An Anarchist and an Objectivist on a Desert Island

Lex Fridman opens with a thought experiment. If the three of them were stranded on a desert island, how long would they last together? Michael Malice, on the show for the third time, remembers the original wording: there was murder in the question. Yaron Brook, on for the second time and sharing a stage with Malice for the first, says he skipped the homework. He did not spend four years at what he jokingly calls Patrick Henry University in order to do assignments. Both men are writers and podcasters. Malice is an anarchist, author of *Dear Reader* and *The New Right*, with *Anarchist Handbook* and *The White Pill* still ahead. Brook is an Objectivist philosopher, chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, and coauthor of *Free Market Revolution* and *Equal Is Unfair*.

Fridman frames the night as an experiment. Good conversation, like good food, is often made by pairing contrasting ingredients; someone had told him to try a peanut butter, bacon, and banana sandwich, and among the three of them he guesses he is the banana. On the island itself, neither guest expects a *Lord of the Flies* ending. Brook has long thought that novel did cultural damage. It is a superb book, he says, and it is not accurate. People trapped in hard conditions usually cooperate first. Survival is a shared goal, and the social animal kicks in. Malice adds that tribes also survive by dealing with bad people. Civilization is cooperation plus the willingness to handle predators when they appear. Sometimes a group is captured by bad people and worse ideas, but that is not an argument against cooperation.

Where, Fridman asks, does it go wrong? Brook’s answer is a pair of Randian figures: Attila and the witch doctor. The witch doctor is the mystic, the philosopher-king who invents an explanation of the world. Attila is the man who wants control and will use force to get it. When those two join, history goes badly, and Brook estimates that is 95 to 98 percent of the record. Stalin, Hitler, and Charles Manson did not kill with their own hands; they needed goons, and they needed someone else’s ideas. Stalin needed Marx. Marx, both men insist, should not be let off the hook. He glorified revolution, blood, and terror, and his correspondence with Engels discussed peoples who would have to be eliminated because they lacked the proletarian character. Malice names Marx’s polylogism: if you are a capitalist and I am a worker, our logics cannot meet, so you must be liquidated. They pretend that is not murder. It is murder. Brook’s verdict is blunt. The people who write the books are responsible for how history evolves, and the bad guys know the consequences of their ideas.

Malice quizzes Brook, claiming he knows Rand better: whom did she name the most evil man who ever lived? The answer is Immanuel Kant. Passages in Kant can sound liberal, even friendly to the individual and the American Revolution, which is why the verdict baffles people. Brook’s reading is that Kant was trying to undermine the foundations that make revolution, freedom, and individualism possible. He was attacking the Enlightenment and attacking reason. Without reason, Brook says, we cannot survive as a species. That is why Rand thought him the worst: his ideas cut at reason and individualism, the ground of being human.

Malice then brings in Donald Hoffman, a University of California, Irvine neuroscientist whose book argues that evolution conditioned us not to see reality. Brook hears Kant in a lab coat. Hoffman, he says, presents pseudoscience for Kant’s epistemology, puts up equations, and announces that a simulation proves him right. Anytime someone says reality does not exist, Brook asks who is speaking and what the words even mean if they do not refer to something out there. Fridman tries to defend Hoffman as a kind of humility before uncertainty, a check on treating reason as a superpower with no limits. Brook will not take the frame. Astronomy is his counterexample. Ninety-three million miles to the sun is in one sense incomprehensible, a number on a screen, and yet a mind can grasp what the sun means, what heliocentrism means, and compress galactic distance into powers of ten. That, for him, is the unlimited capacity of reason.

Hoffman’s split between fitness and reality is, in Brook’s view, nonsense. Fitness is always fitness *to* something, and that something is reality. Evolution works because organisms are fitted to the situation around them; most mutations violate reality and die, a few match it and live. Malice despises the related claim that the reality we do not live in is somehow more real than this one. Quantum mechanics and the macro world are layers of one world, not two, and they have to integrate. Kant, Brook adds, split the phenomenal world we see from a noumenal world we cannot access because we have eyes. That is Plato with a Prussian accent: the table you grasp and lift is treated as a shadow. Take the glasses off and the cup is still there. The handle still lifts. That is not an illusion.

