The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. What happened? This is The Iran Book Show. Welcome to Iran Book Show on this, what is it, Sunday? Sunday afternoon from rainy Puerto Rico. It just hasn't stopped raining for like three days. If you notice yesterday, the show kind of ended abruptly at some point. That was the rain taking out the internet. The rain and the wind, it came back a few seconds later. And generally, it's just been pouring rain nonstop. So it is the tropics. It is the tropics. But it's supposed to be winter in the tropics. It's supposed to be beautiful right now, but all right. Today, we've got the AMA and our hangout with supporters of The Iran Book Show. What we have, we're joined today by six, I can count, seven. Seven with Andrew on the phone. So we've got seven of us. Remember that those of you who want to participate on the AMA through the chat, you can use the super chat in order to do that. Super chat is we have a goal. I think Catherine's here. Catherine's here. Catherine's here. So Catherine has a goal of reaching $600 on the super chat today. So we've got a lot of people. So we'll see how long we go today. I've got dinner at some point, but we'll see how long we go. And we'll alternate between the panel's questions and the super chat questions. And we'll have a good time. All right. So with that, I will go through the panel to begin with. And we'll start with a question from Jennifer. And I think everything's running, right? Everything's running. That's running. That's running. Yeah. I think we were quoting. I think everything's kosher. OK. Jennifer. When you were on Lex Friedman's show, the topic of how the Founding Fathers wrote, we find these truths to be self-evident in regards to rights. And you said that rights are not self-evident. Well, what would you use that phrase for? Could you say that things like consciousness are free will or self-evident? Or would you only use that phrase with metaphysical axioms? Well, consciousness, I think, is self-evident, right? Because you're conscious. But that is a metaphysical action, right? So would I use it for epistemological axioms, free will? I think so. I mean, I think so. That's the nature of axioms, right? That they are, in a sense, self-evident and they're self-refuting. If you don't, that is, if you don't accept them, it's self-refuting. So I think that's a feature of axioms. It is unfortunate that I think it's an unfortunate wording for the Founding Fathers to use. I think it gets in trouble with a lot of people that come later on who don't have the context from which they were talking about and can't create that context, partially out of dishonesty, but partially out of honest kind of confusion. The idea of individual rights is a complex achievement. And it wasn't self-evident to John Locke. It wasn't self-evident to Poopendorf, or the philosophers in the Netherlands who kind of started talking about individual rights even before Locke. And even all of them got it wrong. They didn't quite get the concept of individual rights until I ran. So yeah, I think it's an unfortunate wording. On the other hand, God, that document is so beautiful. It's so beautifully written. It's so succinct. It's so right on the money and everything. Who am I or who is anybody to criticize it? So it's about as perfect the document as anybody has ever written. Certainly the best political document ever written. So yeah, it feels weird to even consider criticizing. Thank you. Sure. All right, Nick, you have to unmute. There you go. OK, we're ready to go. Now, I had an interesting observation with famed investor Charlie Munger, 98 years old. He recently doubled down his position on Alibaba Group. So he's had something like 600,000 shares, $71 million invested. And he had this quote that said, the reason he doubled down is, what do I care if it's a white cat or a black cat? As long as the cat eats the mice. So now, right here, he's agnostic. The evasion, we all know about the house arrest of Jack Ma. And it reminds me of an essay that Anne Rand wrote years ago when he was comparing the situation in Russia with Bobby Fisher and Boris Spassky, how the rules change all the time. So here you have a billionaire famed investor icon being agnostic and evasive, practicing evasion, when he pretends that we're just dealing with a white cat or a black cat. Yeah. So you're absolutely right. I mean, it's horrible. I mean, Charlie Munger is brilliant. And it's hard to challenge his investment history. He's done phenomenally well. He's made more money than almost any other human being has ever made. Maybe the most money, human and Warren Buffett, most money, any human being has ever made through investment, through investment alone, not through actually running and owning a company. By the way, just this is a nice tidbit. Ackman, one of his disciples said, what makes Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger so special is if you look at their compounded rate of return over 60 years, it's 20%. It's phenomenal. It's phenomenal. Nobody's ever done that. Nobody's ever done that over that period of time. And it's hard to believe that they achieved that. But as your quote suggests, he is a sense in which he's a pragmatist. He's a pragmatist who could think long-term only when it comes to the narrow history of investment and is a pragmatist with a broader perspective. Would he be investing in some Nazi industrialist in the early 1930s, not caring if it's a white cat or a black cat or whatever? And you're not seeing what would happen, not only are you investing in something that potentially supportive of evil, but what that evil will do to the ability of this company to do well and to be successful and to make money. So I think he's mistaken, obviously. I think that he probably won't live long enough to discover his mistake given that he's 98 years old. These things unfold over the very long run. So he might not be there to see the collapse of Alibaba or the collapse of the Chinese economy as a consequence of the lack of freedom, of the authoritarianism, but it's coming. And to think that you can invest in such an environment and not suffer the consequences is, I think, quite bizarre and surprising for somebody like Charlie Munger, who typically has invested long-term, thought long-term, and here is not. He is completely ignoring the long-term. So yeah, I agree, Nick. Yeah, he just doesn't address the issue that the Chinese change the rules, the investment rules, as you go. Like they can change from week to week, whatever suits their purposes. Yep, absolutely. And look, it might be that Alibaba right now, as an investment, has been pounded and is so cheap because of Jack Ma's house arrest and because of everything else that China does, that Charlie Munger has done the math and figures that even considering the authoritarianism, even considering the regulations and controls that changing the rules, it's such a good deal right now that it's much more likely to go up than anything else. And he might be right. You know, he might be right. It's hard to argue with purely financial standards with somebody like Charlie Munger because he so clearly does. Yeah, but he's gambling. He prides himself of being a long-term investor in here. He's gambling. Putting it so. But he would argue, and there's some argument here to make, that that's true anywhere because almost every government in the world right now functions to some extent or another like the Chinese government by changing the rules all the time. I mean, look at Congress right now. Bipartisan bill coming out of the committees to regulate and break up big tech. And that's arbitrarily changing the rules and it's gonna have profound impact. You know, as if they need regulation, I mean, everybody's afraid of Facebook. Facebook shares plummeted at 25% the other day because they can't keep up because they're not as good as the market thought they would be. The market takes care of its own, right? But the fact is the government wants to intervene. I mean, tariffs, all the different regulatory regimes changing from Democrats or Republicans to Democrats. There's a sense in which it's all on a continuum. China is much worse than the United States, but the United States is not good, right? It's all just, you know, in a sense, trying to figure out what the probabilities are that the government will screw up your investment in a significant way. And maybe Alibaba is so cheap right now that it's worth it, right? That it's worth the risk. But we're all exposed to massive regulatory risk, massive political risk. I know from my hedge fund, my hedge fund is massively exposed to regulatory risk.  And it's frustrating as hell because the FDIC, the OCC have these little fascists in charge and it makes it really hard. And I couldn't predict that, you know, it was like gambling by, you know, but that's the problem of a mixed economy and economy as it approaches fascism, by state control of every aspect of it. You lose control over your investments. You lose control over what is going to happen. Instead, you know, you get, you have to, you're betting probabilistically on where you think on government behavior. And that's a dangerous thing, but we all do it. We all have to do it. Yeah, but what I'm saying is in a authoritarian country like China. It's much worse. And the mixed economy like the US, it's like night and day. So, you know. Well, it used to be like night and day and I think we're getting worse and they for a while were getting better and it was becoming less easy to differentiate. Well, they made a U-turn. But then they became worse. And now you're right. I think it is night and day right now. So, you know, so the bottom line is no matter how cheap anything is, you've got to evaluate the context. Yeah, absolutely. No question. But Charlie doesn't get involved in politics in making those kind of assessments. We're just unfortunate. He'd have a huge voice if he could. All right, let's see. Yash, we've got a lot of people today. Hey, Aaron. Hey. So first of all, I'm very happy to see our subscribers going up after the shorts. Thank you. Thank you. I had an idea along those similar lines. I'm not sure if you operate your own Instagram account. But, you know, have you thought about like responding to posts by Bernie Sanders or AOC or Joe Biden on Instagram? Yeah, take specific posts and give a few minutes of context and just respond to it. Maybe even leave a comment there so people find your Instagram through it. Just a second. I mean, I find Instagram and Facebook, I don't understand how they work. Once in a while I go on Instagram and within three minutes I'm off of it because I have no clue what I'm doing and I don't understand it. Facebook have given up completely. Facebook is like, it's become a maze. It used to be simple to use. I used to know what I was doing and now it's become completely inoperable for me. I can post stuff and then I go away because I don't. And as I don't manage my Instagram account, but yeah, I think anytime I do something in response to Bernie or response to Elizabeth Warren or response to AOC, it attracts attention and I need to figure out how to do that. Do you think Instagram is where everybody is? People who follow Bernie are following him on Instagram, not on YouTube, but not on other channels? There may be both, but just like you saw the difference with the one minute clips, right? If you have just one image on Instagram which has some catchphrase that they use, which is of course bad economics or bad philosophy, right? So if you leave a comment below that and if you cover that in your show, maybe people, you know, maybe you attract people through that video as well. I don't know, just a thought, yeah. No, it's definitely worth experimenting. And yes, I will see if I can hire somebody, if I can get Action Jackson to go in and try to do something like that and maybe put up some of my short videos in response to the Bernie video, right? Because those videos are good to be as Instagram posts. Yeah, and for what it's worth, I'm also not good at Instagram, but the bare basics, it's easy. It's okay. