 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 Thursday afternoon here on the East Coast. We're here in Puerto Rico. I hope everybody's having a fantastic week. We are going to do one of our news roundups today. And of course, I just want to remind everybody that tonight, 8 p.m. East Coast time, we have Ben Baer joining the program. We're going to be talking about altruism and religion, the impact of altruism and religion. We're going to see the impact of altruism immediately right now in our news stories. It's all over the news stories that we're going to cover. So let's jump in. Let's jump in and start. So I wanted to start out by talking about the submarine. And as you know, efforts are still continuing. The odds of finding them and finding them alive keep decreasing, but the search continues and hopefully they can be found. I wanted to focus on something a little different than the submarine itself, because that is what it is. And that is the response. The response on Twitter, particularly and elsewhere to this whole, to what's going on and the response. Now granted, look, this is the response on social media, which is of course exaggerated and you only see certain voices. And there is, you know, people post stuff. I mean, the thing about Twitter is people post stuff all the time that is, you know, they're just mouthing out often and they're not really serious. You know, a lot of it is they're doing it anonymously. But the response to this has been really horrific. That is the number of people going on Twitter saying they deserve it because some of the people on the vessel are rich is just truly unbelievable. I mean, here's a post on Twitter, next time some rich white person wants to take a Sama Lido on an expensive trip, please take him to see the Titanic. Yeah, go kill Sama Lido and a rich white person. Why not? It turns out if we just charge a large sum of money, we can make the billionaires put themselves in the contraption. That is, we can get them killed. People are arguing that, yeah, they deserve it. The bad people, bad stuff happened to bad people. It's all cosmic justice. Why? Because there are a couple of rich people on this ship. One is Hamish Harding, who is the chairman of Action Aviation out of the UK. He's a British businessman. He's often referred to as a billionaire, but Forbes doesn't list him as one. So hard to tell, but he's wealthy. He's wealthy. So therefore he needs to be hated. But this is a guy who's an adventurer. He holds a Guinness Book of World Records for the fastest circumnavigation of Earth by both the geographic poles. He went up into space with Jeff Bezos, to the edge of space, I guess, with Jeff Bezos last year. You know, he does stuff like this. So we'll get to taking risks in a minute, but why celebrate? Why be happy if somebody like this dies? Shahzada Dawood and his son, a teenager, are both on the submarine. Shahzada is 48 with his son. They are both Pakistani. He is from a very, very wealthy family in Pakistan, one of the largest fortunes in Pakistan. I don't know how they made their wealth. I don't know if they're virtuous people, good people, not good people. But to celebrate that this is the way they die, you know, a really, really horrific way of doing it. And then the other people in the ship, Paul Henry Nugilert, who is a Titanic explorer, he probably knows more about the Titanic under the water than anybody else alive. He's done six expeditions to the ship in a submarine going down. You know, so he is a researcher and a salvager. And, you know, again, somebody who's pushing the envelope, but why have any ill feelings of it? And then Stockton Rush. And this one's interesting because Stockton Rush is the CEO of Oceangate. Oceangate is the company that owns a submarine that took the submarine down. He started this company. He is the pilot of the missing submarine. You know, he's, again, kind of an explorer type at the age of 19. He was the youngest person ever to gain a jet transport rated pilot's license on a DC-8. He's, you know, he founded Oceangate in 2009. And, yeah, I mean, none of these people strike me as deserving this. And yet the envy, the hatred is just disgusting. And it tells you a lot about the culture that we live in, or at least some people within the culture. They don't want to overstate this. And this is driven by altruism, right? I mean, it's the needy that deserve our sympathy and they can never do anything wrong. But if somebody's successful in life, if somebody's actually achieved something in life, if somebody does something amazing with their life, particularly if they've made money doing it, they don't deserve any sympathy. They don't deserve anything. Let them rot. That comes from altruism. The more altruistic a society, the more envious a society is. And in a mixed sense, we'll talk about this tonight with Ben. But, you know, hatred of the good for being the good, hatred of success for being successful. Well, when you worship failure, when you worship suffering, when you worship the oppressed, well, then the people who are not, particularly those who are successful, and who are in many parts of, in many philosophical quarters, you are viewed as responsible for their oppression, the fact that their wage is made into a number of these tweets. Well, you got to hate them because the people who are down