WBD249 Audio Transcription

Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand with Yaron Brook

Interview date: Wednesday 5th July 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Yaron Brook from the Yaron Brook Show. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to Yaron Brook, host of the Yaron Brook Show and Chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute. We discuss the differences between libertarianism and objectivism, how an Objectivist society would work and Bitcoin.

“I think the government is necessary. A necessary good, not a necessary evil.”

— Yaron Brook

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Well, it's evening here Yaron. How are you?

Yaron Brook: I'm good, thank you. Afternoon here.

Peter McCormack: So I need to tell you a little story to get this interview going. I accidentally started podcasting about two and a half years ago, I discovered this thing called Bitcoin and I didn't understand it. I'm not very political, I don't really understand economics, I'm certainly not technical. So I started this podcast to kind of go through a journey of learning about Bitcoin and here I am two and a half years later and I've had quite a few people follow the show. What happens is I get a lot of emails every week, people telling me different things that I should be following and who's talking nonsense.

I got this email last week from a chap called Adam and he said, "Hi, I continue to enjoy your podcast. But sometimes I lose patience with your apparent conflation of libertarianism and anarchism" and he goes on to make a few points. I was like, "Okay, help me out here. Who should I talk to?" And he said, "I really need to talk to Yaron." So to give you a very short background is that I had no idea what libertarianism is before I discovered Bitcoin. I've spoken to a lot of libertarians, I like a lot of what they have to say.

I didn't vote in the last UK election, but I've struggled to ever fully imagine a society without some form of government and I've kind of got myself to this position while I directionally want less government, but a world of no government still scares the crap out of me. So I'm coming to you today Yaron with no agenda, no questions, I just want to talk. I want to hear what you have to say, and hopefully I'm going to be able to navigate some of this and get a clearer picture from yourself, because I've watched some of your videos and I agree with a lot you have to say. Can you understand where I'm lost?

Yaron Brook: Yeah, absolutely. Well let me start by saying that I completely sympathize with you and your gut instinct, if you will, is absolutely right, that is a world with no government would be a horror equivalent to the horrors of the most oppressive status regimes. So I am not an anarchist and many of your listeners I think, are going to be upset by the fact that I'm not an anarchist because so many Bitcoin unfortunately supporters or people interested in Bitcoin are anarchists. No, I think the government is necessary and necessary good, not a necessary evil.

I think if it's limited to its proper function and we can get into what the proper function is and why wants you to limit it, then it is a necessary good and the negation of it leads to what anarchy always leads to, which is bloodshed, gang warfare and all hell breaks loose. So I completely understand why you want some government, because there is one aspect of human life, which you cannot leave to the market because this aspect of human life is what is necessary.

If you exclude it, that's when markets get created. So it is a necessary, not sufficient, but a necessary feature of markets to get created and that feature is violence, force. You have to exclude violence and force so that they becomes a marketplace. If I can pull out a gun at any point in time and take your wallet, we're not going to trade and there's no points in trade. We're going to be watching each other's guns and we're going to be cautious of one another, trust breaks down, contracts break down, everything breaks down.

So the one reason we institute governments is to exclude force from human interaction, exclude corrosion, exclude authority and so that's the job of the government. The job of the government is to be a policeman and a judiciary so we can arbitrate disputes because even, because we don't want to go out and duel in the streets when we disagree and provide a military to protect us from other people who would like... But that's pretty much it, but it has to do that. If it doesn't do that, everything breaks down.

Peter McCormack: See, I agree with all of this and I found myself in a position sometimes where I've tried to argue for this, I get called a status slave or a statist or a statist cuck. All range of insults, because to agree with any form of state or any form of government, the counter argument is, "Well, you still believe in coercion because some form of government is coercion." I understand the point they're making, but I can only foresee a Mad Max world without any form of government.

One of the things I've always said is like, "Okay, well what I would like to see is..." And this came from a guy called Erik Voorhees who said to me, "Let's not try and have the magic red button and switch off the state, let's directionally move to less state." I've always felt like, well, shouldn't we try and wean ourselves off the state, see which bits we can get rid off and makes a better warden and see which bits where actually, no, we need that.

This whole defund the police, having no police and not that I like the police and certainly the problems in the US are very different from the UK, but I imagine no police and just think chaos.

Yaron Brook: Yes and see, I don't take the approach of let's defund things slowly, progressively see what works and what doesn't. I look at this from a principal perspective and part of the problem, I think with libertarians and I don't consider myself a libertarian and maybe Adam should have been clearer on the differentiation between all these different ideas and all these different groups.

Peter McCormack: There's too many now.

Yaron Brook: I've been called an objectivist, which is an Ayn Rand and I believe Ayn Rand's philosophy is true. Part of the challenge with libertarians is they start with this idea coercion is bad and you ask them, "Why is coercion bad?" Most ethicists, most philosophers in the human history do not think coercion is bad. Indeed if you have to go to coerce somebody in order to achieve a good, then so be it and that's why we have taxes, that's why we have a welfare state, that's what we have all these government intervention, is because a significant majority of humanity believes that coercion for the right cause is a good thing.

So I start with, you need a philosophical explanation for why coercion is bad and only then can we discuss, okay, is having any government coercion... I don't think it is, because I think a government, a limited government that prevents coercion from happening is acting primarily in self-defence and an action in self-defence is not coerced. So if I'm propelling you from killing your neighbour, that's not coercion.

You were going to commit coercion and I'm preventing that from happening by interfering, or if you've already killed your neighbour and I go and catch you and put you in jail, that is in a sense, an act of self-defence. It is not an act of initiation of force, I'm protecting, I'm not initiating and that's a crucial differentiation that comes out of why we even uphold coercion to begin with.

Peter McCormack: Right, but I would say the element they say would be coercion is that tax is an optional and if I don't pay tax, I can end up in court and I can end up being convicted as a criminal for tax evasion. That part would be considered coercion.

Yaron Brook: Yes and I think they're right. This is why I'm against coercive taxation. So it is where again, you might view me as radical as they are and Europeans have a hard time with this, but I think of taxes or the revenue from the government, I think that's just a problem to be solved. How does the government generate revenue without coercion? I'd say there're two ways of doing this.

One is there are certain services that the government can't charge for, for example, let's say the two of us have a contract and we don't just want mediation and arbitration. What we actually want, if we truly disagree this to be able to go to the state courts to be enforced by the police. Then when we sign the contract, we pay a certain fee to the courts to guarantee that contract and we pay in advance and that funds the court system and certain aspects of government.

So you could think of certain government services that you could charge a fee from. Now, you can't charge for the police because the police job is to protect us from violation of individual rights and they can't go around charging money as that happens. But you can do it for a certain segment of what the government does. Patents, copyrights, the register they will charge, and they could fund part of the government. The second way the government would be funded in my world would be through voluntary contributions.