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know if it's age or they become, I know with Facebook, with Facebook it's obvious to me, they have tried to load it up with everything. And by doing that, they've made it too complex to actually navigate. And so there are 75 different ways in which people can message me on Facebook. And I get stuff and I don't know where it is and I can't find it. And it's just, yeah, anyway. I don't know, it used to be pretty simple and straightforward. And I can't now advertise on Facebook. They've decided they don't believe I live in Puerto Rico. And therefore I can't advertise anything political because I might be a Russian bot or something, right? So I can't do, I can't promote my stuff. It's just, I see. Anyway, Joe Rogan has bigger problems I guess than I have. All right, thanks, thanks, Yash. Ian. Hey, Yaron, can you hear me? Yep. Are you fine? So I've really enjoyed your appearances on Lex Friedman's show. Yep, thanks. And one thing I've seen is he sometimes brings up Iron Rand with other guests. Yep. When he's got a philosopher on or something like that. But part of the problem is that he really doesn't understand Iron Rand. So like when her views on knowledge come up, it seems like he really misrepresented and then they get into this weird discussion. It seems something like if you can get more discussions with him about some of those particular maybe targeted topics at some point, it might be really valuable because he's kind of trying to touch on the ideas. And you can see it with your discussion with your arm. Like he really, he really doesn't get it in certain ways. You know what I mean? No, and look, he's not an objectivist and he's not pretending to be one. He's a fan. He likes Iron Rand. He likes me. He likes the ideas more broadly. But I agree with you in the sense that he doesn't get it or and he doesn't agree with it, I think deep down. You saw that with your arm. He was much more in many respects, more sympathetic to your arm's position and to my position, I think. And he's more sympathetic to Mike Malice's position when we talked with Malice. I think he's much more comfortable with Malice than he is with me. And I think he's consciously trying, and here I speculate, to avoid getting caught up in the philosophy because I think he feels like that would put him in a box. And part of his success is his openness. And he doesn't wanna jeopardize that to some extent. But he just doesn't mind. He's read a lot, but I agree with you. He really hasn't internalized it and he still misrepresented. And one other quick comment on the joint broadcasts you've done, the joint sessions you've done like Mike Malice and your arm. You know, one thing, just a suggestion is you might, you might try to get them to actually articulate a position because it seems like they get you to articulate a position and then it's just about criticizing that. And that's the easy game, right? But your arm in your thing, he never actually said anything about anything. No, and the same thing was true in the debate, the formal debate itself. It was supposed to be conservative or individualism versus conservatism, but the debate was really about individualism. There was no, he never made a case for conservatism. He made a case anti-individualism, which is a lot easier. And it's much harder to make the positive case, particularly when it's wrong. Now, I don't mind that in a sense, right? Because my goal is not to make him look bad. My goal is to try to make individualism look good.  And now, true, I don't get the opportunity to criticize it in the kind of objectivist way. But if I do another debate with your arm, I'll try, I definitely have made, will make a conscious effort to get him to defend conservatism more and allow me more time to criticize his defense. I'm hoping we'll do more debates. He's open to it. It's just that he's fairly expensive and it's finding the money, finding the place that'll pay him to do it.  I can't think of anything more fun than that. So you can tell how I, you know, get a blast and things. But anyway, that, I don't think he'd actually do it, but that would be fun if he did. Thanks Ian, let's see, Adam. Thank you. First of all, I do participate in many Zoom seminars that are mainly in academia and the pronouns are required. So that was your first joke. However, with respect to pronouns, my favorite politician in the world is Taiwan's Minister of Digital Industries. As you know, Taiwan is the world leader at this point in making high-end microchips. And they're also very big in many areas of hardware and software and his name is Audrey Tang. He changed it to Audrey. The Chinese language does not have grammatical gender and he says he doesn't care what pronouns people use in English. He calls himself politically a libertarian, which again is something that some objective is considered taboo. However, the staff of his ministry is 15 people. That's the smallest government ministry staff in the world. And their job is to keep other ministries regulations from adversely affecting the digital industry. So here's a guy who's taboo to many objectives because he's gender fluid and because he's a libertarian. And yet I think of all the politicians in the world, he's doing the most brilliant job. My view generally is people outside of the United States who call themselves libertarians, I have no problem with that. I mean, there's a fall less of a context for them. What are they gonna call themselves if they're free market? And it's not as associated with the kind of Murray Rothbard, crazy anarchist positions that American libertarians and the American Libertarian Party which has gone through some really weird iterations over the years, it doesn't have the same, the libertarians overseas don't have the same pacifist anti-American attitudes that American libertarians often have. So I have no problem with foreign politicians calling themselves libertarian on the contrary. So I'm an admirer, I have no idea what to take from the gender fluidity, I'm not sure it means anything but whether he takes it seriously or whether he's just saying it out of not wanting to, not wanting to pigeonhole himself in any way, I just don't know.  I like that. And yeah, you would need about 15 people one for every other ministry to be able to monitor the other ministries to shut them down and to close them off. Thanks Adam, Daniel. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has opened it in theory. Favorite. Into by now, pay later companies saying it is particularly concerned about how these payment providers impact consumer debt accumulation. Going to their website, the CFPB implements and enforces federal consumer financial laws to ensure all consumers have access to markets for consumer financial products and services that are fair, transparent and competitive. They say nothing about fraud in that. No, I don't think it's fraud. Looking through the published rules on their website many of them refer to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. I mean, that wasn't the start. How far back do you have to go with this idea that a company that wants to make a good loan and a person who wants to take out a good loan do a voluntary transaction and the government has to step in and say, no, no, no, no. It's all voluntary, but it's not right. We're... Oh, you have to go back to, I don't know, Aristotle. Because usury laws, right? I mean, that's basically overcharging on interest rates. So we have to have laws and usury is deemed as negative is throughout, is partly in the Greek world, but certainly in the Christian world. It's certainly in the United States in the 19th century, early 20th century, there are all kinds of laws. And then of course the big move to intervene in financial markets really happens in 1933 and 1934 with the two big massive regulatory bills that passed Congress, two of the first laws that the FDOM administration passes, one of them is God. 1933 Act, 1934 Act, I've forgotten. Well, the one is the famous one because the Clinton administration undid part of it and then everybody blames the financial crisis for it, right? Is it Saban's Oxley or is that, or am I getting my bills mixed up? Anyway, I think I'm getting the mixed up. I can't believe I can't remember this, but anyway, 33, 34 laws that completely put finance under the thumb of government, every aspect of finance, every transaction, everything, including the interest rates, everything. And then the consumer protection agency, the CFPB is a creation of Elizabeth Warren. It was part of the Dodd-Frank Act. She was supposed to head it up. She was supposed to be the first head of it, but the Republicans really made a huge think about her, Glass-Steagall. Thank you, God, I can't believe I forgot Glass-Steagall. Glass-Steagall is the 33 Act, I think. And then there's that one, and then there's the 34 Act. And Glass-Steagall is a lot more than separation of commercial and investment banking.  And then the CFPB is this agency created by Elizabeth Warren, passed through the Dodd-Frank. She was supposed to be the first head. They wouldn't let her. So she basically took one of her cronies and made him the head. And then when Trump was president, there was a big fight about who would head up the CFPB. But one of the interesting things about the CFPB that should have made it unconstitutional is the CFPB is the only agency that is a government agency that is not basically has, that Congress need a Congress nor the executive branch have oversight. So the CFPB does not get its budget from Congress. The CFPB gets it budget from the Fed. So, which is very strange and probably anti-constitutional. But it's just a monstrous organization. Trump tried to read it in a little bit, but couldn't. And now, again, out of control at the CFPB with the leftist agenda. So it's just horror. And the whole idea of financial regulation is to protect the little guy from evil bankers taking advantage of them. And of course, the little guy often has over $250,000 in his bank account. I don't know many little guys that have that, but the little guy is often a big corporation. The little guy is often just anybody. So of course, they use the excuse of protecting the little guy to control everybody, to control everything. And if you're taking it back to the Greeks and Christianity on the moral side, it's gotta be being your brother's keeper, something like that. I mean... Yeah, Molly, it's your brother's keeper. It's Plato's myth of the cave. It's the philosopher king. You're exploiting these simple people. They're not as smart as you. You should not be allowed to do that. We know better. But yes, it's all grounded in altruism and it's all grounded in the concept that most people live in a cave. Most people don't have access to reason. Most people cannot take care of themselves and therefore you need a benevolent government who can supervise and take care of everybody else. Which is why no one's out there saying, why the heck do we have a CFTB and why aren't we getting rid of it tomorrow? No, I mean, they said that for a little while, but then it becomes institutional and then it's gone. It's there to protect. I mean, how could markets exist without it? The world couldn't happen without it. We use it in a way. How could we exist without a Fed? How could we exist without a fill-in-the-blank? It's inconceivable to people. It's to protect and the whole idea, and if you look at most government regulations, this is about that. The whole idea is that people cannot protect themselves and that businessmen, because they're self-interested, are exploitative. They will do anything. They will do anything. And if you leave them alone, they will take advantage of everybody. And so it's to control both sides of that equation.  