 I thought that ARIs, a little discussion of it, was a good analysis of a lot of the debate and switch, a lot of the bad faith approach to it. Not that I've read it myself, of course, but I'm just so used to, and I'm sure you guys all are too, so used to the distortions, the people who want to debate Ayn Rand almost never actually address what Ayn Rand had to say, what she believed. They're always debating the straw man version. Yes, it started up. That's right. Started up. All right, let me just copy these. Everybody will get started in a second with streaming, but not in the right place, sometimes the way it is. We're not streaming on Facebook, I couldn't get Facebook to connect, so it's only on bullet joining. Right, yeah. YouTube is strong on YouTube, but not on Facebook. No, I'm just on YouTube. So we lost some people, but so be it. What can I do? Okay, one, let's see, just do this. The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Brookshow. Hey, everybody, welcome. Welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Sunday afternoon, and today we've got a contributor hangouts with some of my most generous contributors, supporters of the Iran Brookshow, and sorry about all the technical problems. I don't know if it's Zoom or if it's Restream, but one somewhere in the connection between Zoom and Restream didn't work, so I had a dump Restream and go directly to YouTube, and that opened up a new channel on YouTube. Anyway, the fun of live streaming these shows, it never ends. But we're here. We're rolling, we're working, everything's working, so we can jump in. Hopefully everybody was on the other stream, jumped over to the stream and is catching this live. Don't forget to tweet and invite all your friends over, so they can enjoy this too. Of course, with all that, I forgot to turn on the light, so let's do this. The way we do this, as always, is we go through everybody who's on live, asking, have them ask questions, and then I also answer the super chat questions, so those of you who are on YouTube can use the super chat to ask questions. So let's start with Jim. Why don't you ask a first question? Sure, I think when you move to your new studio and get your green screen set up, you'll have to take a webcam shot of exactly this backdrop drop right now, so you can put that in your background. So it looks exactly the same. Oh, no, we need you. It's studying, must be boring for you guys. This is all you look at, but... All right, so hello everyone out there. It's good to be back. It's good to be in Miami. Whether it's much nicer here, I'm loving it so far. Okay, so this first question in my usual style is going to be a bit vague, but even more vague than usual. I've been trying to formulate this idea and I still don't know what term to put to it, but one term I've heard thrown around a little bit that I'm a little iffy on is the term, scientism. And the way I'm hearing this term scientism used sometimes is as a critique of what I'm gonna call faux science, the listen to the science people on this issue or that. And obviously as a person who's a believer in the value of science and the value of the scientific method and the value of reason to me, science and that sense of scientism is awesome. But the idea of listen to the science, which really means listen to the authorities, which really means listen to a narrow scope of the anointed authorities, which really means listen to the politicians and the ideologues and not the scientists. Do you have some thoughts on this and what's the right terminology to use? What's the right way of framing this? Sure, I mean, look, I think scientism is an anti-concept and a package deal. It's a bad term and I would never use it. It's packaging real scientific knowledge and real scientific expertise. And, you know, this hatred of elites, this hatred of expertise is absurd and ridiculous. Now granted, elites and experts have betrayed us, have stabbed us in the back as an American people in our anti-freedom, anti-liberty, anti-capitalism. So I understand where it's coming from. But whatever culture replaces the existing culture, whatever we get to something better, we're going to have experts and elites, I hope, who are good at what they do understand because not everybody can be a philosopher, not everybody can be a scientist, not everybody can be an epidemiologist, not everybody can be, you know, a physicist. Some people, that's their expertise and those of us who are not, are going to rely on them to an extent. Now, scientism is supposedly this idea of viewing science as a religion. But does anybody really view science as a religion? Well, no, science by definition is the opposite of religion. Science, if it's really science, it's about facts and evidence and experimentation and testing and so on. So science is science. Science doesn't tell you necessarily what to do, it tells you what is. So the package deal is the good, which is science, a respect for science, a respect for fact, a respect for evidence, a respect for knowledge and this idea that you have to accept the should that the experts claim comes out of that science. But you don't have to accept that and indeed that should is not science. That should is morality, it's political science, it's politics, it's whatever it happens to be, it's