Today people write checks for all kinds of causes and many of them very large checks and imagine a world in which we really we have reached a point where people understand that we need to have a limited government and that government is going to protect them and that's all it's going to do. It's not going to interfere in their lives, it's not going to tell them who to sleep with, it's not going to tell them who to marry, it's not going to tell them who to do business with and how much to pay their employees, it's just going to protect them.

I think people would be happy to write a check to the government every... Indeed my fear is that government would have too much money, not too little and I would want some kind of provisioning of how their money gets returned back to the people who wrote the checks. But so you make it voluntary and so people would come and say, "Well, you create free-rider problems. People don't pay and still benefit from the fact." Sure who cares, right? Free-rider problems are everywhere.

We have lots of free-rider problems. I don't really care that we have free riders as long as my rights are being protected, as long as I have a good police and a good military and a good judiciary. If a few people don't pay their taxes, so what? There are all kinds of other mechanisms we can take care of, that you can have social pressure. The government could actually publicize who pay taxes, that's probably a good idea because you don't want people buying influence.

So why not have a list of everybody who's paid into the system and we can all monitor that list and evaluate it and if where somebody, if my neighbour hasn't paid maybe I don't deal with that neighbour, maybe I don't speak to him for four months or whatever, to kind of put social pressure on them. But yes, I agree with those libertarians who claim that coercion is evil. I agree coercion is evil and therefore the government needs to find ways to fund itself that are not coercive.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so I understand these kind of principles and there is some alignment here with the libertarians suddenly. So what areas would you say the government's responsible for in the judiciary? Contract law is obviously very important, certain things I'm assuming fraud, violent crimes etc. But I'm imagining very similar to libertarians, the list of possible crimes is a lot smaller.

Yaron Brook: A lot smaller! So all the financial crimes we have today have nothing to do with fraud. They could be like a voluntary association, so for example insider trading, why can't there be a contractual issue between insiders in the company and shareholders or a contractual issue between the company and the exchanges in which they are listed and traded? So that's the kind of laws that just wouldn't exist. If shareholders didn't like companies that allowed insider trading, they wouldn't buy their shares.

So a lot of the laws that protect consumers, not from fraud, but exposed. You would have a lot more reliance on civil law and things like liability and things like that. So there'll be no preventive law, no law that says you're not allowed to use this because there's some possibility maybe. They'd be no regulatory agency that allowed certain drugs, certain vaccines let's say to be used or not to be used. I think what would happen is you'd have private entities that would screen medication, give recommendations to doctors, this gets a thumbs up, this gets a thumbs down, use this, don't use that and doctors and patients would have to decide what kind of drugs and how much risk are they willing to take?

A good example right now is these COVID vaccines. Why can't I go and get a vaccine right now? They've gone through phase one and phase two, in other words, they're fairly safe. If I want to take the risk as an individual, why can't I go and get a vaccine? Why is the government dictating? If there's a doctor who's willing to write me a prescription, because he thinks they're pretty safe and the drug companies will need to sell them, even though they might face liability, why is the government deciding 30,000 people is the right number for a phase three trial and I have to be excluded?

All of those kinds of decisions would be given back to individuals and back to markets and back to voluntary relationships that we have with one another.

Peter McCormack: All right, I'm going to run through a few scenarios with you and sadly you probably kind of covered this a few times with various people before, but I just think a specific scenario. So firstly, I'm guessing you'd just have no objections to the forming of monopolies?

Yaron Brook: Well how do you define monopoly? So if you look at the word monopoly, it comes from government grants. So I think the East India Trading company in Britain was the first monopoly and the King basically gave them a grant to do all the trade between India and the UK and they had a monopoly of it protected by the government. In a free market the government doesn't have the power to do that. So there are no monopolies almost by definition because the government haven't even granted that. If you're asking, do I have a problem with a company having large market share?

The answer is absolutely not. Indeed the goal of every successful company is to have large market share and that means they've been successful and to the extent that they continue to be successful and can sustain a large market share, it means they're doing the right thing. If we take historical examples, for example, Rockefeller's Standard Oil in the 1870s, I think it was had 93% of all the oil refining capacity in the United States. Now when we take classes in economics and I don't know if you've taken any econ 101 class, but we're taught that what happens then is prices are going to go up because there's no competition and quality will come down.

The fact is that's not what happens in reality, that is when somebody gets large market share. What usually happens is they keep prices down because they want to keep their market share and they know that if they raise prices, there are no real barriers to entry. Capitalism, the beauty of capitalism, people are always trying to knock you down and indeed by the time Standard Oil was broken up in the 1920s, its market share was something like 23%, 24%, not 93% and when it had 92% of the oil refining capacity, the product they were selling was a product called kerosene. You know what it was used for?

Peter McCormack: Heating?

Yaron Brook: No, it was actually used for lighting. Who competed them out of existence? It was a lighting company, Thomas Edison.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Edison of the bulb.

Yaron Brook: Yeah, so who would have imagined? Imagine the bureaucrat sitting in 1873 thinking, "Oh, this is an uncompetitive business because they could throw 93% of the lighting business. Oh wait, Edison is going to invent the light bulb soon." That would have never happened. So you would have broken up Standard Oil because of lighting monopoly, but it was irrelevant by then because Thomas Edison was already working at the light bulb.

So nobody can predict what the real competition is for any particular product and at any particular point in time. Today, a large so-called monopolies offer their product for basically zero, like Google. What do you pay to use Google? Nothing. What do we pay to use Amazon? Lower prices than what we paid and of course they don't even have a large market share. What do we pay any of these, Facebook or whatever? Zero.

So the whole framework of antitrust and the whole idea of monopolies, I think comes from bad economics, bad political philosophy and really comes from bad thinking. It's just not an issue and never has been an issue in a free market and never will be an issue. The real issue is when government gives you special favours, when government protects you from competition, then you have real barriers to entry that cannot be overcome.

Peter McCormack: That's fair. Okay, let me try another scenario with you. I watched a film recently called "Dark Waters" and it is about DuPont and when they were poisoning the water in a certain area, which affected the cows and the cows died and then a lot of people locally got sick. In this kind of scenario where does that fit in terms of say, is that a criminal law? Are there regulations around say certain chemical usages? That feels like a complicated one.

Yaron Brook: Sure, but not that complicated. Again, what's the principle? The principle should be property rights and the principle is that I can harm you. Sometimes I harm you on purpose and that's criminal and sometimes I harm you by accident and that's civil liability and the variety of liabilities. I don't know whether DuPont purposefully poisoned the water because it didn't care or wanted to hurt cows and people.

