 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right everybody, welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Tuesday, early afternoon, having a fantastic week so far. So another of our news roundups today where I try to distill what I think are some of the more interesting, important news items out there. Often I don't cover what is being carried by all the other networks because I don't think it's that interesting or that important or I don't know enough about it. I don't trust them. A lot of times I'll see a story that's important, I don't know what's going on, and how to get good information out there sometimes and so I just wait until we get better info and then I cover it so I'm often late on breaking news because I don't like to just give you stuff off the cuff that is not where I don't really know what is going on. All right, today we've got a bunch of things to cover, we're going to cover a new law in New York that makes it illegal to discriminate based on weight and height. We'll talk about is there a teen mental health crisis? It just seems like the way everybody says there is, we'll talk about that. We'll talk about offensive speech and what American students think should be done about it and then finally we'll do a few different economic stories and we'll cover a few of them. I ran out of characters so I didn't have enough to wait through. Let's see, remind everybody you can use the super chat to ask questions, we already, Remo and Michael already started that. On that anonymous user and Catherine, thank you for the support, really, really appreciate it. Remind you that tonight there will be a show at 8pm, I don't know what the topic is, but I will post the topic once I finalized it, so hopefully you'll join tonight 8pm East Coast time. So that'll be a longer format topic, a longer format show. And then I want to remind you tomorrow there'll be no shows, no shows tomorrow, I'm traveling to Aspen, Colorado, where I'm doing kind of an interview talk. In Aspen on Thursday night, I'm hoping to do a show from the hotel on Thursday and then a show from the hotel on Friday and then on the weekend I'm spending the weekend in Colorado and then head back home on Monday and back to regular flow of shows on Tuesday. All right, let's get going and yeah, thanks, thanks guys. All right, so it turns out that, that overweight people might be, might face discrimination in the workplace. This seems to be a lot of people arguing and claiming that, that weight is a factor on, in promotion, if you want to be in top management, you better not be obese and so on. And New York City decided to do something about this, so New York City and a number of other states are also moving in this direction to outlaw weight discrimination at work. You know, this is part of the big agenda that's out there of trying to control and trying to tell us exactly how to treat people and how to relate to people and how to deal with people. So the argument is that weight is still not looked at from a DEI diversity and inclusion perspective and it needs to be. So the law in New York was signed in May, it bans weight and height as they characterized them as protected from protected classes from discrimination. So if you discriminate against somebody, or you accused of discriminating against somebody or you suspected of discriminating somebody based on their height, I guess if they're too short, maybe if they're too tall, then you could be sued and you can be, it is a real nightmare. I think the only state that currently prohibits employment discrimination based on weight is Michigan. Not a state I would have expected, I would have thought California, but Michigan, yeah. I mean this is insanity. But once the government thinks that it is in a position to be able to dictate to us how we behave in our own businesses, how we behave in our own private property, who we discriminate against and who we don't discriminate against, there is no end to it. Now there are lots of different potential causes of obesity. Some of them are behavior and might reflect on somebody in terms of their leadership skills, how seriously they take their own health and therefore themselves and therefore maybe it reflects some way on their work. Certainly you can imagine work environments in which weight matters. So it's none of the government's business. What happens in the voluntary interaction between employer and employee? Employees can leave and employers can file or they can discriminate. Indeed, but once you allow as the Civil Rights Act did and the courts following the Civil Rights, once you allow that the government has a role in limiting ability to discriminate based on race, yeah, no race, it's awful to discriminate against race. Race is truly a characteristic that you have no control over. And look, some people have no control over their weight, I recognize that, but okay. But you know it's truly horrible. But once the government is not responsible for our personal behavior and behavior on our private property, then why not based on religion of course and based on sex and based on sexual orientation and based on gender and all 98 genders of course and based on weight and based on height and based on colored eyes and based on size of nose and based on there's no end to it. These slopes, by the way, do exist all the time and everywhere. Once the government, once the state wants the collective is emboldened by law to intervene in what who we hire, who we promote, how we promote, how we hire. There's no end to all the kind of parameters that they will try to