 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 Saturday, as Robert says in the chat, Happy Saturday, team. Time to rock the house. And he means, rock the world. Yeah, time to change the world. So please feel free to share this. Go on on Twitter, X, whatever the hell they call it, Facebook, whatever you call it, and let the world know that we're on. We're talking about, we're talking about a culture of fear and how we can go over it and its sources and everything else. So this should be fun. A today's show is sponsored by Andrew Trager. So I don't know if Andrew's here, I assume he's here. I think he's here. We'll find out. But Andrew, who's a regular super chat supporter of the show and is almost always here, he's a sponsored today's show, which means he gotta pick the topic and help fund the show. So there's Andrew, he's definitely here. He also sent me a list of questions, issues. He would like covered. So we will definitely do that. Let's see, super chat is open, of course. You can ask questions on this topic on anything. Jennifer says, the world is melting. I hear it's snowing in Michigan. So I don't know how you can combine that. She's kidding. So you can use the switch out to ask questions about this topic, about any topic. Free free to ask about anything. I will get to them after we finish discussion of the topic. Let's see, what else do I wanna tell you? Somebody asked, yeah, Maximus is asking if the debate I did on welfare yesterday was recorded. It was, it was live streamed. But I think they take it off at the end of the live stream and then they clean it up and then they put it back on. I think they don't edit it. But maybe they edit the beginning and the end or something. Anyway, it should go up on the channel where we live streamed it yesterday, which, so put it this way, when it goes up, I'll get a link and I'll put it on Twitter. But it should be up any day now. Should be up today, tomorrow, somewhere like that. All right, I'm also doing a debate tomorrow, not live streamed, interesting. It's not gonna be live streamed. It's on the Israeli-Palestinian issue with this Palestinian libertarian Bitcoiner. And it will be, we'll see. It's gonna be contentious. It's gonna be, I'm glad we're not in the same room, I guess. We'll see how it goes. It's gonna be very difficult. And the plan is four hours. So I, you know, we'll see. I hope it's not four hours. Four hours is a little long. And I've got other things to do, but it's gonna be a long debate. So that'll be interesting tomorrow. What else do we have? Yeah, news about Millet. Just wanna update you on Millet. It looks like the Millet thing will not be me and Millet doing a panel. I mean, it was kind of, you know, surprising that that would ever be considered really, if you think about it. I mean, he's the president of the country, who am I? And so I think it's just gonna be Millet answering questions at the event. I'll get to meet him, I'll get to talk to him, but I don't think I'll be up on stage with him. He will just be doing a Q&A by himself on stage, which is too bad. Would it be fun to actually engage with him? But he is busy running a country and it's not exactly a position in which you wanna publicly debate people or engage in public dialogue about things. I mean, basically, once you become a political leader, it's about you telling the rest of the world stuff. But at least they're gonna meet him and say hello and so on, so that'll be good. All right, let's see, what else? Yeah, don't forget to go on your social media platform right now and let the world know we're live. So maybe they'll join us, that'll be great. Thank you. Miroslav says the debate is unlisted but accessible. So you can access the debate from yesterday at that link. I don't know if it's worth your while, I really don't. I mean, I really don't think it is worth your while to watch the debate and spend the time. I mean, you might find it interesting, I don't know. I was, yeah, I just don't think there's that much value there. Generally, I don't like debates, but other people's debates, I like doing them, I guess. Although I find them frustrating as hell, yesterday certainly was frustrating, but I don't think Jennifer says she had a lead because it was horrible. I assume that's about the debate. All right, let's see. Robert says he's posted a link in his Facebook news feed. We have a link in this feed. So if you really want to watch it, it's right here. Right here and do it. All right, so what we want to talk about today is something I've talked about quite often or brought up quite often, but we want to dig a little deeper into this topic. We live in a culture where fear plays a huge role. We live in a culture where so much of, I think individuals' lives and our political lives, are really shaped by fear. And I think what we want to think about today, and I'm curious in your ideas and your suggestions and your comments, you can use the super chat to make them, is how they manifest itself in a variety of different ways and why it is. So first we're going to show that it exists, talk about why it is, and then maybe talk about how we reverse it, how we get out of it, how we get out of it. So let's start with, is it indeed out there? And I think you see it in the relative passivity of so many people in our culture, the lack of ambition, the lack of risk taking, and really the demand by individuals to eliminate risk for them, to get rid of risk for themselves. I don't know, there's a super chat that asks me, have you found a curriculum of a course you like, I don't know what course you're talking about. I don't know what curriculum, I don't know what course, so I'm confused. Anyway, it was a distraction. You see the fear in all the demands that individual makes on the government to protect them, to shield them. You see the fear in people not willing to move. So mobility, mobility, not social mobility, income mobility, but geographic mobility in the United States is I think at all times those, people don't want to move, and they're willing to be unemployed, and they're willing to live a crappy life, and they don't want to move, even though they're opportunities, they're jobs. I mean, think about that in comparison to immigrants, you know, those evil immigrants that everybody loves to hate, who, yeah, they leave horrible circumstances, but think about the trek they need to make. Think about how little they know of the place they're going to. Certainly think about immigrants 150 years ago, you're almost nothing about the place they were going to. And the trek was a three-week or three-month journey, sometimes, you know, off and over the ocean, and then by land, to wherever it is, they landed up in the middle of the wilderness. But think even today about the immigrant who leaves Nicaragua and just sets sun foot to Mexico, not knowing what's gonna happen, whether they'll get through, whether they'll be turned back, whether they're gonna be raped, murdered, stolen farm on the way. So think about the difference, all a lot of Americans have to do is pack up their stuff, get in a car, rent a U-Haul if they can afford it, or put their stuff in storage, and then go find, go somewhere where there's a job. I still don't understand what you're talking about, Jim. Sorry, Jim Brown. So the lack of mobility, I think it's a big part of this. Jennifer says, Jennifer says, helicopter parents, yeah. We don't let our kids out of sight. They can't play by themselves. They can't climb trees, jump off of walls, I don't know, do crazy stuff that I certainly did, a lot of us did, we don't let our kids do it. You know, physical harm is just, the risk of physical harm is just, we're trying to drive it to zero. Trying to drive it to zero. You know, it manifests itself in so many different things when it comes to policy-wise, right? We have to have the government regulate every aspect of what we buy and what we buy because God forbid you buy something that you didn't intend or you buy something that's quote unsafe. You can't be trusted to determine that. You can't be trusted to figure it out and the risk, we create a whole bureaucracy to test everything, check everything, make sure everything is the way it's supposed to be. Everybody rides a bicycle with a helmet. Now maybe that makes sense, I don't know, but I never rode a bicycle with a helmet ever in my entire life. But then again, I never grew up while wearing seatbelts either. And when I started wearing seatbelts, it was very strange to me. I mean, I was in my mid-20s probably, early 20s I refused to wear seatbelt. And it probably makes sense to wear seatbelts. I'm not saying these things don't make sense, but it's just given how much of it there is, there's something underlying this that's much more important. I guess more crucial than any of that, we're afraid of change. AI is coming. Oh my God, what is AI gonna do to you? It's gonna kill us all and it's gonna take our jobs. It's, you know, terminate all over again. Well, terminate and leave your life. It never really happened, right? It's in the way we look at these immigrants coming into our country. Oh my God, immigrants are coming. They're gonna kill me. They're gonna rape. They're gonna destroy. They're gonna take my job. They're gonna lower the quality of life. They're gonna spit in the bus. They're gonna, I don't know, do horrible things everywhere. Fear. There's no stepping back and thinking. Just fear. And because social media is such today, fear spreads very, very quickly. So I just, somebody sent me, you know, people on social media are constantly trying to prove me wrong, which is great because, you know, maybe they will and sometimes I am wrong and that's good. Um, but I saw a video, somebody sent me a video and said, see these immigrants. See how dangerous they are? So it's a, I guess it's a video, a TikTok video of an immigrant who's telling everybody about the story I told you about, like yesterday, about squatters. And telling them how they can squat in people's homes and they can go in and they can take over people's homes and they can't get kicked out. And this is the way to solve their housing problems as immigrants. And they're like, okay, so somebody posted this on TikTok and I'm sure there are a few immigrants, illegal immigrants, as they say, university professors, illegal immigrants today who do this. It's possible. I'm pretty sure that most of the squatters could be wrong. I don't have the stats, but pretty sure of this. Are Americans legally here? Probably several generations. Maybe there's some legal immigrants, maybe there's some illegal immigrants doing it. I'm pretty sure that if the law was, if property rights were respected and the law was enforced, squatting would go away. Whether illegals come here or don't come here, the squatting would go away. So while squatters are wrong and evil for doing what they do, their existence is only made possible by the fact that we won't actually enforce the laws. So instead of railing up against, let's enforce the laws about property rights and kick squatters out, we've got fear among growing about illegal immigrants that are coming to squatting in our homes. It's just, you know, because it's an invasion. It's scary. So there's fear and there's fear of