Let's assume, I don't know, but to an extent that they did it on purpose let's say and they knew that this was actually going to kill three people or they're going to kill x percent of the population or the people drinking the water, then it's criminal. They did something with the full knowledge that somebody was going to die and they were the absolute cause of that death. If on the other hand, which is more likely, they just spewed this stuff into the river because it was easy thing to do and they didn't really think about it and they didn't have evidence that this was going to kill anybody, they thought it was harmless or whatever.

Then as somebody got sick, then you would have to go to court and show that they were negligent or grossly negligent and you would get compensation like you would in civil law. But there was a third element here, which I think solves a lot of these problems, which we don't have today at our detriment because we assume that they're throwing their chemicals into the water and then nobody owns this water. That is, this water is public property. Therefore, public poverty means nobody owns it, which means nobody takes care of it, which means nobody can sue at that point.

Nobody can tell you, "You can't do that." Now we know, for example, from British common law, hundreds of years going backwards, that you can't take your garbage and dump it in my backyard. That's settled law, we know that. Well, if I own the lake or if I own that piece of the river and there's no reason I can't own pieces of river or lakes, then you're not going to throw your trash in my river, DuPont is not going to dump their garbage in my river and if they dump the garbage upstream and I own the river downstream again, there's well settled law on how to deal with polluters up here when I bear the consequences down here and there all kinds of ways in which we can deal with that from a contractual relationship and that the law steps in because you're damaging my property.

So the solution to most pollution problems, I'm not going to argue all of them, but most pollution problems is private property. If you make the rivers private and I know that sounds bizarre, but why not? If you make the lakes private, if you even start thinking about how to make the oceans or at least the asset within the ocean, for example, fish. In Iceland, they have come up with a whole structure, legal structure where they're basically privatized the fishing stock and because it's private, the fishermen don't have an interest in depleting it because they, in a sense own it and therefore they have an incentive to keep it thriving, to keep it going.

The same, by the way, happened in Africa, the way they dealt, I think it was in Uganda or Kenya, the way they dealt with the extinction of elephants is they privatized the elephants. Now if you privatize the elephant and you sell hunting licenses, then you have got an ongoing incentive to keep the elephant stock robust so that you can make money on the hunting licenses. What happened is the population of elephants has gone up dramatically since they were privatized. So because if it's privatized, there's a value to somebody and that person is going to protect that value.

Whereas poachers, it's easier for poachers to attack elephants on public property where nobody's really defending it because nobody cares that much than on private property where there's an economic incentive. So most of these kinds of problems are solved true of private property the same is true of like the burning of the Amazon and the problem is nobody owns the Amazon. Somebody should own it. If I owned Amazon, you couldn't burn my forest. It would be my forest.

Peter McCormack: I think there's a slightly more complicated point with say the DuPont example and it is one that I wrestle over because there are certain regulations with the how much and the certain concentration of things they can release. Without that existing, there's no benchmark to work from and we know self-regulation with greedy corporates isn't always a good thing, at least with some kind of centralized regulation that came from a state, at least it's independent of the potential polluter. Do you see what I'm wrestling with there?

Yaron Brook: Sure, so I think what you need to do in circumstances like that is before you have such a law that restricts people's actions, you need a significant burden of proof that somebody's rights are being violated. So let's take something that is not easy to privatize, the air, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Yaron Brook: Let's say you have a factory and you're spewing out I don't know, cyanide into the air and nobody knows that cyanide is bad. Some people get sick, they investigate, it turns out it's cyanide and they now sue the industry that's polluting with the cyanide. At some point when these cases become evidence and a few of them, let's say, pass the legislature as they do with common law, I think at that point, it makes sense for the government to say, "Okay, we've gotten now significant evidence that X concentration of cyanide in people's lungs causes real harm. 

This has gone through the process and now we're going to ban cyanide above this concentration from being in the air." So there has to be a process in which it's made clear that there's a rights violating. We've learned it because you can't go back and say, "You should have known back then, how would I have known back then?" But we've learned that this is damaging and now we stopped the behaviour given that it's damaging at this point.

Peter McCormack: Is there any chance for something like that, there's a risk that these things would take too long to possibly even resolve and cause a lot more damage? Sorry to keep going back to the DuPont example, it's just, I watched it recently and I know Nathaniel Rich from Vanity Fair who did the research piece, but it took a nearly 20 years to resolve the case in that DuPont were able to abuse the legal system. Do you think the legal system would be different, these kinds of cases could be expedited in a different framework?

Yaron Brook: Well, first I'd say the DuPont case never would have happened if you truly had property rights. The DuPont only happened because they assumed that the water they were spewing there stuff into was not owned by anybody and they wouldn't get caught and nobody cared. That's point number one. So I think a lot of this just wouldn't happen in a proper system. I also think things would be a lot more expedited because the legal system would be a lot less burdened because they'd be a lot less regulations and a lot less controls.

But also look, stuff takes time. We like to have a Garden of Eden ideal where life is just perfect and life is... But that's not life. Life is messy, sometimes big time and I'll give you an example where sometimes you just got to suffer through the pollution. The best example of that I can think of is London in the middle of the 19th century. So take London in the middle of the 19th century, literally the air is filled with coal dust. This was really harmful, objectively harmful to human life.

This is not good, it's polluting, it's damaging and yet, if at that point let's just randomly pick 1850 or 1860, you choose to stop producing energy using coal because people are getting sick, that's the end of civilization and literally the end of progress. They end of innovation. The end of technology, the end of wealth, the end of all of it. Sometimes there's a cost to progressing, to growing, to getting somewhere and if it's civilizational like that, where it's a civilization event, then you just have to say, "Okay there's going to be a certain cost."

But you know what? Life is still better than it would be if we hadn't discovered coal and we're just going to live to it. It's not as good our so-called ideal, which we can't really create right now because it's too expensive, but it's far better than what it was without it, we'll bear the costs. So you have to be careful of utopias. Life is messy, things are messy and sometimes things don't work out. Optimize based on some ideal that somebody has in terms of how the world will be, but the outcome is far superior by any other measure or by any measure.

Peter McCormack: That will put me to guess that you are against any of the current of our mentalism, which is going on right now and the fear over melting ice caps etc. Is that because you don't think it's happening or is that because you believe any form of regulation or taxation to try and solve a potential problem would be more damaging, it's not really worth it?

Yaron Brook: So I certainly think the last one is true. I think that the regulations would... Look, if it's really as bad as they claim it is, then we would literally have to shut down CO2 production tomorrow to save us all. That would mean like five, six billion people would die. That would mean just the annihilation of the human race, at least at the levels of which we live in today, there's just no way to maintain it and I find that particularly absurd and particularly evil, if you will, given that there are solutions, if they really cared about the solutions.