go after you in order to get you just to behave in ways that they deem as virtuous and based on them or a code and what they think. I mean a lot of this is pushed by what's called the body positivity movement which champions what's called fat acceptance. The idea that we just accept people the way they are and I think this is such a wrong, such a bad movement and such a wrong movement particularly given that we know that obesity is directly related to health, it's directly related to longevity, it's directly related to a bunch of different diseases, COVID was one of them, shouldn't we encourage people to be healthy, isn't it something as a culture, we want people to be, health requires less body fat, not zero, not the kind of emaciated, what is it, runway models where you can see every rib on the bones, that is not healthy either, but shouldn't we encourage people to within a range live a healthy lifestyle, live healthfully and shouldn't we admire people who take care of themselves and take care of their bodies, now again not everybody can but the people who do good for them and now when there are drug treatments for obesity that seem pretty harmless on the one hand and pretty effective on the other hand these drugs as a zempik and we gov, we gov, something like that, you know it really is sad that this is the attitude people take, now height for example is you can't control your height and people are going to discriminate based on height, suddenly you don't want a short basketball player, you do want tall, you discriminate for tall, you don't want tall tank drivers, no tall tank drivers, so, but yes probably irrationally some people will discriminate, some people discriminate because they don't like the way you speak, some people discriminate against you because they don't like your accent, they don't like you, they don't like, I don't know, your lips, your chin, who knows what, when irrationality is out there it has an infinite variety, irrationality has infinite varieties, what are you going to regulate every irrationality out and by doing so you know you raise the cost of business and you raise the cost of doing anything and you give you basically redistribute wealth towards lawyers and it really is, it really is ridiculous the extent to which people go to try to take away power from employers, try to put employers in their place, try to regulate and control everything employers do, so yeah if you live in California, if you live in tech in sorry in New York City, be aware, be aware, be aware how you treat your shortened overweight employees or tall, maybe discrimination in another way or overweight employees. All right, so over the last few years, certainly since COVID, there has been real, you know you could argue hysteria, a real emphasis, a real focus, a real passion around this crisis that we are told has happened in teen mental health and that you know this is since 2012, so this is a crisis that was happening even before COVID and then is accelerated after COVID and teen mental health is you know is a is an issue that everybody's talking about and trying to find causes to, I think I've talked about this on a few shows and some of the most popular causes that seem you know pretty popular out there among commentators of all stripes, maybe the most popular cause is social media. Teen mental health started supposedly to deteriorate at about the same time, at about the same time as the apple, the apple iPhone came out and and the iPhone, as a consequence, it's blamed on iPhones and Instagram and TikTok and body shaming and all this kind of stuff related to to this. Now so all of this of course is based on statistics and this is this is always where it gets interesting, right? Like most social sciences, like most medical sciences, most of the information we have are based on stats and you know stats can be tricky, very tricky. What are we measuring? Is the definition of what we're measuring changed? Are we measuring the thing that really is happening? Are we measuring something completely different? And then of course you can get into are we using the right methodology? Is it statistically significant? And yeah it's statistics and the so-called the science that people claim based on it is a tricky thing and as I came across this article, which I think illustrates this really, really well. So this is an article that was just published, I think it was published, said it maybe it's no it's it's it's an NBER, National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, it's part of the working paper series, it's by Adrian Corridor Walden and Janet Curie. It is brand new is just published this month, July 2013. It's out of the NBER in Cambridge, Massachusetts and it's been a working paper that's yeah that's the essence, right? So what this paper does is it examines the startling pre-pandemic increase in recorded suicidal behaviors among new Jersey children and I'm reading the paragraph here from the study from among New Jersey children 10 to 18. So this is pre-pandemic increase in recorded suicidal behavior. 