 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right, welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Tuesday night. I hope everybody's doing well, having a great beginning of your week. Two shows in a day. I don't know. We're trying this, but we'll see how long this is sustainable. We'll see. We'll have to figure this out. December is the month of experimentation, so lots to experiment here. All right, today we're going to talk about woke businesses, in particular woke corporations, in the context of an article I read on Barry Weiss. Do you know Barry Weiss has now changed her sub-stack? It's no longer Barry Weiss as whatever was called before, but now it's called the free press for free people. And part of what she's done, and this is, I'll just compliment Barry Weiss for a minute, part of what she's done is she's created an alternative media outlet. She's actually got now journalists working for her. She's actually reporting on news. She's also of course got commentary, but she's really building a business. It's pretty cool to watch. It's pretty cool to see she's building a media, alternative media platform. And I think it's an alternative to the mainstream media. And of course Barry Weiss, for those of you who don't know, was a New York Times reporter who had it with kind of the crazy left attitude of many people at the New York Times, and she landed up leaving. She was harassed by some of the other employees, and she landed up leaving. And when she left, she had no idea what she was going to do. She started up the sub-stack, which has done phenomenally well. And she's taken, I think, the profits from that sub-stack and really built a media platform. And that is super exciting. It just shows how conventional media or what's called mainstream media doesn't have to have a monopoly or a dominant position. There is competition. Competition is super alive and well. By the way, the same thing has happened with the Bullwalk, something like that. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. And with the dispatch, both kind of right of center, never Trump, intellectuals who left, one left a national review. Others, I'm not sure why they left the national review and started their own sub-stack. And now it's turned into real media, and they have multiple channels, and they have multiple writers, and they have podcasts, and they have Barry Rice's podcast. It's a whole world, and it's not just commentary. There's also an aspect of it that is reporting. So we live in an amazing world in which the amount of diversity in media that we have is unprecedented in all of human history. We've never had as much media, as much to choose from. We've never had as many alternatives with such a huge variety, a huge variety of points of view. And perspectives. It is truly amazing sub-stack. Whatever the business model has been has been a massive success. I don't know about you, but I don't know. I've subscribed to a bunch of them. I need to actually figure out how many I've subscribed to, because I fear I've subscribed to too many. I don't think I pay. I think a bunch of them I get for free, but some I pay for. The problem is you lose track. There's no one place where I have all my subscriptions listed. The same thing is true of newspapers, and I'm subscribed to Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal and a bunch of others, and some you would not approve of. And just keeping track of all that has become a full-time job and a major hassle. But anyway, that is not the topic today. So, first of all, before we even start, kudos to Barry Weiss. And just notice, notice how, in a sense you could say the profit motive, the ability to make money off of what one does, the ability to create a business that funds itself, allows for diversity, diversity of opinion, diversity of viewpoints, diversity just of outlets. We're seeing that with Twitter. The fact that Twitter was a publicly traded company made it possible for Elon Musk to buy it and do whatever he's going to do with it. And I'm still hopeful of what happens in the end is a good thing. So, again, there are warning signs on the way, but it's great. It's great that that can happen. It's great that it is happening. It's great that that is the way things change hands. Money is really, really important. Money is a tool by which we can create these kind of opportunities. We can kick out managers we don't like. We'll talk about this later. And change directions of companies, businesses, of the media in this case. So, good for Barry and good for the others. The particular article that came out today is what the hell happened at PayPal. I don't actually think it's a particularly good article. I don't think it's particularly well written. And I don't think the conclusion that comes to a correct or particularly well-ugged, I think there are a lot of problems with the article. I'm not going to get into it because the point today is not to critique it. It just, this is the article that kind of stimulated my thinking about this. But it is interesting, but it is, yeah, these issues of work are complex and people mix up a lot of different things with it, a lot of different things. Maybe we'll talk about some of them as we go through the show. Just to remind everybody, we have a goal for these shows and that is to raise $650 in the Super Chat. You can use the Super Chat to either just support the show or to ask a question. Questions of $20 or more get priority. Katherine is not here tonight, so you're going to have to be self-motivated without Katherine to reach that goal. But hopefully we can actually do it. Thank you for the early Super Chat participants. I appreciate that. All right, so let's jump in. So one of the things this article illustrates or brings to forward, which is absolutely true, or I think is true, is that PayPal, like Twitter, like to some extent Facebook, like many businesses, including MasterCard and Visa and certain banks and many other institutions out there. The argument is that Disney and others are heavily influenced by the philosophy, by the moral perspective of the people who are engaged in the business. And as a consequence, many of their decisions are based on their moral political views, rather than on what you'll call, quote, pure business arguments, or even as opposed to what seems to be their explicit mission statement. And I have a problem with mission statements because I think that they tend to be, what do you call it, ambiguous and general and not always tied to reality, not always tied to the reality of the business, and they ignore certain features. So the idea is that PayPal, for example, has become what people consider today woke. That is there are certain ideas, there are certain people, therefore, that are just unacceptable and therefore it is unacceptable to deal with them. It is unacceptable to trade with them. It's unacceptable to do business with them. And as a consequence, they drop them from the platform. So for example, if you are an advocate for a particular view of gender, and not any advocate, but you're loud and maybe a little obnoxious, there is a chance, I don't know how much the chance is, I don't know that anybody's really done the research and really figured it out that somebody like PayPal will say, look, we don't want to do business with you. And as a consequence of that, we are pulling you off the platform. And suddenly, if you're somebody like me who relies on PayPal for income, a lot of you are monthly subscribers on PayPal. And PayPal could tomorrow decide you're on. We don't want to deal with you. And I would lose contact with all of you. They would stop collecting money from you. They would stop. And as a consequence, it would be very, very difficult to do my business. I mean, the reality is if I told you all, okay, everybody go to Patreon, I'd lose about 50% because 50% would drop off just out of inertia. And it would really, really hurt my business. So businesses, we know that businesses are doing this. We know anecdotally, we know from articles and studies and newspapers and the media. We can see it. There was definitely an ideological bent to who businesses are willing to deal with and who are not. And sometimes, like in PayPal, that seems to go against their mission. PayPal's mission is to democratize financial services to ensure that everyone, regardless of background or economic standing, has access to affordable, convenient, and secure products and services to take control of their financial lives. And it literally says everyone. And yet we know that's not true. Everyone doesn't necessarily hold. Everyone doesn't include the people that for a variety of reasons, not because they're doing illegal activities necessarily, but for a variety of reasons, PayPal had decided that it is just not right for them to do business with these people. And, you know, this is related to cancel culture, which is very similar. You know, we don't want to do business with certain people who hold certain views. And as a consequence, we're laying them off, we're firing them, we're boycotting them, whatever the case may be. And of course, Toyota taking them off their platform because of the opinions that they hold, because of the views that they hold. And we can see that over and over and over again in a variety of different countries. And of course, this imbuing of the values, the morality, the moral values of the people who work at a company and how the company is run or how the company deals with its customer, I think is inevitable. It's how do you function otherwise? I mean, so Disney makes movies. Disney movies have a particular point of view that reflects the point of view of the creators and probably reflects the point of view of the creators' bosses, the people that they had. But how could it be otherwise? I mean, could Disney basically say, because every movie, for example, has a point of view, it doesn't have to be a political point of view, but it has a view about if it's any good, it has a view about life, the world, morality. It has a view about the world. You know, if it's art, then it's a recreation of the metaphysical value judgments, which has a view of the world. You can't escape that. So every business has this. The idea that you can somehow