Thank you. Altruism is a nasty, nasty, nasty idea. All right, Debbie. Well, based on what you were just saying about the Consumer Protection Bureau or whatever they're called them, I love the idea of taking a page out of the Taiwanese playbook and creating a government agency whose job it is to reign in other government agencies. I mean, if we're gonna have government agencies, maybe that would be something we could put in place and they could start mopping up some of this mess. The problem with the CFPB is because it's not controlled by the executive. So even if you try to do that, you can't actually, they can do whatever they want. They can get whatever budget they want. They within months of starting out there at thousands of employees because the Fed just wrote them a big fat check and they could hire them wherever they wanted. They didn't need to go through Congress. So it's just, it's a fascist monstrosity. What we need is, what we really need is massive, we're beyond, I think, we're beyond having an agency that just controls everybody. We need massive legislation in Congress that does away with stuff. Just does away with stuff. It eradicates it. And you find one senator or congressman who believes in that, maybe they're five, combine Senate and House. Maybe they're five congressmen who believe in that. That's it. Well, so what I wanted to ask about, well, quick shout out to Yash, who's in my OPA reading and discussion group. Actually, we were just talking before this and then both of us had to go to come join this. So that's cool to see Yash on the call. I wanted to talk about feedback in the American culture. And you talked about how repressed Americans can be. And one way that I see that showing up or at least a similar phenomenon is when giving feedback, like in a work context or just a personal context, like, hey, you're right. I didn't like that thing you said. Don't do it again. But like, I could easily comfortably say that to you because I know that you come from a culture where it's just, okay. So then we argue about it and come to some understanding and then we move on with our lives. And I have some colleagues who are from cultures like that. Like I have a German colleague who's lived really close to Denmark. Or anyway, he comes from a culture where it's like that. And so he did something that I made me angry last week and I was able to just call up to say, hey, cut that out. And then we had an argument and then we moved on. He started talking about business and it was just, it's so liberating. So, but why do you think Americans are, you've got to tell, now I want you to know that I think you're doing a great job in general, but there's this one thing that maybe you could just take to the next level and do a little bit better. And like, why do we have to treat people like snowflakes like that? And that if you don't, it's gonna be received as some devastating sweeping condemnation of I'm a bad person because Debbie thinks that I'm not doing such and such as well as I might. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It is bewildering that of all the countries in the world America would suffer from this because it shouldn't. I mean, I think it's because our educational system is too influenced by Dewey and we focus too much in emotions and we get insulted quickly and we read people's body language.   Why should I have to deal with your body language? But that's insensitive and you got to take other people's emotions into account. Why? And so I think it's Dewey's doing. I think it's the idea that socialization is so important. I think it's kind of the undermining of the idea of individualism, but it is funny that a culture like Germany, which is not an individualistic country at all. Right. You can tell people whatever, they're completely open about these things. Maybe because women just don't have any emotions. No, I'm kidding. But it's easier to do it. Israelis, yeah, definitely. I mean, I've got a good friend who's, my friends were Israeli. We can tell each other pretty much anything. We could yell at each other. We can, you know, and, you know, within boundaries, but yeah, I mean, it's completely acceptable and, but Americans have this over emphasis on emotion, which is interesting because they're also repressed emotionally. Yeah. And I think that goes together. I think that they've been told that emotions are super important, but they don't know what to do with that and how to express themselves. And they know at some level that being emotional list is no good. So they press the emotions, but then they give it too much weighting and it just creates this real confusion and real difficulty into personal relationships and just dealing with other people. And yeah, I don't know. I think that's the best I have, but it is an issue.  And it rubbed off on me. So I was becoming sensitive to their emotional states. I was not being an Israeli, right? And that I think made me a less good manager. I would have been better if I just, to help with your body language and your emotions, I'm gonna just tell you the way it is. I think I would have been more effective if I'd done that. You know what's funny is that I do do that. I am pretty direct with people. And on my team, and they love it once they get used to it. Like they say, oh, don't we just tell it? You just tell it how it is. I don't have to worry where I stand with you and like you just give me the, you just give it to me straight. And once they get used to it, they like it. But I wonder- But they're just so second-handed about it too, right? People overly care about what other people think of them. Yeah, and I wonder almost if it's got to do with the religious background of America, the puritanical sort of origin and how religious we are. Because if you, for example, for whatever reason, every American high school student, at least at the time when I went through high school, read the essay by Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. I don't know if you've ever read it, but it's just shockingly like, we're all just hanging over the fires of hell at God's mercy. And just the slightest little thing can cause him to release, drop you into the flames and then your soul is condemned forever. And there's these just horribly graphic language about just how wicked, how vile and wicked we all are. And it's just by God's grace. And so if you're facing, if that's what it is kind of implicitly based in maybe to the culture of, if I give you some negative feedback that there's some really major implication that it reveals your true nature as some kind of a vile and wicked creature. It's some kind of residue of that from culture. I think that's absolutely right. And I think Americans, more than Europeans and certainly more than Israelis, take religion seriously. And Israelis don't.  There's no original sin. There's none of this stuff in Judaism, but there isn't Christianity. It's a big deal.  And even if you're not religious, that condemnation of humanity, particularly in really in Catholicism, but primarily in Protestantism, if you read Luther and you read Calvin, oh my God, they're human, it's just unbelievable. And it damages their self-esteem. So they've been raised in a two e-based educational system. Christianity is always there in the background. It is a mess. It is surprising how well America does in spite of all that. It really is. But yes, I think you're right. I think Christianity plays a huge role in this. I'm reading a book right now on the history of the Reformation. And it's fascinating. So the whole history of Christianity is truly fascinating. I mean, do you realize that these people went a war against each other and slotted one another about arguments, about weather during mass, that little piece of bread that they put in their mouth is really the flesh of Jesus or just a symbolic image of the flesh of Jesus or something in between. Neither the flesh of Jesus, nor symbolic of the flesh of Jesus, but something else that they literally would slaughter whole villages over that disagreement, that little thing. This is Christianity. And the reasons for the splits in Christianity over the things that they disagreed about shocking from kind of a modern perspective. And they took all this seriously.  This was either dropping into hell or not.  So it didn't matter what you did in this life. You know, it's all predetermined.    We need to question the motivations of God. Yeah, right, exactly. I mean, that's what, that's a conclusion of the book of Job, right? Who are you to question? You know, why I do what I do.  And it does its work on people in a profound, deep, horrific psychological ways. All right, I assume this is Andrew, 917. Oh, I need to allow you to talk. Okay, you're permitted to talk. Andrew. All right. There you go. Hey. You're doing it under there. Now, you know about God. You need to speak up for some reason your volume's very low. You know about God that according to religionists, he doesn't need us to worship him. You need to worship him. You know, it depends on the religion, right? But I think that flies in the face of the tax. I think he needs us to worship him. Yeah, I mean, but the beauty of the Bible, and I really think this is true, the beauty of the Bible is you can interpret it any way you want. Read into it whatever you want. Right, there is no objective, this is the problem, right? There's no, what does objective mean? Reference to reality. There's no objective interpretation of the Bible. And when we studied the Bible in school, every passage in the Old Testament, literally every passage in the Old Testament, we had three to 50 rabbis interpreting it each with a different interpretation. Like every passage, and I'll do that on the millions and millions of passages, you know, you can see what kind of a mass that leads to, and that's just the Jews, that then you get the Christians, and this is why Protestantism, once you take away in Protestantism, and you know, I'm thinking about this because I'm reading this book, right? Once you take away the Catholic church making rules, right? Once you take a pope who decides what the truth is and packages for you, well, then it's completely disintegrated. And that's why you have 3,000 different Protestant sects, at least, because anybody can decide anything and make it make up whatever the hell they want, God said or didn't say, and claim that it's in the Bible and claim that it's in the text and interpreted it in some way. And whatever they want is available to them. It's all gibberish. Right. Well, this is the funny thing about Jordan Peterson, giving long lectures about the stories of the Bible. This isn't my question, but I don't want to spend too much time on it, but can you hear me? Hello? I can, but quick question. If you can ask one, make it quick. Can you hear me? Hello, hello. Yes. You're on? Am I coming through? Yes, I can hear you. Yes, you are. I can hear you. So, you know, I do think an objective interpretation is that God needs humans to worship him for the text, no matter what they say. That's not my question. Probably other passages that contradict that. All right, go with your question. I'm sure. So, on Lex, Lex Freeman's interview. Yes. Lex takes love very seriously, which I think is great. And he talks about it. I've never really heard him talk about it, Lance, but it came up in your interview with him. And he was really startled when you said, I shouldn't say really startled, but he was startled when you said, when you brought up conditional love, you know, that scares people. And you know, it's almost like they really want, people want unconditional love to be true. Yep. So, why do you think that is?  People also assume that everything good in the world happens because of love. I think this is Lex's view, right? That the good stuff happens in the world because of love. And there's truth to that, right? There's a lot of truth to the fact that everything good in the world happens because of love. People's love of knowledge, people's love of work, people love of their values. And if that's true, then wouldn't we want a world in which there was just dominated by love and by placing conditions on it, that limits the potential for that love. It limits how many people love, how many people? It limits the potential for the good. If you take love out of context and you're associated with everything good in the world and you view it as the cause out of context of what generates that love, where love comes from, then you want to maximize love and maximizing love makes it unconditional. And I'm sure for some people, it's a psychological issue of they don't want to be judged, right? I know Anne talks a lot about this. The fact that people don't want to be judged, but the principle should be judge and be ready to judge other people and be ready to be judged yourself. And that's a proper self-esteem. That's a proper perspective on life. But most people in the culture don't want to be judged. They're afraid of being judged. And it goes back to Debbie's argument issue, right? If they be judged, they might be criticized. And if they're criticized, well, it may be true. It might be not true. If it's true, then they have to question the selves. They don't want to do that. If it's not true, then they've lost their respect of other people, but what do they do about that? It just confuses the world. It's much easier to just have everything unconditional. Everybody loving everything else. And great stuff happens. But it's a fantasy. Of course it's a fantasy. Of course it's a fantasy. And it's a Christian fantasy. I mean, it all goes back to my favorite biblical story since we're on the Bible today for some reason. And that is Adam and Eve.  