10 to 18 years old presented at hospital emergency departments between 2008 and 2019. So this is pre-COVID. We show that there was relatively little increase in teen self-injury intentional self-harm, suicidal attempts, or in completed suicide in New Jersey over this period. So no increase, relatively little increase. Instead, the rise that is documented that everybody fears that everybody's worried about, the rise is mainly accounted for by a sharp increase in diagnosis of suicidal ideation. Suicide ideation is a serious condition that is grouped with self-harm in commonly used mental health disorder classification systems such as the clinical classification of the software or the child and adolescents. We show that the increase in reports of suicidal ideation over this time period corresponded with two sets of changes in medical practices. The first is new guidelines from the United States Preventive Services Task Force and other professional organizations recommending screening of adolescent girls for depression which was announced in 2011 and then the Affordable Care Act made it part of the mandatory for insurance companies to provide coverage for this. So A, there was a change in guidance on how to treat, how to evaluate children and the second change was a revision to the instructional notes included in the new version of the whatever hospitals were required to start using new versions of this classification of diseases in October 2015. Our results had suggest that they may always have been large numbers of children and adolescents with serious mental health conditions but that the changes in screening and coding practices helped to bring the problem to light. So there wasn't an increase. What there was is a change in how things are classified. No increase in suicide, no increase in self-harm, all of those are flat. What increased was in ideation thinking about suicide, imagining suicide but it turns out that they only started measuring that in 2011 and then in 2015 which saw another jump which you don't measure, you don't know. It's quite possible that if you'd measured that all along then ideation would be flat and there's no there there. So this is applied just to one aspect of mental health which is suicide and self-harm but what the authors of this paper suggest is before we rush to the conclusion that there is some mental health emergency here, that there's some crisis in America, maybe we need to look more carefully at the data, maybe we need to look at things like how these things are defined, what is actually being measured, are the standards being changed. And you know I talked about autism on a previous show and the dramatic increase in autism and a number of people wrote to me saying a lot of that increase is just a question of different definitions, collapsing of a lot of other mental disorders into one phenomena or if one compares adults diagnosed with autism and children diagnosed with autism, the percentage of the population seems to be the same suggesting that these, that it hasn't really shifted over time that much. So my point here is a broader point because I don't know what the right answer is with mental health or with autism for that matter. My point is be very very careful with citing these kind of statistical papers and that's that's for me and for you and for everybody because almost none of these papers are as thorough and this is why usually in a particular field you need multiple papers, multiple researches, multiple trials, multiple investigations. So you know be wary of jumping out on the bandwagon when things are really really seem you know to suggest something, be wary of statistics more broadly, very very few people out there. God I mean almost no layperson that I know of knows how to interpret statistics unless you've been trained to interpret statistics. You don't know how to do it, sorry you just don't and if you want a good illustration of this I highly recommend Stephen Pinker's book Rationality where he takes you through some of some examples of probability problems where the answers to the problems are so counterintuitive that almost nobody gets them right and those are simple probability problems those are not econometric difficult statistical econometric problems. This is why you need experts you really do and your intuition what you think is right what you believe is right what your emotions are telling you is right is not necessarily right usually it's not actually but to interpret the actual statistical results you need for a lot of these things you need a translator and as a consequence I mean this is part of the problem that we face today we don't trust our experts and justifiably so in some cases the experts are too motivated by a social agenda and a political agenda this is going to create real substantial problems real substantial problems and you know nobody nobody out there and it's it's it's the lack of trust in experts is going to be a real show a real decline a civilizational decline all right let's see what are we oh offensive speech yes so there's a poll from not the court of state university among young people they interviewed 2250 undergraduate students 131 colleges around the country and to ask them about in a sense what they think about offensive speech and this is the question they were asked if a professor says something that students find offensive should that professor or class instructor be reported to the university so if a professor says something that the students find offensive should he be reported and the answer was overwhelmingly yes 74 percent of students say that if a professor says something students find offensive they should be reported to the university now this is particularly true of left-leaning students where you'd expect it with woke political correctness and and and all of that 81 percent of students leaning left say yes they should be reported but what shocking is students who consider themselves independent were not part of the left 76 percent of them want to report to professor and even students who are conservative and conservative