change, I think, more than anything else. Technology, you know, there's a lot of people today trying to make the iPhone out to be the devil's tool. Left, right, center, all across the board. You know, it's the iPhone that is responsible for kids committing suicide. It's Facebook, it's the iPhone responsible for teen depression. It's the iPhone responsible for the lack of parental communication. It's the iPhone responsible for people not having sex as much as they used to. All kinds of stuff like that, it's all the iPhone. And God knows what new technology will bring us, the disasters that will come. And then there's fear of other countries. There's World War III, it's just around the corner. The Russians are gonna use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. This is before Putin ever mentioned nuclear weapons. In the West, we were already mentioning it. You saw it in the clip from Jordan Peterson when he talked about the Ukraine war. The fear, oh God, God, if we help Ukraine, it's World War III. We can't bomb Iran because then all the Muslims in the world will attack us. We can't defend ourselves because it's just scary. We can't say anything about good and evil because they might be offended. Can't offend anybody, that's scary. They might say nasty stuff about us. Ooh, that'll offend us. I mean, the whole cancel culture phenomena, in many respects, is driven by fear. And it's driven by the fact that people won't stand up for themselves. One of the reasons I respect JK Wallens, in spite of the fact that she's on the left, is that she won't take it. Now she has money, but she won't take it. I have a sense that even if JK Wallens didn't have money, she would not take it. It's like, you wanna cancel me? Go ahead. I'm not gonna change what I say. I'm gonna stand up for what I believe. I'm gonna articulate what I believe and I'll point out your complete and utter vile irrationality and I'll keep doing it. If everybody who has attempted to be canceled did that and did it publicly and did it consistently, the phenomena would go away. It's bullies. The only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them. I don't know. Who are we afraid of? We're afraid of the Arab world, so we support the Palestinians. We're afraid of moral condemnation from the Pope maybe. So we have to build them a port so that we can supply them with ships full of supplies. Anyway, really fear is everywhere. Think about the environmentalism. We're destroying the planet. We're gonna cook, we're gonna die. Right now, there's a big thing about El Niño, El Niño, whatever, something is shifting and next year is gonna be this disastrous, unprecedented disastrous hurricane season and we're afraid and it's on and on and on and on. So it's constant. It's everywhere. The environmentalist movement is the best, right? Don't use plastics, don't use this, don't do that, don't live, don't live because you'll kill yourself. If you live, you'll kill yourself. Life is all about dying and now it's don't take any risk because you might die and you gotta live to be 300 and if you live too vigorously, don't eat this, don't drink that, don't... It's no end to it. You know, there is this dominant emotion in our culture of fear. You know, can't trade with people because they'll take advantage of us and we'll be poorer for it. I mean, put aside the economic ignorance of it, it's driven by fear. Chinese are coming. They're gonna destroy our auto industry and they're gonna destroy every other industry and they're gonna take our jobs and they're gonna drive us into poverty. All right. Now, Andrew said something over here about conspiracy theories. I don't think conspiracy theories are an expression of fear. Conspiracy theories are part of the way people try to understand what they're feeling. So people feel the fear. They don't understand the world. The world is incomprehensible to them. They fear change, they fear everything else and they need an explanation for it. They need to find a way to explain what is actually going on here. Why is the world unintelligible to me and why they feel fear all the time and what's going on so they create elaborate conspiracy theories that basically explain the state of the world, explain why it's even scarier than anybody thought, explains why they should be really afraid even more, explains why the powers that are causing the world to be this bad are really, really, really powerful and really, really, really big and they're doing really, really, really horrible things and there's really not much you can do about it. And therefore you have no control over what is going on. It's just out of control, which just makes you fearful even more because wow, powerful people in powerful places are doing horrific things to you and your children and you can't stop it. You can't do anything about it. So then they fear everything. I mean, I mean, pedophilia is horrible and it's disgusting and it's awful and it exists at all, it's horrific but it and it exists, it's out there but it's being elevated to this constant, nonstop fear among certain people in this country. And of course it's all run again by very, very powerful people. Many of them, if not all of them being Jews because yeah, Jews are a good scapegoat but it's just the other. All right, so this leads to a culture of political catastrophizing of doomsday, the world's gonna end and it's across the board. It just, it's going up, the economy's gonna collapse. It just, it's going down, the economy's gonna collapse. It doesn't matter, we're always predicting World War III, we're predicting collapse. I mean, among free archetypes, economic collapse is just around the corner, has been just around the corner since the 1980s. Well, no, that's not right. Since the 1960s and maybe before that, I just wasn't around but certainly since the 1960s, economic collapse is just imminently, just around the corner and real collapse, not just a little bit of inflation, not just stagnation but real economic collapse may have and again, see that everywhere. So the question I ask is, is why, why? Now, I will note that there's one aspect in American culture where the fear is not that prevalent and it's worth thinking about this, right? And I'd say the one area in American culture where fear is not that prevalent is business. We still have a lot of entrepreneurs. People still start businesses. One of the things that happened during COVID is entrepreneurship went up dramatically. People started a lot of businesses. They had time in their hands and they decided this was a good time to fulfill their dream or whatever and that still happens and that's still good. Whether it's startups in Silicon Valley or whether it's somebody opening a restaurant or a corner store or whatever it is, there's still an entrepreneur spirit in this country that goes in against this fear-based mentality and the dominance of fear. It's the one realm where there seems to be some sense of, I don't know, rationality that people understand. You have a product, you have to sell it, people have to want it, you do some marketing. It's understandable, it's graspable, it's containable. Anything to do with anything bigger than that is very difficult. So why? Why is there so much fear? Well, I think the underlying cause has to be, and look, we'll talk a little bit about psychological issues but I don't know psychologists. I don't want to speculate about psychology. What we're really looking for is the ideological reasons and how they maybe manifest in the way people think and behave but not pure psychology and when one does, yeah. So we live in a culture that has, I think, three components philosophically. None of these components are consistent. None of these, these are three components, I think, that lead to fear. None of them are consistent. None of them are played out throughout the culture because if they were, we would have collapsed right now but they all ultimately result in people being more fearful than they should be. Well, there are actually four that I can think of right now. We'll see. Let me spell them out and see how many we come to. One, and this has to do with metaphysics, really. People hold the view that, and this comes from religion so it's mysticism, right? They hold a mystical view. They hold a view that says reality can just shift on you. Things can just change. In a sense, A can become non-A or it can be non-A at the same time and you can't tell. I mean, maybe this is metaphysics or epistemology, it's a combination of both really but it's, I can't really trust my own mind. I can't really trust my reason. I can't really trust my senses. I can't really trust my judgment. The world is unexplainable. This is by the way why they jump to conspiracy theories. There's real, Christopher says, existential uncertainty. God might not like me tomorrow and things will be upside down. The powers to be, the spirits, the, I don't know, whatever kind of pseudo religion you believe in but mysticism undermines human reason and by undermining human reasons makes the world unintelligible and causes, I think, real insecurity. Causes, you know, a real questioning of what do I really know? What is really happening? Instead of looking scientifically for cause and effect, well, cause and effect can be mumbo jumbo, can be, you know, the cause could be something that's completely bizarre, unintelligible. And if that's the case, then why can't it be a bunch of rich Jews in a basement pizza joint organizing a pedophilia ring that ultimately will take control of the world that dictates everything that happens in our lives? Is that not just as reasonable as, I don't know, Jesus being killed on a cross and then getting resurrected and then dying for all of our sins but he doesn't really die cause he gets resurrected. Suffers for all our sins but he's really the son of God but he's not really a son of God cause he is God and there's a Holy Spirit and all three of them are different but they're really all the same and they're all exactly, I mean, what's the difference? It's all mumbo jumbo mysticism. And once you embrace in your mind some form of mumbo jumbo mysticism, just replace it with another form of mumbo jumbo mysticism and it's all in the end the same. And what that leads this Andrew calls it metaphysical insecurity, it leads to fear. I don't know. It's a shape, oh, I like that. Shape shifting world, I like that. It's a shape shifting world. I cannot trust my reason. I cannot trust my eyes. I cannot trust, so what's gonna, you know, uncertainty breeds fear. Particularly if it's metaphysical uncertainty. Particularly if it's suddenly, literally I don't know what's going on. So that's kind of metaphysics. And it's of course connected with the idea that as we in the West, well we in the world have undermined reason and continue to undermine reason and to undermine thinking and to undermine facts and evidence and all of that. And if we have taught our kids to rely on the emotions, I mean, think about any books we have out there on emotional intelligence. I'm not saying there's nothing worthwhile in those books, but the focus on emotion. When we live in an era where people are pretty good with emotions, maybe they don't introspect enough, maybe they don't deal with their