 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 Monday. Hopefully your week has started well. Mine has started messy, messy. Scheduling stuff, urgent calls, urgent this, urgent that. So I have to start today with an apology. I apologize for switching the times. One o'clock, eight o'clock, three o'clock. I know that's probably why we don't have as many people on live because everybody's confused about when the show is actually going to be on. So my apologies to everybody. It's just one of those days. And hopefully, hopefully we can overcome that and have a good show and move forward. I'm hoping that the rest of the week will be more stable, but a bunch of not good stuff is happening. So my schedule is a mess. I suspect for the next few weeks, but I will do my best to get us on a regular schedule most days. We'll try for that. And I certainly hope I don't have to change the schedule like three times like today. Let's jump in. A lot to talk about. News is bubbling. We'll not talk about Trump, but interesting story I bumped into today. I thought was kind of curious. So there's a big deal now about electric vehicle charging stations. There are two standards for electric vehicle charges. Maybe you know this because you have an electrical vehicle. One is NACS, the North American charging standard, which basically is the Tesla standard. And they call it the North American charging standard to kind of give it a kind of universal sense. But this is the Tesla standard. It's a standard by which the Tesla uses on all of its charging stations around the country for Tesla cars. And then there's a second one called the combined charging system. This is CCS. And CCS is kind of the non-Tesla charging stations, which I guess are different. They have a different plug and they have a different size and they're just different. I'll give you some stats on them in a little bit. Anyway, the Biden administration in its, I don't know what it was, the Inflation Reduction Act, I think basically has launched a program to subsidize the creation of charging stations because, you know, we need to all be starting to drive electric cars. And to do that, we need to be able to charge our cars. And to do that, we need a network of charging stations. It's like we need a network of gas stations for gas cars. But of course, we can't trust the private markets. Private markets will take forever. Private markets, you know, it'll be more expensive. Private markets won't know where to put the charging stations. We know that central planners and the governor are very, very good at planning, very, very good at deciding where to put the charging stations and how much to charge for them and what kind of standards to use and all of that. So the Biden administration has launched a campaign to fund and to subsidize charging stations all over the country. Make sure rural areas have charging stations. You don't make sure that, you know, make sure that you can lose money and still be okay, which is basically what it is. Anyway, so Tesla in the meantime is expanding its charging stations on the basis of the profit motive, I guess, and on the basis of providing its customers with available charging stations. And what's interesting is because Tesla has done so much and has produced so many charging stations, they have now signed a deal with Ford and General Motors, whereas Ford and General Motors will start using the Tesla charging stations and they'll start using the North American charging standard, the standard developed by Tesla. So new Ford cars and new GM cars, as my understanding goes, will be using this new plug and this new system to charge their cars, not up until now they've been using the combined charging system, the general charging system, which is different than Tesla's. So Tesla's kind of selling the other automakers and trying to get them on board, trying to establish themselves as the standard. And it turns out, by the way, that if you own a car that charges in one way and you want to use a station to charge it the other way, you just have to buy an adapter. The adapter can cost anywhere from $150 to several hundred dollars, but it's not like you've just invested a huge amount of money in this car. It's not that big of a deal to buy an adapter so you have it in the back, so just in case you're stuck in a place that only has the other standard you can charge, it's all doable. But it's a standard competition. Free markets are very good at this and this is kind of standard to a lot of new technologies, standards matter, and therefore there's competition around the standards. Anyway, the Biden administration announced today that they will start providing subsidies to Tesla charging stations. But only if they include the combined charging system. I'm not sure what exactly that means. I'm not sure if a plug, an adapter would count, but you can all be now relieved and you can now be happy for Elon Musk because the reality is that whereas before he was not getting a subsidy, moving forward, Tesla will get a subsidy like everybody else in equal subsidy regime. I guess there was an industry body that promotes one of the charging standards, the non-Tesla charging state, and it published it said public funding must continue to go forward, but it must go towards open standards, which is always better for the consumer. I'm happy to see the various central planners know what's good for the consumers. We don't want competition. We want government-funded open standards. That is the best for the consumer because it's worked so well. And yeah, the industry and we know that most of the progress we've made economically and otherwise in the last 200 years has been because of government investment and government standards, really. I'm