Everybody wants to be an animal, right? And think about it this way. I mean, one of the things people love about animals, pets, pets, is they love you unconditionally, right? Why do people, I mean, when they talk about their dogs, or more so than cats, because I don't know the cats love, but dogs seem to express love, right? And they love you no matter what. And it's true, you know, you project the love onto them. Of course, they don't literally in the same sense as human beings love, but it's reassuring. It feels good, but there is, among a lot of irrational people out there, there is this longing for Garden of Eden-like existence where everything is just taken care of, where you don't have to make an effort, we don't have to judge other people and therefore they won't judge you. And you don't have to judge values, you don't have to judge anything. It, everything just happens and it's all good. In that sense, there's a certain cultural longing to be an animal, to be at the animalistic level. And, you know, I've talked about that when I've talked about the Garden of Eden, but I think it's a powerful, it really is a powerful story and a powerful reality. God, there's thunder and lightning out there. So, you know, if we go dead, it's the thunder and lightning and the non-stop rain. It's God, it's God. God being upset at my show. You know, maybe, you know, instead of getting me to 50,000, subscribe as quickly. Here it is. That's why we saw that big drop off in that one of the one minute videos is, God was unhappy. All right, let's do some super chat questions. Just to remind everybody on the super chat, yeah, 50,000 watts. Let's see if everybody's muted. Yeah, super chat, we haven't even made a hundred bucks. So, you guys need to jump in here, but let's do the $20 questions. Daniel asked, what is your view on no-knock warrants? I think it's absurd no-knock warrants. The only time you would have a no-knock warrant is if somebody's life was in danger. That is, you were convinced, I don't know, there's a hostage situation in which you have to get to the place.  I think it's ridiculous other than that. Particularly ridiculous, and this is by, you know, one of the reasons I'm so upset about drug laws is that this is used constantly in drugs. People die, people are killed by police.  Preventing somebody from taking heroin or cocaine. Who cares? I mean, maybe you care, but there's no reason to use violence to stop it. So people die, people die, including cops. Who shouldn't die? So I can't think of a situation which justified to have a no-knock. Lightning got him. Yeah, I think he runs frozen for a moment. Hopefully he can come back. There's an interesting book called Rise of the Warrior Cop about the phenomenon of the militarization of the police. And they talk about these no-knock warrants in it. And the types of things that can happen. And I think that's how Breonna Taylor got killed. This was a year or two ago that she was, the cops did a no-knock on her home, but she was uninvolved. She was a nurse or something like that. And she had no involvement in whatever was going on that prompted it. It was like grander, something like that that was, yeah. But she mistook them for intruders. I think what happened is what happened. So she came with a gun and then she got killed. And something like that happened. It was a completely senseless death. We're still on YouTube. Your own's gone, but we're here. Well, we say as well, keep talking. As long as we want about whatever. Yeah, well, about the unconditional love, too. I wonder if that's also, because Yaron was saying it's got to do with altruism, I agree. And then in another way, maybe, that it might involve altruism is that if this is the commonly accepted standard of morality, altruism, which cannot be practiced insistently by anyone who remains alive, then we're all inherently flawed. It's almost like a secular version of original sin. So then in that case, hopefully, people are gonna love me unconditionally because if they love me conditionally on me being a good person, well, I can't be a morally perfect person if I believe in altruism. And so like, I wonder if that's part of it that drives that desire for unconditional love or even the religious version where there's a religious version of original sin, too. Like if we're all inherently wicked, then there won't be any love whatsoever if there is an unconditional love. Do you think it's also just fear of failure? Even from a secular person, we are afraid that we might fail and so we're afraid that we'll be judged for failing. And but that's like trying to escape reality because it's a fact that you can fail, but you have to learn to deal with that fact, to learn to be better at not failing. Right, right. And why would that necessarily be the condition of love?  Like that you never say, like make any kind of fail in any endeavor you try and that if someone does that I will cease to love them, I don't, you know, that would be kind of a dumb condition to put on it, like not a rational one, but. Well, it goes back to those same arguments about, well, how can you be angry with him? He's your brother, you know? It's your brother, that comes above everything. If you've ever said something horrible, it's your brother. So, yeah, yeah, it scares them. The whole idea, judge and be judged scares them. And tying it into OPAR, the metaphysics, the law of identity, I wonder if this is a attempt to deny or negate the law the axiom of identity by saying that there could be unconditional love, let alone that there should be because just it's what love is, is the response to values. And so if you're saying, I want you to have a very strong intense feeling of valuing for someone, for me, if I'm the one asking for unconditional love. Even if I don't have any values to offer, then I'm asking you to do something that's impossible by definition. Love isn't just something that you can grant willy-nilly by definition of what it is. It's like the identity of what that phenomenon actually is. And so we're trying to say that we can try to go around it somehow, go around the law of identity. Yeah, if you accept what you're calling love, yes, but they're saying there is a different kind that is something you give away because you're conscious, but it doesn't have to do with the value of the person. Right, like consciousness has no identity. And well, you're all back. Welcome to your own book show, you're all back. Yeah, you guys have been kept it going, I see. About law of identity or unconditional love, we were talking. Is it on, are we on, are we on YouTube? Yeah, it never went away on YouTube. So you guys stayed chatting on YouTube while the whole thing gathered. Did you raise any money for me? Oh, good question. Who was watching this? No, showed up, sorry. We're, we're. Who's on there? Let's see, somebody's saying hello, hello. Do I have to, what do I have to do here? It's in these. Oh, I have to mute. Okay, while you're thinking about that, Yaron. Are you guys there? You've moved again for a second. Yes. I wanted to. It's unstable. Okay, I wanted to comment on something in current events, if I may, because I think the current Russia-China strategy of messing tanks on the border of Ukraine and the Chinese overflights of Taiwan, their strategy seems to be to keep the target countries in a constant state of military emergency, which is very expensive. And the aim is not to actually invade, which would be very destructive for the invader. The aim is to have an economic impact. In other words, it's driven by the Marxist idea that economics drives everything. And if your enemy is forced to divert their investments into military readiness, they will be more amenable to other concessions. Now, as a former military guy, what is your opinion of that? I think that's part of the reason, but I don't think it's a whole reason. I think that Putin is much more concerned about the U.S. and about NATO and wanting to put them on notice and put pressure on them. And to just, I think he's less calculated than that. I think a lot of what he wants to do is just flex muscle and show to his own people that look, Biden called him nine times. He got a personal phone call from the president of the United States nine times and he can go and say, no Russian president has ever got so much attention from the Americans. Look how strong and powerful I am. So I think this has to do a lot with domestic policy. It has to do with Putin's particular nature, if you will, or particular psychology as needing attention, partially is how he gets his self-esteem, pseudo self-esteem is from the attention of others. I think what the Chinese, I think what the Chinese, the primary thing that they're doing, some of it is that, let the Taiwanese spend money on military, although they don't really want the Taiwanese to spend money on military, because if they ever decide to invade, that'll make it a lot more costly for them in order to do it. But what they're hoping to do is somewhat bankrupt them, although that doesn't seem to be happening, but just constantly put pressure and constantly test their will. And the idea is China would like to take Taiwan without any bullet shot. I don't think the Russians care about bullets. I think the Chinese do. The Chinese would like to take Taiwan like they took Hong Kong. And they're constantly testing the waters to see if that's possible. They're constantly seeing whether our America response, how the rest of the world responds, what will be the damage if they take Taiwan? I think it's constantly going on in their mind in terms of the evaluation that they're doing. So I don't think it's purely, they want to bankrupt these other countries, although that is part of the consideration. I think it's a combination of a lot of different things going on in their minds. And look, I think in these dictatorships, a lot has to do with the particular psychology of the dictator, of the man in power. Much, you know, and not just his ideology, but also his psychology. And this is certainly true of Putin. Hard to tell with Xi because we know a lot less about Xi than we do about Putin. All right, let me go back to the super chat questions. We now have $250 ones, one from best friend Hopper and one from Shazbot. So let's see, both on racism. Oh, Shazbot is just repeating friend Hopper's question, I think, yes. All right, on race, do you think race would be a valid concept? If it would be only the no anatomical traits and nothing else, someone pointed out a formulation at ITOE, where Ayn Rand described racial anatomical characteristic. She doesn't throw the lines in race. I mean, maybe, but it's never used that way. I mean, if that were case, there is no one race of black people. There are many races of black people. You would have to define, for example, the Pygmies differently than the, I don't know, the Kenyan runner types, differently from the anatomy of, I don't know, Southern Africans or whatever. I'm not sure. So it can't be the color skin dominates the anatomy. Color skin seems to be the least important of all the anatomical issues. It's not clear what anatomy is important and what is not. Is height important? Is shape of nose important? Is color eyes important? Is color hair important? What exactly is important here? We're gonna make the demarcations between one race and another. What do we do with exceptions? I just think it's too confusing and too misused. And I still, even if it's just anatomical, what's the purpose? If there was a medical purpose and we could define the things that medically were important and therefore we were relating to, okay, but that's not how it's used. So it's useful to know that somebody is a Jew from Europe because there's certain diseases associated there. I'm sure there are lots of other groups, ethnic groups, geographic groups that have diseases or particularly genes that make it useful to have that knowledge about them. Whether we wanna start categorizing those as races seems difficult. I don't see how you would get away from that. So my answer is no, don't do it because I don't see the point. And I think I don't see where you get from that. And the fact that I'm going to use it doesn't mean she gave it a lot of thought necessarily. Doesn't mean she was right in using it. Doesn't mean she had to full context of how race is used, particularly in modern America. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe she was wrong or maybe she was right and I don't understand her at all. But that's my best effort at it. Fennelpa adds onto that. I wouldn't call it race at that rate was my thought. Something like anatomy instead. I don't see the purposes applied to dealing with others unless I'm a doctor. I agree, there's a scientific purpose. You wanna genetically map how people move from one place to another. It's interesting, I find it interesting to know where people were 5,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago. It's kind of interesting in terms of history. But other than historical interest, the only other reason to know any of this is medical. And I'm not sure you need the concept of race for that. And indeed in the context of people's movements, they don't talk about race. They talk about, I don't know, different cultures, different peoples, right? So they don't really talk about it in terms of race. So it's the peoples of the, I don't know, the steeps, right? It's amazing how much of human history has been kind of determined by the people of the steeps in Ukraine, Russia and inter-Central Asia. Think about how many invasions came from there that wiped out and changed the course of history. But the very fact that most of Europe is populated by people who speak languages that came from that area. And so is most of Southern Asia. It was a, it's hard to call it a civilization because it wasn't civilized, but it was a people. And it was a series of peoples who've had a lot of influence on the course of history. But I don't think anybody would call them a race because there's nothing that makes them, they don't look the same. The Mongolians don't look the same as the Ukrainians. I don't know. The whole concept of race is beyond me in some way. All right, best fit handcast. Do you think that Michael's sale of micro strategy will end up getting crazier like John McAfee or and or flee the country with the crypto wallet keys? I don't know. I don't know. Michael's sale is an interesting character. He's a huge on Bitcoin, huge on crypto. He does have a little bit of evangelical zeal to him when he talks about crypto and he talks about Bitcoin. But I don't know if that translate into any form or any kind of, I don't know, craziness or whatever you wanna call it. So I just don't know. And since I don't know him, I don't wanna attribute anything negative to him. All right, that's the same question. Robin Nasir, not Nasir. Nasir, Nasir, I think that's right. Kudos and thanks from Robert and Amy, Nasir and looking forward to saying hello at Iron Man Con in London. Oh, great, you guys are coming. Question, do you have a favorite lighthearted film, comedy or simple fun? Well, yes, I mean, my favorite comedies are Ernst Lubrich comedies. These are from the 30s. So I apologize for them being in black and white. And actually my son gave me for Christmas one of my all-time favorites, which is lighthearted and wonderful and just one of the most charming movies you will ever see. And it's got Jennifer Jones and a French actor whose name now, of course, slipped my mind. But it's called Clooney Brown. Clooney Brown, one of my favorite all-time movies. It's just, it's about a female plumber who falls in love with a highfalutin French intellectual in pre-war Europe, in pre-war London. And it's, yeah, it truly is a wonderful movie. Highly recommended, lighthearted, but then of course everything by Ernst Lubrich. And I say here, everything by Ernst Lubrich is worth watching. One of the all-time great movies of all time. I meant commented on it, is Ninochka, which makes funds of the Soviet Union. Another great one is, to be or not to be, which makes fun of the Nazis. Now, you could argue you should make fun of the communists and the Nazis too serious of a topic. They unbelievably funny movies, so, you know, go for it. Now that they need the party exists, I think you can laugh at them. And, you know, a whole series of other Ernst Lubrich movies, pretty much everything he made is up there. Oh, Chopra on the Corner, which I've talked about my favorite Christmas movie. Chopra on the Corner with Jimmy Stewart. And so it, you know, it's just that, that would be my favorite lighthearted comedies would be of that, of Ernst Lubrich. Lots of others, you know, His Go Friday is another real favorite, which is just charming and, you know, the dialogue is just stunning, stunning. And the actors can speak that fast. And of course, the whole movie is just dialogue. This is people speaking really, really fast to one another. And nobody has dialogue like that anymore. Almost nobody, almost no films have it. All right, Roland, speaking of love, what do you think of Valentine's Day as a holiday?  If you put that aside and forget about him, Valentine's Day is wonderful. I mean, a celebration of love, how can that be bad? I land up not really celebrating Valentine's Day for one simple reason. And that is that completely by accident, my wedding anniversary is three days from Valentine's Day. It's three days after Valentine's Day. So I land up, you know, it's too much love in a span of three days. So you can't celebrate it twice. So, you know, we land up celebrating the wedding anniversary. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. We celebrate mostly the wedding anniversary, although this year we're going to a nice restaurant for both Valentine's Day and that. When we were poor, we could only celebrate one. So we would celebrate the wedding anniversary. I often, if you go back to my travel history, I have often missed Valentine's Day. I've tried never to miss my wedding anniversary. So that's the, although I'm not sure I've succeeded every single time given my travel schedules in the past. February seemed to always be a very busy month for me traveling. All right, so we're going to go back to our panel. And I don't know, yeah, Jennifer's still there. My screen has you in a different order this time. Okay, Jennifer, go for it. When you were talking about Debbie and with Debbie with other people's feelings when you criticized them, I assume you meant it work, right, because in your personal relationships, obviously you should still be honest and say what you need to say, but you would be concerned with your personal friends' feelings, right? Yeah, I mean, suddenly in work, it's not an issue. It shouldn't be an issue. Although even there, I mean, if somebody's very upset and there's a relevance to it. Sometimes you're friends that work too. But friends, it's important because friends, there's a wider contact of relationship. But that's part of the issue is that a good friendship is one where you build it on the foundations of honesty and of just telling people what you think. And as a consequence, that isn't what's gonna cause a problem. Maybe the facts of reality are gonna cause a problem in the friendship. That is maybe you have a deep disagreement about something fundamental that causes you to split, but expressing that difference shouldn't be the thing that causes the problem in the friendship because your friendship was built on truth and openness and talking to one another and the same thing about love, right? Of course you don't wanna upset your partner, but sometimes you have to, you know, truth requires it. And so you care, but that's something you, not always easily, but you overcome. And it doesn't stop you from handling the situation whereas I see too much of people delaying, not saying, evading or just not wanting to deal with it to postponing and delaying. And in both a work environment and a personal relationship that is unbelievably destructive. Right, yeah, I agree.  So there is some reflection there on how you are to the dog. It's definitely, I mean, yes, I think what people really enjoy by pets rationally is that they reflect back to you which you give them. And love generally, Nathaniel Brandon talks about love as being psychologically a reflection back of your values. So visibility, that love is associated strongly with this idea of visibility. And with a dog, in particular, I don't think you get this from cats, but with a dog there is certainly that visibility. And maybe you do get it from cats. And of course, I ran love cats. But dogs just express it more. But it is, I think you're absolutely right. It's what you give them and that's reflected back. And you get, they see you in some profound sense. Yeah, and they see you. I wanna say honestly, but it's not obviously honest in the sense of human honesty, because they can't do that. But there's no deception. There's no deception at a dog's park because they're incapable of doing that.  That's right. That's right. That's important. That is really important. They're not playing and with human beings, a lot of the sign people are playing. They pretend to like you. They pretend to say nice things to you. And with a dog, they don't know how to do that.  And that's it, right? All right, Nick. Yeah, I wanted to ask you a question going back to the Yoram-Hazouni, that debate that you did. He made an interesting comment. I think it was meant to you both as a compliment or it's a, you know, it was a two pronged thing where he called you Moses. And so I guess he's trying to capture your idealism and maybe your naivety in terms of your views. What's your take on why he called you Moses? He said, you've never been called that. I probably have never been called that. I think he was the first. Should we benevolence to it? Because I think maybe wrongly, but I think Yoram actually likes me. So I think he was trying to be benevolent. He viewed as a compliment. Think about what Moses is to him. Moses is the most important figure in Jewish history. There is no, he is the liberator, the person who brought his people out of slavery, brought them to freedom. There's also a certain tragedy to Moses, right? Because he doesn't ever see the Promised Land. He sees it from a distance, but actually never lives in the Promised Land because he violated, he did something God didn't like. So God penalized him for him so much for a benevolent God. But so I think it's the idealism. I think it's the trying to bring people out of wherever they are, right? It's the preachiness and the trying to get people to see something they don't want to see. If you think about Moses, he is constantly doing the 40 years in which the Jews wander the desert. If you've ever been to the Sinai, the idea of wandering that desert for 40 years which strike you as bizarre because it's so small, but they wandered the desert for 40 years and he's constantly fighting with them. They're constantly complaining. They constantly don't like him. They constantly want something different.  This is a very ancient Jewish trait. And Moses, sometimes he gets impatient with them and that's why God penalizes him one time when he gets impatient with them. But Moses has this because of his idealistic has this immense patience with him. And I think that's the sense in which he views me as a Moses. I take it as a compliment. I think there is a sense in which you could view me as something of, I wish I was as successful as Moses. Moses was much more successful than I am. I have a feeling that I will die not seeing the promised land from a distance, but die maybe knowing it's coming in a few generations, but not actually seeing it. So I think Moses might be in a, land up in a better situation than I was. And I think Moses had a lot more subscribers than me. What a historical irony. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.  I mean, in this, I agree with George Peterson. There's a lot of good stories that are interesting, that are open to interpretation. I mean, I even see Adam and Eve as a cool story.  It is the story of human beings attaining free will and reason. I mean, the eating the apple is that evolutionary switch, that evolutionary thing that happened to us, that allowed us to have reason and free will. And it's a cool story that illustrates that. And then, you know, it has some, it has some, and it's true. The consequence of having free will is now you can, you can, you can introspect. You can, you can project your own suffering. You can project your own misery. You can, you understand that labor, for example, is hard, labor is hard for every animal. Not just for, for, for, for human beings, right? They're labor when giving birth, but human beings know that it's hard in a conceptual integrated sense that animals just, it's hard. You know, there's no optionality. They don't know anything different. So cognition creates challenges, not just good, but it creates certain difficulties. So there's a lot of truth to these stories and a lot of interest in the stories, both the ones that are historical and both the ones that are purely metaphorical. It's just that most people interpret them wrongly, I think, or don't interpret them wrongly because there is no right interpretation. They don't take the right lessons from them. All right, let's see, Yash. I would like to go back to the topic started by Debbie and then continued by Jennifer. Sure. So as problem solvers, what already works doesn't often matter to us. So we may focus on criticizing the things that aren't good or don't work, but in the spirit of objectivity, it's also okay to add some redundancy in appreciating the things that are good. So for example, like I would not say we should give someone a fake feedback about something they're doing well, but if we are telling our partner or even someone at work that they're doing something wrongly, I think there is value in, even if we are repeating ourselves and saying, oh, but I really appreciate what you did for me then. So I think at least I have to remind myself of this because to me, what already works does not matter as much as what needs to be improved. But as an egoist, if my partner only complains to me, then I might feel, why are you with me? Because I don't see you getting any value from me, right? You always complain. You don't say anything positive. I'm not being an altruist, but as an egoist, I don't think you should be with me if I'm not adding any value to your life. So in that sense, I feel like there is genuine value in even if you're just repeating the positive that we've already mentioned before. I mean, I think that's absolutely right. And it's a crucial point about justice and much, much more important than criticizing people is complimenting people, is telling them the value that they represent. And this is part of what it means to I think be a good boss. If you're going to be open and critical of them, then you've got an other occasion when they do good work, tell them they've done good work, tell them what's good about them, tell them what value they've added to the project, to your life, to whatever it happens to be. This is true in friendship, it's true in love and it's true in work relationships. So creating an environment that is honest, right? Creating an environment that is honest is, goes, it means being honest. It means being honest about everything, not just about the things that are bad. And I think objectives tend to focus on the being honest about the things that are bad. They tend to be critical of everything in that sense, they're like Jews, right? So they tend to complain and they tend to be critical, right? And that's not being objective. It's not being objective, right? So if you create a context in which every time you see something good, you address it. And then when you see something bad, you address it. Now you get objectivity and the recipient is much more likely to accept what you said. Properly, right? And objectively, because they understand that there's an objective relationship going on here. Sometimes we do this artificially in the sense that we go, whenever you wanna criticize something, first say something good and then say the negative, that's artificial and therefore bullshit. I think a good relationship is one where you're constantly giving feedback and that feedback is good when it's good and it's negative when it's good negative and it is what it is, right? And people can see through the, I say something nice and then I say something not so nice and it doesn't really work unless you've created this relationship in which things are constantly in flow. Yeah, and that sandwich style of feedback where you put like something good, then the critical feedback, then something good. People see through that and it dilutes the message that you're really trying to send, which is the, but absolutely, I give positive feedback too and I think that's part of the reason why my team's okay with me being kind of direct with the more critical feedback. But it's really important for this is about the moral and the practical being one and the same because as a matter of justice, yes, to recognize when someone does something good, but it's necessary in a practical sense at the same time for reinforcing those behaviors and not just generally saying, hey, good job, you do a good job, like things like that, okay, that's nice, but it doesn't help as much as, specifically, I love the email that you sent because you were super concise, got right to the point and sent the message that you needed too so that people could, you know, so that it's a more specific action will feedback. Why was it good? Why did I do a good job today as opposed to not? Absolutely, and it's amazing how little positive feedback people get and is provided out there. You know, I just see it, I mean, some people are really good at it and some people are just terrible at it. I mean, the people who are most critical of my show never say a good thing about it. They never say, or about me generally, never say a nice thing. So I'll get an email from a long-time objectivist saying, how could you say this and this in the debate? Every objectivist, I mean, that's exactly the opposite of Vine Rand, every objectivist know that, you know, who, you know, some, now if it's somebody who in the past has said good job in this debate or good job in this and that, then when he says something like that, I go, okay, he's angry, I get it, but if that's the only message I ever get from that person, tell it with them. I mean, and even if they're right, tell it with them. And in this case, they were right. But, you know, it's like, and I, it's, you've gotta, if you, at the point where you're gonna give critical feedback to people, you've gotta build a relationship with them.  You're not gonna get to them. It doesn't achieve anything positive. Yeah, I would just, I would just quickly add that, first, this helps rationally reinforce my view of the benevolent universe, not just fall into seeing the negatives, not to delude myself, but to rationally remind myself when things are good. And second, if we can criticize the same thing twice, then we can also appreciate the same thing twice. Absolutely. It doesn't always have to be that, okay, I already appreciated you for that, so why should I have to mention it again? I don't see it that way. Yep. Thank you. Daniel. So, so in there, pardon me. In the year-end issue, MIT Tech Review had their best stories of 2021. One of them is titled, our brains exist in a state of controlled hallucinations. Was written by a neuroscientist and a philosopher out of Sussex, University of Sussex. And he says, the entirety of perceptual experience is a neuronal fantasy that remains yoked to the world through a continuous making and remaking of perceptual best guesses of controlled hallucinations. You could even say that we're all hallucinating all the time. It's just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that's what we call reality, in quote. What do you say to a guy like this other than you're hallucinating, dude? I mean, that's the only response possible because there's nothing rational can be said because what does rationality even mean? There is no reality. I mean, this is the ultimate in the privacy of consciousness.  Nobody talks like that and that was shrugged or whatever. Or when she accuses the intellectuals or a slippery slope, if you believe this, this is what you'll end up believing. And everything she said is absolutely true. I mean, this brain and a vat idea, which is old, it's not new, it's been going on for a while. It just, now it has the veneer of legitimacy from neuroscience. Neuroscience proves that, no, it doesn't prove anything. The whole idea of a brain and a vat is absurd and nutty and nutty. But that's the primacy of consciousness. And unfortunately, you're seeing more and more and more of it. I remember in high school, it was kind of the cool philosophical thing that you, the gotcha, that, you know, prove that you're not imagining this. And I remember in like, I don't know, 10th grade or something, thinking about that, huh? You know, maybe that's right.  And then going on and never thinking about it again. And I did the same thing with solophism. The whole idea of primacy of consciousness, just I tried out all the different variations of it and each time decided, nah, didn't make any sense. And I wasn't philosophical, it was just, it just didn't make any sense. It wasn't much deeper than that.   Obviously he expects that I can read what he wrote, right? If it's all just hallucinations, who knows what I would read. You have a shared hallucination. That's what reality is. Reality is the shared hallucination. And that's the whole thing. He claims to be trying to teach us about the brain, but all he's trying to do is justify his thought that reality is socially determined. That's right, that's right. And that's, that's, yeah, it's, and that it's all, you know, it's, they're just religionists of a different form, right? Religionist reality is determined by God's consciousness. These guys are determined by some collective consciousness that we might have that, you know, but it's just as mystical. It's just as nonsensical. Thank you. Let's see, where are we? Debbie. So bringing up again, the issue of the great attrition or the great resignation, I don't know if we've settled on which of those terms is the one people are calling it, but that phenomenon in general, I have a hypothesis about the root cause of it. