Mentions personal use of The Fountainhead.

Transcript context

…So, we’re talking about today in part about two people who fought for ideas, for an idea, like we’ve mentioned freedom for capitalism. They did it in very different ways. It’s so interesting to see the impact they both had and how their elucidation explanation of those ideas reverberated throughout society, and how we together as a society figure out what works, the degree to which they have influence on the public, the degree to which they have influence on individual administrations like the Reagan administration, Nixon and so on, and how it might return, fade away, and then come back in the modern times. It’s so interesting if you just see this whole world as a game of ideas where we were pushing and pulling and trying to figure stuff out. A bunch of people got real excited over 100 years ago about communism, and then they try stuff out, and then the implementation broke down, and we keep playing with ideas. So, these are the two greats of playing with ideas. I think that’s a thread that just runs through this. Yeah, and of pushing back against that movement towards communism, social democracy. But one difference that I really should emphasize, Rand is a writer of fiction. She’s a philosopher, but she’s also a writer of fiction. So, she is working almost in the mythic register, much more in the psychological register. She’s creating characters that people identify with and people relate to experiences they’ve had, and that’s one of the reasons she hits so deep. She’s also offering people… I read all the fan letters to her. People would say things like, “I read The Fountainhead, and now I’m getting a divorce,” having just these incredible realizations. Milton Friedman didn’t get such letters.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.