Brook’s account of emotion is that feelings are responses to reality, conditioned by the concepts you already hold. Show five people the same bacterium under a microscope and you get pride, indifference, or fear, depending on what they know and what they value. Aligning emotion with reason means making sure the feeling is shaped by what you now explicitly know, not by a conclusion you internalized at five and no longer believe. A dog jumped you as a child; dogs are dangerous; the adult who still flinches can work the fear down until the emotion matches the present facts. Malice’s footnote is Vladimir Putin producing a large Labrador for Angela Merkel, who is afraid of dogs. Labradors, he says, are among the least aggressive breeds. Intensity of fear does not raise the odds of an attack. Facts do not care about your feelings, even when the feeling is real.

What Malice finds more dangerous is people denying the validity of their own emotions. Someone in an abusive relationship tells himself there was dinner on the table and no black eye, so it cannot have been abuse. The emotion is a response to something real, and denying it is the injury on top of the injury. He quotes a twelve-step line he considers profound: if it is hysterical, it is historical. A minor incident that produces a disproportionate reaction almost always sends you back to an earlier scene, often childhood, often powerlessness. You are not eight years old in the boss’s office, and you feel as if you were. The mechanism is useful because it lets you unload programs you installed as a child. Emotion can also arrive before cognition. Examine it, bring it into thought, and then you can resign, change jobs, or complain upward.

Later in the night they return to Ben Shapiro’s slogan, “facts don’t care about your feelings,” which Fridman has always found somehow incomplete. Brook hears it as a loose attack on philosophical idealism: the claim that ideas are more real than reality, so when the world fails to match the idea, the world is wrong. Internet talk of “Republicans in name only” is a small version of the same move. What Shapiro is saying, in Brook’s gloss, is that reality comes first and feeling has to be a response to it. You can yell at a table all day; the table remains indifferent. Both left and right, he argues, now live in a dimension they invent in their own minds, and when they fail they invent stories to justify the failure. Malice’s practical version is humor as a shortcut around defenses. Take someone out on their birthday because you are selfish in the Randian sense; the audience laughs, and then he points out that the person who does that is the one people remember.

Why is Ayn Rand so controversial? Brook’s answer is that she is consistently radical. She upends premises people drank with their milk: you must be altruistic, you must live for others. Anyone who questions that is usually presented as a cynic or a Joker, the man who smashes because he does not care. People are given two slots, live for others or be an evil SOB, and most pick the first. Challenge the ethic and they have nowhere to go cognitively except the villain. They cannot picture rational self-interest that is not exploitation. The same consistency on capitalism, freedom, and the dismissal of faith alienates many people and electrifies others. Brook himself did not find confirmation. Rand turned upside down everything he had believed. What she gave him, around fifteen, was an explanation of why morality had always seemed to be about other people, and why that was wrong.

Malice offers more worldly reasons. For a sizable share of people who have never read her, the name Ayn Rand lands like Scientology: door closed, followers crazy. Her personality was aggressive. She was for a long time the lone voice in the wilderness, and she hated the way Milton Friedman would call rent control inefficient while she heard mass homelessness and dying people. In the 1940s she wrote all-caps letters to Leonard Read at the Foundation for Economic Education after FEE published *Roofs or Ceilings*, a pamphlet by Friedman and George Stigler. How could an organization devoted to free enterprise discuss a Stalinist idea in the most casual terms? She was also furious when Read shopped her work around for other people’s approval. A second cultural effect, Malice says, is that Rand licensed the young to refuse certain conversations. Someone who announces plans to take your guns, lock you in your house, and seize 60 percent of your income is not opening a debate. It is a declaration of war. Kids who used to argue now say they will not talk, and their elders blame Rand.