leaning a majority thinks that the professor should be reported maybe they think what's offensive is different and you know so for example you know for conservative students think that you know something about COVID vaccinations is offensive so they would report to professor whereas you know the the leftists think that like a statement if you look at the data there is no evidence of anti-black bias in police shooting that is offensive and should be so what is offensive changes between the different groups but a majority of every group politically believes that the professor should be should be uh i mean this is while this is not a rejection free speech because you know the university is an employer and the university has the right to determine what speech is acceptable within within its uh within its framework the attitude is a is massively anti-free speech that is the attitude that says offense is bad offense is something that something should be done about offense is something that one should considerately silencing somebody for offending that is that is really bad that is basically a rejection of free speech basically a rejection of a culture of free speech and once you reject the culture of free speech it's not that far off before you actually have you know laws that ban i don't know hate speech offensive speech and so on as they do in more and more so in europe so a very bad trend that we've known is going on in universities and and doesn't seem to be abating uh in spite of all the publicity about it in spite of all the uh people uh speaking out in favor of free speech we still see that young people are heavily influenced by these ideas that reject the idea of free speech that reject the idea of liberty uh of an you know maybe one of maybe the most important aspect of liberty which is the ability to express yourself the ability to talk about things that might be offensive that somebody will find wrong as i've said in other contexts i've said every every new idea in human history is being offensive to somebody all right a few um a few uh economic stuff uh economic stories i'll do this quickly um and uh and then i'll go to your questions we are about halfway uh to our goal so um i encourage encourage you to ask questions twenty dollar questions in particular so we can get to that goal quickly you know seven twenty dollar questions and we're there uh you can also use a sticker we have 65 people watching right so three dollars from each one of you gets us over the goal so please consider supporting the show value for value your listening suggests to me that you get something out of it uh please show um show appreciation uh that you do value the show by uh supporting it and you can do so with the sticker of course those of you who are watching who are listening afterwards uh not live uh you know the best way to support the show is uh through a monthly contribution on paypal you run bookshow.com slash support or on patreon all right so um i've talked a lot about this with repeating because more and more data keeps coming in this chip act the semiconductor industry the building manufacturing plans the building all this stuff uh they're projecting that uh the chip industry's workforce will grow to 460,000 people by the end of the decade by the end of this decade up from about 345,000 so about just over uh uh you know just over a hundred and uh what 115,000 jobs are going to be necessary you know to fill all the positions that the semiconductor industry is creating over the next decade however it is expected now that by 2030 there would be a shortfall of half of that almost half of it more than half of it sorry more than half of it there's a shortfall of 67,000 workers that with current expectations about who graduates from what universities and with what kind of degrees and and assuming immigration stays constant as it is today the U.S. semiconductor industry will have a shortfall of 67,000 employees nobody seems to care about that not the government the government continues to pump money into the sex the 39 billion dollars in subsidies uh as part of the chip act going to a variety of different companies building factories that then will not be able to produce anything because there won't be any employees in order to do it of course the solution here is easy it's it's uh it's open up open up the the immigration channel for people who can work in this field um well I mean the better solution would have been never to subsidize this industry but over half of the jobs and this is the kind of political central planning you do you you pump it in oh we're going to build new factories this is going to be great it's going to boost the used economy without thinking about where the money could have been invested could have been used the broken window fallacy but then the next step is not even thinking about who's going to work in these factories do we have enough employees do we have the policies that will make it possible for us to have enough employees no nobody even thinks about stuff 67 000 people that's a lot of people that's a lot of people all right there was this um twitter stream that I thought was quite interesting with some data on consumer expenditures the coming out of the government BLS report where they look at household budgets since 1984 and how the median household today does versus back then and the conclusion is that Americans generally on a household level are significantly wealthier than they were what is it 40 years ago in spite of all the talk about uh about stagnating wages and stagnating living