not science, right? So the mixture of the two of this religious attitude towards, you know, right now this idea that we have to do what Fauci tells us, right? No, you don't. But you know what, you're an idiot if you don't listen to Fauci, if you don't at least take into account what he's saying, you might disagree with him, you might listen to other experts, but he is a scientist, he has worked in a field 30-something years, he has some knowledge, unfortunately he's in a political position, that's sad, I'd rather there not be these political positions, but you know, but you don't, science is anything Fauci says is the word of God, but that's not science, so it shouldn't be called scientism. That's authoritarianism, that's respectful authorities, not respectful authorities, but blind obedience to authorities. So it's mixture of the positive science and the negatives of blind authoritarianism or blind adherence or blind following of somebody, and that mixture is a package deal and it's the purpose of the package deal is not to obliterate blind obedience, the purpose of the package deal is to obliterate science. Yeah, exactly. And I would layer in another aspect to this too, because I completely agree with all that. The other aspect is, excuse me, the idea of people who are say in media who are not necessarily scientists who are starting with their own preconceived notions and saying that scientists agree with my idea. So they're essentially, it's sort of like priests saying, I speak for God, you know what I mean? I speak for science. That's the part that seems to me even more insidious is the not scientists who are telling you to listen to science by which they mean listen to them. Yeah, but I don't know because you need those journalists, right? I mean, part of the, you need the journalists to translate the science into language that we can understand and to apply it or show its relevance to our lives. So I don't think they, yes, they are journalists who are using this to being about a particular agenda, right? A social agenda, philosophical agenda. And that's a problem. But the solution is not to call them scientism. The solution is to call them for what they really, what they are, propaganda, socialists, whatever, you want to call them. But don't muddy the term science and notice that this primarily comes from the right from people who don't believe in evolution. Yeah. From people who don't believe in science, who are skeptical about science. And look, not believing in evolution at this point is close to flat authors, right? I mean, there's enough evidence now that it's... It's not just a theory. It's not, well, I mean, it's... I mean, it is a theory that is not just a theory with tons of evidence, right? It's a theory that's been proven. So it's, for the right to accuse people of being scientism, of scientism, given their religiosity is ridiculous. And the term does not refer again to the religious nature of those who adhere to science. It undermines the whole concept of science itself, right? Yeah, I'm still stuck looking for a term for, I guess what I would regard as charlatanism, but you're right, I don't like the term. Not bad science, call it charlatans, call it people using science for political agenda. Call it wrong, call it false. But don't mix it into a new term, first of all, we don't need it, but a new term that actually undermines the good, which is science, science is a good. Doesn't mean all scientists are good, it means science is a good, unequivocally a good. And therefore anything that's, there is no scientism other than the greatness of science. And people misuse it as Marx did, calling it scientific socialism, that's a misuse of the term science, but that doesn't undermine science. It's their misuse, call them out on the fact that they're misusing it. You shouldn't take science on faith, but most of us don't have the knowledge of all the details that go into particular scientific theories. I mean, I know that quantum is behaving a certain way. I kind of have done the math, but I haven't run the experiments myself. I don't know that experiments are actually, I mean firsthand are actually real, but you know what? I kind of trust the scientists that I know enough that I believe them. It's not validated like it was if I'd run the experiments. So, you know, don't trust the scientists on faith, sure, but don't expect to really have firsthand knowledge of everything in science that you claim to agree with. I mean, how many of you, how many of us really understand Newton's Laws of Motion? Even though we all agree with Newton's Laws of Motion, I don't know anybody. Or as I said before, you know, Darwin's evolution. I mean, really, really, really know all the evidence and run down and can prove it. Fewer. Yeah, I've never been to space. Earth couldn't be flat, right? Just kidding. No, let me tell you, I've, somebody who's been on, somebody who's actually, as somebody who's actually traveled around the world, flown around the world, I can tell you it's round. No edges, no flat, I flew to the edge of the earth and it was round. So yeah, just to point to your point, we obviously can't experience all of the world and all the things that... No, I mean, of all the people out there, I believe scientists more than pretty much anybody