emotions well enough. But emoting is not the issue. The real issue is thinking. Discovering truth, figuring stuff out. So that's what I do. I do rinse. Richard is worried about my sanity. Please don't worry about me, Richard. Worry about yourself. Best advice I have. So what do we have? We have a society that's lost its reliance on a steady, consistent metaphysics. We've lost the capacity to think logically. To reason, we've been taught that's in notifications. It's bad. So you get exactly what we're getting. That is all gonna generate fear. Now you said there were four reasons because there's one more metaphysical one and then we get to ethics. And we should actually add politics, so five. The other metaphysical one is we've been told over and over again by philosophers and by various thinkers that we have no free will. That everything is determined. Everything that happens happens for a reason. What is, is, can't change it. And what does that do? Well, it basically means we have no control. We have no control over our lives. We have no control over what happens to us. We have no control over, you know, if you go back to Calvin and, not Hobbes, I was thinking Calvin and Hobbes, but no Calvin and Luther. We have no control over whether we make it a heaven or hell. It's all predetermined. Makes no difference what you do in this life. It's just determined. And that determinism. That determinism basically says you don't have control. You don't guide your life. It is what it is. That's scary. That's very scary. My fate is written in the stars. Nothing I do makes a one Iota of difference. And I'm just stuck. So yeah, and the evolution is disempowering. Absolutely disempowering. And when you disempower it, you're fit. You're afraid. You're afraid. That's reason number three. So we got shape-shifting. Yeah, metaphysical shape-shifting. We've got, you know, abandonment of reason. We've got determinism, lack of free will. And then altruism. Altruism. You've got to live for other people. Why? How? I don't want to. Most Americans don't. Not essentially, not fundamentally. So they live for themselves a little bit, but not too much. And again, it's a morality that undermines your control over your life. It's a morality that says other people are in control. What you do with other people is what matters. What you do with yourself doesn't matter. And have I done enough? Am I a good person? Have I volunteered enough to soup kitchens? Have I sacrificed enough of my life? I don't know. You know what? I'll go to that. You know, I'll recycle this week and earn some altruistic credit. I'll get a little bit of off my guilt. But you can see how if it's again out of your control. I think this is kind of the theme that we're gonna get to. It's out of your control. It's disempowering. It's somebody else gets to determine or you get to determine based on somebody else, whether you're moral or not. The framework is others, not you. And then finally, there's the political. So that's the fifth. Well, there's six. God, of course there are. There's probably 255. But there's six that I can think of right now, philosophical ones, so let's do politics and then we'll do the other one. The political is, well, a mixed economy. How does it work? How do I know people are not screwing me? They really seem to be screwing me. People go out there and they lobby and when they lobby, they get money and they take it my expense. My taxes go up, regulations on me go up and other people seem to be doing okay. Why is it so hard for me? It's not completely intelligible. You might make a great product and there's no market for it because people are taxed because the other guy gets a subsidy and you don't. Why am I not getting the subsidy? Why is that industry getting subsidized? And my industry is not getting subsidized. Why am I going out of business? And they're being bailed out. Again, this indeterminism. I'm not controlling my fate. I'm an economic fate. My economic fate is controlled by somebody in Washington, pressure groups, cronyism, politicians, business leaders, unions, and some of it's in my favor, some of it's against it. It's a tug of war and it's unintelligible and I can't make all the connections. And particularly if I forgot reason, well then of course, I mean, even for somebody completely dedicated to a reason the mixed economy is completely impossible to figure out. So what do we do? We become afraid and we'll talk about tribalism in a minute, but we can't be afraid. We don't understand, again, it's not understanding the world. And then I'm actually going to add a six one. Five branches of philosophy plus free will, that's good. Aesthetics, aesthetics. The world of aesthetics is a world that's depressing. It's depressing, not depressing emotionally, but depressing in the sense of it is a world that describes people out of control. It describes naturalism, which is the dominant form of this art, at least in a world, in a representational world. We are just what we are. We're deterministic animals and that is fed back to us through the art, through naturalism. Or life is horrible, life is a disaster, think amongst the screen. Or life is unintelligible. It's just, there's nothing there. It's fragmented, it's broken up, it's incomprehensible. So all that metaphysical shape-shifting, think Picasso. Talk about metaphysical shape-shifting. That's the metaphysical value judgment he is projecting back to you when you see a Picasso. The world is unintelligible, broken out, fragmented, disintegrated, fundamentally disintegrated. That is Picasso. Or you watch Making Bad is no out. Everybody's a villain. And the people are not villain. Villains, the people are not villains, are just the victims of villains. So we all suffer from the villainy of so many people. Well, you watch Making Bad, and if this is the world, if this is the world projecting back to you, if this is what people have to do in order to survive, it's a dangerous world out there. It's very, very scary. So again, you're constantly aesthetics, which affirms or secures or bolsters your sense of life, your view of existence, your view, your metaphysical views, your metaphysical values. It's doing that to you. It's reinforcing all the fear. Maybe that's why horror movies are so popular. Maybe that's why science fiction movies that depict a horrible future so popular. Maybe that's why anything scary, anything fear-inducing. Jim Brown says, politics today, reality is negotiable. Yeah, that's right. So it's another reinforcement of the shape-shifting nature, the metaphysical nature of reality, which is, again, scary. So fear is a direct consequence of embracing an irrational philosophy. Fear is a direct consequence of the fact that our culture is immersed with a irrational philosophy. In every part of it, in metaphysics, epistemology, in ethics and in politics and aesthetics, every one of those, we are being inundated with ideas and facts, politics, that reinforces the fears. It really is a scary world out there. I mean, it's scary because the good guys won't do what's necessary, but it's scary. If you live in Israel, it's scary right now because Israel didn't deal with how much properly, but when you start not doing the right things, when you start being irrational, things only get scarier. So if you pay attention to the environmentalist scaremongers and you shut down all your nuclear power plants and you build solar panels in Germany where the sun never shines, and suddenly there's no energy and prices of energy go through the roof and you're in whole industrial base which is based on cheap energy collapses and you say, see, the world sucks. Yeah, the world sucks because your fears were justified because you accepted fear to begin with and you acted on that fear. So that is the reality in which we live and it's a reality that reinforces itself because the more irrational culture there is, the more things objectively in reality, the more bad things happen and the more fear becomes justified. So it's reinforcing constantly. And what do people do when they're afraid? Well, particularly when they're afraid because they've lost the tool to know reality or lost the willingness to use it, i.e. reason, rationality, when what they do is they rush to a group, to a leader, to somebody who can reassure them that they know what's going on, that they have the answer. They rush to conspiracy theories, they rush to tribes, they rush to political parties and make them into tribes, they rush to authoritarians, they rush to cults, they go anywhere they're allowed not to think because they've given up on that, but where there's something reassuring, the tribe reassures them, the leader reassures them, the cult reassures them, so they can somehow live with the fear. The conspiracy theory provides them with some kind of explanation and that reassures them. It gives them some security, it doesn't alleviate the fear, it doesn't solve their problems, it doesn't do anything, but emotionally, it quietens them down. It gives them the pretense of an explanation. It gives them the pretense of, okay, he's calling the shots, he knows what he's doing. He understands what I'm afraid of, he'll take care of me. All right, so I think that's what causes the fear and of course all of this isn't the one with psychology because the psychology, we develop all kinds of psychological defense mechanisms once we give up on reason and part of that psychology drives us to other people, part of that psychology drives us to maybe, in some people, it could drive them to be violent because reason is out, argumentation is out, all there is is force. The manifestation psychologically is neuroticism, unhappiness, and you see it in the culture, you see it everywhere you turn. And again, the art just reinforces that and reflects that back to us and builds on that and convinces us, yes, yes, yes. And what we get is the kind of politicians then who rise up, who are gonna feed on this, who are gonna take advantage of this. There's carnage in the streets of America. We're being invaded. The world is gonna warm up and we're all gonna die from the flooding and from the literal heat of the thing. You know, the whites are pressing everybody in this systemic racism everywhere and you have to be aware of the systemic something that's coming to get you. Every one of those is grounded in some element of some little bit of fact. And then God, we don't know the future, so we need to resist it, so we need to control it. We need to regulate it. Let's have AI regulations that's, and even intelligent people rush to this. So it's scary, scary. Those videos on the Southern border, those are scary, God. Really, people rushing to come into the United States, what a scary thought, what a scary idea. And they're coming from God. These horrible countries, scary, scary, scary. Fear, fear, fear. Run and hide. They're coming to get you. End of America. You know, again, fear is dominant. I think one of the reasons, and as you get older, I think fear becomes more of a part of you. I think young people tend to ignore fear more readily, although this generation, who knows? But at least in the past. So fear is, it grows with age. It's why people with age become more conservative. What does that mean? They