standards and the fact that now you need two incomes to sustain yourself and all that stuff the um the reality is that Americans are wealthier uh significantly higher incomes even though at the same time households are smaller so on a per capita basis higher income significantly because you have less people in the household to feed to close houses are just as big fewer people income is higher significantly with fewer people at the same time food and clothing and of course computers and a lot of other things are dramatically cheaper almost everything that where the private sector is responsible for producing it is significantly cheaper so we have more income the things we buy for the most part are cheaper the only things that are more expensive primarily are education health care and housing the three things that the government is most involved in uh of those the one does it really the most uh detracting in terms of the standard of living quality of life is housing Americans today spend I think 37 percent of their income this is median Americans this everything is median here so this is the you know half of Americans make more money half of Americans make less money these people in this median bracket spend about 37 percent of their income on housing which is a historical high housing is really what is a pain point but even taking into account the increased cost in housing the increased cost in education the increased cost of health care Americans are significantly wealthier this they have more uh you know uh what do you call it discretionary discretionary dollars than they ever had before and again whenever you hear these stories about oh this economy you know used to be fantastic in the olden days when we had unions and it's a disaster today be skeptical all of those stats are just plain wrong and and this is a nice uh twitter thread by Aziz Sundarji I guess Aziz is a what is Aziz he is in real estate he's a he's a strategy research at Buckley's bank right and he is a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal so nice judge Aziz I mean some of the stuff he says in the twitter stream is not completely right but but at least he's bringing out a point that I think it's important to bring out people are so easily so easily pessimistic so easily convinced by gloom and doom all right let's end with a quick positive story next gen nuclear reactor company it's called x energy has signed a deal with a washington state this is washington state um energy company this is uh what is it energy northwest to build 12 modular nuclear power plants power reactors in central washington state if you've ever been to washington state central washington state there's nothing there it's pretty isolated um but so they want to build 12 modular devices in central washington this is in addition to the fact that x energy has now a deal with chemical giant dow chemicals to build a a a a one of these modules one of these nuclear devices uh in one of their facilities one of their big chemical facilities somewhere in the gulf now of course all of this is these uh deals with projections and none of this yet is a reality these reactors the first reactor is supposed to be come online on 2030 of course a lot of that will depend on regulators a lot of that will depend on the government allowing for it but the fact that there's more movements in this direction the fact that there's more deals announced the fact that there's more technology the fact that there's more public support for this and remember this is washington state one of the most leftist states in the country one of the most environmentalist states in the country this is good news uh and this is uh this suggests that uh nuclear power is back is is on the rise i think and now we just need to get the federal government to get out of the way um if you guys seen the new logo for twitter i don't know what i like the twitter logo that little blue bird i thought it was pretty cool now twitter has become x so i think the name is going to change you're not going to be tweeting anymore you're going to be xing i guess but uh it's x so i learned musk announced it yesterday they launched last night there is no longer that blue bird i miss it already and this x it's kind of just an x it's not that interesting it's not a great logo maybe it'll survive i don't know but i i don't know why is that real was that really the the problem with twitter was the bird was that the issue i thought the bird was cute i don't know all right you know part of the news all right let's see we have yeah we've done we've made some progress so we're now only about 90 dollars short so you know two bucks from everybody online right now would be great gale thank you mic thank you steven thank you friend harper thank you uh and i know there was some early on yeah i did those early on okay let's jump into the super chat questions uh remos says do you think that there is a bubble in the stock market because of the ai hype i mean i'm sure there's a bubble in ai stocks and and i'm sure you know that that a lot of the ai just like with venture capital a lot of the the the energy around ai a lot of the companies that that are announcing and doing and dealing with ai will be busts and will lose that always happens uh and but ultimately that this will be a huge industry but it's just not clear right now who are going to be the winners and who are going to be the losers it's not clear right now uh you know which companies will do great and many of the companies that are going to do great at ai are not public you can't invest in them