Malice often withholds her name on purpose. Talk about the ideas first; if they land, mention the source. Brook calls that deprogramming. Make self-interest discussable in the culture, then attach the label. Both men worry about the sixteen-year-old who absorbs a millennial genius’s answers without the life to prove them. Brook says it took him perhaps twenty years to know that he really thought she was right. Until then you advocate, you sound obnoxious, and you cannot demonstrate what you assert. The young also start talking like Rand instead of thinking like themselves. She would have told them to be original. The charge that Rand is “for fourteen-year-old boys” is, in Brook’s view, a confession. Those are the ages still open to idealism. Adults become cynical because their ideals failed, often socialist ideals, and failed idealism curdles into contempt for the young who still want a great life. The threat is not youth. It is a mirror held up to compromises people know they should not have made.

Fridman asks them to define the words Rand is famous for reclaiming: selfishness, egoism, greed. In ordinary speech they are insults. Malice thinks she was being needlessly provocative, and that the provocation has a price. On *Donahue* in 1979 she was asked to define the virtue of selfishness, the title of her essay collection, and she immediately said to use a different word: self-esteem. Why champion a term so loaded that people hear “someone is bleeding in the corner, but I want a Coke”? She condemned that sociopathy. Malice’s complaint is that sticking with the word lets the caricature win. Brook disagrees. Dig into what people actually object to, he says, and they are objecting to the ideas, not the syllables. The caricature is a defense mechanism. Some people, Paul Krugman among them in Brook’s telling, know exactly what she argued and treat her as the enemy. Malice grants that, and still thinks the costs of the word outweigh the benefits.

Inside *The Fountainhead*, whose working title was *Second-Hand Lives*, Rand distinguished two kinds of selfishness. One is the claim that my life is the most important thing, not the only important thing. Family and friends can be extremely high values, but you cannot have second values without a first. The other is Peter Keating’s version: greedy, status-hungry, unable to say why he wants money, a beautiful wife, and a big house except that other people have them. His frame of reference is other people. He lives secondhand. Young readers, Malice says, often pick up the second posture and miss the first. They argue online in Rand’s cadence, dated and comic, instead of restating Objectivism in their own voice, which would be the proof they understood it.

The argument over the word never quite ends, and it becomes a running joke when they later fight over the word anarchy. Malice needles Brook: you mean like selfishness? We never finished that discussion. Underneath the semantics is a practical test both of them keep offering. If you replace selfishness with self-esteem and still want the ethic, you are after what Rand meant. If the substitution makes you flinch, you may have learned Keating’s hunger for comparative loot. Brook will not drop the original term because he thinks opponents are not confused about vocabulary. They are refusing a view of the good life in which your own happiness is the point.

The room is three Jewish men with Soviet family history, and the comparison between Hitler and Stalin is not academic. Malice refuses a contest over who was worse. He thinks Americans understand Nazi horror and still treat Stalinism as a punchline or a botched ideal. His North Korea book *Dear Reader* was written to move the camera: stop laughing at the clown in front and see the corpses behind him. People put on the makeup because a gun is at a child’s head. Brook agrees that the difference in evil does not matter at the scale that counts. What matters is the ideology, the consequences, and what we have not yet learned to fear. He is not worried about Nazism as such; even the American far right mostly avoids the clichés. If the United States goes authoritarian right, it will be some other fascism. Communism is the larger threat because it is still treated as a beautiful ideal, and people still call themselves communist economists.

What unifies the two, Brook says, is the common good. Both believe an elite can run your life for the public interest, and that you as an individual do not matter. Communism sacrifices the person to the proletariat, a collective with no consciousness, so someone must speak for it: you need a Stalin. Nazism swaps proletariat for Aryan race and needs the same dictator. On a national scale the strongman is not an accident. It is ideologically required. Malice fills in the fascist side from history. John Diggins’s *Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America* shows how, after the Depression, intellectuals declared capitalism finished and found the USSR unacceptable; Mussolini offered markets without chaos and control without full Soviet bureaucracy. A Broadway lyric once ran “you’re the top, you’re Mussolini,” later edited out when he took the wrong turn. A 1936 book, *The Philosophy of Fascism*, said the quiet part: against reason, for will and strength. If you are united enough, you can force the world to work.