there, the people who are suffering, they're the standard. And these rich guys could be helping more. They could be helping a lot. They're still billionaires. They're not helping as much as they could. Where's the bleeding? Where's the suffering? One of the tweets is, it's good when bad things happen to bad people. Bad people by what basis? By the basis that they have money. That's it. Beyond that, there's massive amounts of misinformation. I mean, again, this is a perfect example of don't listen to just, you know, people need some expertise. They need to know what the, after they're talking about. So, you know, some guy tweeted, he gave specific timeline of when this happened. And then the next day he tweeted and said, ooh, sorry, I got all that wrong. He said, good morning. Every time, every time I mentioned in this tweet is wrong, I read a dozen articles, very fast, then drank three glasses of wine, please understand. I mean, fine. Why is anybody taking these people seriously? This is why you need experts. This is why you need some kind of, you know, not that he shouldn't be allowed to post on Twitter, let him post. But this is why you as a consumer of Twitter shouldn't pay attention to a nobody just citing supposed facts because half the time they're making the facts up. And then here's one about, what do you call it, fact checkers, snoops is a fact checking organization. Well, there was a story out there that the sub lost connection to the Internet and lost communication because of Starlink that they somehow this was related to Elon Musk's Starlink and it was a Elon Musk fault because the satellite network it wasn't connected or didn't connect to the submarine. And snoops verified this is true. But that's insane because there was no Internet on a submarine kilometers down in the ocean. There's no internet connection. No satellite can reach the submarine deep down in the water. It's just a joke. I mean, yeah, your iPhone might be might be a waterproof up to a certain depth but it's not going to get a signal and it's certainly not going to get a signal four kilometers down. I don't care Starlink. I don't care any Internet. But somebody out there believes that, you know, whoops, the Internet connection got lost and people are so ignorant as to believe this stuff. And then a fact checking organization verifies it. And then there's the whole thing about, you know, the submarine moves with that navigation stick that's controlled by a game controller. They use a game controller joystick kind of thing to navigate the submarine. And everybody on Twitter and elsewhere is making fun of this. This is ridiculous. Why? Who the hell are you? What do you understand about these things? The reality is that the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, use these kind of navigation mechanisms as well. They're actually pretty good, really good, amazingly good for all kinds of things. Right? So just because you use it for game doesn't mean you can't use it for something seriously. Anyway, so much misinformation about relatively small story, so much envy and hatred and viciousness. It really is horrible. So I don't know. You get stories like this and you see the response and you see what's happening in the world and you want to strangle somebody. I mean, it's just super upsetting about the state of people. I mean, I put on top of this all the conspiracy theory nonsense and all that. People can't think, people can't screen out misinformation and people are envious and hateful and that just makes everything a thousand times worse. Really discouraging about the state of humanity. All right, here's some good news, I guess. I guess in some universe this is good news. This is what's happening to U.S. manufacturing. U.S. manufacturing is going through a massive boom. This is factory construction spending. This is the amount of dollars spent on construction of factories since 2016 or 2017. And if your standard for U.S. well-being is like it was, I think, for Trump for much, manufacturing, how much manufacturing, how much, you know, new factories are we planning, then you have to say Biden has succeeded where Trump has failed during Trump administration, mostly flat. Biden, it's gone through the roof. Factory construction spending has doubled since early 2022. Wow, you go. And then maybe you step back and think about this for a minute. Why? What has happened? What has changed? And one of the principles in economics is if you subsidize something, if you provide a strong monetary incentive for people to do something, they're likely to do it and do a lot of it. If you subsidize something, you get more of it. Generally, if you tax something, you get less of it. If you subsidize it, you get more of it. No, this is all pure subsidies. This is the consequence of the CHIP Act. This is why you've got a lot of billions and billions of billions of dollars going on here invested in new CHIP manufacturing because the U.S. government is going to print money or borrow money to pay you to build the CHIP manufacturing plant. So you do it. And this is the consequence of the Inflation Reduction Act, which basically printed money or borrowed money to give people money to do all kinds of things. But a lot of it was about building EV plants, electric vehicle plants, building batteries, subsidizing batteries. So this is