might not have been founded yet this is still a very early in the ai boom but it's going to be a boom has that spilled over to other tech firms and is this causing a big spike maybe i really haven't looked at it carefully so i i don't have a strong opinion i i think the main reason you are seeing uh stock prices go up right now is because the market at least is assuming that we have averted and will be averting a recession they think and we can talk about whether that's true or not but whether there's there's grounds to believe this but they think that inflation is basically being tamed it'll be down to two percent not that long for now and that at the same time we're going to have a soft landing that is we won't get a recession everybody was pricing stocks last year based on the assumption we were going to get a recession inflation was here to stay that those two are going to cause stagflation you still have a lot of commentator out there commentators out there that are saying inflation's you know just gonna skyrocket it hasn't stopped i'm skeptical of that i think inflation has come down and probably without any new physical shocks will probably stay down for a while but but they think that we will avert a recession and if we have a voter recession and interstates start coming down which is that the market is projecting then they're saying stocks are worth a lot more than they are today and i think they're right so i don't know how much of it is bubbly excitement enthusiasm and how much of it is an economic evaluation of the economic evaluation could be wrong we could still be heading towards a recession and then stock prices will come down to reflect that inflation could spike up again in that case stocks will come down again so again but but those are the kind of rational estimates that people are making i don't think it's in a position to be categorized as a bubble or as necessarily irrational hopper says when you were growing up in the 70s and 80s in israel man i was way beyond grown up in the 80s there were no fat people there were more fat shame was there more fat shaming back then or were people just more physically active because there were no computers or video games well i don't think that's true i mean there were certainly fat people i mean there were overweight people in my family i mean i grew up in a household where my parents are pretty overweight so i mean they were overweight back then so i think the 1980s there were already a lot of overweight people not quite as much as they are today and certainly not quite as much as they are in the united states today i i think a lot of a lot of the the you know you could argue about obesity but a lot of obesity is is about what we eat how we eat and how physically active we are or not in this case and that has only gotten worse in terms of the quality of the food both in its quality of the food and in terms of everything else i was just looking at the chat why can't somebody up didn't say abuyin says that he can't criticize me why can't he criticize me is i can't see why he has criticized me people criticize me all the time uh so i'm not sure why uh if you guys have you guys attacked him for criticizing me that's fine um so you know i think i don't think it's got to do with computers i don't think it's got to do with video games i think it's got to do with um those two things i think it's got to do with physical activity for a variety of reasons we don't do it i think i think suburbia had a lot to do with it i think uh television even before video games and all the rest of it and then i think i'll diet high on carbs high on bad fats high on all kinds of things that are just not good for you a sugar the the the the absolute ridiculousness of the amount of sugar that people consume and it doesn't matter if it's sugar concert but sugar basically um you know all of that it's probably has more to do with you know not just the obesity but the the diabetic the the number of diabetics we have in this country which is alarming and everything else so but i don't i don't remember an issue around weight when i was growing up it's true kids were not overweight maybe that's what you're getting at when i was going up in the 60s and 70s i can't remember we were also in a in a poorer place as it was poorer so there was less wealth it's it's as you get wealthier you get more obese people but um i don't remember that being an issue i don't remember fat shaming i don't remember any of that so i but that doesn't mean it wasn't there it just means i i wasn't aware of it by the 1980s 90s there was definitely more overweight people in a place like israel right alan says um general support it's been a while thank you alan uh two experts can also suffer from group think string theory yeah of course i mean i'm not saying blindly follow experts but we can't survive without them it can't build microt processes without experts can't design new cancer fighting vaccines without experts uh you know can't build any basic thing i don't know how to build it without experts in building that thing division of labor expertise is what may make civilization so yes experts can go off and be wrong and um you know but that is a that that is the awful thing it's not having experts that's awful it's the fact that some experts get engaged in group things some experts lied to us because they think they're philosophers kings uh but to reject all experts and therefore turn to mediocrities that people don't know anything for advice and for knowledge is basically suicidal right to replace your doctor with