separate the moral views about anything, really, and the way a business is run, the moral views of management, at the very least, of senior management, and the way the business is run is ludicrous. And those moral views should be reflected in the mission statement, but they're typically not because they don't want to. It seems exclusionary, even if they're going to be exclusionary. So the woke phenomenon is a phenomenon which the moral views of a group of far-outed leftists are being reflected in business decisions that are being made. And those business decisions, you don't have to do in PayPal's case and in Twitter's case with regard to the opinions of the people they're dealing with. Now, is that in and of itself wrong that they have opinions that, I mean, I don't think so? I mean, if you were running PayPal, would there be people you would not want to deal with as a business? You're a business. You're trying to be profitable, trying to maximize shareholder wealth, but you're trying to maximize shareholder wealth in the context of what? What is the context in which we're trying to maximize profit, we're trying to maximize shareholder wealth? If you hold a proper morality, what's the context for that? What the context for that is the creation of values, values that enhance human life. So context of any business is the creation of values. The problem with, let's say, drugs were legal and you were selling, you were manufacturing, selling cocaine to anybody who wanted it and willing to pay for it, I would phone upon you as a CEO of a cocaine company and you'd say, but wait a minute, I'm maximizing shareholder wealth. Everything is fine. No, it's not. You're not creating values, not in a pro-life sense, maybe in the sense of somebody wants it, yes, but in the sense of somebody wants it because they believe it all, hence their lives, no. You're not creating objective values, you're not creating life-enhancing values, values that actually improve human life. And therefore, your profit is, you know, it's not quite exploitative in the sense that people are still choosing to engage with you, but it is destructive. The product you're making, the product that you're selling, the product that you're trading, is a product that is destroying human life. And therefore, it is immoral, it shouldn't be illegal, it should be legal, but I think it would be immoral to work for the business that produces cocaine and sells it to people. So when we say profit maximization is the purpose of business, I don't take it as devoid of context. There's a context there, and the context there is the profit made by the creation of values that approach human life. And what values those are, what your mission statement articulates, it articulates, the particular values that you are producing, the will create profit. And the particular values are what motivate the CEO to get into a particular business. He's passionate about media, so he starts a media company, but that media company makes money. That is the principle that guides most of its decisions in the context of creating values that enhance human life. But that context does create situations in which you would say, huh, so I'm running PayPal, it's time to see your people. And I discovered that there's a whole network of Islamists, people who advocate for the overthrow of Western governments and the establishment of Islamic Khalifat. Maybe they're not tied directly to terrorists, but we know that Islamists, those ideas are often the inspiration, are the inspiration for many terrorists around the world, that even though we don't know that they're tied to terrorists, they certainly might be tied to terrorists, we know that these ideas inspire the terrorists. Would you really want to host a bunch of Islamists' accounts on PayPal? Because you promised a new mission statement that did everyone. Well, no, I wouldn't. I mean, if one of my employees, you know, I run a hedge fund, if I discovered one of my employees was a communist, I try to convince him to change his mind, but if I couldn't, I would fire them. If I discovered one of them was a Nazi, I would fire them. I would cancel them. So, and even though that employee might be super productive, even though that employee might be very difficult to replace, since communism and Nazism, I consider enemies, not just of me, but of human life, human progress, supporting communism and Nazism, and by employing somebody of those views, I think you're supporting it. By allowing somebody of those views to have an account with you, you're supporting it. If you trade with people like that, if I had a store, and I knew somebody was a, I mean, a card member, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, I wouldn't want them in my store. I wouldn't trade with them, just as I would with a normal human being, because they are truly a threat to my life and to the existence of human life, the anti-life. I mean, part of the problem with discrimination laws is it doesn't allow us to do that. It allows you to do it only if you're Christian and you don't happen to have, you don't happen to have, like, gay people, so you can decide not to trade with gay people, but if you're, you know, it's not clear that you can discriminate in your store against points of view you don't like, although, again, PayPal is doing it, Twitter is doing it. What we really disagree with when it comes to woke, when it comes to cancel culture, is not the cancelling, it's not the dropping people, eliminating their accounts, blocking them from Twitter, it's the lack of any kind of standards, it's the lack of objective standards, and it's the application of a wrong morality, a morality that views as threatening and bad and the wrong people, and a morality that doesn't take into account human life. It takes into account the prevailing fashion of views, the prevailing stereo about certain threats, but it's not actually attuned to any moral principles. I mean, moral principles that are pro-life, that, you know, they reject the life standard. The problem is that we disagree about the standards, we disagree about the principles, we disagree about who, but we don't necessarily disagree about whether we should have that power or whether we should exercise that power. The other thing we disagree about is we disagree about the nature of profit, and this is why I added corporate social responsibility. I mean, I still view the purpose of a business, I think what makes a business a business, versus any other kind of enterprise, versus any other kind of corporate endeavor, is that a business makes money, that a business is in business to make money by creating and trading values that enhance human life in one way or another. And that would ultimately guide my criteria for who I do business with and who I don't do business with. It's the standard of, is this good for human life or isn't it good for human life? Is it good for this customer to thrive because me dealing with them will cause them to thrive, they're better off, not thrive, but it will cause them to be better than they would otherwise be. Or is it really horrific for human life for this particular customer to do well, and therefore ultimately not the way I want to make money, want to be profitable? But the view today is the profit is at best a model and it was a model that the actual seeking a profit is something to be, there's something you have to do, there's no option, but what a business is really about, really about, is some kind of model ideal above and beyond. You know how they say, you know, you need a cause greater than yourself, you need something bigger, something outside. And there's a sense in which that's right. There's a sense in which our lives are not just about some kind of momentary satisfaction, which is the caricature of self-interest. We need something greater than that. We need something of a perspective on the whole of life, but we also value things like liberty and freedom and free speech, and we value these things that are, but they're not greater than ourselves, they're not outside there, they're part of who we are, part of what we are. To be self-interested properly is to value really, really abstract things, really, really abstract ideas, because that's what it means to live a conceptual life, that's what it means to be a human being, that's what it means to really value your life. It means to understand the relationship between liberty and my life, between free speech and my life, between, I don't know, capitalism and my life. So I'm willing to fight for capitalism. Is that an idea greater than myself? No. It's an idea, I don't know how to use that language. It's an idea of me, it's part of me, it's part of who I am, it's part of what my life constitutes. I understand the value of capitalism to me, I understand the value of liberty to me, I understand the value of all these things, all these abstract ideas to me. They're not greater than me, they are me, they are part of who I am. You are in a sense the values that you adopt, the values that you choose to pursue. It's part of what makes you who you are, it's part of what building and making a soul for yourself is. It's the choice of those values. So what though most people in business today demand is the equivalent of something greater than yourself. Something, the equivalent of something greater than profits, which I, you know, profit to me is, I don't know, it's something like what self-interest is to the individual, profit is to the business. Pursuit of profit, pursuit of self-interest. You could even say pursuit of happiness. So they're looking for something beyond that, something greater than that, something external to that. And they view that as morality, right? Pursuit of profit just like pursuit of self-interest. Well, that's stuff you just do, that's, well, you have to pursue your self-interest to survive. But there has to be something greater than yourself, there has to be a moral, noble ideal. No, the moral, noble ideal is the pursuit of my life. The moral, noble ideas I view is the pursuit of profit correctly understood, right? In the right context, as I just explained. But they're looking for something beyond that and corporate social responsibility, I think, is that. That is, yes, you have to make a