being cynical. They continue public EV infrastructure funding should continue to only be approved for CCS standard enable charges per federal minimum standard guidelines. Why? Of course, no government funding should be used for any of this infrastructure. This is the kind of infrastructure exactly that needs to be developed by private businesses, particularly auto companies that are getting incentive in creating the kind of infrastructure that would make their electric cars usable. That's what Tesla has done. For Tesla's credit, they recognize the need for charging stations for their ability to sell their own cars. They've gone and invested a huge amount in these charging stations. They're out there. Every car company should do that, whether it's a standard or whatever standard it is, they should just go out there and do it and stop expecting the government to subsidize it all. Tesla already has 17,000 charges all over the United States and Canada. The other standard only has 11,000, so Tesla's way ahead, even though the other standard has government subsidies and Tesla does not. I wonder how that happens. How does anything get done without government subsidies? It's kind of a mystery. It's really intriguing. The Tesla charging stations are half the size and twice as powerful. Not too surprising, given that there was a public, quote, public government. 70% of electric vehicles in the United States, 70% of them are owned by Tesla, GM and Ford. These are the three that have signed up for the Tesla standard. So that is 70% of all orders. And yet all government subsidies were going to just one standard, the standard that serves the other 30%. Anyway, let's see. Worldwide, CCS has an advantage, about 81,000 stations and 45,000 for Tesla. I guess there's a lot of those in China. And, yeah, $175 it costs to get an adapter to use for the Tesla standard or to charge it a CCS standard. In Europe, because the Europeans are really, really smart, the Europeans don't allow you to use whatever plug you want or whatever device you want, because in Europe they've mastered the ability to use central planners to decide exactly what cable, what plug, what connector, what anything you use. They've got it down. So in Europe, Tesla is not allowed to use their own standard. In Europe, Tesla has to use CCS. So Tesla cars in Europe use the alternative standard, even though not as good, not as fast. But that is Europe that only believes in standards that by central planners, God forbid, the market has anything to do with it. All right, I thought you'd find that interesting. Just the charging wars, this is only going to get more intense and it's only going to get more intense because government is subsidizing it and there's huge amounts of money, billions and billions of dollars going into this and who captures this, who gets to capture this money, who gets to build the charging stations. I mean, you should probably start, think about starting a company that just builds charging statements to government specs and you could rake in probably a lot of money, probably not a bad investment. All right, talking about Elon Musk since we were talking about Tesla. God, how disappointed am I? I mean, I've talked about this a little bit, but I figured it deserved a segment. I mean, Elon Musk, one of the great innovators of our time, a technologist, wants to die on Mars. I suppose he loves tech, loves progress. He's responsible, of course, for Tesla and, you know, what is it, the interlink or whatever, the new link, chips for the brain and all of this. Anyway, God, anyway, Ted Kacinski died, probably from suicide and somebody put up a post with a quote for Ted Kacinski and the quote is, the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Now that is very much Ted Kacinski's philosophy. He engaged in terrorism. He engaged in sending homemade bombs, 16 explosions, killing three people, injuring 23 people between the years 1970 and 1995. He was very, very good and therefore he didn't really, he was very difficult to catch him, only based on a tip from his brother. But he was caught, he pleaded guilty to all charges. But he was a real, and what motivated him was a real hatred of the modern world, of our technology. He really bought into the fact that the idea of primitive life, being superior to modern life and living life in the dark ages, I guess, was much better than today. He himself lived in a sports cabin in Montana, really, really smart guy supposedly, really high IQ, for those of you who love high IQ people, really, really high IQ. But it came to the conclusion that, quote, the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. And as a consequence, when after scientists and when after people that he viewed as responsible for, futuristic technology. Musk would have been on his list if Musk was around during the period where the Unabama, Kacinski, was property. Anyway, Musk tweeted right underneath this quote. So responded to this tweet with his own tweet, saying, quote, he might not have been wrong. I mean, where do you even start? This is truly ridiculous and absurd. I mean, think of life expectations, think of the number of people alive today, think of the wealth, think of the convenience, think of the comfort, think of the beauty, think of the amazing lives that we live because of technology and because of the industrial revolution. And he is Elon Musk, one of the contributors and one of the beneficiaries of all this amazing progress. He might be right. Or he might not have been wrong, interesting phrasing. But this is the corruption. This is the corruption of our modern society in that sense modern society is corrupted. It doesn't appreciate the values that it has and it doesn't appreciate how we got