Whether a solution would be nuclear power, which they take off the table, even though it's the only solution. It's the only thing that does not emit carbon and can produce pretty much an infinite amount of energy. Whether it's all kinds of technologies that might be able to cool the planet as it warms, nobody wants to touch that kind of stuff, right? That you put stuff in the atmosphere and it's cool. If this is really the end of humanity because of climate change, well, let's try to change the climate in our favour. Whether it's all kinds of technologies that suck CO2 out of the atmosphere that nobody's discussing.

There's a lot of scientists working on this and there's a lot of progress being made of doing this, nobody wants to discuss those. So to me, I'm suspicious when the obvious post civilization solutions are shunned, and what they really want to do is shut down civilization. I'm also suspicious for another reason. I'm a finance guy, so if you want to sell me or if you want me to invest in your project, one of the first things I asked you is how have you done in the past? Are you good at this? If I asked the global warming crowd, how good are you at predicting catastrophes?

How good have you been over the last 50, 60 years? Well, their track record is abysmal! Whether it's, we're all going to die of cancer really, really young because of chemicals or whether it's because a global cooling or population bomb or even with regard to climate change we're going to get the things they predicted 20 years ago never happened, the things they predicted 10 years ago never happened and so on. So I'm suspicious now, is it happening? Probably. Is it catastrophic the end of the world stuff?

No, I just don't believe that. Oh, another thing, if our oceans are rising, why aren't we building dikes? Think about Amsterdam. It's been under sea level and it's been below sea level for hundreds of years. They've built a dike and they protect it. So if there are low lying areas that we really honestly think are going to be submerged, why aren't we thinking about new modern 21st century dike systems to protect the low-lying areas? So again, none of these solutions are being considered in any kind of serious way.

So I'm skeptical about the urgency or the panic involved. Plus human beings like catastrophes. We like to believe that our generation is going to be the one where Armageddon happens. Millennial cults happen on a regular basis. If you look at the religious fervour, which where some of these people relate to climate change, it seems to me like a religious fervour.

Peter McCormack: I don't think that point is entirely true in terms of if the sea levels are rising, we would be doing things. I just did the search again. I'd have to spend a bit of time on it, but I'm pretty aware that for example coastal regions of Florida and Miami have experienced increased flooding and they are doing work there. I'm also pretty aware that I'd say in the Maldives they are spending money because that literally the whole nation will be submerged if it's true. So I think some of that is happening.

Yaron Brook: Sure, but nobody's talking about large scale civil engineering projects like we did maybe 100 years ago to solve a problem. Maybe there are localized efforts that pour a little bit more sand on the beaches. I'm not sure what they're doing exactly in the Maldives, there're localized effort to do that.

But if this was really, "Yeah, we're talking about a catastrophe that could wipe out millions of people", you'd think we would be thinking about big solutions and advocating for those, instead of saying, and "By the way, we'll need a lot of fossil fuels. We'll need to burn a lot of fossil fuels in order to implement these solutions" and that's why maybe people are not thinking about the solutions in order to do it.

Peter McCormack: I would say, I think some people are thinking about it. I've always assumed the reason it's not really happening is I think because of the way election cycles work, it's always possible to kick that can down the road a little bit. It's somebody else's problem because nobody wants to be the President who turns around and says, "You know what, we've really got to do something here. We've got to cut back." So I understand your thinking.

Yaron Brook: The question is, are there activists advocating for this? I don't see that. I see there're activists almost exclusively focused on reducing CO2 emissions, which is the wrong goal, the wrong approach. CO2 is a lifesaver. Oil companies are the greatest beneficiaries mankind has ever had. We would still be poor without oil companies and CO2 emissions as energy is what we live on.

The cheapness of energy today is unbelievable and has raised our standard of living. So if we're going to find solutions, they can't be solutions to reduce the amount of energy we produce and indeed, if you look at this stat, this is a really fascinating stat, that is how many people die from weather events today versus 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago from tornadoes and hurricanes and flooding and all these bad things as well. The number has shrunk dramatically.

A lot fewer people die today because of the weather than in any point in human history. Well isn't that the measure? If that's the measure, shouldn't we focus on protecting human life from whatever the weather? One of the things that really scares me is the next ice age, because there's going to be a next ice age. We know that, the cycles, are we ready for an ice age where there's a glacier in New York City? It strikes me as there's no relationship between the scam ongoing and the kind of solutions that they're proposing and that leads me to suspicion about motivation.

Peter McCormack: No, and I can agree with that. The suspicion about the motivation is certainly an issue. Are there any within this kind of your school of thought, your thinking, are there any specific areas where you get really challenged where you think actually, maybe that does require some form of regulation? So for example, I wouldn't want myself to be able to set up a nuclear power plant and I certainly think nuclear power is something I'm glad is regulated and having watched Chernobyl, which was fantastic, I certainly think there are certain standards that is useful that we have globally.

We have Fukushima as well, which obviously was very scary and I don't think perhaps we should be building nuclear power plants where there can be tidal waves. That one I would find hard to argue against, but again, I'd put it to you. Are there any areas that, or other areas where you're thinking is challenging and you think perhaps we do need regulation?

Yaron Brook: So let me take the nuclear one first, I view it exactly the other way around. When I watched Chernobyl, I said to myself, "Oh my God, the last people in the world who should running a nuclear power plant, designing one, building one, and then responsible for its safety are government officials, government bureaucrats. Those are the last people." I think Chernobyl illustrates why we don't want to take responsibility. It's political, it's not economics that drive it. Economics I understand, motivations, they're understandable and you can easily structure incentives in a way that increase safety.

Even Fukushima, one of the problems with that old power plant was that because of the regulations, because of the panic of the last few decades, we haven't built modern nuclear power plants, which are far safer than those old ones and as a consequence, we rely on old nuclear power plants that are susceptible to things like earthquakes and title waves. 

So my view is if we had allowed nuclear power to continue to evolve and we'll get to how much regulation, but let's say free of regulations, I think we would have today small, efficient, unbelievably safe with zero waste, because completely recyclable nuclear power plants, and they would be plentiful and they would be everywhere and there wouldn't be any of this risk of shut down all the old power plants, and we would have less concern about CO2 because so much about energy will be produced by nuclear. Now look, if somebody's building a nuclear plant in my neighbourhood...

So I can imagine that when you're building something where and again, this is why I like small, rather than big nuclear power plants. So let's say they were building a big new power plant and there was the potential of a problem that could wipe out tens of thousands of people or more. Then yes, I think that at the margin you could have specific very, very limited regulations that gave the government very, very narrow powers to go in and just make sure that nothing crazy was going on. But I also know that I give you some examples.

