Andrew is lying through his teeth. I would take a lie detector test on this. He told me explicitly, that Bibi offered “to take Turning Point to the next level and Charlie said no”. This was in the course of the same conversation where he told me that Charlie declined to have Bibi on his show. The ONLY REASON I knew that Bibi Netanyahu called in the Hamptons was because of Andrew Kolvet.
Men should not be capable of telling a bare-faced lie like this. We are a weaker society because of men like this.
Now The Fountainhead – arguably the better book:
1. There are two ways to exist: create from your own vision, or live by reflecting and pleasing others – Rand calls them the first-handers and the second-handers.
2. Howard Roark is an architect who will only build what he actually believes in. He starves rather than compromise the design. The world resists him constantly.
3. Peter Keating is the opposite – talented enough, but builds his entire career on flattering clients, copying styles, and climbing socially. He succeeds, but remains hollow.
4. The villain, Ellsworth Toohey, is the system made conscious: he deliberately promotes mediocrity, knowing that a world of second-handers needs a critic to tell them what to think – and that gives him total power.
5. Roark’s crime, in the eyes of that world, isn’t failure – it’s that he doesn’t need their approval. That independence is experienced as an affront.
6. The novel’s argument: civilization’s actual source is the rare individual who originates rather than imitates. Everyone else — including people who despise him — lives downstream of what he creates.
7. The Fountainhead is Roark himself. Not a fountain – a fountainhead: the original source, where the water actually comes from. Before the river, before the tributaries, before anyone else draws from it. The title says: find that person, and you’ve found where everything real begins.