them. It is indicative of the corruption on if I can call Musk the right, but there is a real movement on the right that hates technology, the suspicious of technology that thinks the industrial revolution set us back. It goes back to conservatives in Germany in the 19th century, independent of Marx, conservatives on the right who are bemoaning capitalism and bemoaning the loss of the small community, bemoaning the growth of cities and industrialization, bemoaning the alienation that this was creating from community, from church, from religion. And so this has been a theme on the right. This is why I don't consider myself a right. What does the right even mean? This has been a theme on the right really since the mid-19th century. And here is Elon Musk reverberating, reinforcing this. It's sad. I mean what a mind he has, what an ability he has and how corrupt could he be. The industrial revolution, its consequence of being a disaster for the human race, Musk says he might not have been wrong. All right. Let's see. We've got three more topics. All right, so we're going to do this fairly quickly. This is a big topic that I'm not going to be able to fully address now and we need a whole show for this. This is one of those topics that deserves a whole show. But there was a really important and good op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. And by a Columbia, Columbia Law School professor, Phillip Hamburger and it's been kind of discussed on, it was discussed in the Vote Conspiracy which is a legal blog by Randy Barnett. Randy Barnett is a, call him a libertarian law professor, very well known, very respected law professor. I think at Georgetown, I think at Georgetown University. Anyway, the really issue is, and this is an issue that's going to come up before the Supreme Court, an issue that's going to come up through the courts now. It's going to be significant and big. And this is the issue of government censorship of social media companies. So here's the story, right? Here's what we know from much of the Wiki, not the Wiki, the Twitter files and from other revelations and just from people telling us, telling us this. The U.S. government has placed over the last few years as increasingly, and I think this goes back quite a while and actually my guess is in the Hoover days it also included regular media, but over the last few years there's no question with the rise of social media, the U.S. government, whether it's the FBI or other agencies within the government have been putting pressure on social media what is being, what they are willing to post, including what's called, you know, any kind of what the government perceives as false information, misinformation and so on. So the government is basically being telling and sometimes just asking. The social media, not to report anything from stuff about COVID or stuff about elections or basically to restrict what is available to the public on the social media platforms and the government has been quote, asking, demanding and forcing social media. And we all know this has been happening and people have come, particularly in the way they've come to calling this Twitter censorship and Facebook censorship and so on, that these social media platforms are censoring people. And one of the things I like about the op-ed and one of the things I like about this the Radio Barnett article is they point the finger, they place the locus of the problem not on social media. They understand fully that the real evil here is what government is doing and they understand that censorship, censorship is censorship by government, that there is no censorship by private parties and as a consequence, the problem is a government problem. The problem is indeed a First Amendment problem, but the problem is not a First Amendment problem at the level of what social media cannot do. It's why social media cannot do it. If social media just chooses not to publish tweets by, I don't know, COVID vaccine deniers or whatever you want to call it, that's a social media problem. It's not censorship. It's a choice about what they allow and what they don't allow on their platform. But when the government tells them, whispers to them, encourages them, threatens them to get them to do it and one of the good things about Barnett and about hamburgers, they recognize that even the government just asking is a violation of the First Amendment because a government is a gun. There is no such thing as the government just asking. If the government asked it as of force, of the law behind it, yes, they might not be threatening right now but there's an implicit threat in every ask the government makes. So this is government censorship. It's the government doing it. It's the government that is the crook. It's the bad guy, not the crook, they're not crooks, but the bad guy. And it's the government that is the locus of the censorship itself. And that is really, really, really important to name the party that is actually violating our rights, and that party in this case is government, not social media. They do a good job. They also do a good job of kind of explaining how we got to this point, how we allowed this to happen. And they offer in a sense an alternative program for the courts to stop this because this is way too prevalent and government just doesn't think it's a problem, doesn't think it's an issue and it's now the job of the government to, sorry, it's now the job of the courts to reign in government, to reign in FBI, to reign in government agencies, to reign in whoever needs to reign in to stop them and they identify a number of provisions that are going to have to be dealt with in trying to seek to fix this problem, to eliminate government censorship completely and to