is the financial crises around the world in these emerging market countries. Now, it's not even fair to call it an emerging market anymore. But I'm heading to China next week for a couple of weeks. It'll be my first trip to mainland China and I'll be reporting from there. Can't wait to see these ghost cities. We've talked about that a little bit and there are some real parallels. You know, the Federal Reserve, the way they're acting, they draw another parallel there.

Well, with financial crises, you didn't even mentioned the biggest one. And that's what on earth is going to happen with Brexit.

True enough, true enough. Now, you know I would be interested. Adam, you were probably against Brexit, I'm guessing.

I'm not necessarily against it. I, I think it's hilarious at the moment, just because it hasn't kicked in.

Oh, it's a total soap opera that.

They voted to do it and now they're threatening to kick out all the politicians because they're actually going to do it because they changed their mind and it's suddenly the politicians fault they voted this way and not their own. It's incredible. I actually if they can get out and start running their own currency and form trade alliances, it makes sense. It's just gonna be painful for a little while. I mean anytime any of those countries eventually decide to get out, it's gonna be painful.

I think it's gotta happen. The EU is just, is not good. It's certainly convenient as a tourist. But that plan was unworkable from the beginning. The idea that these countries with such different look, when you look at something like states, there is a federal government that creates uniformity and there's the commerce clause and all of this stuff. You know, the states aren't that different. But the European Union, it's just absolutely nuts that you have these, I'll call them lazy countries and then productive countries mixed in. You can't. It's just never going to work. It's a totally unworkable plan.

It reminds me of the situation where when our nation was originally founded, when people were deciding like, hey, we don't want a trade alliance with every single state and then we have to go out individually and make it with other governments and they said let's just do it together under a federal government and then we can do interstate commerce with no real hiccups. And they did. We can trade amongst each other with no tariffs and all that kind of stuff. But they didn't do the overarching government and that's created an issue where they just can fight against each other. And then when, when you do leave, it just creates an absolute nightmare for everybody.

Yeah, no, the EU and not to mention different languages and cultures, they're so different. You know, the uniting the US was a much easier task than uniting the eu.

Yeah. Because it was just little territories and not an established country that. I mean, what are you going to do? Go up to Germany and say, hey, give up more of your sovereignty.

Yeah, right. You know, you know, give up. Just support the lazy Greeks who want to retire at age 47. You know, it's.

Everybody wants to retire at 47.

Sure. Yeah. It's crazy. Okay, so the Fed paused rate hikes in 1998. They're doing the same thing now. I'm not sure that's A big deal. In terms of parallels, I think that.

One'S a bit off because right now the Fed has paused interest hikes because our economy isn't doing as well.

Right.

Comparatively to how it was back then. It was skyrocketing and they paused interest rate hikes. Now they're saying, hey, we're going to raise it. Oh, wait, hang on. Our economy isn't as great as we thought, so we're going to pause. It's not like they're doing it just for the sake of doing it and to not slow down a rise.

Okay. Tech stocks lead the market in 2019 as they did in 1999. Well, is that really a parallel? I mean, tech is the market. It's like, what is a tech stock anymore? For example, would you take a company like Exxon and say, well, that's an old economy company, it's an oil company. It's not a tech stock. Tech impacts everything. Every company is a tech company. I mean, you know, it used to be. I remember when I wrote my first book, right? You know, there was a whole rant in there about get a website before you do anything. Create your website, stop reading, stop doing everything, go launch your website. But that was a big deal in 1999. Okay. Now it's like, if you don't have a website, you're not in business, right?

Oh, yeah. If you don't have a website now, nobody's going to trust you.