all government subsidies. And look, government subsidies create economic activity. They allocate capital to where the subsidy is targeted. There's no question about that. Subsidies are very effective. If your goal is to get lots of manufacturing construction, just subsidize factory construction and it happens. And this is subsidizing the construction, but it's also subsidizing the product that the ends. A lot of people are rushing to build the product so that when they deliver it, it gets subsidized. This is government, this is government, quote, stimulating the economy. And this is government creating demand for the products that central planners in the government have decided are good. The problem with this, of course, is this is another broken window fallacy. The money has to come from somewhere. The money doesn't just prove a pier. The money is not costless. Any money spent on constructing these factories is not being spent on something else. Something else that has greater utility to people than this. How do we know it has greater utility to people than this? Because people are choosing to spend it elsewhere rather than here. This is, at the end, government coercion. This is the use of force on dictating where money should be spent. The choices made in the market are choices made voluntarily. Those choices did not lead to a manufacturing boom. What is leading to manufacturing boom is government coercion. Therefore, this is taking money from people who would have spent it differently, who would have invested it differently, and investing it the way the government wants. Now, I don't know exactly how this will end. It won't end well. I don't know when. I don't know how. I don't know how it will manifest itself and not any more. A lot of it will be, as I've said many, many times, one of the things about economics is it's very hard to say this caused that, particularly over long periods of time, because there's so many moving pieces. But what I will say is that all of this stuff, what it will cause is slow economic growth, stagnation, and a real challenging economy in the decades to come. Potential negative growth, but certainly very slow positive growth, if any at all. This might end with a lot of companies bankrupt who invested in these industries, that the government is then subsidizing, that then turn out to be maybe suboptimal, maybe not that profitable, even with the subsidy. Maybe some of these factories that are built now become obsolete very quickly. Maybe the construction is going to be shoddy. Who knows? Tom says Snoop, Snops, or whatever they're called, is listing the Starlink and Substory as false. I have a screen image of them listing it as true. Now, maybe my source is wrong in this, but I think it was the whole Snoop thing, Snop, whatever, was listed on Twitter. And as a consequence, my guess is they changed and they realized they made a mistake, but the original was true and I have a screenshot of that. Anyway, government manipulating economy, you have it right there, doesn't end well. These things never do end well. So yeah, we are heading in a manufacturing boom, but where is the bus? There's a bus somewhere where all that money would have gone if not for these distortions. Part of the distortions, by the way, are just the fact that the government has taken on more debt in order to fund all this and that budget deficit will have to be paid one day with taxes, with inflation, with some future distortion of the market, which will be much more negative and much more harming than this might be a little positive. Central planning doesn't work. Maybe you can let your politicians know. All right, ooh, good news, I-95, you remember that I-95 collapsed because a truck burned, weakening the steel, it collapsed, and they said this was going to take months and months and months to fix. So this is the best we can do. Well, it's going to reopen this weekend. Well ahead, I mean months ahead of its insanely long initial schedule. This is a testament to the ability of engineers and construction companies when properly motivated and properly incentivized to do the job. The first timeline was a bureaucratically created timeline created by a bunch of political, you know, political and bureaucratic machinery, I guess, in Pennsylvania or Philadelphia or whatever. But the fact is that these things are going to be fixed pretty quickly. You've got to knock it down. You've got to lay new concrete. You've got to make sure, you know, it's reinforced properly, and you've got to pour the concrete. It shouldn't take that long. But here it is, we are the richest country in the world, not just in the world. We're the richest country by far, not even close in all of human history. I think we can fix a frigging highway pretty quickly or should be able to fix a highway pretty quickly, and we have. So this just should be confirmation that people can do stuff. Stuff can happen pretty fast, pretty quickly. Again, when people incentivized and when the bureaucrats get out of the way. And I think what happened here is there was such an uproar about the timeline of months that the bureaucrats got out of the way and it happened quickly. All right, here's a story that should really, really infuriate you, but you might not be surprised at all. And here is the story. Here's egalitarianism. I mean, the ultimate