show that the government using social media to stop us from saying certain things is the government censoring us. The middle man in that sense does not matter. What matters is that the government it's at the instigation of the government. So this is huge, super important. I think today I encourage you to read these stories and then you know, share them and get the word out there. Again, this is a Wall Street Journal opinion piece from this last weekend called How the Government Justifies Its Social Media Censorship by Phillip Hamburg. Note how the government justifies its social media censorship, not social media's censorship. It's not social media that's censoring. It's the government censoring. Just the title gives them a old star, right? So really good. This is the direction the conversation needs to go in. This is the direction activism needs to go in. This is the direction that we need to push. Stop government from censoring social media companies. Social media companies are the victim. We too are the victim. Government is the perpetrator and that's how we need to view this. Even if it was just an ask. Well, there is no such thing as just an ask when the government is doing it. Alright, really good to see that published. It gives me a little bit of optimism that there's some people out there who are smart and able and see through these issues. Good for Randy Barnett. Good for Phillip Hamburg. I need to look him up and see what else he's done because this is quite good. Alright, quickly, San Francisco. We've talked a lot about San Francisco. San Francisco is having a lot of issues. Highest vacancy rates for office properties in the country. 30% real problem because lower people not going to work in offices in downtown means no customers for coffee shops, restaurants, shops. So you get a lot of those closing and you basically get slowly get this ghost town feeling. But on top of that more vacancies means fewer businesses in San Francisco which means less tax revenues which means less investment in keeping the streets clean and keeping the subway or whatever, keeping boat running and everything else. So real problems the city itself of San Francisco running a $780 million deficit. That's 6% of the annual budget. California can't help because California has a $32 billion budget shortfall. Remember California was raking in tax dollars when tech companies were booming and going public and everybody had capital gains and they were taxing those capital gains and they were making a fortune and they were running surpluses they spent those surpluses and now when over the last couple of years when tech companies are not doing quite as well although they're doing well this year but last year they didn't do well because it was way down tech companies firing people and therefore few people paying taxes high owners people leaving California tax revenue down so California can't help San Francisco so you've got the spiral of no vacancies lower taxes not enough taxes to clean the streets which discourages people moving to San Francisco which increases vacancies and you can see how the spiral goes on and on. As an illustration of the challenge that San Francisco is facing I think it was last week the owner of San Francisco's largest hotel which is the Hilton right off of Union Square a Hilton I've stayed there at least two or three times probably in the 90s but I stayed there and another hotel called Park 55 which is a very nice hotel but these are big hotels Hilton conference center it has a lot of conference rooms massive hotel the owner of this hotel basically just walked away from his debt that is he owes a lot of money on these hotels the hotels are not making enough money for him to pay off his debt he handed the keys to the banks and walked away that is stunning that is stunning that the major hotel in San Francisco largest hotel in the city can't pay it's debts stunning that this hotel is going to happen to it who the banks are going to take a hit on it they'll have to sell it at a huge discount if not he would have sold it they're going to have to sell it for a huge discount whether it can function as a hotel in the future who knows whether it be converted to condos maybe clearly not office space too much office space already in San Francisco even beyond the homelessness problem even beyond which is a big problem in that area this hotel in Union Square not that far from the Tenderloin district where homeless people are just taking it over maybe that's part of the reason nobody wants to stay there and then this is also related to the fact that shoplifting massive problems of shoplifting so a lot of stores are closing so in the Union Square area which has a lot of luxury stores some of those luxury stores are going away they can't cope and they can't cope with shoplifting and the homeless problems so that's it more tax revenue going away businesses walking away so real problems for San Francisco real difficult times hard to tell how they get out of this of course a lot of companies moving in so I don't want to end this on San Francisco's finished but San Francisco is on the brink of a tipping point companies are moving in so the working effect San Francisco is still incredibly lucrative for startups to be in maybe they won't go to Union Square but there are other areas in San Francisco a lot of AEI companies that are getting funding that are starting now are going to headquarters themselves in San Francisco in some of the areas in San Francisco the network effect of being in a place like Silicon Valley, Bay Area or even San Francisco itself they are as compared to the others and very very there's a real problem people don't want to live there people don't want to live there and major