profit, we understand that. You have to, you know, you can't run up, you can't survive as a business, you've got contract, you have to pay people, you've got to make money, right? But what's really important is something else. It's some utilitarian function, it's some common good, it's some public interest. It's something, and of course those things are always amorphous, how to put your fingers on, how to actually explain. And therefore easily manipulative, easy to manipulate. What is the common good? What is the public interest? What is social responsibility? What is the socially responsible thing to do? Well, it's what the latest, greatest theorists are telling us it is. It's what politically we deem as acceptable, morally and politically deem as acceptable. Today it's woke. To be woke is to be socially responsible. It's to eliminate those point of views that you find that a world finds supposedly offensive and bad and doing harm to people. And that's an expansive set of views. It's not just the communists and the Nazis, it's a lot of views. So they take on this mantle of corporate social responsibility which wasn't created for this. It was created to provide businesses with something greater than themselves. The whole notion was to provide corporations with a moral mission with something more important than mere profit. And as a consequence, it opened business up to saying, okay, well, what should we do? What is the right goal we should pursue? Profit is not enough. We know that. So what moral goals should we pursue? Profit is a moral. Profit is just makes it possible for us to exist, but then we have to pursue a moral purpose. And then you can fill it in with different things. You know, I think every decade, every decade, different things are going to come in. Different things will fill it depending on what's the particular views in the culture around us. And some businesses are more susceptible to this and others less susceptible to it, but almost all of them are susceptible to it to some extent because how many of them are willing to stand up and say, I don't know, what was Microsoft mission? Microsoft mission was to put a computer on every desktop running Windows, right? So ultimately, you could say the purpose of Microsoft is, maximize shareholder wealth by putting a computer on every desktop running Windows because putting a computer on every desktop that runs Apple would not have served the profit maximization demand. So you don't say the maximize shareholder wealth, but Microsoft has run with that as its intent. It was run to maximize shareholder wealth within the context of the pro-life values that entailed putting a computer on every desktop, believing that putting a computer on every desktop was good for people, was a value, was something that would promote human life, would further human life. And Microsoft, I think, is a good example of a company that later on probably gave lip service to the idea of corporate social responsibility, stakeholder capitalism, but never actually really did it, it did what it was required to do by law, but basically ran the company to make money, I think to a large extent. Many of the companies, most of the companies in America today do that. But there are a few where they take it seriously. They take it seriously partially because management, senior management, which guides these companies and ultimately determines their direction, take it seriously. They went to business schools, they got MBAs, they took classes in business ethics, they took classes and all this stuff, and they are serious about being ethical, being moral, running the company in a way that's consistent with ethics and morality. What is ethics and morality? Well, right now it's woke. It's following the prescriptions of the intellectuals of the time. So none of this should be surprising. It's scary to someone like me because I could easily be categorized as one of the people that are doing, from their perspective, doing harm to the world and therefore they should drop me from PayPal and drop me from YouTube and drop me for whatever. So far, interestingly enough, that has not happened. Not because I'm careful about what I say, I'm not, but maybe because I'm not big enough, maybe because my views are not the kind of views and are certainly not presented in the kind of way that would offend to the extent that they would act. I think the latter is, I think it's a combination of both. I'm not big enough and my views and the way I present them is not offensive enough, right, from their perspective. But clearly, so what happens in business if you separate profit from morality, there are two possibilities that can happen. One is you become a total pragmatist and therefore morality is out the window and you just do what you need to do and almost, not always, but often that leads to criminality. It leads to fraud. It's what happened in Enron and WorldCom and what happened. FTX is a little bit more complex, but it's ultimately pragmatism, whatever, whatever works. I'm supposed to make money, whatever happens, I need to make money. I'll just make money, I'll cut corners, I'll be short-term. Morality has nothing to do with profit. Everybody agrees on that. Sheldon's maximization is amoral. So morality is out and therefore I will become a pragmatist. The alternative is to say Sheldon's maximization is amoral, but morality is still important. So I will guide how I run the company within certain boundaries as to not to affect making money too much, but affect it somewhat. I will run the company in a way that expresses that morality. You see that, again, probably at Disney, you see that at PayPal, you saw that at Twitter. You're seeing it now on Twitter. I mean, what is Elon Musk doing? And profit is okay. We'll keep the profit, but we'll try to apply morality. And then what you're doing is you're applying conventional morality to the circumstances and that's the mess you get. And then another approach, which I think American business to a large extent has held in the past implicitly without knowing it, is to say, no, if I'm in a business that is enhancing human life, that is producing values to enhance human life, then profit is moral. And indeed, pursuing profit is moral, pursuing life is moral, is the context for morality. And I will then guide my company to maximize profit and what I want to make sure, and I will do it morally, that is I apply morality in how I run my business. I will treat people justly. I will treat with all my customers fairly. I'll be honest. I'm not going to cut corners. I'm not going to be a pragmatist. I'm going to think long term. I'm going to think about how to produce these values in a way that will maximize wealth, but also that doesn't undermine the essence of the value creation. And yes, I will take action against threats, against people, organizations, entities that I believe undermine human life, human values, human progress because that's what I'm about. I'm about human life. I often say that businessmen, the billionaires make the world a better place. Yes, and that's not altruistic. They make the world a better place because there's huge egoistic reason to do that, but it's in the very nature of productive activity. What is productive activity? It's producing for, it's creating values for not just you, but it's creating values for other people so you can trade with them and you make yourself better and you make them better, and you're making the world a better place. So, you know, if PayPal was run by, so I think American business implicitly for a long time ran that way, but look, you know, American business has been a mishmash from the beginning. There were always pragmatists. And look, sometimes the pragmatists committed fraud. For many, many decades, the pragmatists basically built themselves empires at the expense of shareholders, usually, but there were no mechanisms to really fix that and no mechanisms to adjust for that. So, a lot of them, you know, there was a huge conglomeration boom in the 1950s and 1960s, the errors that the left admires so much and yet these are the errors that created conglomeration. There were super inefficient, but they produced vast wealth for management because management got compensated on things like sales and revenue growth and things like that, but not on profit, not on shareholder wealth. It's an innovation to tie managers' incentives to shareholders, which I think they were in the old days. Now, part of this is caused by regulations and I could go, you know, I could talk hours for the regulations that brought about the mismanagement of America. And part of this is also, so, for example, we just saw this with Twitter. So, Twitter does a bunch of things that do not make sense economically, do not make sense from business perspectives. They don't make money, they don't make significant money. And as a consequence of not making significant money, their share price drops. Let's say they make less money that they could potentially do because of business decisions that they make and some because of moderating decisions that they make. I don't know if that's the case, but let's assume that's the case. Fred Hopper, thank you, Len, thank you, theme master, thank you all supporting without actually asking a question, so that's why I'm thanking them separately. So, let's say Twitter wasn't making money or didn't seem that it was on a path to make a lot of money for shareholders. It was involved in a lot of controversy, it was involved in a lot of moderation issues that caused people to leave and caused competition to rise and caused people generally to be, you know, to not exactly know what was going on and platform advertisers were never really comfortable with it. And it couldn't really make money, it didn't have a business model to really make money to be profitable. And the beauty of free markets is that if you're in a sideline and you see this and you say, I could do a better job, I could do a better job by what criteria? I could do the criteria of maximizing shareholder wealth. And by that criteria also, you know, improving the way Twitter's run, improving whatever it is that is required to generate revenue by providing real values. So you buy the company, this is what Elon Musk did. Elon Musk