You can't build a power plant, you can't raise enough money to build a power plant without issuing bonds, without taking on debt. Bond holders would want the insurance plan to be insured, they want their nuclear plan to be insured, the insurance company now has a incredible incentive to make sure that nuclear power plant is safe. Again, I trust the insurance company more than I trust the government bureaucrat any day to make sure why, because the government bureaucrat, nothing's going to happen to him like at Chernobyl, nothing's going to happen to him if he turns out to be wrong.

Maybe he gets fired, maybe in the worst-case scenario he gets sent to the Gulag, but nothing in a free country is going to happen in this bureaucrat, he's got a lifetime job. An insurance company will lose and go bankrupt, so they better get it right and that employee will be fired if they get it wrong. I far prefer that incentive than the government bureaucrats and stuff. So you can easily see how in a free market, the incentives for self-regulation, this will be true of building codes and true of all of these things, the government should only interfere if there is what I'll call probable cause.

If somebody has noticed something suspicious, something with like the crane on this building is really tilting or I watched them pour the concrete and it just looked bad, then there should be a number I can call and yes, maybe then a government inspector that comes and said, "People in the neighbourhood are afraid of what's going on here, we've come to inspect." Other than that, I think markets are a million times better at self-regulating and self-regulating, I don't mean the company regulating itself. I mean other companies like insurance companies and holders and other elements within the marketplace regulating the company.

I think I trust that much, much more than I trust any government bureaucrat. It's funny, I've listened to a number of these shows where they interview farmers in the United States about food safety, the whole issue of food safety and the farmers always describe how the FDA comes and inspects. But when they really get serious, when they really get intense is when they describe the private companies that are sent to inspect the food on top of the FDA, they're sent by supermarkets, grocery stores, because look, the grocery store doesn't trust the government.

The government can say the food is fine, but the grocery store wants to test it again. Why? Because the grocery store is going to be liable if something bad happens. McDonald's is going to be liable if you eat a hamburger and get sick from it. FDA, the food inspector regulator, they don't care. They're easily bribed and they're easily just lazy and have no reason. Not because they're bad people, but because the incentives are all messed up, the incentives just don't. So private sector just does a better job and that's because self-interest is the right motivation for proper rational decision making.

Peter McCormack: Another area I wanted to ask you about, and I'm pretty sure I know where your stand on this is the social safety net. Now I'm going to assume you're not particularly keen on redistribution of income, because I certainly not myself in terms of how the government does it certainly right now and I've got a specific question related to the pandemic, but I'm going to come back to that. But I watched a film recently on Netflix called Crip Camp, I think it was called and it was about disabled people. I don't know if you've seen it?

It's fantastic. Then the campaigns that the people who attended the camp ran for years to try and get equal access to buildings and certain things like that. Now I certainly think in a city like London, you could argue that, well, you don't need wheelchair access to every cinema because in a free market, there would be enough incentive to build a cinema for disabled people to have access to.

But in a small town where I live, the incentive model might be there and I think it's a great thing that we do have equal access to all people with disabilities to be able to access services. I think that is a great thing that society, I see that as a progression of society and I'm in favour of that, but to do that require some form of regulation to make it happen, of course. How does that sit with you?

Yaron Brook: So I would be against any kind of compulsion to do it. I agree with you, I want to live in a town where people have access, I think it's a good thing and I think it's a nice thing. It's the right thing, if enough of us think that's true, then enough of us could get together and lobby and encourage store owners, cinema owners to make the changes necessary to make that happen.

So I think it needs to be done voluntarily. I think if we're convinced that the cinema owner is being irrational here or is destroying the town or destroying in the sense of what it means to be in the town or whatever, then we can argue against them, maybe even boycott the cinema, the people who want it could boycott the cinema. It doesn't have to be just people in wheelchairs that boycott the cinema. We can all do it and until he fixes it. So I would much rather see... I think all these kind of issues but dealt with much more positively and in a much more healthy way than compulsion.

So for example, there might be a small grocery store in your village that just doesn't have the money to do it and if you force them to do it, they'll go out of business. Some businesses in the US I know, went out of business when they were forced to do this. Well, maybe that grocery store doesn't do it, and there's no access to it, but there are other grocery stores that do, because they have a little bit more of a profit margin, or they have a little bit more capital than they can afford to do it. So if you make it voluntary, then it adjusts and over time, maybe this grocer can save enough money to make the changes if that's necessary.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm not sure. See I buy most of your free market stuff, and I'm agreeing with you and I'm nodding, but this one, I think this one feels a little bit more utopian that we hope we would, but I don't imagine we will, especially having watched the film and watching how these people had to campaign for years and fight for their rights to have equal access. I think they had to do it because people didn't care and whilst in your world, as you said, well, we might, I just don't think that we would.

Yaron Brook: If we wouldn't, then we wouldn't, then we don't do it. Then we just don't deserve it. You get what you're willing to do and if you're not willing to, if you don't care enough... You said you cared, you watch the... Fine. But if you don't care enough to actually do something, not do something by voting to take somebody else's money and to force somebody else to do it. But if you're not willing to put up your own money to actually go and do and make the changes, then you don't care that much. If we don't care that much, then it shouldn't happen.

That's the beauty of a market. The market values our caring and our caring is measured by whether we're willing to boycott a cinema, whether we're willing to put our own cash at play and the same thing with a social safety net. I don't have a problem with the safety net, as long as it's voluntary and if you say people wouldn't give enough money to help the poor, then the poor won't get helped. But that means we don't care enough about the poor to help them and that means, why is it okay for us to vote, to take somebody else's money when we don't care enough to put our own money into it?

Peter McCormack: I think we do, because the funny thing is times are really tough right now, especially in the UK we went through a period of austerity and we saw a massive growth in the food banks and the food banks often rely on donations and people do volunteer. If I had the other 40% of my income back that the government takes from me, I'm already quite generous with it, but I'm pretty sure I would be generous and I trust myself to distribute it better than the government. So I'm with you on that side of things.

Okay, so I'm agreeing with a lot of this and the next thing I would worry about is that, okay, "how do we get there" is a tough question, but how do we maintain it is a bigger question for me, because one of the things about say, going back to the idea of the big red button is that I just think humans are designed in a way of where we like to organize. We have leaders and followers, and without any form of governance and governance structure, we will naturally have bloodshed and potential warlords and I know the Rothbardians will say we don't, but we potentially will.

But it feels like it requires some form of very strong constitution to avoid the slow creep of the state to say, "Oh, we need to do a little bit", because we've seen this. The US has a very strong constitution, something I wish the UK had and I think it's something that's going to protect the US government from Donald Trump personally. I know that's going to trigger people, but I do. I feel like you'd need an even stronger constitution to maintain this small state.

Yaron Brook: So yes, but you need something much more than that. So I agree about the constitution and I've got some ideas on how you would structure a constitution to make it much stronger and we can talk about that in a second, but I want to go a little deeper philosophically because I think the problem is not that we don't have the right constitution. I don't think the problem is that people don't understand economics. I don't think the problem is any of that. They don't really get how we get wheelchairs in cinemas.