Yeah, of course. Every company is a tech company. Duh. So I don't know, it's just different. Almost daily gains in stock prices with very little retreat. And then growth stocks outperforming value stocks. Adam, that's a big one. We got to get to our guests, but just a couple of quick comments on that one. Okay? So you can either be a cyclical market investor or a linear market investor. When you're in the real estate game, the cyclical market is the growth stock. The linear market is the value stock. The linear market is the Warren Buffett philosophy, the buy and hold philosophy. That's what we recommend. We just apply it to a better asset class, income property. And the growth stocks are the speculative crazy things that just don't necessarily make any sense. And what they didn't say here, which I guess you could read in the subtext, is all this money chasing unprofitable or marginally profitable investments, companies. So you have companies that have never reported a profit, yet their stock is booming. And that's like investing in a property in Los Angeles, California that never has any Cash flow. Yet the price is rising like crazy. It's the speculative gambler mentality that is violating commandment number five, thou shalt not gamble. That I think is probably the most important maybe of all. Seven points.

You've got it balancing on a one legged stool in that situation.

And that stool always, always, always falls over. It could be the crazy.com stock, it could be the cryptocurrency, it could be the New York City, Los Angeles, South Florida, Boston, London, Dubai, Hong Kong market. Right? Those are all those crazy cyclical markets and they always, always, they always collapse as many of them are now. So be a long term buy and hold investor, be a value investor. That is the message we want to leave you with today. Adam, let's get to our guests.

Have a good one everyone.

It's my pleasure to welcome Tal Sefani to the show. We've had people on from the Ayn Rand Institute before and he is now president and CEO of the Ayn Rand Institute. He's former CEO of kidm, the largest private education company in Israel before it was sold to Kaplan University. He's co founder of the Ayn Rand center in Israel. I took the objective activism courses at the Ayn Rand Institute back when I lived in Irvine, California. So Tal, welcome. It's good to have you on the show. How are you?

I'm good, thank you very much. I would just say that, you know, in order to know a little bit who I am, I have a pretty significant tech background and kind of in the middle between my Israeli. I moved to the US in 2006 with a technology company and then helped start another company and then been in Silicon Valley for five years and so on and so forth.

That's fantastic because really what you're doing with the Ayn Rand Institute now under your leadership is kind of changing the focus and making it more accessible. You just created an app that is getting a lot of downloads very quickly. You're doing courses in Prague and hopefully all over the world to spread the word about objectivism. We live in a pretty strange time, you know, these American colleges, I mean the universities have become oppressive regimes against free speech. They are so far left, it's mind boggling. What do you make of all this?

I think politics and what we're seeing in the culture is a reflection of undercurrents that are more philosophical in nature. And I think Rand opened my mind to really understand how we think, how we operate. We're basically organisms that are trying to find meaning and trying to do the right thing. For us, we're not born like a squirrel. So knowing how to collect nuts and find a hole in a tree. Right. We. If you leave us alone, we'll die. So we have to program ourselves. I think what we've seen in politics right now, what's happening in colleges is just a reflection of or a result of, let's call it progressive philosophies that have detached us from reality and the real nature of who we are.

Yeah.

And that has a lot of issues. It resulted in collectivism and communism and now it's taking different shapes and forms. But I think the tragedy, to be more specific, of what I see talking to thousands of students all over the world is this generational gap that we have right now. People all the way from 16, 17 to 25 having no idea what life is about and pursue their happiness.

Well, we live in this world of. It's like this dystopian world of apathy and luxury. And it's just. We'll get into that. But, you know, I'd like to clear something up first. And I, I think when I came to the Ayn Rand Institute many years ago and I studied objectivism after reading Atlas Shrugged, such a profound book. I mean, it's just life changing. Everybody says that. And I don't agree with everything Ayn Rand says or believes, but a lot of I definitely do agree with. There's this misconception, I believe. And when I had Joran Brook, your predecessor on the show, I believe I asked him this question too. I'd love to ask you. On the political spectrum, I think most people believe Ayn Rand would be some sort of. And it's really. This is the wrong description in and of itself, but like a right wing libertarian. But she actually, I believe, called the libertarians the hippies of the right, if I'm not mistaken. So she's not really a libertarian or. I mean, she wasn't. She wouldn't be a Democrat or a socialist or a collectivist or a communist. She hated communism with a passion and she was obviously very right about that. What would her political beliefs be?