else. Now, that doesn't mean I agree with that. And I certainly don't agree with their prescriptions. But what should be done, and one has to be careful in terms of what one calls science, but, and science is being corrupted and is being corrupted and is becoming more corrupt as time goes on by philosophy. So one becomes more skeptical about what the scientist is saying, but that does not excuse creating this new anti-concept called scientism, which is meant to undermine the good, all right? Thanks, Jim. Matt. Well, Jim, I wanted to validate kind of your question. I have half of my questions kind of of that same vein because that kind of feeling is something that's been irking me for the past year. And I love what I've, the science because I think it really gets at truth and objectivity and capability to increase production. And so many of the marvelous things that exist in the world today, but are not just natural events or weren't there in the past. So one of those that's kind of related to that, I think is like when it comes to not understanding quantum theory or specific things, but believing I'm reading OPAR right now, I'm like halfway through it. And I definitely do not understand a lot. Like I get some things from it, but I'm very far from saying, oh, I totally get this. But I still believe it even when I don't understand, but I don't think of myself as somebody who has faith in things. So it's not faith. And I also don't, just because I don't want to just say, oh, it's from an authority that I trust. So I believe it, but it kind of is that, but I consider it to be because he's an expert in the field instead of himself to studying it. And there's things in mathematics that I don't understand. And hard science. So I'm not a philosopher. So just along those lines of, I do believe, I don't truly know it for myself. I don't feel like I'm second-handed, but I somewhat do just defer to the expert on that. Yeah, I mean, we certainly have to. I mean, if you go to the doctor and he gives you a diagnosis, you can check it up online, which you should. You should verify it. You should see that it makes sense to you, but you can't replace a doctor. I mean, you can get a second opinion or third opinion, but at the end of the day, some expert is going to tell you what you have. And if you need surgery, some expert is going to perform the surgery. You're not going to do it to yourself. You know, thank God that you're not, right? Because you couldn't. So I love experts. I love the division of labor society. I love the division of labor. So part of the question is how do you validate an expert? And how do you come to trust? How do you come to not have faith in, but believe an expert? And partially it has to do with his credentials, you know, his training and things like that. And partially it has to do with, particularly when it comes to philosophy, it has to do with the things you do understand, the things you can validate in your life. Did they make sense? Did they integrate? And then, do the things you don't quite understand? Do they integrate with the things you do understand? Or are they in conflict with them, right? If they're in conflict with them, then don't believe them until you resolve the conflict. But it's- I kind of call this the smell test. Yeah, but it's in philosophy, it's deeper than the smell test, because you have to actually go through the integration. So you're reading Opom, and you're saying I kind of get this stuff on epistemology, I don't completely get it, but everything else he says makes sense to me, and I do think I get it. And it seems to integrate with the epistemology stuff. I'll have to come back to it later to really get into it. But, and I'm gonna accept it now, because it integrates with everything else and it fits. It doesn't create conflict. If it creates conflict, you have to resolve it. And at whatever level of depth you wanna go into something, it can't be contradictory. I mean, if you remember, Rand defines logic as the art of non-contradictory identification. So if it's logical, it means it didn't contradict existing knowledge, it didn't contradict existing conclusions. And if it did, and it might, you have to resolve the contradiction. That's on you. That's what reason requires, demands, right? That you follow logic. So, but there's certainly a sense in which, I don't know fully all the entire objectivist epistemology and it's, and I know, I only got to a certain point of epistemology. She could have gone deeper and probably would have if she'd have another 10 years, right? She was studying mathematics before she died because she thought that had relevance into kind of some of the questions she was still asking about epistemology and wanted to go deeper. So this is a deep, deep topics here that we're not gonna know, we're never gonna know, but what you do know, do you, does it fit? And here integration is so crucial. And then is there anything in your experience that contradicts it? Concrete or through integration? The non-total, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, and then over time, I think you make it yours by constantly going back to those issues you might not particularly in philosophy that you don't fully understand and we, you know, Leonard calls it the spiral of knowledge, right? Going