Each week I present a round up of the podcasts I listen to. These podcasts are all centered around the theme of looking at current events through the lens of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. This week, there are just two podcasts and both are from Yaron Brook.

Yaron’s AM560 Rewind: What’s Wrong With the World? 

In Yaron’s AM560 radio program, broadcast on 4/23/16 (posted as a podcast on 4/26), from Chicago discusses the sense that many people have that things are not going right, that the system is rigged against them. The theme of the podcast is to discover why our view of the world has become so dismal? Why have so many people lost the sense that we can be successful, that we can create life changing innovations? Why have we lost the ability, the self-esteem necessary, to stand up against what the culture is doing to us? Once we know the underlying cause of all of this, we can begin to see the cure, a return to idea that reason works. That reason allows us to learn about the world and guide our lives.

Radical Capitalist Episode 44: Yaron Is Back

Yaron has made it back from his very successful speaking tour in South America where he gave talks in Brazil and Colombia. He opened the show with his impression of the state of Latin America. He was very impressed with the energy and passion around free market ideas in Brazil. At one talk in Porto Alegre, he spoke before 2000 to 3000 people and received a standing ovation. They also sold 300 copies of Atlas Shrugged in Portuguese afterwards. While he is impressed with the energy in Brazil, the rest of the area he is mixed about, with some countries on  the right track (e.g. Colombia though he did not see the same energy there as in Brazil) while others are moving away from right ideas (e.g. Chile) and Venezuela has gone completely off the rails after 15 years of Marxist ideology.

After the energy in Brazil, Yaron is feeling a bit down back in the United States. In these other countries where they have experienced the whole gamut of statism, there is the understanding that new ideas are needed, that freedom must be embraced and fought for. Here, we are complacent and very open to the lure of statism. No one is making the case for individualism here. Instead, for this election we have a gamut of statism from both left and right.

He returned to the theme from his AM560 show in discussing why people are willing to accept statism, starting with reference to “Alienation,” an essay by Nathaniel Branden in Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. (ed: I wrote a post some time ago with a quote from this essay.) As he pointed out in the earlier show, we have been taught for many years that reason cannot really help us, at least not with the big issues. Once reason is out, what’s left? Only emotion. Emotions we cannot explain and which are terrible guides to action. The solution to this is found in thinking and acting, knowing that you are responsible for your life, not some leader who promises you the American Dream without effort. Luckily, we have a philosophy, Objectivism, that teaches us how to do that.

Yaron ended the show, as always, with positive values, this time in the form of music and television recommendations.

The Paradise – A BBC television series about the rise of the modern department store in 1870’s London. The main characters are people who continually use their minds and take the risks needed to succeed. The series is an adaptation of “The Lady’s Paradise” by Emile Zola. I’ve just started watching and it is a great show. There is a scene in the third episode which relates to what Yaron was speaking about in his shows this week. The heroine is told by her immediate supervisor that she is no longer to think. No more ideas. Just come to work and do her job with an empty mind. The series is available on Netflix.

Yaron’s music recommendation is from Beethoven. While Ayn Rand did not like Beethoven, feeling his music embodied a malevolent universe premise, Yaron sees the essence of the music as struggle, and after listening to it he is ready to go out and struggle to spread the right ideas.