They would be objective, they would be scientific. I think she creates a whole different dimension that we're not seeing in that spectrum. And that's, you know, before tripping over Atlas Shrugged and understanding the role of philosophy in one's life, I thought that it's all in physics. I love physics. So it's like asking, where would you put Einstein in the spectrum of physics? Before Einstein, he created a whole new dimension that people didn't see exist.

That's fair.

I think that, yeah, that's what Rand is offering, at least from my perspective. She would agree with the left that, you know, we should leave you alone to be. Be gay or whatever you want to be. She'll agree with the right that economically you should leave people alone. And she advocated, let's say, fair capitalism. She really understood why we as human beings need freedom in everything we do. And she separated out force and coercion to a whole different dimension that you should not trade with. You just try to remove it as far away as from human interaction. This is where she disagrees with libertarians and the anarcho capitalists and all of that, because they don't understand the nature of why we need freedom and things like that. So you're right to say she doesn't fall anywhere. The right loves to hate her for some of her ideas and the left loves to hate her about some of her ideas. She doesn't fit anywhere. But this is how I see it.

I know it's interesting because, you know, I have friends who are like these anarcho capitalists. I mean, she wouldn't be in favor of that either, would she?

Completely. She thought that the most dangerous are the people that are advocating for freedom from the wrong philosophical foundation, not understanding the nature of force and coercion and how it destructs and disrupts our ability to do what we do. The means of survival is our ability to think and integrate the world into our consciousness. She proves, I think, you know, she laid out a whole philosophy. It's like a scientific progression. You integrate one, one step after the other to come to the conclusion that in the realm of society, you and I need to trade voluntarily. I cannot because I basically disrupt your ability to be human if I, you know, choke you or I punch you in the face, or I just threaten you to kill you if you don't what I say.

Rand would not approve of any vigilantism. I believe through her reading she loved the court system and the legal system. She said that is one of the major roles of government is to provide a court system. Because if you don't have the law, you have the point of a gun.

That's the choice that brings the worst out of us. And she said there are three things a government should do. Police to protect us from the inside, army from the outside, and a court system, which is the rule of law to resolve conflicts in a non violent way. But in no way she advocates dealing with trading like she thinks it's gang Warfare. If you start thinking about, yeah, free market for armies and police and so on and so forth, there's a reason why we have countries. There's a reason why we have armies and police and rule of law, and that's it. The rest she says, leave us alone.

Yeah, it's a great philosophy. You know, it's very true. Talk to us about happiness. I assume you're familiar with, and you're probably a fan of Dennis Prager and Prager University and so forth.

I think they're doing a good job. I don't think that I agree on everything.

Yeah, nobody's gonna agree with everything. Listen, I don't agree with Ayn Rand on everything either, okay. But one of the things that Prager talks about is he does on his radio show, the Happiness Hour, right. And he says that, look, happy people make the world a better place. If you want to contribute to humanity and be altruistic, the first goal should be to be happy, because then you'll contribute more. And so I know Ayn Rand would not say be altruistic necessarily.

Yeah, I think utilitarian kind of point of view of, like, you should be happiness because it serves a higher goal. I don't think there's a higher goal. And that's the revolutionary perspective that Iran continues from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which is the life is about you. She has this wonderful definition for happiness, and she says happiness is that state of consciousness that proceeds from one's achievement of their own. I add rational goals. Goals, she says, goals. I find that fascinating. She basically says there are two things you need to do. One is to define your goals. They have to be rational. They have to be aligned with who you are, what you love, what you're good at, what people want to buy from you. And second is an effective way to achieve it, because if you don't achieve it and you fail over and over again, you won't get to this result, which is a state of consciousness of, wow, you know, I'm pretty effective, I'm successful, things are working according to plan. I'm in a state of happiness. It's a state of mind. And it's beautiful how Jefferson put it, like, it's a continuous pursuit. Why? Because goals change over time. I change over time. I become more specialized in specific areas. And I think that's what it is all about. It is out figuring out, first, what is your central purpose. And she has this concept, central purpose that I haven't heard anywhere. It's like in my world of business, everything is Clear. I got a mission for the company. I have a clear plan. I know exactly what to focus on and how to measure it. When it comes to my happiness, it's pretty blurry. What am I. And what she says, the way I interpret it is take that level of clarity that we've developed in business and apply it to your life. And that's a fascinating idea. So I can talk a little bit more about how to find this or how to discovery process, but, you know, happiness is hard work.