Fascism, in this telling, does not care who owns the house if it can tell you when to sell it, for how much, and what you may do inside it. Control is the essence. Brook thinks today’s economic environment already looks more fascist than anything else: corporations are privately owned on paper and told whom to hire, what to pay, when they may fire, and what they may do with property. Authoritarianism is the historical default; liberty is the rare exception, invented in pockets and then, radically, by the American founding. As long as the moral standard is the group, Brook says, we drift that way. Malice adds a second lever: technology. Encryption, copying at the speed of light, and crypto make authoritarianism more expensive. Brook grants the cost and not the impossibility. Governments can still turn off the electricity, and China shows how the same tools become cameras and social scores. If the ideas are wrong, technology will be used for evil, even if some people escape for a while.

Fridman turns to a concrete tool. Many people think inflation is the state’s most practical instrument of control, and they see Bitcoin as a way for individuals to step outside it. Brook starts with the twentieth century. Much of its political evil, and the New Deal, required control of money. Franklin Roosevelt denied during the campaign that he would take gold, then made private gold ownership illegal except for things like wedding rings, took the United States off the gold standard, and voided gold clauses in private contracts. Malice’s analogy is rewriting the length of a foot after you have already signed for three feet of drywall. Inflation wrecks long-term planning. You do not know what a dollar buys in ten years, so you spend instead of saving. It hits the poorest hardest. His mother, new to America, would walk from one Bensonhurst fruit stand to the next for three cents a pound. Five percent inflation is a statistic to the comfortable and a material loss to someone living hand to mouth.

Brook wants competitive currencies and does not care, under freedom, whether Bitcoin wins. He is skeptical that it can function as money now. It is too volatile to be a unit of account; it works as an asset and as a technology for moving fiat, not as something you can plan with. Gold, as he describes it, has two features Bitcoin lacks. Its supply grows, roughly with productivity, which helps stabilize prices; Bitcoin is eventually finite, so prices would fall at an unpredictable productivity rate, with technological shocks bringing bouts of deflation that are just inflation in reverse. Gold also has non-monetary value. Humans have made jewelry for a hundred thousand years; that demand underpins the monetary one. Malice answers that if gold became the standard, resources would pour into transmuting other elements into gold, eroding the scarcity. Bitcoin is harder to attack that way. Brook still thinks Bitcoin looks like the birth of a technology, not the endgame, and he is surprised when technologists treat it as finished.

His deeper fear is the state. You can exchange Bitcoin quietly until you advertise that you accept it, or until a sweatshirt has to be shipped. Then the government can forbid selling anything for Bitcoin and push the rest into the black market, where it thrives by deciding when to jail you. Money becomes money only if people use it as money. If you cannot pay at the grocery store, it is not money. Malice does not share the fear. He is more impressed by what the internet already did to censorship: infinite copies, light-speed delivery, a passphrase, essentially free, a 1990 conversation made obsolete. Knowledge is no longer concentrated in one Rome that can fall. Brook’s last word on the stack is still ideas. Technology makes full control harder and not impossible. Full freedom, for him, still requires a political implementation. For Malice, full freedom means anarchy. They flag the disagreement and walk toward it.

Fridman puts his own cards down. He has more faith than either guest that government can work, meaning it can achieve goals and build a functioning society. He goes further: the only path to a better world is through government. Brook, unusually, sides with the host. You cannot have liberty without a government, not a government like today’s, but some government. The idea that freedom exists without one is, for him, a rejection of liberty and a sabotage of any attempt to secure it. Malice treats the sentence as the mask dropping. The road to fascism, he says, is anarchy. Brook demands an example of anarchy producing fascism. Malice answers that every stateless society in human history has led to authoritarianism. Brook hears a word game. Malice says anarchism is a relationship, not a location: the three of them have an anarchist relationship, and so do the United States and Canada, neither holding authority over the other.