took advantage of the fact that Twitter, now he overpaid because of when he made the bid, he didn't pay for the NASDAQ collapse, but Twitter stock was not doing well. So he could offer a premium to it and shareholders would say and management said, yeah, we have to sell it to him because he's offering a premium, that's in shareholders' interest and they sold it to him. So you get this major shift. Why? Because somebody believed that they could do better than what current management was and current management had to go along with it because that was what was in shareholders' best interest. Now we'll see if Elon Musk has the solution. If he has, great, he'll make Twitter more profitable. He is now the shareholders here, make more money for himself. He'll probably take it public at some point and he will make Twitter more productive. He will make Twitter more usable if Twitter becomes more profitable. I think Twitter will also, that will be a reflection of the fact that Twitter is better. We'll see if that actually happens. We'll see if that actually happens. All right. So I guess a couple of things and then we'll go on. The whole idea now of the resentment towards cancelling and cutting people off from PayPal and so on, I think it's important to understand that every business does that. The question is not whether you do that or not. The question is what are the criteria and those criteria are ultimately going to be determined by your morality and by the morality of those running the business. And I think that a rational morality guiding a business in one in which we maximize, you maximize shareholder wealth in pursuit of human life enhancing values using justice, reason and justice as the virtues guiding in honesty. And I think the objective is virtues are very good when it comes to business, using those virtues to guide your actions as a business. Because I think using those virtues to guide you will maximize shareholder wealth, certainly maximize shareholder wealth in the context of human flourishing, of human achievement, human values. All right. So those are some thoughts. I have a feeling when you keep coming back to this issue of corporate social responsibility of shareholder wealth maximization, of stakeholder capitalism, of conscious capitalism, of other stuff, I think we keep suppling it back because it's a really important issue. I don't think it's an issue that is necessarily completely resolved and where we have all the categories lined up correctly yet. It's something I'm thinking about. I know others are thinking about to try to figure this out and to try to nail it down, the relationship between kind of the purpose of maximizing shareholder wealth and the mission statement and maybe a vision and how are those related to the objectivist value of purpose? And for most people, purpose is career. How is that related to a business's purpose? Is that purpose wealth maximization or is that purpose what everybody else calls a mission statement or is that purpose something completely different? So all of these are good questions. I think we've scraped the surface in terms of what we can talk about and where we're going with this. I think a lot more thinking and a lot more work needs to be done to really get out a handle on the issues. All right, theme master, thank you. Len, thank you. I appreciate the support. We're still way, way, way, way behind on our super chat goal. That is where we are. All right, let's see. All right, so any, I'm trying to think if I have any, we'll leave it at that. It's also 10 minutes. It's already 50 minutes already. So we'll leave it at that and we'll pick that topic up later on. James G though has a question on topic. I don't see many questions here on topic, but this one is, you like other people's money. What other movies and finance stand out since the SBEF got arrested? How do you, how do we show he was a young Bernie Madoff in tech? Well, I don't think he was a young Bernie Madoff in tech. I mean, look, every case, every one of these cases is going to be different. I think it's, I think drawing too many parallels between the different characters is a mistake. Bernie Madoff was a particular character. SBEF is a very different type of character. They're both frauds, but they're very different frauds. And I think somewhat motivated differently. The two are somewhere motivated differently. Although ultimately, I think what sinks them both is, is pragmatism. You know, certainly with, with SBEF, it's ultimately, you know, resolving to be pragmatic about everything, not having any principles. But also with them, it's a kind of cocky nonchalance about things like accounting. Only nerds do accounting. We, we crypto bros, we cool crypto bros. We don't have to do accounting. We don't have to actually keep track of money. We, you know, we just roll with it. We're just fine. It's a very unthinking attitude that I think exists within. And I think with Bernie Madoff, it's more of a, I see a pile of money there. Nobody's looking. I think I can get away with it. It would feel kind of cool to be rich, super rich because it was already relatively wealthy. I'll just take it as an emotional just, just, I'll take it. So, so, and then, and then you get stuck with, I take it and then, and then you're in a spiral. I think Bernie Madoff was in a spiral. I don't think SBEF was ever in a spiral. I think Bernie Madoff knew for years, years and years and years that not only was what he was doing, evil and wrong and destructive. I think for many, many years he knew he would get caught and it was just a matter of time, but he tried to avoid it and avoid it. I think with SBEF, I don't think he actually completely registered the evil of what he was doing. I think, I think he just did unbelievably stupid things out of a sense of arrogance and out of a sense of I am the future. I can do anything. Nobody can touch me. And, and I think it got out of his control. I think he did things and then didn't realize how bad it was. And then, you know, as a kind of a social, not a social, kind of wishful thinking things will get better. I think SBEF was definitely guilty of things will get better kind of mentality. And I definitely think James says SBEF didn't care that he was caught. I definitely think he cared about whether he was caught. I think he thought he would never be caught. I think he thought that he could pull it off. I think SBEF thought that he could finagle it, that he could raise more capital or he could shift money around again and shift it in that direction. I think he's somewhat because he didn't keep track of stuff because that wasn't cool to keep track of stuff. I don't think he quite knew where everything was. I don't think he completely knew what he had done. And then I thought, I think that he thought, okay, yeah, we're in a hole. I can get us out of the hole. I'm cocky and arrogant enough to get us out of the hole. And I think I think it was devastating for him whenever it all collapsed. And I think sitting in our jail in the Bahamas, I think it's pretty devastating for him. It's really, really bad. Again, these are people who, particularly with SBEF, I think because he was, I did a show on this, right, because he was committed to a morality that was impractical, he had to adopt a practical view of the business. And the only practical view of the business once you abandon morality is pragmatism. I'll just do what I can get away with. And I think that most corrupt businessmen are like that. They basically look and say, well, morality means I should be altruistic. Morality means I should sacrifice. The morality means I shouldn't make profit. That can't be right. I mean, in that sense, they're right. So to hell with morality, morality is not useful now. Some of those people become crooks. But they don't become crooks seeking to become crooks. That is, they don't set out with an evil motivation. They become crooks by default because they cut corners because they make mistakes and then they try to cover up the mistakes. The better ones, the ones that have a basic sense of morality that is somewhat removed from altruism, right, they have this altruistic notion of sacrifice. They say, oh, that's nonsense. Can't run a business that way. But I'm still going to be honest. I'm still going to have a sense of justice. I'm still going to do all those things. But I'm not going to do the altruism stuff. So they kind of divorce their particular moral commandments from the moral foundation. And they do better in terms of at least not becoming crooks. And then the really good businessman, I think, basically value profit, understand that profit is a reflection of value creation, a reflection of their impact on the world, their reflection of, and I think this is a Steve Jobs. I don't think it's an accident that so many of the really, really good entrepreneurs of the last 50 years were red I ran because I think I ran provided them with the sense that profit was good, it wasn't neutral, it was a good, it was something positive. They didn't quite get the morality, certainly not as it applied to their personal lives, but they got a sense of certain values that should be pursued and a sense of integrity and a sense of making money and wanting to make money and the goodness of making money. And the relationship between making money and creating values in the world and making the world a better place. I think somebody like Steve Jobs and even Bill Gates got that, understood that. And then I think Bill Gates, the way he does it is he can pop in lies as he says, okay, well that was my business life. Now I've made all this money. Now I have to feel guilty. I don't know that he actually feels guilty. I doubt that he actually feels guilty, but he says now I'm supposed to feel guilty and I'm supposed to give it away and I'm supposed to do these things. So he goes ahead and does them. But I think when he was running Microsoft he was committed to profits. He was committed to making money. He was committed to producing great products. He was committed to enhancing the world by creating values that he could make money off of. And I think that drove him and I think it drives all of them. And they don't see a different screen. They don't see in their business life, they don't