I don't think that's what causes bad government. I think the challenge we have is a philosophical one, it's an ethical model and this is why it's so hard to convince people of this, of free markets and the benefit you get in free markets. We grow up believing that our moral duty, our ethical duty and responsibility is to do what? It's to take care of others. Our whole morality is built around sacrifice, otherism, altruism, which means otherism, literally it's about thinking of others first. We celebrate people when we view them as selfless. Now, none of us wants to be selfless and none of us actually are consistently selfless. We would die if we were, but that is our model idea.

That's a little conscious voice in our mind saying "you need to do good" is really means that you need to sacrifice for the sake of other people. Now what better way to sacrifice for the sake of other people than socialism, feudalism, all kinds of isms that have a big state. We outsource the responsibility, we don't have to worry about it on a day to day basis and yeah, they take 50% of my income but I don't care because I'm supposed to do it, it's the right thing to do, it's just, it's noble. I might say "It doesn't work guys", and you go, "I don't care that it doesn't work that well, I've done my duty. I've given it the church, leave me alone. I'll give again on next Sunday."

That whole moral framework needs to be challenged, which means, and I don't know where you stand on this so I risk offending you, but it means challenging the whole foundation of Christianity, which means challenging the whole foundation of the Judeo-Christian, so-called Western tradition if you will and maybe going back to a Greek Aristotelian tradition, which says, actually, that's not what morality is about. It's not about sacrifice. It's not about Jesus on a cross suffering, not for sins he committed. That I get, if you commit sins, you should suffer. No, he suffered because of sins we all committed, that's like the biggest injustice in the world. That's horrible!

I don't admire Jesus for giving his life for my sins. I should give my life for my sins. So we have to reject that whole view of morality and embrace Aristotle's view, which Ayn Rand has modernized and I think improved this significantly and that is the view that the purpose of life is not to sacrifice and live for others and feel guilty about not doing enough. The purpose of life is to live with a capital L. It's to live the best damn life you can live on this planet. Now, not in some after life. It's to embrace happiness, it's to strive towards happiness, it's to pursue happiness and be guided by some pretty clear moral principles that are empirically have been shown to produce happiness. 

That is, and that's what life should be. It's about living the best life you can live in this earth based on using your mind, based on using reason and using rationality and then the question becomes, if that were the model basis that people accepted, let's say they accepted that, then I would ask them, "Okay, what is the enemy of you being able to live the best life you can using reason and rationale? And what's the enemy of reason and rationality?" Well, the enemy of reason and rationality is coercion.

If I put a gun to your back of your head, you can't think. If thinking is meaningless, it doesn't mean anything and of course you can't act based on your thoughts because you have to act based on what the regulators told you is okay to act on. The whole areas of research that people don't even research, that entrepreneurs don't go into because they're banned, they're not allowed to, so why even bother? So the only solution for a person who values his own life, values his own happiness.

Once they live the best life that he can live, is freedom. It's the freedom to think and the freedom to act based on those thoughts and as long as you're not violating somebody else's rights, as long as you're not hurting somebody else, being left alone, that's it. So to me, that is what we need to convince people. The economics is easy, right? What's hard is to convince people to live that full flourishing, successful, embracing life, with everything that they have, and then adopting the political system consistent with such a life, that's the challenge. It's the overturning 2,000 years of guilt.

Peter McCormack: Do you have to enter the political system to do that? I don't mean you personally, but does somebody have to enter the political system with a party, with a goal of doing this? We have libertarian parties, is that possible or not?

Yaron Brook: It's not possible, it's futile and I think for most part, a waste of money and time. One day it will be possible and one day it will be necessary, but we're far from that day. What is necessary today is education, education, education, and primarily philosophical and moral education, not political and economic education. Now you can often use economics and politics to illustrate a moral point, but unless people value their own life in and of itself and are willing to embrace...

If you're a couch potato and you just don't care, you are just living for the moment your television, eating the junk food, and you don't care about yourself and you don't care about your health and you don't care about what's in your head, then forget it. Any politician is going to be able to manipulate you and promise you goodies, and you'll vote for them. What we need are active minded people engaged in the world, pursuing their happiness, pursuing values, trying to live a good life.

If you have those kinds of people, then I think freedom becomes almost inevitable. We can easily, I think, convince that group of people that these ideas make sense. It's getting from here to there, which is hard and going to take a lot of time. It requires real education and it requires people to really think and thinking is work.

Peter McCormack: So it's funny, the other thing I want to talk to you is about the money, broadly the money, rather than just...

Yaron Brook: There's one of the few we were going to talk about. Yeah, the constitution... I would say there are a few things that a constitution would have to have in order to be solid. I would call it four separations. In the constitution, the American constitution is separation between church and state and I think that's incredibly healthy and required. I would actually make it stronger, I would make it the separation between ideas and state. The state should not have ideas about how people should live about what's moral and what's not.

It should basically be there to protect rights, to protect rights as Locke conceived of the most, Ayn Rand has modernized it, but just protect us from false and not have detailed ideas about human behaviour, religious or not religious, secular or religious. So one, separation of ideas from state and two, separation from economics from state. The government should have no role in economics, none whatsoever. It should never raise and it should never be tempted. Then third would be separation of education from state, which I think is crucial.

Peter McCormack: I agree with that.

Yaron Brook: Fourth is separation of state from science, which I think is also crucial, particularly in an era of panics around global warming and stuff, which I think the politics of it are far more the politics of the science are destructive. So if we could get the government to just focus on what the government is supposed to do by separating from other human activities, then I think we have a better shot at that constitution sustaining itself. But to have to get to that point and then to sustain it, you also need a population that actually has the right morality, the right moral approach to life.

Peter McCormack: Okay, well they're good points and that takes me back onto the money point because you said the separation of economics and state, which I get, I absolutely fundamentally agree with, but how do you do that when the state controls the money? How do you have money that isn't controlled by the state?

Yaron Brook: Well we've had it, at least in the UK you had a great example of this, in the I think it was the early to mid-19th century in Scotland, not in Britain, but in Scotland until the Bank of England decided that this wonderful free market experiment was diminishing their power and basically took it over. So the Scottish free banking system was an amazing period in which Scottish banks actually issued their own currency and it was a currency that was...

I don't know the names of the bank, but bank X had its currency and bank Y had it's currency and they were backed in this case by gold reserves that they had in their volts. It's one of the most successful systems in all of history and it's actually more successful than the American system than America ever had it. But in America until 1914, when we established the Federal Reserve, banks issued their own currency based on reserves of gold or silver. Canada had the same system and they only established a central bank in, I think the 1940s, so relatively late in the game, and indeed before central banks, money was gold.