robert f kennedy is suicidal uh yes it's a big problem that too many people feel for truth instead of thinking deeply reasoning for truth yes but but it's also what i'm saying is some some truths you can't discover as an individual you don't have the time some of us don't have the brain power some of them don't have access to the right to the full information the idea that you can in every aspect of your life give your life without experts is an impossibility in this world in which we live which is a deep division of labor world and the only reason we're so rich is because it's a division of labor of world in which we rely for everything on the expertise of others and hopefully we are experts in something right andrew says the discourse we social media excludes positives the young have access to a much bigger world today pre-existing mental issues may be increasing increased but it is not as much as they say what is a real motive behind the attack i think some of it is is is people are discovering that teenagers are meant to hold problems and they really do care and then you know it gets on a life of its own i but i don't i i i don't know what the motive is i i'd have to think about that it's um i don't know exactly what it is um oh i see uh abuin is upset because uh i refer to uh didromaklasky as a she yeah i mean this is uh this is uh this is the state of the world in which these are the things that upset people kind of sad uh michael says a negative mind will never give you a positive life true doesn't mean the thinking positive irrespective of the facts of reality is um um is going to give you a positive life you have to you have to be objective we call this philosophy the objective is objective philosophy objective is philosophy james taylor says how do you objectively measure growth in the objective's movement your show growth is flat my show growth is flat right now it's it's you know the periods in which it grows a lot and the periods in which it's flat and you know what is it what is the objective's movement you know people part of the objective's movement who uh disagree with me vehemently about a particular issue and have unsubscribed it depends how you define the objective's movement the influence objectiveism has the voice objectiveism has um then i think it's it's much larger than the people who subscribe or listen uh to this show but you know it's hard to measure the growth of the objective's movement and it's hard to again define what objective's movement is what what the definition of a objective's movement is um what is the objective's movement who counts who doesn't count who's a member who's not a member i think the more important question is the extent to which objectiveism has influence in the world out there to the the the degree to which objectiveism is viewed in the world out there as having something interesting and important to say about the world um and and again that is that is hard to figure out but i think that is clearly growing to the extent that there are how many objective's intellectuals are there how many people speaking out there who i might not even agree with often on stuff who claim to be objective's how many objective's objectiveism small oh very loosely how many objective's intellectuals are there speaking out there to the world right now i mean record levels how many students uh are you know exposed to somebody talking about objectiveism more than ever but what is the objective's movement i i don't have a good definition of what the objective's movement is because i i don't know the objective's movement is probably ultimately much broader than i'd like it to be and includes a lot of people who i don't like and disagree with and a lot of people who've unsubscribed to my show because they find it because they're upset by something i've said i mean is it a boon a part of the objective's movement or is any part of the objective's movement right now a or i objective's people are familiar with a or i is growing dramatically is growing substantially both in terms of money but in terms of people who participate in our events people engage with us the people who receive and and you know engage with us and things like i mean university and things like that that is going dramatically so that that is one measure um god i'm running out of time um but i'll give you one other measure just quickly uh you might notice uh last week there was a story in fox news dot com on in rand today there's another story fox news dot com on in rand lengthy thousand word thing about and next week there'll be another story about in rand in fox news dot com fox news contacted me out of nowhere because they want to they want to do stuff because they saw a tweet that i did about and and that's how things happen who knows what this will lead to uh just before this show i did an interview a long interview with a uh the u.s. correspondent for uh lyff figaro which is one of the leading newspaper magazines in france and in france he wanted to know a perspective on california in this case so visibility is is you know massively out there and and uh how all this comes together you know when you have exponential growth it doesn't look like things are growing until you actually get that big uptake it's it's uh it will happen it's just takes slow steady effort and selling your soul to the various sudo objectives out there is not going to accelerate it um brian says based on what i've seen on the internet people identify with a disability just like as others do with skin color that's pretty sad it's pretty sad that people