want to conserve. They don't want change. They're against change. They don't want to, they don't want things to be altered and they resent any change. And they think this is it when change happens. All right, so how do you change this? How do you change the culture to be a culture of bravery? I don't even think it's bravery, but just a culture that doesn't fear. A culture that embraces risk. A culture that embraces failure. In many respects, how do we create a culture that is like Silicon Valley in business, but on everything? Because in Silicon Valley, they embrace risk. They embrace failure. They go for it when it comes to business. And then they panic because what have we done? Destroy the world, right? But that's the fear kicking in. So what do we need to do to do that? Well, they hint us in the things that cause the fear. So what do we need to do? Well, probably the most important thing and the thing we need to fight for most and the thing that will make the biggest difference because everything ultimately depends on it is to fight for reason, is to fight for logic, to fight for the human mind, the efficaciousness of reason, a capacity of pretty much everybody within a scope of human life and what are requirements for human life, pretty much everybody to reason. We need to change our educational establishment, particularly for young kids and through school. We need to bring back a respect for knowledge, for evidence, for facts, and excitement about discovery, and excitement for thinking, and excitement for reasoning. We need to bring back a respect for science. Science is one of the ways in which over the last 400 years, we've really figured all this out. Everything that makes human life so amazing today. It's because of science. So we need to resurrect that huge respect and admiration for the scientists, huge respect for science and encourage people to try to know some science. Now, some science is very hard, but know some basics. We need real science education in our schools, real math education in our schools. Even for people not inclined towards math and science, they need to know the basics and they need to understand it and they need to understand the relationship between science and math and thinking, in a sense, and the humanities. We need an integrated educational program that shows that the world is understandable, is comprehensible, is integrated. I mean, really, that's it because once you do that, first of all, there's a sense in which that elevation of reason and integration and it is the enlightenment, it generated the United States of America and it survived for 150 years. So just that elevates us to the level of much of the previous two centuries ago when things were culturally so much better, at least culturally in certain dimensions, right? Well, we need us to resurrect the enlightenment and then build on it and then make it even better, make it even better and that's never gonna happen, never gonna happen if the government controls education. It never gonna happen from centralized education. That will only happen when schools are competitive, when schools are competing and schools do it and produce better results, dramatically better results, win. And nobody knows exactly how to do education right in every field, in every area, but this is the beauty of an marketplace. Go compete, try new things. Let's figure out what works. Fundamental here is if we want to live in a world that is not dominated by fear, we must eliminate the source of the fear and the source of the fear is anti-reason and therefore we must embrace reason, celebrate reason, promote reason. And maybe if you're not gonna take over education, the best way to that is to promote science, respect science, hail science, there's so much anti-science today, it's mind-boggling. So yeah, I mean, that it would be massive, massive and huge. Let's see, I'm gonna look at some of Andrew's questions and make sure I've covered it all. What might must be integrated by a person and a culture to move towards a braver future? That, I mean, what needs to be integrated is the efficacy of reason, his ability to think for himself, his ability to control his own destiny, his own life. So reason also implicitly assumes or explicitly assumes free will. So free will and reason, right? I'm in control, I know, I can know and I'm in control. People who are like that, people who have a confidence in their own mind, in their own ability, and a belief that other people have that too, they don't want a government interviewing in their lives. They want to be left free. So what we need is to integrate this idea of the efficacy of reason, of the individual having reason, possessing reason, and possessing choice across every field of human knowledge. And I fear that can only be done through the educational system. What characteristic must a person build into his soul to have the courage to be successful? I think it's independent judgment, which is independent thinking, which is thinking at the end of the day. What you must build into your soul is the idea I can understand the world. I might be slower than other people, but I can figure it out. I can understand. I don't depend on other people. I am not a cog in a machine. I am not just one biological entity within, what would they call it in Star Trek? The Borg. I am an individual, independent thinking human being. That's the principle. That's the principle. And I think once you do that, then you can choose what to pursue in life, but you can do anything. What philosophical principles must become known by a culture to alleviate fear and foster courage? Again, the Enlightenment. Primarily, I mean, think about the Enlightenment. Think about people during the Enlightenment. I mean, some of them came to America out of desperation, but many of them came to America because they were ambitious and because they believed in their own capabilities. I mean, the 19th century had it and we lost it. And it had it because of the 18th century, because of the ideas of the Enlightenment. And fundamentally, three ideas in the Enlightenment, really two, a third consequence. Reason, reason, reason, reason. I keep saying that because it's at the core, it's everything. And second, individualism. I matter. My life matters. And I can take care of myself because of point number one, reason. Reason and individualism. And as a consequence, political liberty, political freedom. So those are the philosophical principles that must be fought for. Reason, individualism, capitalism. But you'll get capitalism only when reason, individualism. Reason and individualism. How does a rational culture foster courage? Because rationality fosters courage. What did Einstein say? I'm too much of a coward to lie. I'm too much of a coward to be a coward, right? I know the consequences of acting based on my emotion. I know the consequences of acting based on my fear. I know the consequences of irrationality. That's what gives you the courage. Knowing the consequences of not living the best life that you can live, not making the most of the time that you have. Yeah, Andrew said, the saying is I'm not brave enough to be a coward. Yeah. So I think with the philosophical, the rational culture doesn't directly foster courage. It's just part of it. I mean, courage is a virtue that I would put under integrity. If you teach the objective small virtues, if you create an expectation in the culture for the objective small virtues, if people end up understanding of why they should be having integrity, why they should live up to their moral ideals because it's the only way to live and it's the only way to happiness, then being courageous, being rational is relatively easy, right? That's all you need. A rational culture's attitude towards change is, you know, positive, embracing, celebratory because change in a free world is for the good. Otherwise it wouldn't happen. If it was for the bad, it wouldn't happen. How socialism, oh, what's the connection between risk and happiness? You can't make the most of your life. You can't do the things that will allow you to flourish. You can't experience the full gamut of what's possible for the human being to experience without taking on some risks. Whether it's by starting a business or whether it's by going into your boss and asking for a raise or whether it's by, you know, in some way taking a risk. Going up to the goal, you fancy and asking for a date or asking it to marry you. You know, whatever it is, the future is uncertain, so you face uncertainty constantly. So your happiness is dependent on being able to overcome fear and uncertainty and acting in ways to pursue your happiness. You start a business, you don't know what'll happen. You go into a career, you might not like it. You go study something in school, you might hate it, you might fail, you might not be smart enough. I mean, I can think of a million reasons why you shouldn't do it, but there's one reason why you should. Once you're convinced it's necessary for your happiness because it's necessary for your happiness because even if you fail, you will live tried and you know you tried and you know for whatever reason it didn't work, you go on to the next value, you find the next thing that'll get you excited, that you get motivated, that will add to your happiness. So the whole attitude towards failure is part of this, right? Failure, you're probably gonna fail in life, it's an opportunity to learn, it's going to happen, it's not the B and N, the B all and all, it's just one more thing, learn from it, move on forward. So you need to get rid of fear in order to be ambitious in order to manifest your ambition and your ambition is necessary for your happiness. If you're not ambitious, it's very hard to be happy. Troy, thank you. Troy has come in with 500 Australian dollars, thank you, really, really appreciate that. You know, sticker, that is great. Thank you, that has blown away our target. Thanks. All right, we've got a lot of super chat questions so we're gonna get to all of them. Let me, let's just finish up. How is socialism built on fear? Oh, in lots of different ways. I mean, the fear of not making it economically, the fear of poverty, the fear of failure in business, of failure in career and failure in a job, treating everybody equally no matter their ability, the fear that somebody else is more able than you and will advance faster than you. So the fear, yeah, the fear of you not making it economically, the fear of, and if you do, maybe, then the fear of you standing out, the fear of other people not liking you because you stand out. Socialism is thoroughly built on the, and you hear it though, why should we have a welfare state? Put aside, oh, what if you became poor? Well, I'll deal with it. I'll handle it. You know, why would you wanna do that? We can alleviate that problem by giving you a guarantee that you will never be poorer than X. That's the welfare state. Yeah, and in that sense, capitalism is a system for moral people. Capitalism is a system for rational people. It's a system which people willing to take on risk, people willing to live life to the fullest, people willing, people who would take their rationality seriously, people willing who are ambitious. This is a system for