manifestations of altruism in full force. I mean, it's so disgusting. It's hard for me even to tell you the story. She remember yesterday I talked about math and how mass scores are dropping and we talked about all that. And then one of the things I mentioned was the number of kids enrolled in algebra classes has plummeted from like 34% to 24%, something like that. Yeah, 34 to 24% in the last 10 years. And we're kind of speculating on why that was and so on. But I didn't even consider the obvious reason why this is happening or one of the obvious reasons why this is happening. And of course, none of the stories I read had this, but the New York Times in a story about the phenomena had this sentence buried in the story. No focus, no emphasis on it, but to their credit, they had their sentence. I didn't read any other new story that had the sentence in it. And it just, you just gasp when you read it. Here's the sentence. In some districts and states, notably California, there has been a push to equalize math education by placing fewer eighth graders into advanced math. So the reason that fewer kids in algebra classes is because some states and some counties and some districts have chosen to hold back kids in math for the sake of equality. Hold back kids. I mean, is there anything more evil than this? I mean, really? I mean, I guess math slaughter and stuff, but sort of slaughtering thousands, millions of people. Is there anything more evil than holding people back, restraining their potential, not allowing them to advance at the rate they want, can, could keep them back? Not because somehow it's good for them. No, I can't imagine how that would be good for them. But because it's good for the other kids, they don't, I guess they don't seem out of line that kids that are slower for the sake of the slow kids. I mean, one godless monkey says, like cutting off LeBron's legs. Yeah, but in, yeah, I mean, oh God, I mean, it is LeBron, but there's a sense in which this is more evil. Because this is the mind. And this is on scale. This is thousands and thousands of kids who couldn't be getting algebra in at a certain age, at 13 years of age, and they're not going to. And this is just happening in one class. What about the books they read? What about the science they study? What about everything else? They just throttled it down. Let's make people dumber. Why? Because some of us are dumb. So we need to make the ones who are not dumb dumb. And this is the point of egalitarianism. It's not about money. It's not about wealth. It's about everything. It's just about making you equal. And ultimately, the way we're unequal is primarily about the mind. So therefore we have to find a way to throttle the mind of some in order to, it's not in order to benefit somebody. Nobody benefits from this. Nobody benefits. It's just to penalize the able. I mean, maybe they rationalize it so that the dumb don't feel too bad about themselves. But that's not even true. Everybody knows. All right. I mean, that's just outrageous and disgusting. All right. More outrageous and disgust. You know, we talked about antitrust and we're going to talk a lot about it because the Biden administration is uniquely bad around this and uniquely dedicated to going after tech. Unfortunately, there's nobody to restrain them. Nobody to rein them in because the right of Republicans are hateful to big tech as well and hateful. So they want to use antitrust as well. It's just a little differently for different reasons, but it's all, all of them. You know, going after, going after big tech with antitrust. And I told you yesterday about Amazon, the FTC is going after Amazon, the Prime program. And I didn't give you a lot of details, but details have come out. You know, the idea is that Amazon tricks you into signing up for Prime. And then it makes it difficult for you to cancel. The cancellation process is difficult to navigate and designed to deter customers from ending their Prime subscription. The FTC alleges. Really difficult? Like how many steps? Like what is required here? And they trick you into signing up. And anyway, it's, so they claim that Amazon makes it difficult for consumers to buy items on its site without Prime. I don't know, those of you who don't have Prime, do you find it difficult to buy on Amazon? And Amazon has a button that instructs users to complete their transactions. Did not clearly state that they were also agreeing to join Prime for a recurring subscription, the complaint states. I mean, yeah, we're all stupid. We all don't know what we're doing online. Aren't you happy? Aren't we all glad that the FTC is there to guide us through the process and to rein in those evil, evil, evil bastards at places like Amazon who are just trying to cheat us out of whatever. Second lawsuit filed today. Google is suing news publisher Gannett. No, sorry. Google's not suing anybody. Gannett is suing Google over ad tech market monopolization. Google suppose he has a monopoly. Gannett, whose main property is USA Today alleges Google's, a lot of Gannett publishes a lot of local newspapers and a lot of this lawsuit has to do with local newspapers. Alleges Google's ad tech business engages in anti competitive practices as stifle publishers and local newsrooms. Most of all, the lawsuit comes as Google fends up. Forget about that. Anyway, you've