Brook says that empties the word. Every gathering of people would then be anarchism. What they have is a voluntary relationship. Malice: that is what anarchism means, voluntarism. Brook: no, it is a political system, look it up. You are taking a word and saying it means something else. Malice: like selfishness? The joke lands because the earlier fight never closed. Underneath it is Brook’s claim that force cannot be privatized. Competing police forces are an unstable equilibrium; the biggest gun wins and becomes the state. Malice says Brook has just described the present, except the biggest gun is already the government. Civil asset forfeiture, he notes, exceeds burglaries in the United States. Police seize cars and houses, auction them, and fund themselves. RICO, passed in the 1970s against the mafia, was turned by Rudy Giuliani on financiers: accusation, not conviction, and the assets are gone. Innocent until proven guilty went out the window. That is why Malice despises Giuliani as much as he does.

Malice’s core reversal is that the strongest criticisms of anarchism are descriptions of the status quo. Brook will not accept the flip. Markets do not consolidate into monopoly when substitutes exist; that, he says, is leftist propaganda. Force has no substitute. Security can be a market. Law cannot. Law is the framework that lets markets happen. Marketize the framework and the market collapses. Malice points to eBay and PayPal: you buy from a stranger in another country, you cannot realistically sue, and a private arbiter with access to the bank account settles it, faster and cheaper, getting it wrong about as often as courts do. Brook’s reply is that those innovations sit on English and American legal systems that already defined property and contract. In countries without that, eBay does not work. If three parties live under three definitions of property rights with no way to operationalize the difference, the deal dies. Malice asks why the legal identity has to be geographic. A British diplomat in America is not under the same law as a citizen. Why not citizenship in a company rather than a plot of land? Brook: if it is Britain and the United States, maybe. If it is Iran and the United States, and they are sitting next to each other, the difference is enormous.

Malice offers Rand’s own fiction as evidence. *Atlas Shrugged* imagines Galt’s Gulch, a privately owned valley where no one has authority over anyone else except the landowner, and everyone has moved there by choice. That, he says, is an anarchist society. Brook says there is one judge, one authority, one system of laws. That is government. They argue over whether the strikers have left America or merely hidden from it. Brook will grant the private-club description and then deny that a hidden club is a model for how societies form. Malice accuses him of Platonism: never happened, therefore cannot happen. Sit in 1750 across from Jefferson, he says, and the country Jefferson wanted had never existed either. Brook reverses the painting. Plato points at the heavens, Aristotle at the earth. Study man, dogs, and the sun by looking. Anarchists, he says, live in Cartesian imagination. The anarchy Murray Rothbard and David Friedman describe is fiction and mysticism. Jefferson’s fears about the Constitution, Brook adds, were in one sense right: the federal government centralized, and there was a civil war.

Fridman tries to keep violence on the table. Anarchism’s proposal is a market in defense: security firms, competition, accountability, more layers than a monopoly. Every Objectivist, Malice says, already knows monopolies distort, cost, and fail, and when the product is safety the failure is death and persecution. Brook repeats that force is not a product. He would not marketize science either. Science is about what is true; law follows the same ethic. On small disputes, private arbitration works because everyone knows a state still sits above it. On large money and large guns, he imagines two insurers after a wrecked Rolls-Royce, one refusing to pay, then a hostile takeover with actual weapons. Malice says that is lobbying with extra steps: call Washington, get a subsidy, or get the rival crushed. Brook says he is describing anarchy evolving into government. They also split on objective law. Malice cites an essay by John Hasnas arguing that the idea is incoherent. Brook thinks objective law is the only coherent system. Competing judicial ideologies already exist, Fridman notes: Sotomayor and Scalia are not the same bet. Brook says common law is supposed to compete on new questions, then converge and get codified. Without one authority you get competing enforcement, and some conflicts, including a system that permits adult-child sex against a system that calls it evil, cannot be negotiated away. One side imposes.