them. If you're not ambitious, socialism, you don't have to work too hard and you'll be just like everybody else. Capitalism is for the risk takers, the brave, the adventurers, the, but really the rational, ambitious. People who take their life seriously. I mean, we've talked about taking your life seriously. Capitalism is a system for people who take their life seriously. And that's why it's moral. Capitalism is a moral system because it leaves the people who take their life seriously free to take their life seriously, to do the things necessary to live their lives in the best way that they can imagine, that they can rationally come up with. So, yep, you know, this fear is gonna kill Western civilization. It's gonna cause us to decline. It cripples our ability to make moral judgments both as individuals and as a nation. It explains why we can't support Israel as a country, as a political entity. It explains why, you know, we cannot assimilate immigrants in certain places because we don't have the confidence we're too afraid to stand up for ourselves. And the remedy really to our problems is to create a generation of people who are courageous. But to do that, we have to really change the philosophy of the culture. We have to change the philosophy being taught at our schools and our universities. And, you know, that's a multi-generational effort. Multi-generational effort. All right, Andrew, you tell me if I've missed anything or if I haven't covered any material you would like me to cover, happy to do that. Otherwise, we will go here to the super chat. I'll remind you, super chat is open. Even though we've reached our target, you can still ask questions. We've got a lot of $20 questions. We've got a lot of under $20 questions. So we'll see how long we go today. But again, Andrew, thank you. Andrew's been amazing. He not only tons of super chats, which he does, which he participates almost in every show, and it was significant funds, but then he sponsored the show, which was $1,000 to fund the show. So sponsor a show, so it's a lot of money. So I really, really, really appreciate it. Okay, yeah, this is how your one-book show is funded. Supporters from contributions by people like you. This is how you, you guys can help get these ideas out into the culture. We get new people constantly on here. We're impacting the world. We're changing people's lives and changing people's minds in spite of some of the skeptics and the haters on the chat. We're actually bringing people to Iron Man. There were so many people at this conference in Europe that I was at in Amsterdam who told me that they discovered Iron Man because of the show or the understanding of Iron Man was deepened because of the show, and then they went on to ARU or they went out to this or they went out to that. So we are influence people, impacting people, and all of that is only possible because of the support I get from you. So thank you to all the people who support in particular, Andrew, but everybody and the superchatters, those who do the monthly support, it's great. It's great and greatly appreciate it. All right, Liam, do you think Founding Head is a better novel than Atlas Shrugged? Has one novel been more influential in the culture than the other? It's hard to tell. I think Atlas has probably been more influential just because it's easier to build a grasp, it's cultural influence. I think the Founding Head is probably is probably a better novel than Atlas Shrugged. I'm not a literary expert, so I couldn't tell you, but it's tightest story. So I think it's just probably marginally better, but I don't know, you're talking about two of my favorite books, my two favorite books, I prefer Atlas Shrugged, have a much more emotional connection to it. I also like the fact that it's big and covers the whole philosophy. But yeah, I think Founding Head is a masterpiece. And is truly brilliant and has had a lot of impact on people's actual lives, on people's actual lives. And I think the dialogue in the Founding Head is brilliant and the speeches in Atlas Shrugged are brilliant. And I think one of the reasons Founding Head is a better novel probably is because it has fewer speeches. I do think the speeches in Atlas break up the storyline. So in that sense, I mean they're both so beautifully written, so well written, pretty amazing, pretty amazing. All right, Stinger Bell, Stinger Bell, I'm skipping to the $50 questions, I should have started with them. Stinger Bell, $50, thank you Stinger. Hello, Yvonne, I saw this quote, if you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done. Make at least one definite move daily towards your goal. To me this quote assumes a disconnect between thinking and action, any thoughts. I mean, there's an element of truth to the saying, right? There's an element of truth in that a lot of people are procrastinators, a lot of people just devote time to thinking and they divorce it from action. I think what the quote is encouraging you to do in a somewhat, I think superficial way, it's to integrate thought with action and to make sure they're integrated because a lot of people just dream. They don't do, right? They don't do, they just dream. And so it's, so I think the quote is decent. I think what it should remind you of is the integration you're talking about. Thinking is impotent unless you act. So the quote is reminding you to act. And whether you do one act every day or five acts every day or whatever, that's, I don't think, the issue. How you act, when you act. I mean, you have to think it through, right? You have to do a lot of thinking before you act and then when you act you have to constantly be thinking and then you have to constantly be acting. And I don't know what one thing to do every day, that sounds like a silly rule, but the point is do act, you know, integrate. James, using reason to explain the world requires real engagement, real effort. People's default is unthinking, drifting. Most of mankind is still in its infancy except for a few thousand objectives sparsely scattered around the world. Well, I wouldn't say it's just objectivist that plenty of people who think, particularly in particular fields. But yes, you're absolutely right. It requires real engagement, real effort. Inland has this brilliant essay called The Missing Link. It's an essay about how people don't think. It's an essay about the fact. You know, the Missing Link, it's an essay about the fact that people, so many people stay at a perceptual level and never achieve the conceptual level, i.e. reason, i.e. thinking, because they're stuck at the perceptual. And I would say that reaching the conceptual level takes effort, takes focus, and takes courage. It takes courage. So how do you recommend you find, I think it's in Philosophy Who Needs It, the essay The Missing Link, The Missing Link, Shahzad. I saw the second half of yesterday's debate. It seemed like a no-win scenario. Judging by the chat, the audience was too far gone to listen to anything you said. Your opponent reminded me of the wet nurse, maybe if he spent two years in a steel mill. Yeah, I doubt it. Yeah, the first half was better. The second half was the empirical evidence about whether Wolf's State is good or not. What empirical evidence? Particularly when you haven't defined what's good or not. But if you watch the first part, you'll see it's all about ethics. And he never defines ethics. He never talks about ethics, but he's pretending that he's talking about ethics. And his bottom line is he doesn't believe in property. Property is the original sin, right? Which Liam, these squatters' rights laws are clinically insane. Imagine if I stole a car, filled it with gas, showed the police the receipt, and then asserted that the car was mine now. They must want homeowners to snap and start taking their property back by force. I mean, I don't know what, how this happened. I mean, I know who did it. It's the anti-property wing of the left. So it's a crazy leftist. But how this is allowed to exist, how people don't rebel against this. This is super fundamental. Once we don't even have a right to our own property, physical property, in the form of a home, what do we have a right to? Nothing, really? So this is one that really should be fought. I hope that like Pacific Legal Foundation or Institute for Justice are taking on squatter cases and trying to show that these squatter rights laws are unconstitutional. I hope so. I hope so. By the way, I read a story somewhere. I meant to mention this yesterday, but I forgot. A story somewhere where this guy now has a, he'll get rid of squatters for you. And what he does is he squats on the squatters. He'll carry a gun and he's a big guy and you'll wait for the squatter to leave the house. When they leave the house, he'll break in. He will basically start squatting there. And when the squatters come back, he'll say, no, this is mine now. I've been here, I've changed the locks. This is not mine. Get out of here. And most of the time, the squatters will run away because the squatters will run away because the cow is and they don't want, they don't want it. So he'll squat the squatters. And then he'll hand it back to the homeowner, right? He'll change the locks, they'll build security and they'll bring in, so squat busters. I like that, thought criminal says squat busters. And he's built a whole business about this and he's making good money by doing it. So the market will help you solve these problems but it's tragic that the government doesn't just solve it by just the police going in and arresting a squatter. Squatters are unequivocal, clear-cut, violating property rights. They're stealing, they're thieves and they should be arrested and put in jail. Just like any other thief would be. Well, in the days where we arrest the thieves, we don't anymore, I guess. All right, let's see what's going on. All right, Andrew's disappeared from the chat. I don't know where he is, all right. James, you see with Frankenstein and most of our leftists are overloads operate under the premise that brown people are too stupid to control themselves. The Palestinians can't help it. Israel should have known better not to upset them. Yeah, there's definitely a sense of that, right? There's definitely a sense that, call it brown people, call it other cultures, philosophy, king kind of attitude of even our people, we have to control and we have to manage. But those people, they're completely out of control and they can't manage their own affairs and they can't manage their own life and we certainly have to control them. And by the way, that is the same thing with the immigrants, right? Immigrants tend to be brown. These animals, we are told, these are criminals, we are told, these are horrible human beings, we are told, these are people with a different culture that's gonna destroy ours, we are told. And a lot of it has to do with whether it's leftist overloads or rightist overloads of this philosophy, king attitude of they are not fully human or they are not, you know, nobody can take care of themselves is the platonic premise. They of course can't take care of themselves because they are different, primitive. Hoppe Campbell, I am so old that I can remember when other people's achievements were considered