change is going to have to happen in the city and those kind of changes take a long time for example converting a lot of office space into condos it's still one of those beautiful cities in the world it's still one of those amazing places I miss San Francisco and it's just a beautiful beautiful place on the best views in the world just a gorgeous city it just needs to get it to act together just needs to get it to act together and I hope it does because as much as I know some of you guys just despise it left and anything in the hood so left is good San Francisco is just too beautiful and represents so much of the goodness about this country that in its past that it would be truly sad to completely lose it truly sad to see it gone collapsed abandoned alright finally and I'll do this quickly because we've got some super chat questions and I can't go over an hour today Ukraine war update Ukraine as you know has launched they counter offensive they are striking on a number of different I'm not sure this is the strike we will see this still feels like them kind of testing and feeling out the Russian defenses and trying to look for weak spots you know we saw this last year when they were prodding and testing in the south and then they out of nowhere attacked on the north and took back the whole Kharkiv province hard to tell if they can get away with us this time movement will not be fast this time Russians are really really well entrenched I mean they have spent the last nine months outside of Bakhmut basically building trenches, minefields any kind of obstacles to mechanized brigades from the Ukrainians they have improved their electronics they are much better at jamming and disrupting Ukrainian drones and the flip side of that they have invested heavily in the own drones and bringing in drone technology the Russian army that the Ukrainians face now is bigger and an army that has learnt the lessons of you know it's lack of success last year in spite of that Ukraine I think still has the upper hand and has the real possibility of defeating the Russians and of reoccupying this territory and it's not going to be easy and it's not going to be without substantial casualties and significant damage wars are not fought on TV screens wars are not fought on computers people die people get hurt equipment gets blown up it is it is it's horrific wars are horrific and it doesn't matter what side it really is horrific and the Ukrainians are going to have a hard time they are making advances on every front that they've engaged the Russians they have advanced but there is a long way to go the goal for most of the attacks that they're making is ultimately to get to the Ozov Sea and to cut off Russia from Crimea at least the ground route between Russia and Crimea that is likely to be a big major goal that is going to be hard to do that is tough land and now filled with mines the Russians are blowing up dams and flooding areas to make it even more difficult and they're throwing bodies at the Ukrainians they're throwing people who are not well trained but they're throwing bodies at the Ukrainians Ukrainians are just going to have plugs through they're going to take their casualties they do have superior technology it's sad that you know it's good that Ukraine has enough control of the airspace to deny the Russians control of the airspace it is unfortunate that Ukraine doesn't have more ability to function in the air with aircraft and helicopters and so forth they're very exposed it's very difficult to run an operation as they're trying to run without air support and yet they're somehow it's going to be a brutal few months I mean we sit here in the comfort of the US and western Europe and we can cheer the Ukrainians or cheer the Russians as some of you might to remember and hold as all of this is going on the horrors of war the horrors of what it must be like fighting right now either side but certainly since I'm since I guess the Russians are Putin's problem it must be it's just horrible these are young kids they were partying in Kiev not that long ago some of them were partying in Moscow not that long ago now they're thrown into situation they're shooting each other they're doing stuff that they never imagined they would do in their lives they're killing people they're getting killed they're seeing their friends and you know their friends and colleagues and family members being killed on their side war is truly horrific activity one of the most horrific horrible activities human beings can engage in and I think it's important for us to keep that in mind as we watch this you know you might see these maps with arrows every arrow represents people it represents young men it represents young men risking their lives young men dying it represents young men again watching their friends die horrific horrific and I think holding that context is really really crucial alright good let's jump into the super chat remember we fund this show with super chats $250 target for these morning shows it's kind of a minimum minimum in terms of you know what I need to know to do the show and it reflects kind of a value for value so hopefully we now have about 80 people watching the show hopefully we can get some people to engage in supporting the show whatever level you can whatever level you view this as a as a value what I'm doing is a value Ryan just stepped in and made this a lot easier because we are only short $37 now so please consider that ok let's start with Ryan's question and we'll do these quickly I find that when people are challenged to judge ideas morality they shut down as if some mystical authority stops them I see this with Rand as if Rand's moral certainty is offensive to some higher power accusing AI of