are willing to identify with skin color it's pretty sad that people identify with a disability or anything like that all right we're going to do the rest of the ones quickly because i i've got five minutes you say most people out there are preconceptual that's why they can't resonate with objectivism but how were people 300 years ago conceptual enough to get the enlightenment i don't think they're preconceptual genetically uh by definition i think that for whatever reason and and by the way most people didn't know there was an enlightenment going on most people still don't know there was an enlightenment 300 years ago most people didn't participate in the enlightenment the enlightenment was a phenomena of the minority and progress is always a phenomena of the minority and then what happened is the culture changed because of that minority that vocal engaged minority and people took advantage of that changed culture they got better jobs they they they want you to know they they did other things so it's always minorities that change the world it's it's not a majority that changes the world almost ever so uh people have always been a majority of people have always been i think in this preconceptual level um but what you need is a culture that encourages concept the conceptual and when that happens i think more people will rise to that level everybody's capable of it it's just a question of whether they choose to do it and i think if you discourage it particularly in kids if you create an educational system that is un non-conceptual then you discourage the people and and you get fewer of them the enlightenment was a culture of the conceptual and even then most people were non-conceptual i mean non-conceptual is is broad in in certain aspects of their life they were non-conceptual nuclear progress is great but i'm still waiting for orbital solar rays those will be cool uh we've had a tech to tap the giant fusion reactor in the sky for decades missing political world sounds cool i'm all for it kfax thank you for the 20 i think that puts only 20 away from reaching our goal hopper cambell i have no skills i'm useless but i but i call it oppressed yep uh jacob um laughed out loud when you said my unvax kids will be sicker well they're taking on more risk you expose yourself that you've done zero research okay so you you're posting for five dollars to insult me you've never spoken to family with unvax kids you know nothing about me uh and uh and you nothing nothing on me i i'm unvaxed right i mean because there were no vaccines when i when i was a child most of the vaccines didn't exist and yeah as a child i suffered through all those childhood diseases and it was horrible horrible i got the measles i've had mumps i've had all of them and you know reminds me to get my shingles vaccine because i'm likely to get shingles because i got whatever it is that produces shingles so i got all those sicknesses and it was horrible i hated it i lost it was unbelievable and pleasant i would do anything to save my kids from having my childhood diseases that i suffered through what a horrible experience that is and we have science to prevent it isn't that amazing and you want to inflict that on your kids go ahead now you're lucky that everybody else is vaccinated so because everybody else is vaccinated your kid's unlikely to get measles but i had measles i had all of them every single one of the childhood diseases i had chicken pox thank you i had the chicken pox i'm not you know so you're free writing off the fact that everybody else gets vaccines good for you scott says in 2020 you call the lab league theory arbitrary in retrospect uh no i think it was that term unfair it's not like there was zero evidence there was a lab leak and it was a lab and one just having a lab and one is not enough to justify a lab leak theory i still think it was basically arbitrary later on when evidence came in that it was likely i was one of the first to change my mind and say no this looks like it's the most reasonable hypothesis visa via lab and in order to do that i read i read all of matt ridley's book i then read other things i read the people who oppose matt ridley books that argue against it i actually got data i did my research and changed my opinion shoot me i changed my opinion about something frank says is discrimination a form of subjectivism no i discriminate all the time discrimination can be completely rational irrational discrimination is subjective but i discriminate based on all kinds of things it's a question of whether you discriminate based on something that is worthy of discrimination or something that's not worthy of discrimination but there's nothing wrong in and of itself with discriminating quite the contrary you should be discriminating and you should discriminate based on skill based on talent based on aesthetics based on lots of things just not based on irrelevant things like skin color or ethnicity all kinds of other things that are stupid that reflect some other real problem that that you might have that are not about anything important and not about character they're not about ability they're not about skill but on the basis of important things that are relevant discrimination is fine all right we reached wow we blew away the goal thank you richard really appreciate that thank you frank really appreciate that thank you steven hopper thank you keyfax all of you guys blew away the goal for today i will see you all i have to run i'll see you all at 8 p.m tonight thanks for the superchatters all the superchatters really appreciate it