to be an inspiration rather than a grievance. Hoppe Campbell is pretty young, I think, isn't he? I'm pretty sure he's a young guy. So, thank you. Yes, I think that's absolutely right, Hoppe Campbell. I remember those days, of course, even those days were quite as good as the older days. I think society is deteriorated slowly and it's just accumulated so much that now we really, really feel it. All right, Andrew, $50, but thank you, Andrew. I thought it was a great show, a very systematic analysis. I'll drag you to one purely psychological question. A lot of strong people try to repress fear entirely and it makes them guarded. Thoughts on a healthy personal attitude towards fear. Yeah, I think when you feel fear and you all will and you all should, the things you should be afraid of. Fear is a red flag. What is going on? Why do I feel it? What can I do about it? What are the facts and reality that are causing this? And what is in my control and what can I change about it? You might fear because, I don't know, a loved one was diagnosed with a horrible disease and that fear is completely legitimate, but now what? It should always be now what? Where do I find the best doctors? What is the best treatment? How do we do the best research to solve this issue? Or if it truly is fatal, then how am I gonna live without them? What's life gonna look like? How am I gonna solve this issue? Because I don't know how to live without them. What was the other one? Healthy personal attitude towards fear. So, okay, so I'm afraid of starting this business. What's the worst that can happen? You know, these are the kind of questions to ask yourself. What's the worst that can happen? What's the best that can happen? Is the best worth it? What's most likely? You know, how would I deal with failure? What will happen if I fail in a sense of what the worst can happen? So, there's a lot of, the fear is a red flag. It's an emotional red flag. And now you're gonna need to bring it to the conceptual level. And now you need to think it through. Now you need to figure out consequences, causes, and deal with whatever issues has brought up the fear. So, a lot of introspection, and a lot of thinking through, asking yourself lots of questions that have to do with this particular emotional state. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Andrew. Clark, a man who doubts himself, is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself, being the first person to be convinced of it. I mean, I think that's right, although, you know, you can't, I mean, doubt is not completely rational. I mean, there's certain things where you gotta have doubt about how much you know, you gotta have doubt about your own capabilities. Doubt is not ominous, or always wrong, or always irrational, and always destructive. Doubt often is, hmm, what do I actually know about this? It's a source of further thinking and establishing what you do know. But generally, if you doubt yourself, quiet yourself. That is, if you don't have the self-esteem, if everything is in doubt, then yes, then you are making yourself enemy number one of yourself. Jennifer says, Christianity is an Armageddon myth. Does Islam or Judaism have one, that too? Before I answer that, you're absolutely right, Jennifer, in a sense that Christianity has an Armageddon myth, and that myth plays a huge role in this idea of fear. Think about Christianity, it has, because I didn't really emphasize Christianity in my analysis, but if you really think about it, the very existence of hell in Christian mythology, the emphasis on hell, the discussion of hell, the fact that we might go to hell, and that you have no control over whether you go to hell or not, or according to Catholics you do, but then you have to bribe the church in certain ways in order to go to hell. But the fact that there's a hell is scary, and that infuses fear in the culture. You know, eternity, it's not just hell is a bad place, and you'll suffer a little bit. It's not even like being tortured, or having a 10-year horrible experience. Eternity, physical pain of burning flesh. I mean, these Christians are psychological sadists. Psychological sadists. To give people the idea that they are going, that a good portion of them are going to hell, and many of you are going to hell because your parents had sex. So you're going to hell for the very fact that you exist, very fact that you exist. I mean, that is so sick, that is so distorting and deforming of a culture, and so inducing of fear. I mean, if that was really a possibility, that it was going to hell forever. I mean, that would be scary. I'd really be afraid of dying. I'd be afraid of anything I did in life. So if you think about how Christianity is so pervasive in our culture, even among secularists, and how it has dominated our culture 2,000 years of this crap. 2,000 years of this in everything, in our education, in our arts, in every aspect of our life. And now you have to live with this constant fear, well, of course you're going to be afraid of everything. Suddenly be afraid of asserting yourself too much, because that's the center of pride, and that definitely takes you to hell. So thanks, Jennifer, for reminding me of Christianity. I didn't do enough to condemn it today. I have it as a program to try to condemn it as often as I can, as many times as I can. Andrew says, I used to pretend the floor was burning to try to conceive of hell. God. I mean, that is, think about that, what it does to your psychology. I get it, but wow. Now notice, Judaism doesn't have a hell, not explicitly, not explicitly. It's not after life in Judaism, really. I don't know enough about Islam. There's definitely an after life in Islam. I don't know if there's a hell in Islam. But just think about what hell. Yeah, no, I assumed it was as a child, but that doesn't go, I mean, having to deal with that, you get psychological scholars from it. There's just no way around it. You get, there's just no way around it. Now does Judaism have a Armageddon myth? Yes and no. I can't remember the prophet. I never really focused on this, but there is one of the prophets, maybe to portray this horrific day of judgment where God comes down and he judges everybody and there's a Messiah with him. This is the origins of the Jesus myth. And there is this, but it's not part of the religion you know, it's not something Jews live with. It's like, yeah, this crazy prophet said these things. The Christians took that and turned it into an entire, an entire mythology and entire theology around that, which the Jews never had. I don't know if Islam has an Armageddon. I don't know. I think they have the same kind of Armageddon as the Jews, not the same as the Christians. Where we know exactly what happens in the death judgment. Everybody goes, the people who are awarded go to heaven and the others go to hell and the death rise up and rise up from the graves. It's why you don't want to be, you don't want to be, what do you call it, burnt when you're dead. You want your body to be preserved because the body is raised up. I guess those skeletons turned into flesh. The whole thing is, it's just a crazy religion, really is. Jennifer, forced economy, you have zero control. You have total control over everything, both wrong, nil put, we draw our own designs, but fortune has to make that frame. Of course, the more you think, the more control you have. Yeah, absolutely, Jennifer. And you see this forced economy play out into the culture. People tell you, because you don't have total control, because you didn't determine who your teacher was in third grade, this is from Obama's speech, because you didn't do this, because you didn't pave the roads that you drive on. Therefore, you don't deserve it because you didn't have total control of everything, which is just a forced economy and ridiculous. You do the best that you can within the context that you exist in. Clark, ARI is solving the world's problems by putting the right institutions in place and seeding the ground in a way that will produce future generations of people who will embrace reason. I think that's right, I think that's right. And as we move more and more towards, ultimately, hopefully maybe, creating our own university, that's exactly right. And that university will seed other universities and will emanate other universities. And I mean, there's no alternative to changing the world by training intellectuals and getting intellectuals out there into the culture. Friend Harper, I understand fear as the emotional response that follows from recognition that a value is at risk of being lost. If one fears, it means they still think they can save a value. It's not too late and one has to act to save the value. I think that's right, but they don't have a good conceptualization of what the value at stake is and they don't have a good conceptualization of what kind of acts to take to save the value because they've given up on the tool that would make knowledge about those things possible, which is reason. So the fear that they feel is that they're out of control. What they feel is they don't understand. And therefore, both represent a threat towards the ultimate value, which is their life. And they're fearing for their life and they don't know what to do, but they do act. They join tribes. They rejoice at authoritarian leaders. That is their response to a value being at risk and the value here is life or understanding. They're fear plus anxiety. Yes, I think that's right. I think anxiety always attaches to fear when you don't know how to deal with that fear. That is, if you don't go through the process of trying to understand the fear and trying to understand what to do about the existential circumstances that led to it, then what you get is permanent anxiety because you have a fear. If no concept ought to deal with it, so you're anxious about it constantly. Shahzabah, maybe being bad in Islam just means they don't get 70 virgins. Perhaps they get 70 sheep instead. Oh, that's pretty bad. Maybe, maybe they don't get virgins. Then hell is better. Who the hell wants virgins? I mean, yeah, I don't know. I don't know enough about Islam to tell you. The reality is that the most powerful force religious-wise in the world is Christianity because the only reason Islam is as successful as it has become is because of the default of the non-Muslim world, and most of that is Christianity. So Islam is the default response. All right, Daniel, Elon made an interesting distinction between mental gymnastics and evasion. In your last interview, I'm currently rethinking whether the two are basically synonymous, degrees of motivation, motivated reasoning. No, I mean, I think that the mental gymnastics is to sustain an evasion. The mental gymnastics, and you can sometimes, you recall it, or maybe this is a little different, but it's similar, is rationalization. It's coming up with pseudo-rational reasons for why this is so, when if you just looked over there, you'd know it's not so, but you're evading looking over there. So you have to create this mental gymnastics, this rationalization in order to, in order to hide from yourself the truth and the fact that you're evading. I hope that's helpful. I like this. Jim Brown says, Islam does have