being dogmatic seems rooted here thoughts yes I mean moral judgment is very very difficult for people we live in a culture where don't judge you can't judge who are you to judge it comes both from the left from a subjectivity subjectivism low self-esteem who am I what's the truth who knows the truth you can't tell the truth and also in altruism you know judging is egoistic judging is indeed egoistic having an opinion about other people having an opinion about morality is egoistic and it's you know Rand was very very emphatic she liked this statement for the New Testament something like judge and be ready to be judged right and you know in moral judgment or judgment generally and morality generally are definitely central to objectivism central to what it means to be an objectivist those objectivists who don't want to judge who want to get along with everybody and everybody's nice why can't we all get along why can't we appease our enemies and be nice to people who hate us they're not acting rationally they're not acting with justice and yes those accused A.R.I. are being dogmatic because of this are ridiculous but on the right you see it as well because on the right it's only God can judge who am I to judge knowledge truth can only really be done by God and only in the last judgment does that actually happen and so you judge because only God can judge and that is he is the ultimate judge and don't you know don't do it yourself you're not God who are you who the hell are you to make judgments about people and it comes from that religiosity that lack of self-esteem lack of self-interest that religion incockates in people Sylvanos thank you for the support so you can also do a sticker where you just support not ask a question Sylvanos did ten dollars we're only twenty seven dollars away from our target okay Bree says war is disgusting any more in every way would it be moral for the U.S. to have dedicated assassin divisions to eliminating bad actors before they start a war imagine infiltrating Germany in 1935 with ten thousand years of success I mean it would if you thought the U.S. government knew what it was doing and could do a good job doing it I would definitely support that I have no problem with that I worry though that once you give the government that kind of responsibility and power that they abuse it they assassinate the wrong guys at the wrong time in the wrong place and they just make a mess of it sometimes you assassinate one guy and the next guy is even worse you have to assassinate them too where does this end so generally I don't think the United States should be the policeman of the world we can take care of whoever threatens us and leave the rest of them to deal with each other there's a reason so the reason I mean in the United States today it's actually the opposite the United States government is banned by law from assassinating foreign leaders so even if we could assassinate Putin right now we're not allowed to CIA is not allowed to, the intelligence agencies are not allowed to and this is a consequence of CIA assassinations that happened in the 50's, 60's, 70's that were perceived as going wrong and going bad and in 1970's there was this big reform of the intelligence agencies that basically that basically banned the assassination of foreign leaders Ryan also asked isn't Musk the ultimate bootlegger he is a genius but his will tests the stock world built around government subsidies, true his position on AI seems to be leaning towards more and to de-risk his venture into AI it could be ultimately Tesla is long-term an AI venture because self-driving cars are AI and you better get it right he does seem like that, I mean there are days when he seems so good and then there are days where he is just awful and basically on the side of cronyism and just supports cronyism in every way and his position on AI is horrific he did build Tesla to a large extent over government subsidies and government help in one way or another he also built it around kind of a moral argument that the left made about climate change which is dubious and you know, ultimately he and he continues to benefit from subsidies the charging stations now it could very well turn out that he is a bootlegger whether explicitly whether he knows it or not whether he thinks in terms of exploiting and cultivating the Baptist so he can exploit as a bootlegger is interesting, right? One of the things about bootleggers in Baptist is the bootleggers fund the Baptist the bootleggers support the Baptist, the bootleggers because they benefit, they profit from it they want prohibitions, they want restrictions they want cronyism that very well could be very disappointing Michael says, asking Frank's question, you're on how do you debate someone who brings up stats and studies? I looked at Maudi Infidelini he likes to pull out studies out of no way how do you debate this type? I mean you can't you can't debate them on their terms you have to bring it to principles and you have to know enough about the studies so that you can literally refute them or at least have studies that are making your case at some level but you can't literally refute every single one of them you can't present studies on the opposite of every single one you have to basically be able to make a generalized statement of yeah Maudi for every one of your studies I can find a study that refutes it or says the exact opposite. Let's think about the principle though behind it, let's think about actual how economies work let's think about morality whether this is right or wrong not whether it has a statistical probability of X or Y you have to bring it to the level of principle the level of economic theory the level of moral theory but you can't reject the