back to them and bringing your new experiences to them and saying, okay, is it still non-contradictory? Is my knowledge still a whole? Is my knowledge of other parts of the philosophy still consistent with this? So, but yes, you cannot know everything, right? You know, in a first-handed, absolute sense. Reality is too rich and too diverse and too, there's too much there. That's part of the division of labor and we should embrace that. The mental model we tend to use, if I may, is this idea of building credibility that if somebody introduces me to something that they say, well, this is science and this is very well understood. If it's something I don't understand, I'm gonna suspend my any disbelief. I'm gonna go look at the sources, get as much as I can and see how credible does this person seem? How much does, like what you're on was saying, how much does it comport with what I already know, what science already seems well-established? If they're consistent with everything, then I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt and that's how experts earn credibility with me. Matt? Yeah, so I think I can accept it and let it go without being faith by the integrates with what I already know, if it's non-contradictory and... I mean, if you have reason to trust this authority. And I believe it could be, if I were to investigate it, I believe it could be proven out, then it's not revelation or reliance on authority. Even if I don't actually go do that investigation, I think if I pass those three tests, I can just leave it at that. That's right. That's right. I mean, think about studying a new topic in school. Your assumption is the teacher has no reason to mislead you. The topic's probably true, but she might be misleading you, right? Like on global warming or something. And later if you find evidence that she was misleading you, then you would reevaluate maybe everything she taught you, right? But even then, some of it is probably true and some of it's false and you'd have to figure it out. But at the time you're sitting there, she's the authority, you're accepting, I wouldn't say it's by faith. You're trusting her a certain level of belief. Once you discover a contradiction, everything's open and you have to reevaluate everything. Just like if you discover, oh no, this doctor turns out he's selling snake oil on the side, you're not gonna return to him. You're not gonna trust his diagnosis of you in the future. I suspect that that is part of what Matt may be getting at here and I'm sorry, I got cut out of my video loss, but is I get beaten over the head all the time by people who are like, who are you? You're not a scientist, you're not credentialed. I'm like, you're right, but point to resources. But they're trying to invalidate me just because I don't have some credential. And I don't think that's valid and I don't accept that as an argument. Well, it depends. I know a lot of people who are amateur scientists who have no clue and the credentials matter. So I'm not one who ignores credentials. I think credentials matter. They don't matter for everything. I know lots of people credentialed to a complete nonsense, but credentials do matter. It means you've focused and you've developed a certain expertise in a field. You might, again, you might turn out to be wrong about everything, but they're not irrelevant to the question of whether I'll listen to you or not. All right, Jennifer, thanks Matt. Oops, you're muted, there we go. Okay, why do you think in economics that when people make arguments against capitalism, just when they make purely economic arguments, they always talk about monopolies. Like, why is everyone so obsessed with there's gonna be monopolies? So you hear that all the time. I mean, why it's because that's what they're taught and that's what they, you know, that's what everybody else says is the problem with capitalism and it's repeated over and over and over again. So it's not like they're inventing this new objection. They're just repeating an existing objection. And it's in the water in America in particular, right? I mean, we have this obsession of fearing bigness. Now it used to be also focused on big government but we got over big government. Now we only focus on obsession with big corporations, big business. But it started in the 19th century with the Madrakas and Madrakas, and with the opposition to the so-called monopolies of the time, it's not an accident, the first law passed that really violated separation of state from economics with anti-trust laws. I mean, there'd be some laws that regulated railroads but generally this is the first law that had sweeping powers over the economy. And it is true that in capitalism, particularly early on, some companies become very, very big. And the confusion was created between the bigness and between the ability of the government to grant monopolies, which is where the word monopoly comes from. The South Sea corporation in England was granted a monopoly for all trade between India and Asia and the UK. That was a monopoly granted by the king. It was something the king had to give you. And then there was a conflation of size with the granting of monopoly power by government because that was the experience coming out of England of the 19th century. But it's kind of