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. So basically what I think is that it's not, that it's a, people are reacting to a disruption of a big status quo, like, and specifically what I mean is all the people who went from working in an office one day to working remotely the next, that that is such a disruption of a thing that had been unquestioningly accepted as a part of day-to-day life, just baked into how we live and plan our days, day-to-day-to-day for at least a large segment of the population. Not everyone, of course, because we don't all work in offices, but for a very large segment. And so that this was just something we didn't like in a lot of cases, the commute and the traffic and everything, but it's just, well, that's just how it is. I have to live with it. And now this massive shift to how we live in every way has opened people up to, okay, the status quo's been completely shaken up. So now all this other stuff's on the table that I can think about, ways that I can live and work differently. I've noticed myself doing this, not in the form of looking for another job, but just in, hey, I noticed that I'm hyperproductive and focused really early in the morning, like it's for 0400. Sometimes I did one day status, just instead of sitting and drinking my coffee and going straight to work out, I went to my computer and started working and I was like, wow, this is amazing. I'm so focused and productive. So now like, you know, rethinking what hours I work. And then, so I think more broadly, it's just people are rethinking their lives. And in some cases that means, well, maybe I want a different career type of thing. And then that's where we're getting people quitting and their job and maybe trying to pursue a different job or deciding they have different values in terms of how much work or where they work. But it's actually just that, is how it's most showing up, the symptoms that people are concerned about, but that the broader phenomenon is one of people, people being more open to thinking, rethinking life and work in general, triggered by this disruption of the status quo in their day to day life. So that's my hypothesis. I think there's probably a segment of the population that's truthful, right? And maybe it's a big segment. It's hard to tell. And the whole great resignation is a combination of a lot of different things, right? So a lot of people are retiring early because COVID disrupted their lives and they spent some time at home and they figured, you know what? I don't need this and I'm just gonna retire early. So, and you think about it, we're talking about the baby boomers, right? So this is the largest generation ever. If a bunch of baby moves decide to retire, so I'm considered a baby boomer, right? I'm right at the tail end of it. And I'm 60. If a bunch of 62-year-olds to 65-year-olds have suddenly left the workplace, that would really register. That's a lot of people and it would have an impact. It is a lot of professionals rethinking what they wanna do and how they wanna do it. So one of the phenomenas that's happened over the last six months, a year, more businesses have been started than maybe ever before. So a lot of people going and doing their own things, starting their own businesses and maybe they're not being counted as employees anymore because now they're doing their own thing, they're consultants and maybe that hasn't completely been registered. Maybe some people are taking some time off between jobs and trying to figure out, all right, I know I don't wanna go into office or wanna do things differently or wanna work different hours or whatever it is. I'm not exactly sure what that is. I'm just gonna take some time off. I've saved some money during COVID because I don't know, because I didn't travel, because I didn't do XYZ. So I've got some money from the government. There's some money sitting in my account. I can afford not to work for a few months and figure it out. But then there are also people, and again, I have no idea how many of all these, who are, and this particularly the very young, who have been, who bought into this idea of why do I need to work? I didn't work through COVID, the government sent me checks. I don't really wanna go to try to find a work. I'm sleeping in my parents' basement playing video games all day.  And they're more of those. So there's a whole generation that, so there's this statistic about, what is it? How many prime age adult men are working? So it used to be, and in most cultures, it's like 90%, right? If you're between the ages of, I don't know, 24, post college and 55, you're working, like 90% of men. And in the US, I just read the stat, but I can't remember the number. It's way lower than that. There's a whole bunch of guys who are not. Now, some of them are on drugs. This is the whole opioid epidemic. There's a lot of depression among middle-aged white men who are just stuck and have given up on work and are just living on welfare or living on something I don't know, or living in their mother's basement and they might not be middle-aged. And then there's a bunch of young kids, young 20-somethings who just don't wanna go work and their parents indulge them. These are not trivial numbers. These are real numbers. So labor participation rates in the US are way below. Women are doing fine. Men are not, for a variety of reasons. Men are not. And suicide rates are high in men. Opiod is high in men. Depression is high in men. It usually whites and usually in this, I don't know, age group of 35 to 55. And that age group, by the way, is life expectancy. It's pretty low for that age group, which is bizarre. It's just bizarre. So there's a lot going on in what we're seeing. A lot of it has to do with the culture we live in and the economy we live in, the kind of jobs. But also, and I've talked about this a lot in previous shows, the promises made to that generation about jobs always being there, the promises people like Trump and Obama and Biden have made, we're bringing jobs back. Your steel job is coming back. Any day now you'll have your steel job back. Nobody being honest with them. Nobody telling them to get in their car and drive to Northwest Arkansas. My favorite place to, because unemployment rates, they are basically zero. Everybody has a job. They get stuck in Ohio. They get stuck in India or whatever it is they're going. They are, they don't move. There's mobility in the United States. Literally people getting in their cars and moving. Is it an all-time low right now and has been declining for 20 years? It has to do with social programs, welfare, but it also has to do with psychology. People have lost that risk taking willingness to get in their car and go somewhere. And so certain people are moving a lot, particularly during COVID. They're leaving New York and they're leaving San Francisco, but there's a whole group of people that is not budging and staying and they're the ones that are hooting. So there's a lot going on in American society right now and it's a combination, I think of all those factors, but certainly what you're suggesting affects I think primarily, I'd say primarily middle-class professionals, programmers, consultants, professionals that can work from anywhere. This is a huge shift going on in America right now where people are moving because of it, people are working from home because of it, people are questioning their careers because of it, people are starting businesses because I mean, and it's all, that's good. That I think is a good outcome from COVID, right? That's the plus side. But then there's a whole large group of people who are hooting, who are really struggling and this great resignation is partially a reflection of both of those phenomenas, plus retiring, go ahead. I find particularly troubling the segment that you described of young people who are just saying, I don't feel like working, why should I have to? I shouldn't have to, because there is that for sure. I get those questions in Q and A's when I'm speaking to campuses. Before COVID, why should I work? Why can't the government just give me a check to do my hobbies? And that's the God and Eviden mentality. Why work? God and Eviden, we didn't work, God just provided. Why can't the government just provide? It's very sad. And they'll never have self-esteem. They'll never make anything of their own lives. They'll never do anything. And that's tragic. Okay, Ian. So I recently listened to a podcast series on Jim Jones and the People's Temple and the whole Guyana Kool-Aid thing that it ended up with. And aside from the really interesting things that I didn't realize that he thought of himself more as a communist than a Christian. He called himself God's socialist. So there's more of a radical left-wing thing than it was a religious thing. But aside from that, they spent a lot of time going into the civil rights movement and the student movements and the way those radicalized and became very strange and got into the whole history of the violence in the 70s. And I think a lot of people have forgotten that in the 70s, there were years where there were multiple bombings every day in the US from these student radicals. And so the context and the question here is about the woke stuff today. I think a lot of people who panic about the woke stuff don't have the historical remembrance of how bad it was. Because as bad as it is today, there are not people bombing government buildings and literally assassinating police. Well, I mean, think about what the 60s were like, right? We had a president assassinated. We had a leading presidential candidate assassinated. Robert Kennedy, who might have become a president. He probably would have beaten Humphrey and he probably would have beaten Nixon. We had a, you know, we had Martin Luther King assassinated. I can't remember how Malcolm X died, but wasn't he killed as well? I thought he was assassinated. Yeah, he was assassinated by... He was assassinated. He was a part, he used to be a part of... Yeah, the Muslim, I forget the brotherhood or whatever.  You had students being shot in protests, right? At certain universities like Kent State, I think it was. Kent State, where there was a lot of students shot. But they were doing these violent sit-ins and it was generally violent. The violence in 1968 riots in places like Los Angeles were in many respects a lot worse than the riots, the BLM riots of 2020. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right in a sense that we don't have perspective. We don't have history. Everything that's going on right now is bad. And in some ways it's bad partially because we already did this in the 60s. Didn't they learn their lesson? But we have to repeat it all. But yes, things were a lot worse back then. And if you think about the economy in the 1970s, if you think about violent crime in the 19th century, if you think about the power of the left, think about a candidate like God, the guy who Nixon beat in 72, who was like Bernie Sanders. And he was the Democratic presidential nominee. He was running for president. Bernie Sanders didn't make it out of the Democratic primaries. In spite of his popularity, he didn't make it out. McGovern did make it out. That says a lot about the Democrats' feelings back in 1972. So there's a lot of parallels, even with inflation now, between where we are right now in the early 1970s and yet there's less violence today. There's less crime. There's certainly less political violence in the U.S. today than there was back then. You could argue though, on the flip side of that, that there's more, the left controls more of the levels of culture than they did back then. So they don't need to be as violent. I'd say the flip side of that is that if you're not a leftist, in the early 1970s you had almost no avenues with which to communicate, right? Because all the TV networks were basically left and all the newspapers were basically left. What was your communication mechanism? Today you do. In spite of big tech, in spite of everything, we have more opportunities to express ourselves and to communicate and to get our message out there and then ever, then ever before. So it's this ways in which it's worse than the 70s but there are lots of ways in which it's much better than the 1970s right now. And I think you're right. People don't understand how bad it was back then. Yeah, I think one thing to think about is it's possible that the youth today is on average worse in that there's more leftist thought in the youth but it's much shallower. Yeah. I mean, these people in the 70s were hardcore Marxists.  Like that's not an exaggeration like the people exaggerate about the world today. That's literal things that happen. Yeah, the same thing is, I think there were nihilists back then, some of them were Marxists, some of them were nihilists. Today they're almost all, I mean of the students, they're almost all nihilists. They don't even have, I often say they're worse than Marxists because they don't even have an ideological context. They don't even have any positive values. They're almost all motivated by the negative, by hatred, by destruction, by wanting to see it burn. But they also don't have fully, luckily the courage of their convictions, right? And that's why we're not seeing the kind of political violence we saw back then. But the other thing, I was there in the 60s and there's one big difference. Back then, the people who didn't have enough money to study at first rate schools went into debt but wanted to repay it right away. So while I was in grad school getting four MIT graduate degrees, I was also working full-time as a medical engineer and then at HP labs. And the people who were staging the demonstrations and sits in and so on were the trust fund babies who didn't need to work. So it was an upper class phenomenon. What we're seeing now is that the upper class phenomenon has spread. Many students take loans and they expect they will never need to pay it back.  