also got the California Journalism Prevention Act, which would tax the revenue of Google makes off of ads and news article and distributed to local newsrooms. So story here is basically a panic that local newsrooms are shrinking because local newspapers can't make enough money to pay for news. And we all know that local news is really, really important. We have that utilitarian graph somewhere in our consciousness. And local news is good. Local news is a good capital G. And therefore we need to do whatever we can to sustain local news. And in order to sustain local news, we have to sell ads that are significant revenue. But because of the way Google auctions off the ads, local news lands up really because they don't have a lot of eyeballs, doesn't get a lot of revenue from those ads. And basically what the local news wants is more ad revenue at the expense of Google. Again, Google owns some of the auction software and stuff like that. Maybe 60% of the market, 60% is not monopoly. There's competition there. This is all just nonsense. But again, what do you call it? Now they want to tax it. So they want to tax Google in order to supply for local news. Again, this is our overseers, our central planners deciding what the good is, what right is, and then going out there and basically using coercion in order to make the good, good and right, right. Just another example of, you know, I don't know what the solution is for local news, but I don't know that there's a problem. Local news goes out of business. People don't have local news. If they really value it, they'll find a way to resurrect it and pay for it. But people who don't value it shouldn't have to pay for it. Tom says, my wife had no trouble cancelling Amazon Prime. Your wife is probably brilliant, Tom, that's why. And I have never subscribed. So you must not be buying anything on Amazon because as far as I can understand, you cannot buy stuff on Amazon effectively without subscribing. But I have Amazon Prime. My wife has Amazon Prime, actually. I'm on her account. We share an account. We've never tried to cancel it because we love it. We love Amazon Prime. We buy a huge amount from Amazon, the free shipping, the expedited shipping. Yeah, Amazon Prime is a godsend. So not a godsend. It's a Bezosend. It's a Bezosend. So good for Bezos for sharing with us Amazon and Amazon Prime. All right. Finally, I wanted to share with you guys this amazing quote from the Secretary General of the United Nations. So this is an article about the Secretary General of the United Nations. So these are not all of their quotes from him, although some of them are. So I'm reading you from a news story about the Secretary General of the United Nations and what do you call it? Fossil fuels. Fossil fuels. But I don't think it needs much commentary. Quote, the head of the United Nations launched a triad against fossil fuel companies Thursday, accusing them of betraying future generations and undermining efforts to phase out a product he called, quote, incompatible with human survival. Secretary General Antonio Guterres also dismissed suggestions by some of our executives, including the man tapped to chair this year's international climate talks in Dubai, that fossil fuel firms can keep up production if they find a way to capture planet warming carbon emissions. So kind of they find a way to suck up the carbon. The argument is they should be able to continue to burn carbon. He warned, I'm quoting him, he warned that this would just make them quote more efficient planet wreckers, unquote, quoting from the article again. This is quoting Guterres. The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions, Guterres said. It's fossil fuels. Period. Where do these guys get the audacity, the, the, the, this level of hatred, and this level of just blindness, fossil fuel manufacturing, he is saying, is incompatible with human survival. Look around you. There is no human survival without fossil fuels. Not now, not in the next 20, 30 years probably. There is not probably longer than that. What are you talking about? Energy is required for life. The cheapest, most efficient and most abundant way in which to reach, get energy right now is through fossil fuels. You've made, they have made nuclear energy almost impossible. What are you going to replace it with? How quickly? At what cost? I mean, that cost is incompatible with human survival, particularly for poor countries, poor countries. And then it's not simply fossil fuel emissions, because those could be captured. It's fossil fuel period. And that is so revealing. They don't want to solve the problem of climate change. They don't want to solve any problems or issues. They don't want to, you know, fix what's going on. What they want is death and destruction. What they want is, what motivates them is some hatred of human progress. The hatred of fossil fuels in and of themselves. I mean, you think that if you cared, you know, one of the reasons they're doing this climate change in Dubai, Dubai of course, big, all their wealth is based on fossil fuels, is because the Dubai, people in Dubai and Saudi Arabia in that region of the world are really pushing, really pushing for carbon capture. What they're saying is, oh, we can capture the carbon. They are now technologies that allow you to capture CO, the carbon. So let's