become part of the culture in the US to resent bigness, to resent big companies and to question size and to resent this whole, to resent big business. And it's captured in this idea of monopoly plus in economics class, economics 101, they spent a huge amount of time talking about monopolies. In a way, the monopolies don't exist, doesn't exist even when you have very large businesses. They create this whole detached from reality vision, a perfect competition, a garden of Eden economics, and then monopolies as these evil entities and then they do all this price theory which has nothing to do with reality, nothing. And they educate kids year after year after year about what this false economics and that's what the kids retain because it's heavily emphasized and a lot of kids take econ 101, it's in high schools, it's in freshman year, colleges, even if you're not an economics student. So it's, I mean, I always tell students that's the section in the econ book that you should rip out the pages and throw them out because they're useless, they're worse than useless, they do wrong. The whole section of perfect competition and monopoly should be trashed completely. And it's ironic too, these students being taught Marxism should also be taught that all of the major socialism- That is even Marxism, right? Cause it's, that's not even Marxism. It's- I know. Because it's classical economics and it's complete perversion of the field by these mathematics oriented, rationalistic detached from reality, economists of the early 20th century. But it is ironic that the socialisms of the early 20th century, all were about monopolizing all businesses and unions. Well, yeah, but yeah, because they, and they reject the classical economics in favor of socialism. Socialism is not classical economics. Yeah. All right, have you? Hi, I didn't really come with a question, but I wanted to add one little bit of a thing to the epistemology discussion of earlier. I just had a comment which is that one thing I do is when deciding what to do with some new information that I'm reading or that I don't fully understand is also, I also tried to always remind myself that if I'm having trouble integrating this new information into my existing knowledge, it could also be that I've misintegrated something in the past and it's I that I'm wrong. So leaving that window open is very important, especially when tackling something very new and unusual for me, because I'm wrong a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And I think being wrong is an important part of life and failing is an important part of life, but part of that discovering a contradiction is you don't know how it's going to be resolved. You can't know it in advance. The whole point is you discover competition, now you dig deeper to discover the source of the error. Is it past knowledge or is it this new knowledge or is it something completely different? Because it's not even true that there are only two options here, right? You could be right in the new piece of information is right, you're just disintegrating, right? So there's a lot of possibilities here in terms of doing that and absolutely we're often wrong and it takes real thinking and real focus and energy to figure out when you're wrong. And one of the problems I think with the world in which we live is that people are not happy and excited about engaging in those activities, that thinking, that figuring it out and it's so easy to fall back on your tribe or on the truth that you've accepted and you must fit everything into whether it's and I know people who are objectivists and take objectivism in that sense as a religion, right? They never challenge it, they never question it, it's just the truth and everybody has to fit into it otherwise it's wrong and they never question their own knowledge and they never question their own understanding and they never question the ideas that they have. And that's true, I see that everywhere, certainly in politics, but in the culture at large it's everywhere sadly. All right, Daniel. One of the things that I've heard talked about with the vaccines is that maybe we would go to having a vaccine passport to be able to move between certain countries. I'm actually asking if maybe that's not such a bad idea. I mean, if you did away with national passports that basically say you pay taxes in a particular country and you went to a passport that in effect is saying I'm not harmful, at least walking in, is that really such a bad thing? I mean, I don't think so. I think if part of the job of government is to, on the border, protect us from infectious diseases and protect us from crooks and criminals. One of the things that an ID does is it allows that government to look you up in a database and make sure you're not a criminal. You're not affiliated based on your intelligence organizations with some terrorist organization and maybe in a time of a deadly virus, are you not a threat medically? Now, there's a question of how bad is COVID and who's susceptible? And is this the virus that justifies these kind of things? We'll put that aside, certainly in theory. I think a passport that includes a little section with here's what I vaccinated in terms of contagious diseases. I don't see why that is wrong. I don't think it's a violation