After listening for a few evenings, I showed my logical-positivist colors. I donât recall the topic being discussed, but something prompted me to postulate that there are no moral absolutes. Ayn Rand pounced. âHow can that be?â
âBecause to be truly rational, you canât hold a conviction without significant empirical evidence,â
âHow can that be?â she asked again. âDonât you exist?â
âI ... canât be sure,â I admitted.
âWould you be willing to say you donât exist?â
âI might....â
âAnd by the way, who is making that argument?â
Maybe you had to be there â or, more to the point, maybe you had to be a twenty-six-year-old math junkie â but this exchange really shook me. I saw she was quite effectively demonstrating the self-contradictory nature of my position. ... It dawned on me that a lot of what Iâd decided was true was probably just plain wrong. Of course, I was too stubborn and embarrassed to concede immediately; instead, I clammed up.
Rand came away from that evening with a nickname for me. She dubbed me âthe Undertaker,â partly because my manner was so serious and partly because I always wore a dark suit and tie. Over the next few weeks, I later learned, she would ask people, âWell, has the Undertaker decided he exists yet?â (p. 41)
Taken from "How Alan Greenspan Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the State" which in turn took it from Greenspan's book.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/long/long19.html