But people transacted with paper, paper issued by the people who stole the gold for you, the Goldsmiths and that's how we ultimately developed banking. We developed it organically through a market system. So my argument would be that's where you'd go back to, you'd go back to private enterprise issuing gold. Now it seems to me logical that banks would do it, would issue money and it seems to be logical that banks would do it because that's what they do.

They deal with money, that's their area of expertise. I think at the end of the day, it would be backed by something like gold, exactly what that would be, I would let the market determine. The market is determined in its past that it is gold and let's have competition. Now I know you, for example, probably will argue for Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Yaron Brook: If it's Bitcoin, in a pre-market, the beauty of it is great, let's have some banks or Bitcoin, just mine Bitcoin and Bitcoin enters the system through whatever channels through the miners and let's compete. Now I think Bitcoin will be crushed in a free market, I think the only reason Bitcoin has value today is because we don't have a free market.

I don't think it can survive in a free market, but maybe I'm wrong. The beauty of a free market is that we get to see who's right and who's wrong based on what matters, which is the user's experience and the user's willingness to embrace this currency or that currency.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's really interesting because I feel like it's a funny one. I feel like when you've described the kind of perfect money we need, I feel as a Bitcoiner you've described Bitcoin and part of me wonders, I've seen you talk about it. I obviously had to do some research and I wonder how much time you spent looking at it and what it is about Bitcoin that has turned you off it? Because to me, it has all the properties of gold, essentially.

If you get out, if you ignore the fact that somebody needs to hold onto something tangible, if you just talk about the fundamental properties, it has all the properties of gold, but it has these other properties where you can teleport it around the world. It's very easy to divide, it's highly divisible, but most importantly, because it's decentralized, it isn't really controlled by anyone, so it's very difficult to co-opt it. So I'm on there thinking, I wonder what it is that's made you reject it?

Yaron Brook: Well, that it's intangible.

Peter McCormack: It is, yeah.

Yaron Brook: That it doesn't have an alternative use, it's either money or nothing. So that if I had Bitcoin and nobody was willing to accept it, it's value goes to zero. It literally goes to zero because it has no alternative use. I think money has to have an alternative use. Gold has value partially because it's money, but also because it can serve as money. It isn't money right now, but partially because we use it, it's pretty, we use it for jewellery, it's used in electronics and it's used in other things. So even if all my neighbours refuse to accept gold, it would have to still have some value to me, I could still use it.

I could still trade it for something because it has value out there maybe not as money anymore, but it's something else. That to me is the big barrier that Bitcoin totally relies and everybody agreeing that it has value. Of course, part of it is, the value gold gets in a sense that, what is it worth, right? How many cows, how many goats, is its value in other uses. What is the value of Bitcoin? I don't know. It's whatever people want to give it a value of and this is why I think the biggest problem in Bitcoin today, is the volatility, the volatility in the price. So if I own Bitcoin yesterday, I could buy two cows with it. Today I can buy 73 cows with it. Tomorrow I might only be able to buy half a cow with it.

That's not money, that's speculation. So money has to be stable, it has to have a stable value in terms of what it can buy and my sense is that there's no anchor to allow Bitcoin to ever have that stable value. Now I have a theory about what gives it a value, which I think you've heard, but I'm happy to articulate it, but that is something I don't know how to monetize. I don't know how to figure out what that value really is and therefore I wouldn't own Bitcoin.

By the way, I'm a huge fan of blockchain. I'm a huge fan of cryptocurrency in the sense that as you said, easy to move around privacy, divisible, all of that, but what I would like to see and what I think will ultimately be the winner in the crypto game, but not today in my ideal world when we have achieved the point where we have freedom is a cryptocurrency backed by gold or backed by something solid.

So that my bar and gold might sit in a vault in London, but it now is divisible into 75 bits and I can trade those 75 bits and whoever has one of those bits has a claim against my gold bar and the bank would actually give it to them if they put in the claim to get it, they could actually get that physical gold. That to me combines the two system in a healthy way, but...

Peter McCormack: There's a few points there and I'm going to counter some of them. So that use of no use of Bitcoin outside of money, I think is a fair point and I do think some Bitcoiners do ignore it, but at the same time there are some uses for Bitcoin outside of money. So at the moment, Microsoft have developed something called decentralized IDs where you can create a decentralized ID to use on the internet, which is anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain, which allows you to have an identity to use across the net, which is anonymous if so required, but allows you to build trust around the ID.

So that is a use outside of money. There are others, there are timestamps for timestamping information. A guy called Peter Todd has created something called OpenTimestamps because it's such a secure network. It is a way of securing information. So I do think there are some uses outside of it. Are they as compelling as industrial use? I don't think so yet, but as we move to become a more and more digitized economy and digitized worlds and digitized life, I think there is a growing importance.

Yaron Brook: Let me answer this before we get to the next point. Can I replicate, is there any limit to how much I can replicate Bitcoin? Not with the name Bitcoin, but how many different cryptocurrencies I can create with the characteristics of Bitcoin or similar characteristics? They can supply the same benefit in terms of alternative use as Bitcoin does. So can Microsoft use Ethereum or 200 other types of cryptocurrencies to achieve the same kind of secured network as they can with Bitcoin? If so, how do you argue against inflation?

Peter McCormack: Not really, no, they can't. Temporarily they can use Ethereum and because Ethereum is a decent size network, but Ethereum and Bitcoin are very different things and a lot of people would make this point about, you can copy these cryptocurrencies and it is a point that should be discussed because I think a good analogy would be is that Bitcoin isn't the best blockchain. Isn't the most efficient on a number of metrics, but it's the most trusted.

It holds the most value and you could go out and create a faster, more efficient network, but people wouldn't trust it as much and I think a good comparison would be religion. I can design a far better religion than Christianity with better morals, but people aren't going to trust it as much because one of the great things about the religion is the mystery of where it comes from and that's one of the great strengths of Bitcoin.

Yaron Brook: See that makes me suspicious.

Peter McCormack: What I'm saying is that because nobody owns it, nobody knows where it came from, who did it, and it has the network effect because network effects are important. Religions have network effects. Scientology is for a lot of people is absolute nonsense because we know who invented it and we know why the invented did it. Whereas we can't really tell where most of these religions come from if you sit objectively outside of religion, but Microsoft has chosen Bitcoin primarily because it is the most secure network, the cost to hack the Bitcoin network is tens of billions.

That's better security than anything else in the world and like I said, as we move to more virtual worlds, more digitalized economies that is useful and I'm with you on gold, there's a lot of things I prefer about gold, but it's very difficult for me to teleport gold to you in America from here, but I can send you a Bitcoin instantly. I'm not either or by the way at the moment, I'm both. I think they're both important. I just think over a long enough timeframe, there is a number of reasons Bitcoin can win. Not necessarily will, but it can win. I can't remember the other... Oh, the volatility.