of anybody's privacy. I don't think it's a violation of anybody's rights if those viruses are clearly a risk to people. And if I can guarantee that I don't have that risk, that should be a positive. I don't see it why anybody would oppose that. The people who oppose it, and it's fascinating to watch this right now. The people who oppose it or people that insist that everybody be treated equally even when everybody's not equal. I am not equal to somebody who's not being vaccinated. The virus doesn't treat me the same way it's gonna treat somebody who's not being vaccinated, two doses, right? So I am far less likely to get the virus, far less likely to give the virus, far less likely to land up in hospital because of a virus. But importantly for the government, far less likely to give other people the virus that is somebody who's not being vaccinated. That's just a fact of reality. But that's not allowed under egalitarianism. It's not allowed to take those factors into account just like it wasn't allowed to treat old people and young people differently during the pandemic. We had to treat them the same. So we locked down children, even though there was no medical reason to lock down children. And we didn't cocoon or isolate elderly Americans because God forbid we treat old people differently than young people. That egalitarianism is crippling us and the only objections I've really seen to a kind of a vaccine passport are ones that have to do with an egalitarian egalitarianism or privacy. But privacy is ridiculous because the government already knows you're vaccinated when they filled out that little form you went into a database. So who exactly are you trying to protect your privacy from? So the only reason not to have that is an issue of egalitarianism. Yeah, I am all for it. It's the only reason I got vaccinated because I'm not actually that worried about the virus although people say I should be. I'm much more worried about the virus being used as an excuse to lock me down. And if I can get a vaccine and the vaccine would reduce the likelihood they can lock me down, then I'm gonna get the vaccine because that's what I did. Now it turns out that they're not freeing me up in spite of the fact that I'm vaccinated and it's still hard to travel and although it is much easier to get into Israel for example, now with the vaccine. So they don't trust the little piece of paper the CDC gives us and who would going back to Matt's problem or trust, right? It's a little piece of paper that can be easily forged and easily replicated. The idea and it drives me nuts, these things. The idea that the CDC has had one year to prepare for this. And what they came up as a little piece of paper was somebody's little scribbled signature on the line saying you'd be vaccinated rather than a little secure app that the pharmacist could just scan in and just say, yes, he's been vaccinated and it would be secured by the blockchain. I don't know, you know. So it's in your Apple face ID, right? The face ID of this person. Exactly. Something that's easy to verify because now what's gonna happen is the only way we're gonna get a green passport is they're gonna have to take the stupid little card. They're gonna have to transfer it into some kind of electronic form that is secure. A year they had. They couldn't have done a competition between some high tech companies who could develop this and make it available for anybody who's given the vaccines. I mean, it's just mind blowing. And you know why they didn't do it? The reason they didn't do it is again, egalitarianism. I bet you they sat around and said, but what about the people who don't understand technology? What about the people who won't be able to download the app and use the app, right? That's why we don't have it. It's because we have to all be equally shackled. Darius. I don't have any particular questions, but I will just add a comment or two about some of the interesting things that have come up. Yeah, in terms of Jim's question about the mudding the waters of science, I think the key phrase to watch out for, and I hear it a lot more and more these days is, I believe in science. When I hear that phrase, then I know, yeah, something's off because science is not something you believe in. It's like Iran said, it tells you what is. The other thing I thought of is, I think it was Matt was talking about experts. In terms of scientific experts, if you listen to enough, especially like a kind of a messy science field like climate science, if you listen to enough science experts, you eventually will hear contradictions between them. And so then like Iran said, how do you resolve that? One thing you don't hear a lot in common discourse is that in science, every scientific concept has airbands around it. There's no such thing as like the precise answer. There's always an airband around an answer in science. And so a lot of the resolution to these conflicts between experts comes down to just understanding the airbands that they're working with. There's a huge range of uncertainty in their answers. Yes, up to a point, right? Up to a point, you can't have a definite airband. The airbands get narrower and narrower as we get more and more knowledge. Absolutely. There's more and more agreement about what is actually there. All