a hell. It's called life on earth. All right, Jim asked, have I found a curriculum or a course you're like? I said I didn't understand what he was talking about, so he later says, do you have any favorite universities in America today because they're professors of rational? Well, I wouldn't say completely rational, but I'd say my favorite program at a university right now is probably at Clemson University, Brad Thompson's program at Clemson University, which brings in students, a very select group of students, and teaches them great books, but not just great books. And there's a lot of tutorials, there's a lot of interaction with the faculty. There's just, it's just an intense program that is there to provide knowledge and to provide moral guidance or moral knowledge as well, where it's about training the moral person, not just training them with ideas. And I think it's a good program. I think there's a lot of good there. Partially they read Iran, but that's not the only thing they read. They read Aristotle, they read The Funny Fathers, they read a lot of the philosophers and a lot of the thinkers. So the Lyceum program, it's called, Lyceum program at Clemson University. I also like, we'll see how it develops, but I like what they're trying to do it at University of Austin, University of Austin in Texas. It's, we'll see, right? They'll launch it I think in a year and we'll know a lot more there. In terms of other universities, no, I don't really have favorites. I mean, every university has a few, or not every, but significant number of them have a few good professors and a lot of bad ones. Other universities where the waiting is bigger than not, I don't know. If you're gonna study economics, George Mason is really good because they're over-weighted in good economists. That economic department is really dominated by Austrian economists, so you'll learn Austrian economics and that's a good thing. There are also, you know, quite a few anarchists there and you'll learn all kinds of other stuff, but yeah, so I'd say if you look at particular programs like, is there a political science group? I'm sure there is, there's better than the others, but is there a university? No, I don't have a favorite. Neocon, in 2024, I want the GOP to get humiliated in the house and in the Senate, a narrow GOP win with Larry Hogan being the deciding vote and Joe Biden president. I don't understand, a narrow GOP win where? Oh, in the Senate, so humiliated in the house and a narrow GOP win in the Senate and Joe Biden president. Yeah, I mean, I'll go for that. I definitely think they need to be humiliated in the house. I don't know if you saw, but another house member resigned today, resigned yesterday and this one was kicked out of the Freedom Caucus just after he resigned, like he was kicked out. Why was he kicked out? Because you refused to vote for the impeachment of the, what's his name? The guy responsible for the border for border security. I forget the name of the homeland security, right? You refused to vote for impeaching that guy even though he's a staunch conservative, a supportive of Trump and a staunch conservative on pretty much everything else that Republicans like, they kicked him out of the Freedom Caucus and he's resigning from Congress. You have got the number of prominent Republicans, non-wacky, crazy, insane, modulate, green Republicans quitting Congress. It's just such an indication of the pathetic nature of the Republican party in the House of Representatives that yes, yes. All right. Thank you, Neocon. That doodle bunny. How did this wonderful country of ours churn out so many fearful, jealous losers who get ecstatic about the knuckle-dragging brute like Trump? Philosophy. Bad ideas. Bad ideas, the anti-enlightenment, Kant, Pago, Schopenhauer, Marx, the whole gamut of them. They led to this country becoming what it is today. Andrew, wow, Andrew keeps going. I think this correspondence to past things you've said when I was in a, I think this corresponds to past things you've said. When I was in religious phase as a kid, in one respect, I was petrified of hell, but in another respect, I thought hell was much cooler than a heaven based on altruism. Good for you, you were a good kid. I absolutely, I mean, Robert Hanline has this great little, great book. I wish I remembered what its name was. Robert Hanline, a science fiction writer from the 1950s, 60s, 70s, had this book where, God, a couple of brothers who are fighting all the time. So one is God and one is a devil. And hell is this cool, amazing, fun place. And heaven is just this boring, awful, horrible place. And it's a fun novel. So I would definitely, definitely, I like, I read all of Robert Hanline's entire corpus, I think in my 20s, and I really, really enjoyed them. I don't know what I think of them today, but at the time I read them, I really love them. Strange in a strange land. The moon is a harsh mistress. It's called Friday. I mean, there are dozens of them. And I really enjoyed them. All right, Robert, last night, Jennifer, Jennifer, Amy and I went to the movies and saw the new William Shatner bio. One of Shatner's important takeaways is, figure out what you want, take action and take risks. Good for Shatner. I mean, I don't particularly like William Shatner, but you know, I guess with some of the silly things he says, once in a while he says something amazing, something positive, that's really good and that's positive. And I didn't know there was a William Shatner bio at the cinema, at the theater. Interesting, all right, I hope you enjoyed it. James, what did Rand mean when she said, be the silent incorruptible enemy they dread? Why should the good guys be silent? We should be as loud and bombastic as possible. Can you send me the reference where she says that? Cause I can't remember that. But can you tell me where she says that? Like in what context, what novel or what article it was? Cause that is inconsistent with what she says in what one can do, right? So incorruptible, sure, but what is silent? Why silent? Silence seems incompatible with a lot of what you wrote. So I'm curious, if you can send me an email we'll just where that quote is from. Jim, before Ellis Island, immigration meant getting off the boat, getting a shower and making one's way said grandmom about her great, great grandfather. Yeah, I mean, for, I don't know, 70 years in the beginning of this country, maybe up until through the Civil War, you just came to this country, you got off the boat. I mean, showers, I don't know. I think your grandmother must have got that wrong. I don't think there were showers in those days. But you cleaned yourself up and off you went, off you went. So there was no screening, there was no barrier, there was no questions, there was no anything. You showed up and there were no passports in those days. That's another thing. When Inland came to America, I don't think there were passports. So maybe there were, but at some point there were no passports, 19th century, there were no passports. You traveled from country to country. Nobody asked you for ID. So yeah, the world has changed a lot. We build walls, whether they're physical or not, we build walls around ourselves and walls encourage fear. Why is there walls? There's not something to be afraid of. There must be something to be afraid of. There's a wall over here. I don't know, they might have had some papers, but there wasn't a kind of border control there this day. I mean, the reality is that one of the things I love about Europe, I mean, really, really love about Europe, is you get off a plane in Amsterdam, you go through passport control, and then you can travel pretty much anywhere in Europe and never have to show a passport again, right? You can drive, I remember once driving from Czech Republic to Slovakia to Austria in one day and never stopping and never showing for all I looked like it was one country. I mean, that's beautiful. And amazed. Michael Sanders, why haven't there been any major breakthroughs in physics in Science Nine? So I don't know if that's right. I don't know if that's right. So that's a question for Keith or Evan Pico, who is doing, I think, a talk at OConn on physics. It's a question for them. I don't know enough about physics to say that that is true. And to the extent that there haven't been as many as you would like, I'd say pretty simply philosophy, philosophy, philosophy, philosophy. That doodle bunny, the truth does not require your participation in order to exist. Bullshit does. Bullshit does. True. Although the truth, the truth as a concept is something that somebody has to identify. There's no truth out there. The truth relates to the facts that are out there, but that the truth is something that a conception, a conscious human being has to discover. WCZN, on the topic, duty of wrongs rules, I'm leaving my job, traveling the world for six months, and then onto something yet unknown, new, thanks. I am so happy to hear that. That is fantastic. I really, really, really, really hope you enjoy the six months traveling the world. I assure you will. You learn a lot from it and that there's something new is mind blowing and fantastic and great. So that is amazing, amazing. Yeah, that's a good point. We're almost at $1,000. I've changed the goal to $1,000. We're $57 away from $1,000. Thanks, Andrew, for pointing that out. So go for it, guys. We can make it. I'm so happy to hear that Yvonne's rules has had a real impact on people's lives. And again, you notice that on Saturdays, I try to do these positive shows that are kind of follow-ups to Yvonne's rules. So we want to keep reinforcing. We want to keep reinforcing this. Michael, it amazes me how these very, very smart people haven't thought about things very, very deeply. At least not outside their careers. Absolutely. People don't think very, very deeply outside of the work assignments that they get. Sadly. Hop a Campbell. Objectivism is trying to break through to hold the momentum of the destruction. I'm not sure it can. Neither am I, but what option is there but to try? Jim says, grand money from ARI to any university that takes up ITUE without ad hominem, comments on it wouldn't be, wouldn't there be some takers? There might be some takers, but I'm not sure that's the right approach. I mean, what I would like is to find more intellectuals. I mean, it would be interesting to see where that would have the best result, right? Maybe it's in engineering schools and in science departments. So if we could impact philosophers, maybe philosophers could have an impact on the rest. Yeah, I mean, that's a good idea. I wonder if we could, I wonder how we would implement that. Good idea. I mean, let me think about it bringing up with some people at ARI and see if we could implement that. I don't know if they'd be takers. I don't know. Given the hostility academia has to Iron Man and the hostility, they would probably have to epistemology. And the hostility academia generally has to I'll pay for you to teach X. They might be willing, if it's broad, like I'll pay for you to teach if there's something on capitalism. But then once you say, I want you to teach this book, ooh, that really academic freedom, they go ballistic. So I don't know if they'd be any