07. Dear Hank & John. 010. When Your Friend Likes Ayn Rand... Part 2/6
• [Question 2]
John: Alright, this one is from Matt, he writes, "Dear John and Hank. A friend of mine whom I have known for years, has started reading Ayn Rand." Oh, this is terrible news. This is terrible. I'm concerned about Matt, but I'm mostly concerned about Matt's friend. "It's irritating for friends and family." I don't doubt it, Matt. "But more than that, those ideas hurt everyone and everything around whoever spouts them." So true. "He's just begun this. How do I help him realize that this path is not good and is a detriment to this planet? Thank you very much." Ah, it's so rare that I find someone who hates Ayn Rand as purely as Matt and I do. First off, thank you for your question, Matt. It's really moving, it's profound, and it gets at the heart of literature in the United States, which is that Ayn Rand is the worst, is the worst author in print today. And you want to talk about books that shouldn't be on your to-read list, how about you just knock off The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, boom, saved yourself 2,500 pages. I can summarize it for you nicely, which is that if you imagine a world that is different from the world that actually exists, then always acting selfishly would make sense. However, we don't live in that world that doesn't exist, so it doesn't, you know, so Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are both irrelevant to our actual lives as actually lived. There's something incredibly exciting about reading Ayn Rand for the first time, because you feel inevitably like the characters who are at the center of the stories, you feel like a special snowflake, you feel like, you know, the world is aligned against you and if only, you know, things were fair and just and everyone acted according to their will, you would rise to the top as inevitably you should. But the difficult thing is realizing that everyone experiences that when they read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead which is precisely why those books are so popular and still in print. But yeah, I completely agree with you, Matt. All I can say is that usually, in time, people abandon objectivism and when they don't, you abandon them.
Hank: I'm just gonna leave that one all to John, 'cause I know very little about these books. Well, actually, I'm super interested in actually reading them and I would if they were not so large, because I want to see the techniques used to make people get so riled up about this worldview and so, like, they just, like, eat it so deeply that it then, for many people, affects them for their entire lives and then you hear, you know, people who are super smart who have been affected by this and then bec... go on to become quite successful talking about how these books influenced them. And I think in some ways, it creates good business people because it, not necess... not like, good for the world, but good for business, good for a particular business, because it makes people feel very empowered in their selfishness.
John: Right, right.
Hank: And so, when I... I get discouraged when I, you know, when I read that some, that many very powerful people have this worldview, and it's just, it's very upsetting, because it basically requires you to believe that most people are just-
John: Inferior.
Hank: -are un... are inferior. That is the correct word, yes.
John: That they are fundamentally less than you. You, of course, always being the one who isn't inferior, you, the one who has read this book. Yeah, no, there's a guy running for President of the United States who's literally named after Ayn Rand. Um yeah. So I think, you know, this is a place where I have especially strong feelings, and I know a lot of people will disagree with me, and I should say, because it is true, that I might be wrong and I often am wrong and, you know, it's totally possible that I'm completely wrong about Ayn Rand, but I do have incredibly strong feelings about her work. Let's move on, Hank, because I feel like this comedy podcast has taken, it again, a turn for the darkness.
• [Question 3]
Hank: Alright, well, Robert asks, "Dear Hank and John," this question is for me, apparently. "Hank said that he would not go to Mars given the chance." Because, to be clear for those who weren't listening, because of nausea and also fear of death. "But if you had the chance to have a Total Recall style memory of Mars implanted into your brain, would you?" Of course I would! Yes!
John: You would?
Hank: Yeah, that'd be amazing!
John: That's a terrible plan.
Hank: Why? What? Really?
John: Have you seen the film Total Recall? Like, do you, are you familiar with the movie?
Hank: Right, well, that has nothing to do with the way that the memory was implanted into his brain, it was all about previous occurrences of his.
John: No, Hank, things go terribly wrong when you have implanted memories, period, all the time, every time. Have you never read a dystopian novel, never get a memory implanted!
Hank: But, if it just came to me right now, without anybody else having been on Mars, then I would get to know all kinds of things that would be new to science. I would have an obligation to science to get this memory implant.
John: You know, I was just having breakfast with a friend of a friend, and we were together recalling terrible things that have happened to us over the years that now feel almost like pleasurable memories. Because, you know, like you have this wild experience that at the time is very unpleasant, I was remembering, for instance, this sailing trip that we took in Sweden with really good friends of ours, and one of whom, by the way, is a fan of Ayn Rand, and I don't know, maybe a listener to this podcast, and so maybe I've just offended him terribly, but he, regardless, we're still really good friends even though we have different worldviews, and we were on this sailboat in Sweden, Hank, and it was August and my wife had brought a bikini and I had brought a nice pair of swim trunks, except that it was actually like, -45 degrees Kelvin. It was colder than absolute zero, and it was just unbelievably awful. By the way, when I say degrees Kelvin, people get really mad, so...
Hank: Yeah, well, also when you say below absolute zero.
John: Well, yes, exact... Now I've infuriated the Randians and I've also infuriated the people who believe in science and so really, we're down to an incredibly small audience. So, anyway, it was extremely cold in Kelvins, and... But somehow, I have fond memories of this trip, even though at the time, I enjoyed, you know, I basically spent three days feeling cold and nauseated, occasionally playing this Swedish card game called Plump, and it was generally horrific. We went to one island that was occupied by nothing but rats, but it was occupied by so many rats, it was just an unfathomable number of rats per square inch, so that when you walked to the bathroom, which was the only building on the island, you would walk past literally thousands of scurrying rats, scurrying all over your feet, which had to be, you know, clothed in very, very large boots, because it was so incredibly cold in the Swedish August and yet, somehow I have really fond memories. So I feel like the other thing I would say about you wanting to get these memories implanted is that the memories would, in a way, be a lie. They would inherently be a lie, like, memory is incomplete and deceitful, so I'm not sure that it would be scientifically useful.
Hank: That's true. There is truth there. There is truth in that very, very, very, very, very, very long story that had nothing to do with, nothing at all to do with Mars.
John: (Laughs) It's funny, I always make fun of you for being the king of tangents, but in fact, I just, I just did the worst, I did the worst tangent we've ever had on this entire podcast.
Hank: Just was like, rats. So many rats. Rats everywhere.
John: Does anyone wanna hear the story of my time on a sailboat in Sweden? Answer: no. I'll tell you anyway, don't worry. Fear not, faithful listeners, I have returned with tales from Sweden in 2008.
Hank: No, I mean, I think that there are a lot of memories that I would like to have implanted in me, like the memory of... Like, we could take Russ, and we could say, let's just implant the memory of having read those 25 books, and you don't have to read them.
John: First off, he only had 23 books on his must-read list, you have a terrible memory. Secondly, I think when it comes to giving Russ advice, we've gotten way distracted and we need to focus on the core advice, which is that Russ, along with the other people of the United Kingdom, need to make sure to see the Paper Towns movie when it comes out in August.
Hank: Alright, John. You wanna give us a question?