right, good. Let's see, who do we have, Emmanuel? Hey, Ron. Can you hear me? Yep, yep. Oh, okay. On a completely separate subject altogether, keeping on your toes, I guess. What are your favorite readings on business management? And I guess in particular culture, a corporate culture, it seems on one hand to be, any team requires some common set of goals and criteria and mission and values, the ways that employees ought to act. But there's a lot of variability in terms of how you decide an organization, how you properly motivate employees, any texts that you would recommend, and I guess in general, that's a big question, I guess. Well, it's not that it's a big question. I don't retain these kind of texts in my mind. So I'm always, I can't remember, right? Unless it really leaves a mark, unless it really influences me, then I can't really hold it. So even when people ask me for recommendations about books in finance or economics, I don't always have them at the tip of my tongue because it's not just there. But I think there's a lot of good knowledge out there in the field of management about creating good corporate culture. I think there are good stories out there that people doing good work about it. I think particularly if you come at it from the perspective of objectivism, from the perspective of wealth creation, value creation, the need of use of reason for innovation and the idea that you need to give people freedom and you need to give people the ability, the scope to think outside the box and to use their minds in production. Then I think if you take your objectivist perspective, I think most like management books are going to give you a lot of things to work with, right? If you bring your objectivism to the table, right? And take the good out of the management book and separate it from the BS that most of them have. So I think that integration is incredibly valuable because in a lot of times, they'll talk about the same concepts we do in objectivism or they'll touch on them, but they'll use very different terminology. So bringing the two terminologies together, figuring out where the overlap is, I think is valuable. Objectivism is a huge amount to teach us about creating a good corporate culture because we have a huge amount to tell, to say about how to create good culture. And it's the same basic principle, the idea of a team needs to have a purpose, a unifying purpose and people have to buy into the purpose and it's important to motivate people around the purpose and part of their motivation has to appeal to their self-interest, to their rational self-interest. And the way to motivate them is not through emotion but through an appeal to reason, appeal to fact and appeal to rationality, not devote of emotion, but not emotionalistic. The way to deal with other people is through respect, respect primarily for their productive ability and their minds within the context of work. And the application of justice, things like, well, if there's a bad apple in a team, he's gonna destroy the team and the just thing to do is to get rid of the bad apple because it's unjust for everybody else to have to. So it's applying those basic principles of objectivism to the particulars of team dynamics but a lot of the concretes about team dynamics are things that go beyond objectivism and require specialized expertise. And then your challenge as an objectivist is to try to tie it together. And unfortunately I don't have kind of the better books and I don't know that they're the better books because I'm not an expert in the field. So I read a bunch of stuff on strategy, I've met a bunch of stuff on kind of team building and stuff but I don't know if it's the best because I haven't done a survey of the field. Yeah, Ron, I have, I mean, I get throughout a book, all of our C-level officers in my firm, we're all reading at the same time a book called Dare to Lead by Bernay Brown. It's not so much about management it's more about leadership. It's an okay read, it's pretty interesting. I don't agree with necessarily everything but I'm getting some interesting insights. I find that almost all the successful management books have some interesting aspects to them, some insights to them. They have to be connected some, I mean, the beauty of our business is if it doesn't work, it affects the bottom line. And if it doesn't work enough, you lose and you got a business and books that don't work when applied are not gonna sell because ultimately the examples they give people are gonna say, oh, I tried that, didn't work, was a complete disaster. So versus self-helping life where success is more amorphous and it's not clear what is exactly a success and what is achieved and who is happy and who's not and so on. In business there's a clear criteria, doesn't make money, doesn't it? Does the business thrive or doesn't it from a financial perspective? So the filtering out of the garbage happens much quicker. So I think the traditional gurus of business management actually pretty good because otherwise they wouldn't have survived that test. It certainly seems true that there is a certain, like there's objectivity at the end of the day of a P&L and your actions are either incrementing in a positive direction or not, but in a more confusing way, you could have two businesses