see a difference between morality and profit. They have a healthy attitude towards it, not a completely integrated attitude towards it, but at least compartmentalized in that part of their life they have the right attitude. And then they retire and in a sense it's a different part of their lives. Their values change and they take their conventional morality more seriously. But if you listen to some of these guys, some of these successful businessmen, you don't get a sense of, you know, a few you do like the guy at Salesforce, but most of them, you listen to the great venture capitalists and so on. You don't get a sense of what's driving them morally is altruism or conventional morality at all. What's driving them is value creation. It's value discovery and value creation. What's driving them is to trade with people to make the world a better place. And what drives them is the fun and challenge and of using their minds and doing things out there in the world that all create values that enhance life. That's what drives them. And that's all good and healthy and right and right. And I think it's the modern ones that approach it, not from the perspective of they don't start not starting with creating values and not starting with creating values that they love. And this is typically founders. Founders think in terms of founders and companies think in terms of creating values that are important to them that they love and making money in the process of doing that. That is the context is always the values that they love and the values that make the world a better place in some regard that they can trade and make other people better off. But often the managers who come later are looking at it more from, well, they don't necessarily love this business. Like the guy who runs PayPal today. He's a kind of professional manager. He wasn't involved early on in PayPal. He came to them after running a bunch of other companies. He's not particularly dedicated to a particular mission or particular anything. And he brings with him a kind of, he brings with him the baggage that I think conventional Morali is placed on him in business school and everywhere else that he goes and polite society and fancy parties he goes to. And he brings that rather than the passion around the value creation. So the passion around the value creation is replaced by taking Morality more seriously, taking conventional Morality more seriously. And while he still wants to make money, making money is not tied to the values the way it is for founders of companies. For founders of companies, the profit motive, the shareholder was maximization is tied to the value creation process. It's essentially the same thing for them. And it's not for people who come later. I mean, the whole history of Apple is really interesting as an illustration of that, I think, because one of the reasons Steve Jobs was fired from Apple is that he was so focused on the value creation. He lost a little bit of touch with the need to make money. And the CEO who was running Apple at the time had no concept of the value creation, had no connection to the value creation, had no motivation around the value creation. He was detached from it so the two of them couldn't communicate. And I think what Steve Jobs learned from that, and I think what he brought to Apple when he came back, what he brought to Apple when he came back is a unbelievable ferocious focus on making money while at the same time completely being loyal to the values of Apple. To what made Apple a great company. And he had that completely integrated by that point in his career, but he had to learn that the hard way. Because in Apple the first round he lost that sense of this is a business and how to do it. And he saw what the CEOs and a sequence of CEOs at Apple who didn't have the connection to the values. So he saw that you can't do it one or the other. You have to do it together. You have to embrace both. And a lot of times managers have a hard time with that embracing both because they don't love the business. They're not as connected to the business as the founders were. Or as some great managers are. Some great managers are. And one of the challenges of being a manager from outside the company to come and run your company is that they're not tied to the value creation process as much. I don't know. More Iran thoughts about these topics to think about. But it's that integration. Yeah. Richard says Salesforce promise promotes equality as a core value. Sometimes they float equity as an idea, but it doesn't stand up to the challenge. They usually retreat to quality of opportunity thoughts. I mean, Salesforce is you know, the CEO of Salesforce is super leftist who has, you know, big environmentalist, a big equity guy, a huge and BLM and all this stuff. And he tries to at least promote those values within Salesforce. But again, those values often clash with his other desire, which is to make money and to maximize shareholder wealth. I mean, I worry about CEOs like that that are so politically engaged and yet they can't find an avenue for that model and political. This is Mark Benioff for that model political engagement because they're also trying to maximize wealth and he's the founder. So I'm sure he loves Salesforce and he loves the product and he loves the activity and he loves making money. He loves all of that. But yet his morality is pulling him in another direction. Now the challenge there is he becomes a pragmatist. The challenge or that he that morality starts infecting his ability to make money and the business doesn't do well. So a businessman that is torn like that is going to have challenges and going to have issues. I mean, you know, and it's not an accident twice now. Salesforce has tried to have to being a successor to Mark Benioff and what they've done is they've had him be co CEO with another CEO. So co CEOs for a few years. And both times it imploded very quickly because I think there are too many conflicts there and there are too many conflicting polls and the kind of people he brings in. Who are those people? Does he bring them in to really run the business of these? He's bringing them in to follow his political model pursuits. Let's see. Colleen says accounting is only for the cool. I'm going to assume Colleen is an accountant or has something to do with accounting. I mean, I've said this in the past. I said this during the FTX show that I'm not a, you know, I never liked accounting. I don't like accounting. When I studied accounting, I really didn't like it. I don't think I did. Well, I did okay with it, but I didn't like it. But it's super important. It's super important because it's record keeping. It's taking stock of where you are, what decisions you made in a complex. Yeah. I mean, you should have your life organized and you certainly need your business organized when you're managing other people's money. And, you know, so accounting is crucial, crucial to business and business decision making. All right. Adam says, I'm just looking for the $20 questions that are related to the topic. Let's see. We're still way behind. We've got some good $20 questions, but we're still, I guess it's hard to reach the 650 goal with just $20 questions. It has to be somebody coming in with a hundred or several hundred or $50 questions. Otherwise, it's very hard to get to the goal. Anyway, we need close to $20 questions to make up the gap that we have. That's why it's difficult. Let's see. Adam says, Alan Boyle deserves to make money too, Iran. It's not fair to Henry to get all the profits. That's right. I assume you all know Alan Boyle is the bad guy in Adler Shrug, the bad businessmen who can never make a shipment, can never live up to his contracts, sees no value in values. That is, he's not a trader. He's not a value producer. He's just in it for money and he's willing to get money from anywhere, including subsidies and government help and anything like that. Whatever it takes to get him a buck is fine. He's not about the creation of values. Note that with Reardon, it's completely integrated. You remember that passage where Reardon is taking a huge profit off of selling to Dagny? And it's like, because taking that profit is a reflection of that is morality. That is, it's being moral. It's a recognition of the value that you're providing. And it's recognition of the value that you're creating. But first you have to have the recognition and the idea that you're creating a value, that you're making something that is making a difference, that is improving human life. That's a real objective value, an objective value for human life. And once you recognize that, how can you not take a profit? How would you refuse the recognition? I'm thinking today about two... I mean, you could do it without taking a profit. And scientists do that all the time. They create values that change the world, make the lives of people much better. They're doing something they love to do. Everything the businessman does in a sense, maybe at a more abstract level, but everything the businessman does. But the scientist doesn't make money at it. It's not part of what he does. He discovers the scientific discoveries, and often those are then used by other people to make a fortune and the scientist doesn't get much. Now, there's more and more of scientists starting companies or scientists, you know, if they're patent their stuff, they get money later. But it's not about the profit, clearly. Whereas in business it is about the profit. A scientist working for business is geared ultimately towards, how do we make money off of this? Whereas in a science lab it isn't. It's not how it's driven. Andrew says, great COC to create value, but so do bad ones. The differences create value for whom? The greats create a company in their image, Gates did, now doesn't. Jobs did. Musk's primary motive is just others, agree. No, I think Musk has created companies in his image. I think suddenly SpaceX is in image. I think Tesla is in his image as well. I don't think it's just others. But it's not just that they create companies in their image. And if you come as a CEO into an existing company, it's very difficult to reshape a company in your image. I think that the greats understand the value that they're creating. They