History, for Brook, is the exhibit. Small states fought constantly because the cost was personal and low. David Friedman likes the Icelandic sagas; Brook says people who quote Friedman have often not read them. The sagas are full of killing over stolen chickens and sleeping with someone’s wife. There was a council that could not enforce, so disputes returned to violence. Anarchy, in that picture, is legalized violence temporarily constrained. Malice’s comeback is that security agencies would have us by the throat, and so does the state today. Brook would rather live under this government, and under many more authoritarian ones, than in a place of constant violence. He will allow private communities, even a Sharia enclave, so long as they do not mutilate girls or stop a woman from leaving. Rights-protecting law is the only job. Malice can live with a government that does not tax him and does not interfere unless people are murdering each other. They have walked a long way toward each other without dropping the names of their systems.

Asked for a favorite figure in *Atlas Shrugged*, Malice picks a surprising one: Lillian Rearden, Hank’s wife, as close to a vampire as Rand wrote. Hank brings her a bracelet of the first Rearden Metal, his life’s work, and she wants diamonds. Dagny Taggart later trades jewelry for the bracelet because it is the mind made solid. Brook loves Hank’s evolution, the hero who is badly split, who enjoys sex with Dagny and then treats it as depravity, who cannot yet join body and value. The first run over the John Galt Line, in Brook’s memory, has the emotional charge of a consummation: speed, machines, a success nobody else thought possible. Malice’s standing joke is that critics call Rand’s villains too evil, while living intellectuals propose worse with a straight face. He mentions parents who refuse cochlear implants so a child will not leave “deaf culture.” If you are denying a child the gift of music, he is willing to use Rand’s word: evil.

Who is John Galt? Brook’s answer is anyone who takes their own life seriously: lives fully, uses the mind in pursuit of rational values, seeks happiness without compromise, and keeps integrity. In that sense anyone can be Galt. Malice’s motto is more modest: leave the world a little better than you found it, through work, honesty, and kindness, not at other people’s expense. Brook says that is not enough. Many innovators leave the world better and are never happy in their own souls. Happiness is what counts, and if you are happy you will almost certainly improve the world, but the essence is you. Young people, Malice adds, confuse success with the top job. If you are not president you have failed. Success is not being better than others and not being the best. It is maximizing your potential. His son could have been an engineer or a mathematician and chose comedy. That is the value to pursue.

Advice for an eighteen- or twenty-year-old follows from the novels. Malice would send the young to Roark, not Galt. Rand kept Galt a little distant because a perfect man, seen too close, loses his shine. Roark occupies the whole of *The Fountainhead* and gives you the strength to last through loneliness, unemployment, and the feeling that you are falling through the cracks. A child on a bicycle asks who built the building; Roark says he did, and the line gives the child courage for a lifetime. Do not ask equally clueless friends. Reach the older and accomplished; dinner or a book often buys world-class advice. Read, especially literature: Dostoevsky, Hugo, characters placed in situations you may never meet exactly and will meet in rhyme. Brook’s list is more interior. Spend time naming your values, the work that excites you, the people you want near you. If you want the ambitious, consider Austin or Silicon Valley; if you want artists, New York or Hollywood. Fail, learn, improve. Nobody is Francisco d’Anconia, succeeding on the first try.

Fridman asks how to be a Rearden, creating the greatest things you can, and still give yourself fully to a partner, a family, children. Malice rejects the word balance. It is not shoes versus pants. You want both, and they feed each other. You want a partner who thinks you are a badass, and you want moments of watching them on a stage and thinking you married one. Brook says the error is treating work and family as opposites. If you do not work you cannot finance a family, and more than that: why would she love you if you refuse to maximize what you are? Why would you love her if she refuses the same? Time shares change with age and with small children, but the goods are synergistic. Malice’s illustration is Rand’s marriage to Frank O’Connor, who was not cerebral. She would talk philosophy with students until four in the morning; he brought food and sat in the corner. People who were there told Malice he was not bored. He was proud. When she was paid for a screenplay, he told her she could buy any fur as long as it was mink. You earned this. Celebrate it.