You're right. Right. I would like you to talk about that. But, you know, I want to say one other thing. Try and talk during the interview. Just leave a little more time. Because I want to ask you about something that very few people really talk about when it comes to Ayn Rand, and that is her views on romantic relationships and even sexuality. She's got some different angles on that. It's kind of interesting, you know, and I haven't studied it very much. But since that becomes such a part of happiness, I think it's worth throwing that in, you know, not just about achieving goals and, you know, fulfillment, but, you know, certainly romantic relationships and that kind of thing. It's part of the equation for sure. So. Yeah, tell us more.

First, I have to say I'm not a philosopher. So, you know, I don't presume to know things.

You're a practical philosopher. You're a tech guy they call a professional.

It's like an intellectual professional. Professional, intellectual. But I would say this. I think it is all the same. It all integrates to one point, which is values. You are pursuing values. It could be spiritual values. It could be material values for me, and a lot of people don't like to think about it this way, but love is a spiritual goal. It's a spiritual value, figuring out who's that person that reflects and projects that sense of life. She calls it the sense of life that you attract, are attracted to. I think love is, again, is a goal, is a value that you pursue. If you are successful, if you see this beautiful woman and you are attracted to her and you get to know her and she's not that smart, then you'll find a way that, you know, you'll find out that you're not that attracted, and then you find another person and she is amazing, and then she becomes a value, and then you end up marrying her and having kids with her. She's an enormous value. And you need to continue to pursue that value. As we know, you have to maintain and sustain relationships. It's A spiritual trade. And that people don't like to equate love and relationship and sex to trade. But it is exactly the same thing. I'm just looking out to the world as a valuer. What do I love about this? And I go and pursue this. If it could be my, my wife and my relationship with her, it could be business partner and how we succeed in making more money. For me it's all the same. Look at the squirrel. I mentioned the squirrel before, right. What is he trying to do?

Survive, Survive.

But more, you know, collect enough nuts and mate and create really the nicest hole that you can find in a tree. They're pursuing their own values and they are programmed, if you will, by nature, to go and pursue those values. The thing about humans is that we're not coming to this world program. This is why philosophy is so important. It's like our operating system. If you have an operating system that is which aligns with reality and how the nature of our consciousness and the nature of reality and the relationship between them, you'll be very successful. And that brings me to the second thing, which is one is finding your values and second, how to go achieve it. And she developed a whole system of morality which could be reduced to principles to live your life, have integrity, treat people with justice, be an independent thinker, be rational, be productive, give a lot of attention to your productive work. But this is a huge source of self esteem and happiness. And that code of morality, I think was proven in the American system to work. And people thrive and create and they don't create for someone else. This is where I don't like.

They create for themselves.

Exactly. That's what it is. I think when people talk to me about, you know, Rand and philosophy, I said, look, the first thing I care about is myself and you. And the question is, do you know how to live life? Are you happy? By the way, if you're super happy and fulfilled and everything's working, yeah, just continue to do what you're doing. But a lot of people have issues with anxiety and lack of self esteem and issues and they don't understand why things just don't align in their head. And a lot of contradictions that tells you you have a problem. I think it's a philosophical problem, but as you can see, I'm very passionate about the application of philosophy, specifically objectivism, into one's life.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You talked about the trade before. The Ayn Rand detractors would say, you know, those objectivists, aren't they just so selfish and self centered. But like you gave the example and talked about romantic relationships. Is it a quid pro quo? Is it all a value for value trade? Is that really what it is? Or just elaborate on that a little bit?