concrete so you have to have at least something to say about the concrete it's why at the institute I am a big proponent of specialization of people specializing so the person who goes up and debates multi-infidel should be somebody who knows enough about the empirical studies to debate him, somebody who debates somebody on energy should know their stuff about energy inside out so that any study that the opponent brings up they have three studies that show exactly the opposite. I want experts I want deep expertise so that we can challenge the concretes not just the principles you have to do both life is about both Michael says you say you can potentially change the culture in 50 years but it's been over 50 years since Atlas Shrug was published and altruism and egalitarianism are more dominant than ever maybe they're more dominant than ever life was pretty bad in many respects in the 50s people forget what the 60s were like what people forget what the left was like in the 60s or even what the right was like in the 60s people forget what the world was like the rights of communism, the dominance of communism the popularity of communism all that's gone, at least explicit communism. We have other problems now so I don't think things have gotten to that extent worse I think they're just bad and they continue to be bad and our presence continues to be small even though we are growing force. I have not guaranteed that I can change the culture in 50 years I think we can change it in 50 years, not me alone but if we train dozens and dozens of intellectuals go out there into the field and argue these points and make the case and both empirically and theoretically and morally and philosophically and every perspective if we do that we win but whether it takes 50 years or 60 years or 100 years or 120 years or 40 years I don't know the key is you've got to try, you've got to fight and there's only one way to fight and that's ideologically with better ideas and aggressively. Jeremy, thank you Jeremy Morton just put in $30 to get us to our goal so thank you guys we made 250 again thank you Ryan thank you Jeremy, thank you to everybody else who contributed. Alright, three more quick questions Michael says, are Americans less mystical than Europeans despite the religious right? No, not really I think Americans are very mystical unfortunately and luckily Americans don't compartmentalize in the mystical in some areas of life and not in others and I think the mysticism is coming home to Roost in a sense that we're starting to get political leaders that reflect that mysticism political leaders that say trust me, believe in me that's all you need to know I'm not going to make a rational argument or boy you should support me just believe, just have faith Adam says it's amazing how much of Adler's Shrug applies to today's daily news topic already today the anti-Dougie-Doug rule media censorship and opposition to read and steal come to mind from your topics yes, it's scary and upsetting and it's here, you know and you remember when people criticize Adler's Shrug one of the criticisms is oh that's not realistic the characters aren't realistic and it used to be the villains are not realistic you know that the villains are very realistic so now it's the heroes that are realistic and sadly there are not a lot of people out there who exemplify the heroism of who characters, particularly in business Michael says common sense is not a gift it's a punishment because you have to deal with everyone who doesn't have it no, come on common sense, reason, rationality tools to living your life without it you would be a wreck so of course it's a gift and it's not a gift and I thought this is what you were going with it's something to be earned it's something to be figured out it's something to achieve common sense is not a gift it's an achievement and you should view it that way and to hell with other people Valdrin, the right is intellectual inferior openly anti-intellect but do you ever see the majority left embracing Rand's work, I just can't they don't have to stay a majority left I mean we chip away and chip away and chip away until you know both, we take from both so don't view it as we have to convert all the left or we have to convert all the right we have to convert individual by individual, some of them left some of them right and slowly our camp will grow and over time I think that will make the left better and the right better because they'll have to gravitate towards the dynamic, exciting, radical movement that is Objectivism Andrew says, why are evangelicals still strong supporting Trump? Because of what I said earlier because they're attracted to a man, a prophet a messiah like figure who comes down and says, I'll take care of it I got it and who's willing to fight the enemies with thunder and lightning or whatever term you want to use and and you know they believe is on their side and he's going to fight and sometimes God they will tell you, God uses a flawed messenger in order to get in order to win the battle but you need a messenger and you need somebody with that passion and you need somebody with that arrogance and you need somebody with that with that you need somebody you can worship as a human being and that's what they do so they take their authoritarian epistemology which religion teaches them and apply it to presidential candidates and the one who's most authoritarian is the one who gets their votes and right now Trump is the most authoritarian and he will get their votes. That was a marathon. Alright, thanks everybody really appreciate it I have to run we made our targets thank you that's like 3-4 in a row so we're doing great let's keep this up I'll see you all tomorrow taking the night off