understand that it's the value that they're creating. First of all, they love it. They're in love with the value creation process. It's all consuming for them. It's what their life is about. And they understand the way that value impacts the world, the reason why people want to trade for it, and the reason why they're making a profit. The profit to them is not to something that happens as an accounting entry. Profit of them is a consequence of the values that they created. It's a consequence of changing the world. It's a consequence of changing the lives of other people. That's why other people were willing to trade with you over and over again and allowing you to make ever greater profits. I mean Steve Jobs understood what the iPhone was going to do to the world. Bill Gates understood that having a computer on every desk, what that would do to the world. He understood the value that he was adding and why it was valuable and why it was going to be unbelievably profitable and why that profit was completely legit and mowl and justifiable. And CEOs create a culture around them in their own image. Take what's his name, GE, I forget his name, the great CEO of General Electric. General Electric's been around for over 100 years and he came in and he restructured the business and he ran it ruthlessly. But he was brilliant and he created this amazing, Jack Walsh created this amazing, profitable, self-sustaining, values creating business and it wasn't that he was in love with any particular product but he understood business, he understood the scope of what GE was creating. He understood the value creating process and he created a business culture that was in his image but the values were not in his image because the values were there before he got there. I mean the products, right? But he understood the value those products represented and he understood he was super pro-profits, he was super pro-shehode wealth. I mean he talked about maximizing shehode wealth, Jack Walsh did it and he did it with a company that did 10 different things, hundreds of different products. A company where he probably didn't even understand in the minutest of detail every single one of the products that they created but he understood that what they were doing was good, valuable, worthwhile that it was a valuable endeavor and that the profits reflected that value creation. They weren't in contradiction to that value creation. Whereas this is the guy who took over GE after him, Jeff Immelt, didn't appreciate that. To him, GE was just a great big company that had, there was an opportunity for him to elevate his own status but also I think he took seriously the stakeholder and the corporate responsibility and social responsibility and this is a way for him to have this vague amorphous value detached. So detached from values impact on the world. And he almost ran the business into the ground. He destroyed most of the wealth that Jack Walsh had created and he was a political schmoozer and I think most people who ultimately want to be corporate social responsibility, want to be good conventional morality, good, become political schmoozers. SBF is the same thing. He became a political schmoozer. The people at Enron were the same thing. They forgot about the value creation part. Thanks, Andrew. Adam says for $100, thank you. $100 for referencing one of my favorite parts of Atlas Shrugged. Not only Henry taking huge profits from Dagny but who are accepting it, yes. And expecting it and admiring it. She would have viewed Hanke's week if he'd done her a favor because remember she's in trouble. She's struggling. Yes, those kind of exchanges are fantastic. Where the values are right out there, right? There's no, they say them. It's what I think people who don't like the book, one of the things they don't like about it, because they like subtlety and you know, where things are not really, you know, sophisticated people don't just tell you what they think. Don't just tell you what their values are. That's crude. And yet in Atlas, our heroes say it like it is. Reality is what it is. Okay, that's off topic. All right, Finn Hopper for $50 says, being really enjoying the show lately, that's good. Please have this $50, thank you. I also wanted to recommend the book, The Future's Faster Than You Think. Okay, thank you. I'm going to copy-paste that. I appreciate the recommendation. And very optimistic read in an ingenious way. It's about converging technology. I'm starting chip wars next also. Good. I think you'll really enjoy chip wars, particularly given what's going on right now. It's so current and so relevant. All right, let's see. So we've got a bunch of, I'm just looking at the $5, $10 questions to see if anything super relevant. Oh, we answered that. Yeah, this is a question that's relevant, right? Why did you choose to not go to Wall Street and become a millionaire? Would that not have helped you fund, make progress with Objectivism better? No. I mean, if I'd gone to Wall Street and made a lot of money, I would have had to devote all my time and energy and effort to making money on Wall Street. I wouldn't have had time to really studying Objectivism and learning Objectivism. Yes, I could have funded other people to then progress with Objectivism, but my goal in life is not a detached progress in Objectivism. There can be your goal in life. That's what SBF did. His goal in life was to help people in Africa so he went and make a lot of money. But that's strange. One of your cardinal values in life should be purpose, career. And you need to find a career that you love and you enjoy and you flourish within. And so I chose a career that I loved, that I enjoyed, that I was flourishing within, because that was much more important to me than making money. And that career ultimately became, you know, promoting Objectivism. But it was promoting Objectivism as a career, not as, I'll just throw money at it, not as I'm going to sacrifice 20 years of my life to make a lot of money, so then I could do what I really wanted to do. No, I mean, you've got to live, you live now, and you've got to live your values now. And my values were not, I mean, it wasn't interesting to me to go and work in Wall Street for the sake of working. I mean, I literally turned down a very high-paying job to pursue this, because I love this. It wasn't exactly this, it was something else. But it was teaching, it was running Objectivist conferences, it was doing it because it involved doing. The doing is what's fun. It's not an abstraction, progress of Objectivism. I mean, even today, that's not what, you know, if somebody told me, yeah, I don't know, but that's not what excites me. What excites me is the doing about Objectivism. And it could have done that if I'd gone to Wall Street. But life's not about money. It really isn't. Money is important. But money is important for a variety of reasons. We can talk sometime about why money is important. But it's not about money. All right, let's see. Len says... Okay, on topic. Oh, this is on topic. Asking for friend. What about going and shopping, lobbying for subsidy services and providing input for self-serving subsidy services as with most newables and exteriors asked for by multiple social stakeholders? I don't know what social stakeholders means. I think it depends. So if you're initiating the lobbying, if you're initiating the manipulation, then I think it's absolutely immoral and wrong. It's anti-value creation. It's anti-the system that makes life flourish and succeed and therefore should be out and out rejected. But often lobbying and going and dealing with regulators and accepting subsidies and all of that is necessary for survival because of the mixed economy, because of statism, because of all the government has in the economy. If you're a banker, what choice do you have to accept deposit insurance? You can be a banker without deposit insurance. And as it turned out, when top was offered, you didn't have a choice not to take it. And if you know that the regulators are meeting right now to decide on future regulations of the banking industry, not whether they have them or not have them, but what they will be, don't you want to have a voice in what they will be, given how much they'd affect your business? So, you know, so take, I know, I mean, I'll be hated for this example, but take Facebook. Facebook originally didn't want any regulations imposed on it. It didn't want to get involved in all of that. And then Congress brought Zuckerberg in front of them and they basically said, we're going to regulate you. And even before we regulate it, we expect you to behave in a certain way. And if you don't expect to behave in a certain way, we're going to punish you. We're going to penalize you. We're going to lamblash you. We're going to do all this thing. Now, if Zuckerberg had a proper rational pro-life philosophy, he could have argued against them. He could have stood up to them. He could have done a lot of different things, but he didn't. But it's not like you want a regulation. So he went back and said, look, they're going to regulate us. So why don't we write the regulations so that they hurt us the least? And that's what they did. And then everybody said, see Zuckerberg's pro-regulations. It's not clear that he's pro-regulations. He's doing this in self-defense. So the bottom line is to the extent that you accept subsidies and lobby and do all these other things, as an act of self-defense, not from your competitors, but from the government, then it's fine. To the extent that it's not self-defense, that you're initiating it, or that you don't have to do it, or that they're not threatening you or whatever, then it's wrong. Then it's wrong. And the sad reality is that today, for more and more and more businesses in more and more and more context, it's not an act of self-defense. You notice that even somebody like the CEO of Apple, who have a huge amount of respect for, he's not a Steve Jobs, but they still have a huge amount of respect for, how can you not, giving them out of money they make? Again, I value profits, because profits I think are a sign of value creation, even in an economy today. He goes to Washington quite often. Why does he go to Washington? Because if his voice is not heard in