keep emitting carbon and just capture it. And maybe we can capture even more than we're emitting and slowly reduce the carbon in the atmosphere if that's what makes the difference. These haters, and they're truly haters, haters of mankind, haters of fossil fuel, that's not good enough for them. They want the industry to die. They want it gone. They want it finished. That's all they care about. It's not about anything else. All right, on that pleasant note, we'll turn to super chat questions. Let me thank Phan Hopper, Gail, Wes, Catherine, Stephen and Robert. They're all contributors who use the sticker to show their appreciation and contributes a value for value to your own book show. All right, James for 100 bucks. Thank you, James. We last show, I believe due to systemic philosophical problems that engulf the culture. I don't think many negative emotions can be overcome through therapy. Building connections with other rational people is crucial to happiness and access is limited. I think it's somewhat limited, but it doesn't have to be. I mean, look, come to Ocon next week. I mean, and if building connections to rational people is really, really important, all of you should come to Ocon, and it is important. So kind of not coming to Ocon and embracing that opportunity means you're choosing not to work on those negative emotions. So I think you're right. You need to build connections with rational people. I think that's worthy of a real effort, and it's possible even in the world in which we live. And again, they don't have to be completely rational in every aspect of their life. You can have people who are rational at work and have relationships associated with work with them. You can have people who love the same art you do and are rational about it without agreeing with them on politics. You can find rationality in other people with the right kind of effort. And then I do think that as an individual, if you work on solving the philosophical issues, then I think with the right kind of psychological help, you can solve some of the emotional issues. And yes, I agree that you need that connection as well, but part of that is and that requires a lot more effort than it would in rational culture. But you got to engage in the effort. I've always found that I can find around me rational people that I can hang out with, that I can have relationships with. And I've always made an effort to achieve that. And I think that's what it requires. Your emotional health is really, really important. So we need to really, really, really work on it. And I think it's doable, is my point. And you're often going to need help for that. You're often going to need help for that. Michael says, do you think there's a flaw in the market when you price things high enough, people think they're good? Like a piece of crap submarine he put together with Home Depot parts and charged 250K per ticket. He didn't put a crap submarine together. The submarine has been down in those depths many times. It's not scrapped together by Home Depot. I mean, again, I don't know where you get this idea from that it's a crappy submarine. It's not a crappy submarine. Again, there's a lot of crap online describing this stuff. Again, the submarine, he was himself navigating it. He was on it. He built a submarine he believed would function. It has function in the past. So something happened. We don't know what, but let's not go accusing the submarine builder, building a crappy submarine when we don't know what's going on. We don't know what happened. It sounds like they found debris in the last hour. Anyway, landing frame and rear cover from the submersible among the debris. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't surprise me that it's a goner. I mean, I don't think that was, I don't think there was much hope. There was much hope, which is sad. It's sad, but this is not a market failure. These are people who knew the risks they were taking. Everybody there had an adventurous streak and did these kind of things and knew exactly the risks that they were engaged in. And they engaged in the risk. So I don't understand this market failure and high price. Is it a high price? $250,000? Probably not. I mean, I understand that every one of these missions actually loses the guy money. The company money. So I think there's a lot of fallacies going on around this that I don't buy into. This is not a failure of capitalism. This would happen in lez effect capitalism. People would still take risks. Most of us would not take. And some people are going to die when those risks are taken. One of these spaceships that takes people up into space is going to explode and people on it are going to die. That is going to happen. It's not a market failure. That's just the reality of the world's risky place. Life is risky and people take risks. Michael says skepticism, mysticism in a different form. Like communism is Christianity in supposedly respectable scientific form, but fundamentally is otherworldly. To be a skeptic, you can't be looking at reality. Well, to be a skeptic, what you're doing is questioning your own means of looking at reality. I don't know if it's a form of mysticism. I don't think so. I think it's a different category. It's a category that doubts yourself. It's a self-doubting category. I don't think of it as a sense of mysticism, but