takers. I don't know. Ryan, do you know why people who are often called nerds are scared of women and socializing? Many of them are highly rational, but math nerds or science nerds aren't exactly known for being smooth socially. Do I know why? I really don't. I mean, there is this perceived economy that you're either good at dealing with conceptual things or you're good with dealing with people, but you can't be both. And maybe it has something to do with the way we train people, the way we pigeonhole people into particular places. Is it necessary? I don't think so. I think a healthy upbringing, a healthy educational system, I think the nerds would be healthier in that respect. Also, I think the girls would be more receptive to nerds. Being a nerd might be viewed as a virtue, not a vice. But there are certain masculine traits that have to do with physicality, that maybe more kids need to be engaged with, whether it's sports or just athletic activity more broadly, or whether it's one way or another to find ways to express courage and bravery in physical terms. And maybe those are necessary for part of the building that kind of self-esteem that has to do with the opposite sex. I don't know. I mean, I was petrified of women. And maybe it was of rejection. Maybe that's what it was when I was a teenager, right? Maybe it was petrified of rejection and maybe if I had more self-esteem, I wouldn't have been. And that changed over time, but certainly there was a period where I was petrified of it. Partially, it's the whole, this is Christianity again, the whole attitude towards sex, the whole attitude towards male-female. There's no embracing of objective knowledge about this. So you're relegated to discovering stuff from porn, and then that sounds, whoa, I can do that. I'm not sure we deal with puberty and with sex in a very healthy way in our culture, and that probably only encourages this kind of fear that is involved. Kim, say for them, is an anarchist. I think that's, is an anarchist, but believes they should be a Palestinian state. Yes. Yes, they have this, a lot of anarchists believe this kind of stuff. They have this indigenous people kind of thing. I don't get it. We'll find out tomorrow, we'll find out tomorrow. He's promised that the debate will not be about anarchy. So I'm hoping that's not where it goes. Although I think that'll come up and it'll be significant because I'm going to steer it in a sense in a similar direction. What do you think, say for them, is best point will be tomorrow and how are you prepared? Well, I think the best point, I think the two things, right? I think one thing is best point is to couch Zionism as a ethnocentric racist ideology. Of course, his perception of a Palestinian state is exactly the same, right? It's ethnocentric. It's a rejection of Jewish immigration. It's exactly the same. So, and it's tricky. Zionism is a tricky concept. Zionism is a tricky concept because it does have, it's a package deal. It's a package deal of good stuff and a package deal of bad stuff. And certainly the ethnicity, the religion is the bad stuff. But to explain this kind of idea that there in some sense needs to be an ethnic out because of antisemitism, an ethnic focus because of antisemitism, that's tricky and that's hard. So that's something I've done many times so I don't need to prepare much for it but other than think about it. But that point needs to be conveyed in a persuasive way. But I'm not a Zionist. I'm not an apologist for Zionism and Zionism is not my ideal. It's certainly not my set of ideas. But, and certainly not the way Zionism is manifest. But to understand Zionism and to understand the good in it, i.e. an organization built around self-defense in the face of antisemitism for more funds, that is a legitimate program. It's a legitimate movement. The other thing that is gonna happen and God, there's no way for me to really prepare for this, he will present a false view of history and he will have a lot of books to back him up. A lot of bad historians have written about Israel. A lot of them are Israelis who hate Israel. And he will, he will use that fact. He will cite them, he will quote them. And I will say the line. And it's gonna be hard to be convincing. But that's the reality whenever you're dealing with history and you're arguing about history. And this is why it's important to make the initial point which is a moral point, which is about the nature of the state of Israel and the difference between its nature and the nature of the political entity that is the Palestinians. And that's the important point. And if we start, if we get bogged down in history, which we will because they want a four hour debate. So we will get bogged down in history. It will be, I can't literally at the top of my head with citations debunk every single historical thing that he says that's false. And he will say a lot of them. I will show this book. It's a book called Fabricating Israeli History, The New Historians, which has many of the fabricated BS history in it. But I'm not, I don't know the book well enough to be able to say, oh, here, this is where it's false. I see, you know, here's the quote to show it's false. I just don't have that memorized. I'm not a historian. I'm not a historian of this conflict. I don't have everything worked out. We'll just have to figure out how to deal with it. I have on a few points. I can say, you know, Benny Mars made that up, but I can't do it on everything. Megan says, read your mark, read your mark on science. Thank you. My pleasure, of course. It's absolutely necessary for any kind of renaissance or new enlightenment. Bree says, I am just north of the great lakes in a city built in empty wilderness. Mother nature is always trying to kill you here, but because of the enlightenment, I am sitting in the hilton watching you. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing, isn't it, Bree? It's what a world we live in and how few people appreciate the amazing world and how few people appreciate where it comes from. Where it comes from. Jim, reaching the genuinely conceptual level was the most demanding of me. Been swearing as how we know, uncorked Rand's ITUE. I think that's right. I think it's a real challenge. It's work, particularly given how much garbage we deal with to actually understand the truth and implement it in a massive amount of work. Isn't it amazing? Just an aside, me reflecting on the world. Isn't it amazing that there are people who hate the show or at least don't like the show, don't like me or don't like what I say? Richard comes to mind who's on the show. And they'll spend like two hours on a Saturday afternoon listening and just on the chat just bitching and complaining and acting superior and putting all of you people down and just being cynical and skeptical and just being ugly. And this is how they spend their Saturday afternoon. I mean, I find that, you know, what an example of a waste, a waste, right? I mean, you don't have to like the show, hate the show, that's fine. But why are you wasting time on it if you hate it? It's just bewildering. You're not being challenged, it's not challenging because you're not listening, you don't care. You know exactly what you think. You're dismissive, you're cynical. None of that is challenging. That's just, phew. All right, I've been told I shouldn't do that. I've been told I should ignore the riches of the world. I will try. But it's just that I find it an interesting observation and I like to share with you my observations. Frank says regarding objectivism I hear but that's not real life. What? Oh, objectivism I hear but that's not real life. Well, objectivism is all about real life. It's about reality, facts and reality. That's what it's about. My accolades are here to learn or they're here to be stimulated or here to ask questions or here to be inspired. That's not a waste of time. They have a positive reason for being here. You have a solely unequivocal negative reason to be here. So you are seeking disvalues. Whereas they're seeking values. You might not think of what the show is of a value as a positive. But the reality is they do. They're seeking positive values. They're here investing in positive values. You are here investing big chunks of your time on a weekend devoted to a disvalue. And that is mind boggling. I couldn't do it. I couldn't listen to somebody that I thought what you think of me. I wouldn't listen to 10 minutes of it. I mean, unless I was doing research to do a show on it but no, I mean, I couldn't sit through it. It would drive me nuts because my time because my time is too valuable. My life is too valuable. You know, this is about treating, taking a life seriously. Don't waste it on things you don't like. Daniel, I think the New World Symphony perfectly conveys the American sense of life and optimism. What do you say? Yeah, I love that symphony. I'm a huge fan. Ayn Rand didn't, just so you know, she didn't. She thought it was too folksy. There was too much folk music in there. But I really, it inspires me. I think it's got that energy, that excitement. And it's got, yeah, it's got it, right? So yeah, I love it. I know the enemy, can't be know the enemy, Richard. You claim to already know me. There's nothing, there's nothing you're learning. Everything you know already. You know exactly what I'll say. You know exactly what my accolades will say. You know, everything about the show that you're not learning about your enemy. I might be your enemy, but you're not learning anything. You constantly say you're not learning anything. So no, it's not that. It is truly, you know, pursuing some negative, some disvalue, some psychological need you have to, it's a little masochistic, right? Seems to me, a little masochistic, or maybe a lot masochistic. All right, everybody, that was a good show. I enjoyed that. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Andrew. Great topic. It's a topic I talked about a lot. A lot, but over time, like bits here, bits there, it's great to be able to put it all into one thing. Put it all into one thing and cover the whole gamut of it. I'm sure there's stuff I missed. And yeah, of course you're a student on an accolade. I'm not even sure you're a student, but you're a fan, a student. But yeah, an accolade is not the right word. But I'm using his words. But we will keep coming back to this topic because it's an important topic. It's a big topic. And it manifests itself in every aspect of our lives. And yeah, again, thank you, Andrew. You should all thank Andrew. Thank you to all the superchatters. Troy from Australia, thank you, for the 500 Australian dollars. We had a lot of 50 dollars. And Andrew, of course, added to $1,000 he did with 150 dollars and some other questions. Again, thanks everybody. I will see you all, what day is it today? It's Saturday. So I won't see you until Monday. Monday I'll give you a quick rundown of how the debate went. The debate will be published at some point. I'm not sure how long it'll take him to publish it, but it will publish at some point. We raised a lot of money for the Iran book show. So I really, really, really, really appreciate that. And yeah, have a great weekend. Have fun. Go find some values and pursue them. Bye everybody.