I'm good for society. Yep. And they're told they're right.  And so they feel they don't need to work. Graduate school is not that demanding anymore.  There aren't people getting killed in explosions and military occupations like there were back then. No, I think that's right. I think the demographics have changed and the cultures changed quite a bit. And I also think they think they're gonna be more successful now than they did back then. Back then they really did think they were marginalized. Today I think they're far more in the mainstream in terms of their influence on the culture. They're far more in the hearts of the cultural establishments. I think the tech companies have done a lot to make them feel like they are the good guys and they have real power. All right, Andrew. And then we'll do some super chat questions and then we'll call it a day. Andrew, there you go. Hey, Euron. Just to remark before my question in support of ARI's mission to train new intellectuals. You know, when it came up earlier about reality being a hallucination, one of the challenges is with promoting objectivism is it's a positive philosophy. And in the culture we live in, you know, the skeptic and cynical nature of it. When you say something like that, it automatically has credibility, you know? And it's harder to say, no, it's not a hallucination. A is A. It just automatically kind of has an advantage to throw in something like that and it's edgy and people gravitate towards it. And I don't think there's really any, the way to deal with that is, you know, of course kind of the attitude of the culture could change and that could improve and be more receptive to objectivism. But the other way to deal with it is to just break through that cynicism with the message being repeated over and over again. And I think that that's, you know, one of the ways to win the culture. So I just, I like that ARI is hyper focused on training intellectuals. Yeah, and I think that's absolutely right. I think we live in a cynical, skeptical, epistemologically super confused culture in which ideas that are completely crazy, like we all brains in a vat can take hold because it's kind of edgy. And it's connected with that movie I really liked called, you know, Matrix. So people respond to stuff like that, but that's because the culture is the way it is. And the only way to change is, you know, to fundamentally change the culture and to change attitudes so that you could present a positive case that's idealistic, but they have to be able to have a different vision of what idealism means and be more accepting. My question is, what do you think as a cultural phenomenon of the metaverse? I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think the metaverse could be fun. You know, I don't think that the metaverse is necessarily bad anymore than every new innovation that has resulted in people thinking it's awful and it's bad and it's problematic. I think it's what people do with it and what people do with the metaverse. Of course it has the real potential of being horrible and being bad and allowing people to escape reality. But so does the internet and so did television and so does everything. So did books a long, long time ago. So it's what people do with it, you know, this idea of a much more immersive digital experience which I take metaverse to be so that you could have meetings with people where they appear as holograms where it truly is a 3D experience rather than kind of a Zoom wall sitting at the conference table. And it looks like we're really engaging with one another as people rather than just the two dimensions. I think that's great if we can make that happen. That's far superior to what we have today. So it's what people do with it, how they embrace it, how they engage with it. So yeah, it's like every other technology, it's what you do with it, not the technology in and of itself. All right, let's see. Kus, I can't pronounce his name. Kus took money, something like that. Thank you for the contribution, really appreciate it. Free trade rights, great resignation theory. People couldn't work during COVID-19, got stimulus money and started speculating. All the new money pushed up the markets. Now everybody thinks they're financial genius. So why bother with nine to five blind? I mean, how many people really made that much money with that? Some people did and some people you're probably right, but I just don't think that that many of them to have that big of an influence on what's going on. It could be that everybody has a friend that they think has made a fortune on crypto and in the markets. And if everybody thinks that they can leave their jobs and go trade in the markets and do it, and maybe that's part of it, but I still think it's a small part of what we're talking about. As many people as traded in Robinhood, it's still not a huge number of people. It's still not enough to make a massive impact on the number of people who can live without working. Plus, what about the people? How much those people, if you look at the Robinhood stocks, all of those people have lost most of the money they invested by now. If you look at the meme stocks, and if that's the case, then are they all gonna go back to work now? Because they lost the money in December, January. We'll see, maybe if you're right, then you should see the flip side of that. Now that the speculative bubble, at least in lots of stocks has burst. Speculation can be productive. It depends on what you mean by speculation. It can be productive in the sense that it provides liquidity to markets, but it depends on what you mean by speculation. All right, Kusto, he says, you're on watching you regularly for a while. Rules for Life series was really amazing. I messed it up with first one, so the second super chat. Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you. I have no idea how much money that is. It's a thousand something, but I really appreciate the fact that you're a regular listener. Friend Harper, Justin Amash just started a podcast. What are your thoughts of Justin Amash and do you think you would ever be on a show someday or maybe have him on your show? I'm personally a fan. He's consistent on freedom. I mean, Justin Amash is very good on lots of different issues. He, on most things, he's consistently of freedom. I give him a lot of credit for being brave, having the courage of his convictions, for example, to voting against Trump for leaving the Republican Party when it went full-on collectivist and full-on personality worship with Trump.  So he's really good. I disagree with him. I disagree with him fundamentally on abortion. I think I disagree with him fundamentally on foreign policy. I think he's completely wrong on foreign policy. But other than those two issues on abortion and foreign policy, we agree on a lot politically. So, and I think he is one of the better guys out there. Certainly among politicians, he's one of the better politicians although he's out of politics now because nobody will elect him. No, he couldn't get elected because he's too good. He's too consistent on the economic issues, on the political issues. All right, Florida Henry says Adam and Eve shows that even though God provides everything, women still won't be happy. No, no, no. See, what Adam and Eve actually shows is that women are curious and women want more. They don't settle. Adam is just lying around, lazing around doing nothing. And God said to Adam, don't eat from the tree of knowledge. And Adam said, yes, I will not. Yes, sir, absolutely. I'll just lay around here playing video games, doing nothing. He was like, why shouldn't I eat from the tree of knowledge? The snake is kind of cute and he's kind of sexy and he thinks I should eat from the tree of knowledge. So why not? Let's experiment. Let's go for it. Let's do something like Eve is the hero of the story. Like think of it, the tree of knowledge. This is not an accident that it's called the tree of knowledge. I would call it the tree of reason. This opens up the entire universe to humanity. It provides man with reasons. So no, Eve is the heroine and it just shows that the role of women, and here I'm gonna get into big trouble, one of the roles of women is to get men to live up to their potential. I said it, I'm waiting for the backlash.  Potentially thinks of you. All right, that's Adam and Eve. I, you know, we could do lots of shows just on that one story. It's, that's the one benefit of the Bible. It's got cool stories in it. Yeah, I've nominated that for a special one minute video and I second the nomination. That's a good one minute clip. All right, I don't know if action is action is here but I'll let him know that that would be a good one minute video, you know. I'm not sure I'll get the right kind of subscribers. I don't know. I'm not sure who it is. Anyway, let's see. Jean says, the original draft said, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. In a sense, that's better, right, and more accurate than we hold these truths to be self-evident. A cult asks, would you ever be willing to hold an event in Charlotte? Of course. Also, look, I'm willing to hold an event anyway. I mean, on planet Earth, I'm not up to going into space but on planet Earth, I'm pretty much willing to go anyway. I think I'd stand by that. North Korea is out, Iran is out. Generally Muslim countries are out but as far as I know, Charlotte is none of those, right? Not super Thalaterian and not Muslim. So I'm happy to do an event anyway. What I need is an invitation. And if it's a student group, you know, that invitation doesn't have to be associated with a lot of money. But if it's not a student group, it has to also pay. But happy to come anywhere. And he says, also, I just love the irony that you all crapping all over Christianity when I'm building a church in Minecraft. Why are you building a church in Minecraft? Love the show, keep up the work. I don't even know really what Minecraft is but I guess you build stuff and you build cities and things and Colt is building his population of church. All right, Frank says, James Joyce's novel, Ulysses turned 100. Though you like romantic novels, can you still get into this modern book? Maybe someone else can comment too. I couldn't get past the first, can I call it a sentence? Does it qualify as a sentence? I'm not sure it does. But no, I can't read Ulysses. It's just googly goo. And it's boring and it's googly goo-boring. I can kind of get through tall story who is boring in some segments, but fascinating in others. But I can't get through James Joyce. It just doesn't make any sense to me. It just doesn't compute. And yeah, it's just nonsense for me. Minecraft is a warrior game. Is that true? Minecraft is a warrior game? Why do you build churches then if it's a warrior game? So you have some way to go and say, I'm sorry for all the blood I spilled. I guess, I don't know. All right, thanks everybody. I do not play Minecraft. I do not play Disney video games. I played video games. Adam will appreciate this. I played video games in the late 70s and early 80s when you could play Pac-Man and you could play tennis where, like a bouncing bally thing. Pong. Pong and basically things like that. And so I never played real video games and I'm not attracted to it, but I also know that if I do play video games, I'm likely to get addicted to it because it sounds like a lot of fun.   The only game I really enjoy that is addictive, but again, I don't play it much, is Bridge. I find Bridge is completely addictive. It's an amazingly fun game and I haven't played it probably in 15 years, so. All right, everybody. Have a great rest of your weekend and I will see you all on Tuesday. Thank you for sticking around during that long break. Thank you to the panel for entertaining all of you during the long break and making it less painful. It was great to come back and you were all just here and we could just continue. So the rain has stopped. I guess it's okay to go to dinner then. Bye, everybody. I'll see you on Tuesday. Thanks. Bye, everyone.