tonight ask that question of Ben maybe has a different perspective, maybe given that we're talking about religion today. Andrew says rampant misinformation is a sign of a culture descended into rationality. Even people who value accuracy are often misled or confused. A culture's rational forces must be strong enough to withstand it is ours, thoughts. I think it is, but I think there's always been misinformation, always. And the difference today is the speed and the degree to which it circulates. You know, because of social media, because of the internet, misinformation goes viral very, very, very quickly, particularly if it's sensationalist. And so it's not surprising. I think the level to which people are willing to accept information, that pretty quickly, like RFK, right, that quickly one can see is dubious, particularly given his general character. You know, I think suggests that, yeah, we are a culture in descent. We are a culture that's not fully rational, that's not viewing these things rationally, that's not really analyzing things, that's not looking at things clearly, and therefore is easily captured by the sensation. And by something, a lot of this, by the way, a lot of what's happening is that people develop certain views, and then they jump on anything that confirms those views. It's called, you know, confirmation bias. Confirmation bias, as we become less rational, confirmation bias becomes more prevalent and more destructive to our thinking. Chicken, how did you end up evaluating that kid was worth having? Oh, the kids were worth having. As its potentialities before birth, what made you say getting kids would be higher value to me than what in life I'm currently having? I'd say I've always enjoyed being around children. I've always enjoyed the process of interacting with them, of seeing how they respond to the world, of that amazing curiosity and that amazing level of engagement that they have. I've always found it, you know, amazing, exciting, inspiring. I love babysitting my, I don't know, cousins, nieces, whatever. Whenever there was availability, I liked, you know, I liked children. I always have. So for me it was fairly easy. I always knew I wanted kids. There was a doubt in my mind that I wanted kids. And it was just a matter of when we waited, after we married, waited for seven years before we had kids. And then how many, after we had two, we pretty much called it enough, too much work. More than that would have been too much for us. But I don't think we have a contemplation not having them because the process was exciting. The prospect of going through the process was exciting. Seeing a child grow, the challenge of helping them mature and grow and become an adult. I think all of that was appealing and intriguing and seemed like a value with pursuing. I hope that gives you some help or indication. Clark says, obviously, if personal submarines were better regulated, this would never happen. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of cause for better regulations of submarines, you know, and there's a lot of people claiming this is just another failure of capitalism, as if one has anything to do with the other, as if accidents don't happen and the socialism. Accidents happen, even in a mixed economy, even in a lesbic capitalist economy. Liam says, I don't think most malicious or malevolent people go through an altruistic phase. Some people come to the conclusion that it's better to be a predator than a value seeker. I think to some extent, they come to that conclusion by interacting with altruism, whether embracing it or not, interacting with it and seeing it's evil or seeing in it something they do not want and thinking that the only alternative to it is being a predator. Again, a good question to ask Ben tonight. Adam, what's the name of the rest on New York City that is owned by an objectivist? Oh, God, you can't ask me names. Yeah, I mean, I could look it up and find it, but let's see, New York City, God. Anyway, you know, the name is not coming to me, which is ridiculous, but it will in a, I think, in a few minutes. All right, let's see, what did I want to... Oh, Rosella, O-O-S-E-L-L-A, O-O-S-E-L-L-A, two L's. Oh, everybody's answered already while I'm looking it online. Thank you, God. I need to trust my audience more and not have to go look up stuff myself knowing that you guys were looking up for me. Yes, Rosella with two L's. Highly, highly recommended. I loved it. Liam says, does it shock you how disgusting and anti-life people are online? To me, it shows mankind is still in its infancy and dangerous. I mean, that and everything else I've been talking about from people's response to 9-11, to people's response to financial crisis, to people's response to vaccines, to lockdowns, to every aspect of everything that happens out there. It keeps getting reinforced how the extent to which our culture is still irrational. It's still in its infancy in terms of reason and rationality. All right, we made our goal. Thank you, everybody. Thank you to all the superchatters. Really, really appreciate it. I'll be back tonight, 8 p.m. Eastern time. We'll be talking about altruism and religion. Ben Baer will be joining us. I hope you can too, so that 8 p.m. right here and on YouTube. And then we'll also be back tomorrow for another news roundup. See you all.