Washington, then they'll steamroll Apple. He goes to Washington as an act of self-defense. And it doesn't matter. He met several times with Trump, because Trump's tariffs and Trump's attacks on big tech matter to him. He's met a number of times with Biden, because Biden's tariffs and Biden's attacks on big tech matter to him. These things matter. And I don't think, I don't see how if you're big enough and you're in business today, how you can avoid them. So you get involved with politics, not because you want politics, but because if you don't get involved, they're going to get involved with you. So it's an act as an act of self-defense, you get involved. All right, we have made significant progress towards our goal, thanks to Adam, Len and Fred Harper, but we're still about $165 short. So just a reminder, since Catherine is not here, I've still got a lot of super chat questions. So there's a lot of time for you guys to step in and participate. All right, Adam, it's interesting that more people are viewing live my news shows than these other shows. I guess a lot of people just value my commentary in the news rather than commentary on kind of bigger, maybe deeper topics. Interesting. Let's see, Adam says, Dr. Peacock makes it sound simple, but it was not until the lectures of Marcy Shaw that I got the enormity of the obstacle that Ayn Rand broke and its existential importance have you listened to Marcy Shaw's lecture. No, I have no idea who Marcy Shaw is. I don't really know what you're talking about, Adam. I don't know what obstacle we're talking about in what area and what field. So I don't know Marcy Shaw. Never heard of Marcy and I've not heard the lectures. Let me just copy-paste that over. Have a reference to it. There we go. All right, sorry, Adam. If you want to follow up with giving me a little bit more context. Len says, as for dim hypothesis prediction, is Trump a failed, ridiculous M2, exuding incompetence that slows down takeover from D1, D2, and allows time for I to develop to the point M2 is much maligned, allowing for an I takeover? No, because I don't think Trump is an M2 at all. I think Trump is much more a D2 than an M2. I think Trump is a disintegrator, an agent of chaos to use Jordan Peterson's terminology. I don't think he had any principles. I don't think he had any integrating ideas. He is a disintegrator and he is disintegrated. He leads a movement that I think attributes a certain amount of integration through religion and through some kind of sense of patriotism. But I don't think Donald Trump has that, exudes that, believes any of that. So I think he's close to D2, if not a D2 outright. And as a D2, I think he is facilitating, he's setting the groundwork for the rise of N2. I don't think it's an accident that under Trump, we got M2s saying, on the right, saying, yeah, we know Trump is an agent of chaos. But look, here's a way to integrate the things that you think he's doing in a positive way. And those are nationalism. So make America great again. America first, great slogans. He didn't believe them. He didn't understand them. He didn't have any conception of them. He didn't do anything to promote them. But somebody comes around and said, look, these are great slogans. Yes, here's an integrated view of doing it. We can integrate it around nationalism, around religion, around these other things. And that's the conservative nationalist. That's the integralist. That's the whole rise on the right of the new right, which is an M2 movement dedicated to wrapping the world around, wrapping America around the political process, around the flag, and around religion, and embracing religion and the flag, and creating an integrating principle around those features and maybe integrating environmentalism in there too, because I think most of them, at the end of the day, are failing environmentalists. I think religious people generally are pretty environmentalists. It's associated with a left today, but I don't think it has to be. So I think that it's the M2s capitalizing on the chaos that Trump's D2 is creating. Jennifer, did you read DeSantis' Investigating Vaccine Companies? I don't know what for. He is not looking so good. Yeah, I'm going to comment on that on tomorrow's show because it popped up under my newsfeed today. Yeah, I mean, I'm becoming very unenthusiastic about DeSantis, and I'm probably going to be talking a lot against DeSantis. There's this latest vaccine investigation and going to the Supreme Court of Florida to get approval, to get a grand jury to investigate. They cover up a vaccine companies over side effects and all of that stuff. I think it's so pathetic and politicized. And I think it's a massive mistake for DeSantis because it aligns him with the cookie right and it aligns him with I think the elements of the right that prohibit you from winning. I think what we learned from the last six years is, yeah, Trump can win because he's a celebrity and he's got a big name and all of that. But to win, Republicans, if you look at Georgia, Camp wins. Indeed, Republicans win up and down the ticket, but Walker doesn't. And it's not because of turnout. Republicans turned out in large numbers for Trump in 2020 and for Walker in 2022 and they lost. Why? Because moderate Republicans and the dependents wouldn't vote for him. They voted for Warnock in spite of the fact that he's a Democrat because they couldn't bring themselves to voting for Walker because of what he represented. You have to win over what people call moderate, I would call rational, Republicans and you have to win over independents. Otherwise, you cannot win the presidency. Trump did it in 2016 because people hated Hillary Clinton so much that they were willing to throw it all to the wind and try something new. And people felt alienated and confused and the country seemed like it was in bad shape and they'd had enough of Obama and they wanted to change direction clearly. But Trump couldn't win a second time because he alienated independents and I think Republicans who were willing to vote Democratic once in a while. And that's what Walker did and that's what a lot of the, that's what they did in Pennsylvania and that's what a lot of these Republican candidates said to win you have to appeal to independents and you have to appeal to Republicans who don't believe vaccines are killing us and what the Santas has done so far is appeal to the base and he's done a really good job at appealing to the base and you could argue you have to do that if you're gonna win, fine. So he's done a bunch of that and now he's in a position to win. Why does he keep doing it? Because this vaccine thing is just an appeal to the base. Why does he keep doing it? Because it's not just him trying to appeal to the base this is where he really is. And if this is where he really is if this is who Ron DeSantis is if all the crazy legislation that he's allowed in Florida was not just to appeal to the base so he could run for president but it's really what he is then he should not be president and I will fight against him being president. Jeff says, I heard through the news yesterday that they figured out how to make nuclear fusion work with lasers at Lawrence Livermore do you think this could be equivalent to Gold's motor? Well, I don't know that it's equivalent to Gold's motor Gold's motor is literally... So no, I don't think it's Gold's motor it's a huge breakthrough. You still have to... there's a huge breakthrough still have to happen in order to make this a viable source of energy that is economic. So they have produced net because what happened with fusion in the past is it was a net energy waste user so you got negative energy out of it now they've got positive energy so it's a net energy plus producer but it costs a fortune very difficult it's under very, very special conditions we're a long way off from actually producing nuclear fusion that can produce large quantities of power at an affordable or even reasonable price that's still way in the future but it's interesting again, I was going to talk about it tomorrow you guys are eating up all my news items for tomorrow Fenn Opposites, the CCP's primary goal is to maintain and grow the party's power I agree with that I wish they could understand that China would be much more powerful if it respected rights and liberty their party would be the most powerful it's ever been well, the party wouldn't be then because the only way China would be more powerful the only way it could respect rights and liberty is if the party dissolved and went away and there was no party and they care about the party above everything else they also have a wrong conception of history they care about stability and unity more than they care about progress they believe in central planning they believe central planning somehow works but their goal is their own power lust not the war being of China alright, so we're only $118 short of our goal tonight let's see if we can make that up in the next few minutes as I answer these final few questions now, Michael says all the Nazi big shots started as Catholics it's ominous, so many conservative intellectuals will latch you onto Catholicism many of them, I don't know about the Nazis but many of these Catholic intellectuals didn't start out as Catholics that's what's interesting, most of them are converts I think that's true of Danine that's true of Soha Bamaari but that's true of a number of the leading intellectuals in the New Right are recent converts to Catholicism and it shows the power of Catholicism as the most intellectual set of ideas in Christianity it also makes it particularly evil James says, is it possible that biological matter already existed there was no origin of life just like there's no origin of the universe? yeah, I certainly think it is possible I don't know if it's consistent with our understanding of physics or understanding of how the universe got to where it is today from the perspective of planets and sun and all of that I don't know if that's consistent there could be a stuff that's life that is always being there there could be stuff that is consciousness I just don't know, that's way beyond my pay scale but I don't see any reason why it's not possible it's just a question that doesn't contradict any of the