The only thing I'll say on volatility is, yeah, totally the volatility is there, but in 10 years we've gone from an asset worth zero to $200 billion network that may, if it reaches gold within the next decade would be $10 trillion. I think it's impossible to get from zero to $10 trillion without volatility, you can't go up in a straight line and that requires a lot of speculation. But if you track the volatility, Bitcoin's volatility is decreasing. But I understand and right now the volatility scares some people, but other people are willing to take that risk because they believe so much and later on, other people might come in when it's less risky.

Yaron Brook: Sure, I think Bitcoin's an asset, I just don't think it's money, that's the difference. So yeah, I would be willing to hold Bitcoin as an asset and bear the volatility and where it lands up as more companies like Microsoft use it, its value will go up and stabilize over time. I'm just not convinced of the fact that it is money. I think there's a whole asset class, which is crypto, blockchain is an asset, all these things are assets that have a particular value. So I'm not anti-crypto, that would be bizarre.

Peter McCormack: I am.

Yaron Brook: I'm not anti-blockchain, I'm just an anti the idea that this becomes money and replaces all other forms of money. Even when it comes to money, I'm for competition and let's see the best money will win. I happen to think that this won't happen for another few decades.

Peter McCormack: I know.

Yaron Brook: In a few decades, when we have that competition, my guess is that some hybrid gold crypto will win the competition. But if I'm wrong, who cares right? It's not like anything matters here in terms of my wellbeing, whether that happens or not. I don't buy Bitcoin for one simple reason, I don't know what its value is. So if you understand its value and you have a projection and you can say, "I believe it's going to be value X in 10 years", then great, go...

I don't know how the math works, I don't know how the usage works, I don't know if Microsoft using it is justified it's current price justifies the price half of where it is today or justifies the price 10X of where it is today, I just don't know. I'm a finance guy, so I invest in things I think I understand.

Peter McCormack: I think I see the point you're getting, I think what it is, and I'm not going to hammer the point in you because I think we've had a really good conversation there, but I think the price of Tesla is very, very overpriced right now, but it's overpriced based on the fact that we may all be driving electric cars in 20 years and they will own the cars and they will own the charging stations and the power packs and speculation. I think the price of Bitcoin now is speculation that it will replace gold, I think a lot of that is what it is.

Yaron Brook: So I'm much more likely to short Tesla than to buy a Tesla.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because I'm not sure Tesla can win because other competitors come into the market but...

Yaron Brook: That's competition. I don't know enough about crypto to say, "Bitcoin is it". You sound confident that it is, I'm not. I've seen too many confident people get blown up in markets and financial markets over many decades and so I'm not willing to take that risk. So yes, I understand if I took Tesla, I could do a present value assessment. I could tell you exactly how many cars and at what profit margin, the stock price today implies Teslas the number of cars will sell in 10 years.

I can do the math, we can figure that out and I did that once on Amazon years and years ago. This was Amazon and it was... This is 2000 and I came to the conclusion that Amazon was way overvalued and guess what? I was wrong.

Peter McCormack: It went up.

Yaron Brook: Now, that said, it's still true that it was overvalued at the time, but it turned out that Amazon was a winner and a lot of the other companies were losers. If I did that on Tesla today, I would come to the conclusion that it's overvalued. I don't even know how to do that on Bitcoin. I don't know how you would go through the maths to do that on Bitcoin, other than to say, I feel like it should be worth more than this. That's all I know how to monetize in a sense.

Peter McCormack: Well I think mine is based on conviction that it's a better form of store value than gold. Can it take gold's position? Ultimately I think it can.

Yaron Brook: Maybe it's already fully priced. How do you know? It still has to get a price, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well listen, look, we could do this for a long time. It's been a great discussion and I've got one confession before we finish.

Yaron Brook: Sure.

Peter McCormack: I've never read Atlas Shrugged.

Yaron Brook: Well you should!

Peter McCormack: I know I should.

Yaron Brook: Because I think you'll enjoy it. I think you'll have fun put aside the philosophy, put aside all that. I think you'll really enjoy it, but I think given your philosophical leanings and your inclinations, I think philosophically you'd get a lot out of it and you'd be inspired by it. I think and then there's all of our immense non-fiction writings, which I think are fantastic and anybody who believes in markets and is interested about the future and how do we get there, which is a question you asked, I think Ayn Rand is crucial to, at least grapple with her ideas in a serious way.

Peter McCormack: I know there are a lot of Bitcoiners who are big fans of her and I've had the book recommended me a couple of times. I can see a couple of books in the background there as well.

Yaron Brook: Yeah, that one's mine.

Peter McCormack: Listen, I hope we get to do this again at some point, actually I think perhaps in a few months when I've read Atlas Shrugged and we should possibly do it again, but I've really enjoyed this and I really appreciate your time. I think a lot of people listening to this will enjoy. If they don't know you and I'm sure a bunch of people do, but if they don't, do you want to tell people how to find you, how to follow your work?

Yaron Brook: Sure, well first let me say, I'm looking forward to doing this one day, maybe in London, in person.

Peter McCormack: Yes, I would love that.

Yaron Brook: For the days of being, first of all, in London, one of my favourite places on planet earth and just being in person with people, I'm tired of these video conferences!

Peter McCormack:        I know.

Yaron Brook: But if people want to find out more about me Yaran Brook, you can find me on YouTube, I produce huge quantities of content on YouTube. I'm on Twitter, I'm on Facebook and of course, if you want to find out more about Ayn Rand, which I encourage everybody to do, pick up one of her books or go to aynrand.org, which is the website of the Ayn Rand Institute and you can find a ton of material there. So you just Google Yaron Brook or Ayn Rand and all of this comes op. It's one of the wonders of living in the 21st century.

Peter McCormack: Yes, I would definitely put it in the show notes and yes in person would be great. Look, prior to this, I used to do 90% of my interviews in person. I used to fly to the states for 3 weeks, do 20, 30 interviews, and then come home for a month and I would do the same again. There is just something that isn't the same. You have to be much more respectful of someone speaking over Zoom, whereas in person you can interrupt easier.

Yaron Brook: I think that's right and of course, you're welcome to visit Puerto Rico!

Peter McCormack: I'd love to. Are you allowing people in, is Puerto Rico open at the moment?

Yaron Brook: It's not, you need to bring a test results within 72 hours and stuff like that. It's not easy, but hopefully, I don't know when it'll end, but hopefully it'll end sometime soon.

Peter McCormack: All right, one time soon! Well listen, Yaron, this was great, I really enjoyed this and like I said, I wish you the best and I hope we can do this again sometime.

Yaron Brook: Absolutely, would love to!