Does a relationship require sacrifice? Malice’s reaction is immediate: never. Brook defines the term. Sacrifice is giving a value and expecting nothing, or less, in return. You do not do that in love. Love is a trade, not of money but of spirit. One-way giving sickens both people. Jordan Peterson, Brook says, sometimes uses sacrifice to mean investment, and those are different concepts. Money now for a larger return later is not a sacrifice. If his wife is ill, the return is that she recovers, that she is still alive. If there is no return, why do it, because of a contract signed long ago? Children are not a sacrifice. Staying home instead of going to the movies means you love the children more than the movie. If you do not, get a babysitter, or do not have children.

They pause on *Anna Karenina*, which Rand called the most evil book in serious literature. In the version they reconstruct, a man chooses prestige and a vacant marriage over the woman he loves, and the cost is ruin. Pursuing your values is the point. Eating Italian when you wanted Chinese is not the kind of sacrifice they mean. Do not compromise the big moral things. Love, Brook says, is a profound emotional response to value. To say “I love you,” you have to be able to say the *I*. If you undermine your own value, the person who loves you will have less to love. Malice adds that he is delighted when he can be of use to friends, not as a parasite’s host but as someone who has reached a point where a call for help is an occasion for joy. That, too, is a trade.

Is there still value in religion, or in myth? Brook’s answer is that there was, and there is not. Human beings need explanations, ethics, some account of the world. Early religions filled every gap with a river god, a sun god, a moon god. Judaism’s genius, as he tells it, was one bucket labeled God for everything still unknown, so that as knowledge grew you could move items into the science bucket. After the scientific revolution you can say you do not know, and that you are learning, without the bucket. Morality can be derived from human nature and reality; you do not need commandments. Kant’s mission, Brook adds, was to revive religion against the Enlightenment’s attack. Mythology is different if it means art. As conceptual beings we need aesthetic experience, abstractions made concrete. Painting, sculpture, and literature do that. If myth is the gods speaking, or a Jungian template, he thinks it is false and destructive. Religion on earth today, in his view, is bad for life wherever it touches.

Malice notes what Brook did not: Rand herself was a mythologizer. *Atlas Shrugged* is, in a sense, a myth. Listing the people who move the world is one thing; putting a reader inside the story is another. American history has founders and the myth of the founders. Myth often means lie, and it can also mean a useful abstraction. There is a Reagan myth and a Thatcher myth, usually kinder than the record, and watching how figures are mythologized is a way to concretize ideas. He tells of astronaut Clayton Anderson, who applied thirteen times without a callback, a fourteenth with a callback and no job, a fifteenth that worked. Tell children to apply thirteen times; even the silence is a kind of doing. Brook agrees, and adds that the power of *The Fountainhead* is not only happiness but the demonstration that virtue works. Roark keeps his integrity and is happy. Real life rarely hands you that concrete, so it is hard to hold. Art supplies it. Whitewash real politicians too far, especially when the story has political stakes, and the discovery of the remainder is costly.

They close by naming what they like in one another, after hours of not murdering anyone on the island. Brook finds Malice sharp, funny, intelligent, engaging. Fridman, who has known Malice longer, says people sometimes take the humor for craziness; he is friends with him because there is real love there, a startling kindness toward friends and family. Malice likes that Brook does not merely recopy Rand’s arguments in Rand’s voice. In a talk comparing Bill Gates and Bernie Madoff, Brook asked whether anyone thinks Madoff was happy: rich, successful, and going to bed as a good man, with a son dead by suicide. Taking a worldview of value and articulating it newly is an achievement. To Fridman, Malice says he feels seen, and that they share a background that creates a bond even when stories go unsaid. Fridman ends where he began. Underneath the philosophies, he takes both men as genuine and kind, and he was luckier for sitting with them. The island held. The questions about the state, the market in force, and whether love can be a trade rather than a sacrifice did not.