Yes. What else is there? Let me ask you, what else?

I'm just playing devil's advocate.

I agree, you know, with my wife. Let's take the most. I trade value for value with her. She's amazing, she's beautiful and she's life loving and she is benevolent and she's an interior designer. I love everything about it. The reason why, you know, I was concerned about noises around because she's fixing our house now. And I'm excited about this. I am getting something from her and I am the center of the universe, meaning she is very valuable to me because of me. She's not valuable to you because you don't know her.

Right.

And so what is selfishness? You have one life to live, it's going to end pretty soon and you need to make the most out of it and you need to care about this thing. So Ayn Rand defines selfishness in a specific way and most people see it as what she calls a package deal. Two things bundled together. Either buy those two or not. And she says that's wrong. Separate the fact that you should be self centered, self interested, without the lying, stealing liar who tramp over people and push them aside because they want. What she's advocating is rational self interest. If I want to trade with you, if I want to have a, you know, a society around me that I want to live in, why steal and cheat? Right? That's a very bad strategy. So that's, I would say if I'm selfless, then I would cheat and steal. So she breaks down this package deal into two things. Take the rational self interest. But that's really controversial. It means your life is yours, it's not your mom's, it's not your sister.

Certain. And it's certainly not the government's.

Again, the government is there to do the same thing, which is to help me center my life around my life and not have people interfere with my life.

It's just amazing when you talk on the macro political perspective and you look at the concept of taxation, for example, and all of these special interest groups that want to take from the rich and as long as they earned that money, ethically and legally, it's theirs. You know, I mean this whole concept of wealth redistribution is, it's literally immoral. You look at someone like Bernie Sanders or AOC or any of these politicians on the left. But hey, they're on the right too. It's not, you know, it's only a small amount of difference. And what they're advocating is literally immoral. I mean, it is unbelievable that this is entertained in the public square. I can't believe it.

Well, I don't think you should be surprised because if you.

Well, I'm not really surprised, but yeah.

If the morality is altruism, if the morality is good for others, if I'm being good, if I sacrifice or give away my money and not a producer who's profit seeking and goal oriented and so on and so forth, why should be. You should be surprised because as I said, people want to do good. And when I meet a radical leftist, I was like, wait, what are you trying to achieve? And then you say, okay, I just, I want to challenge your goal. I don't want to challenge, you know, you, the fact that you're stealing from other people. You know, if they're smart enough, they'll see that. The problem is realizing that if I am not living for myself, it's a destructive, deadly philosophy. In the end, we'll all die for each other. Yeah, that's the way I see it. Politically, you can see it in many different ways. But if I could just have a rational discussion with someone who wants to take my money away as taxes and say, okay, wait, wait, is that money going to do good for anyone else who didn't produce it? I claim that it actually destroyed them.

Oh, I couldn't agree more. And you know something interesting? My mother went to Berkeley, graduated from Berkeley. Listen to this combination of layers, right? She graduated from Berkeley in the 60s with a degree in social welfare, became a social worker for a few years and saw how giving away government money, that was her job. Doling out the government money to these families just destroyed them. It made them worse. They became inferior people that could not sustain their lives. They became weaker and weaker as they were more coddled. You give more stuff. I mean, look at. Everybody knows this is true. Look at what happens when you spoil a child. They become a disaster, right? You want to make your children strong and independent. You don't want to spoil them and ruin them. Of course, the same is true on a societal level. Interestingly, after all of that, my mother would agree with everything we're talking about here. It's an amazing combo. You know, you can't, you can't get much worse than berkeley in the 60s. Social welfare and then social worker. I'll tell you Something else interesting she shared with me. She said that Interestingly in the 60s at Berkeley, people were walking around with copies of the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. And I said, why? That doesn't seem like. And she said, you know, it was just cool. They were reading Ayn Rand.

Yeah. Let me tell you even something so I can compete with your mother because I was born in Beersheba, which is a southern city in Israel. But then at the age of nine, we moved to a kibbutz. Do you know what a kibbutz is?