knowledge about physics it might Newt Gingrich said we can either have big God or big government we can't have both true I want to pull my hair out I know, me too how can smart people possibly believe this medieval nonsense because they can't conceive of an alternative or the alternative scares them or they're so committed to this for so many years that even when they confront it with an alternative they have to evade it because otherwise their mind would go blow up Harper Campbell says objective is so obviously true, there are no answers to it yet so few people take it seriously it's not so obviously true the more you understand it it's not obviously true and you know take let it pick up objectivism through induction and I think you can see how God I couldn't do that how it's not so obviously true to be obviously true you would have to be able to take every concept in objectivism and tie it back to reality tie it back to concrete in reality easily, right, it's obvious and you can't do that most of us can't do that I mean Leonard showed us in objectivism through induction how to do it God so both reducing the concepts to reality which is reduction but also inducing or at least creating a path by which you could possibly induce the concept of objectivism it takes a genius like I invented to do to create it but it takes a lot of effort even for us folks after she's created it to recreate it so no, it's not obviously true at all it's one of the mistakes objectivists think is we just throw objectivism out there into the culture and it's just so obviously true they'll get it but it's not obviously true they don't get it it's something you have to really explain and work at explaining and engage in constantly and chew and chew and apply to a variety of different topics and hope people will get it because you have to do you have to help people because it just isn't alright, we're only $68 away Mike, thank you Mike just gave $50 and helped us get very close to where we need to be we're only $68 away let's see if we can make the number Catherine is not here so she won't be upset, but I might be Liam says I love your life advice even more than the political commentary your thoughts are gold thank you Liam, I really appreciate that Michael says is Catholicism more of a force for evil than Protestantism because it is more intellectual and better organized I think it probably is but at the end of the day the ground troopers of the authoritarianism ultimately will be the Protestants they're the emotionalists they're the men of action but the intellectuals guiding the revolution will ultimately be Catholics I think this is the authoritarian revolution in the future of America so the ground troops the people who have passion to stoke and the people who will go out there and bring about the revolution the Catholics will be the intellectuals that are fueling it all Liam says are emotions the psychological outcome of achieving your values or not achieving your values depending on your emotions what about people who don't have values do they not have any significant emotional responses to things some don't but almost everybody has some at least implicitly sense of the value of their own life and therefore they have emotions like fear when they feel that value they don't know how to protect that value they don't know how to keep that value and therefore they're fearful constantly they're anxious constantly so emotions are the psychological outcomes of of your of not achieving your values but of the choice of values and the conclusions you come about the world and the life about reality so the emotions are dramatic responses that reflect the choices and decisions you've made including the choices and decisions regarding values Apollo Zeus asks what is the value of comedy and humor in life God that is a big topic Apollo Zeus and it's a complicated one I think it's relief I think again comedy like other forms of art is a way to concretize abstract values and what comedy is concretizing is the futility and stupidity of evil so I think that's what it's concretizing in an enjoyable way so I think it's a value in life because we need that release we need that concretization of an abstract thing called evil, bad stupid so it has survival value that is a survival value to make fun of the unimportant the insignificant Gail gets the last question somebody wants to jump in we are $68 short if everybody watching right now puts in 50 cents we would make it well not quite but almost if you all put a dollar we would break it so feel free to use the super chat to just contribute a dollar that would be huge thank you everybody for watching don't forget to like the show before you leave Gail says the neocons don't seem to understand that the opposite of freedom is force they seem to be a big disconnect here well it's a disconnect in the whole structure of ethics we live in a world in which people still believe that you can force people to be good force people to be ethical force people to be free force people to be good force people to be happy force people to be democratic force people to be virtuous so compulsion in the name of virtue is not a sin according to them so they want to use force to bring people freedom for being people freedom when people don't necessarily want freedom and they're not willing to fight for freedom and don't understand what freedom is and by the way neither is the neocons so yes the neocons don't understand that but they're not that many neocons in the world today they're not that many neocons neocons is a particular type of conservative and those conservatives almost all of them are never trumpers and almost all of them are kind of their influence is way way way reduced in what it used to be alright let's see a lot of people have stepped up to the one dollar challenge I see John Bales twenty dollars so that he's taken up a lot of your one dollars but John thank you Daniel thank you Themaster thank you Donald thank you Mr. Muffin thank you really appreciate it so now we're just sixteen dollars away from a goal so we're literally almost there let's see Andrew said asks I once said Rand was a genius in a group of objectivists and they were shocked which confused me she didn't consider herself a genius she said she was just more honest than others how do you interpret her self-evaluation I think it's hard to conceive of yourself as a genius because you are what you are and I think that's an evaluation that's very difficult to make and she didn't want to attribute it to she a host power she wanted to attribute to the way she used it but look she was a genius she was a super genius she was a once in a millennium genius so it wasn't just honesty there are lots of people that are honest but she combined honesty with a very unique intellectual capacity with the host power to make that honesty matter and what's unique about her is that she was a philosopher that is she applied it to every aspect of her life she didn't just and she applied it not just to work not just to philosophizing if you will but also to her life so she took philosophy seriously that's the other aspect of her that makes it special she took it all seriously and lived it so I don't know why anybody was shocked of course she was a genius and I think I think she knew she was a genius I don't think she maybe knew when she was young but I think as she grew up she saw everybody around her I think she realized she was a smarter name but even other people who were honest her level of honesty what she meant by honesty is a connection to reality that's very very different Christopher says any idea what made Ayn Rand laugh I mean the best source for that is I think the 100 voices it's a book that came out it's a book that came out and that people described experiences they had with Ayn Rand 100 different people interviews you can find it online and there I think there's some stories about what made her laugh but it doesn't come I don't have it at the top of my mind sorry Christopher thank you we've made the goal appreciate it this is great it has two essentials uncommon, new, absurd and of no consequences a sense of humor is formed out of exposure and expectations of what is common and possible given your life experience yes I mean I think there's more to it but yes but it has to in some way what you're making fun of has to be something unimportant because if it's important then you would feel offended rather than humid by the fact that it's being made fun of the line of what's funny and a fence hinges on what you think is of consequence and how often you experience what the joke might be about know your audience yeah I think everything you said makes sense I'd have to think about it more but I think that makes sense cool Richard a business startup develops products that create customers shareholders value follows sometimes much later yes absolutely but why are you creating the products you're creating a products so that you can trade them for profit with customers you're creating the products I know because you love it but then it's a hobby if you're creating the products not to sell them to trade them and to make a profit so core to the whole idea of a startup is the idea of making money it's why venture capitalists invest it's why you set up the business in the way you set it up MH08 says he's kicking him a couple of bucks I appreciate that thank you ApolloZoo says favorite weight training exercise pushups I do a lot of pushups I don't know if it's my favorite but anything that uses this motion is I like that uses the chest muscles and the triceps so I like pushups I like the machines where you're pushing but they all can be very very painful they all can be very very painful Jennifer thank you and cook is your on woke or red pilled maybe I'm purple pilled I think I'm blue pilled blue is my favorite color so I'm gonna go with blue pilled bye everybody have a great rest of your week I'll see you in the morning hard to believe but less than I don't know in about 12 hours I hope everybody has a great night and don't forget to like the show don't forget to share the short segments don't forget to support the show on a monthly basis on PayPal on subscribe star Patreon or any other service that you might find appropriate