Well, kibbutz is the only example where communism is sort of working on the planet.

Right. I'm a living proof that it's not working. And by the way, all but it's working little bit.

People, liberals will argue that the kibbutz works, okay?

Because they really were focused. Like if you treat people like ants, they will produce like ants. Right. And so anyway, but I completely agree with you. I will give you even something, something more deeper than that. When someone, a member of the kibbutz, which is a commune, right, Where I was actually not my parents property, I was raised in a kid's house. I got to see my parents like 4 to 8pm every day. But the interesting thing is that everybody shared, everybody shared the property and so on. Everybody's equal. But when a mother of one of the members got sick with cancer and he went around to ask for a little bit of money from each one, nobody gave him money. No, because we're already sacrificing our lives for you. You work in the laundry room, I'm managing the factory and we're making the same money I'm already sacrificing for you. So it brings the worst out of people. There was like horrible relationships. People hated each other in the.

Really? That's interesting. You know, capitalism is human nature. It's the most natural thing in the world to trade. It's like breathing. It's just natural. I mean, from the beginning of time, people have traded, they've gone to markets, people have developed specialized skills and that's what brought us this incredible modern world. If we didn't have people specialized in, we would have none of this, you know. But, but to your comment about the everybody's equal in the kibbutz. Well, hey, George Orwell in Animal Farm would say some animals are more equal than others. Right?

That's the problem. But I think I want to take your point even a little deeper. Yes, we are producers. We shape the world in our vision. This is the power of this machine here. The Conceptual faculties we own. But why are we doing this? We're doing this to advance our own life. We're born egoists.

Yeah.

We're born selfish. And we try. People are trying to kind of detach this from our morality. And this is so destructive in a capitalist environment, if you get to keep what you have with what you make, it drives you to do more, and it brings the best in you. So this is why I think the combination of free trade and the rule of law is what the capitalist system really offers us.

Right. And then. And then, just to wrap it up here, the only thing you have to have is you have to have just laws. Right. And not all laws are just.

And so I call it objective, objective laws.

Right. And hopefully the people get the chance to change them when they're not just. Right. So very good. Now you've got people out there like Elizabeth Warren and AOC saying, well, you know, if you have over $50 million, you should have a wealth tax of 2% per year so you can have less every year.

And the question is, why? Why? Where's the logic here?

Their logic would be, hey, you know, we'll redistribute that wealth and give it to people who need it more. Right. By their standards.

The only question I have for them is why? Why take my money with a force, with a gun.

Yeah. Because that's what every law comes down to, is a gun and a jail cell. Okay? That's what every law ends in, a gun and a jail cell.

You don't see the contradictions. Like, you want to push the gun away. So we all live freely. And you have to really understand it's all basically down to morality. Elizabeth Warren believes that the good is to give others to sacrifice. And by the way, this is why OAC is so dangerous, because she identifies the moral foundation. When she's asked, how are you going to implement the New Green Deal? She says, I don't really care. It's the right thing to do. So she would rather see people. I don't want.

You know, the means justifies the end. Here we are at Karl Marx. Right. Look at every place on Earth and every time on history. These ideas have failed repeatedly. And yet you still have these idiots that want to do this experiment again. They've done nothing more than oppress people. They're responsible for the Deaths of over 150 million people in the last century. This is scary stuff, and people should view it that way. Give out your website and any closing thoughts you have.

Yeah, so, Jason, my closing thoughts would be. It comes back to haunt us because we don't understand the moral foundation of all of this. We won't see any other results if we don't change the morality of the left to an objective morality. Yeah, I want to let people know that the Ayn Rand Institute just launched a new mobile app. It's called the Ayn Rand University. Just look for it on Android on iOS, and we have an amazing campus that has a lot of introductory content and advanced content to learn about Rand herself and objectivism in Ayn rand.org that's great.

Excellent, Tal. Thanks for joining me today and keep getting the good word out there.

Thank you very much, Jason. Appreciate it.

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