that have entirely different corporate cultures who emphasize different aspects of reality really and two that could be equally successful. Apple focused on quality and Sony on low costs. They're- Absolutely and they had very different cultures beyond that. Not only in terms of the goal with that. I mean, Apple in its early days, Apple in its later days, same CEO Steve Jobs had two different cultures because he learned and he got better. Pixar had a very different culture than Intel both incredibly successful, very different culture. So culture is contextual and part of the context is who the leader is. Part of the context is personnel. So there is no one way to lead in business. There is no one way to do strategy. There is no one way to motivate employees because people have different values and leaders have different values and therefore gonna emphasize different things and that's what makes a rich. Now the principles that I think apply across the board if you abuse your personnel, I mean really abuse them. It's probably not a good thing no matter, right? Now, some people claim Steve Jobs abused personnel. I doubt it, right? He might have yelled at them but yelling is not abuse if it's again context, right? And particularly given if he also really respected them and really listened to them and really accepted when they disagreed with him and he yelled at them when he was frustrated with him. You can do a lot, right? And people focus on the one thing. So yeah, I mean, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were very different CEOs, very different. And yet both incredibly successful, both brilliant and both huge bottom lines. So I think a lot of leadership comes down to who the boss is, who the leader is. And it's why any book you read, you have to bring into the context of your situation because part of if you've got a boss, part of what you're trying to do is also manage your boss, manage your relationship with your boss. And part of reading and thinking about management is to try to understand that relationship, not just the relationship with your own people work for you. And business is hard and complicated partially because it's about people and people are hard and complicated. Thank you. Before we move on, I'd like to give a manual specific recommendation. Good. It's called, Am I Being Too Subtle? It's by Sam Zell. It's a particularly recommend the audio book because he reads it himself. It's his autobiography in his own voice and he's a colorful entrepreneur and it is very compelling to listen to. And I think it really hits the right spot between being principles that apply broadly enough across different industries. It's not overly specific, but it's not too vague either. So I think it's really in that sweet spot and it's a great read on all around. And it's very grounded. It's very based in reality. Sam Zell and subtlety doesn't, don't fit in one of the same sentence for me. So he's great. Sam Zell is one of the great real estate developers of all time and a great investor and has amazing timing, seems to always get out of commercial real estate at the top of the market and not be in it at the bottom. He's just a legend in Chicago, a real, real legend. Talking about a legend from Chicago, Jonathan, you're up. Hi, Yaron. Thank you for all these shows. Just abundance of tremendous intellectual ammunition. I think anyone who's debating becoming a subscriber of yours should know that this is a great investment in yourself and in your own values. So thank you for fighting so hard for all of our values every day and all that you're doing. I wanted to ask you a question actually about the investment world. So much as objectivists, we kind of, I think, learned to put emotions in their place, if you will, kind of put, not ignore them but put them in their right place. My question is how do you deal with the emotions of investing? You know, investing is a unique, I think, endeavor. It could be very emotional, literally kind of the ups and the downs. So how do you deal with the highs and the lows of this pretty unusual pastime? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question because I think it really is challenging. I think a lot of people don't do it very well and if you can handle your emotions, it's gonna be very tough to be in this as a profession. You know, I think it's really the way you handle your emotions in every way, in everything. You have to be able to accept your emotions, handle them, not let them dictate your behavior. Experience them, you're gonna be disappointed. You're gonna be thrilled sometimes but neither the disappointment nor the thrill should guide your actions. Now, sometimes when things are not going well and your emotions might be signaling to you, check your premises, check what you're doing, right? Check the models, check, you know, check what's going on in the world. Have you got it right? You know, and certainly last March, challenged everything I believed about what we were doing because I'd never seen anything like it in our portfolio, right? In my particular portfolio. And you have to question what is really going on? Now, my conclusion at the end of it is, I'm right, the market's wrong. I just need to be patient. And, you know, I've seen some really good interviews with Cliff Asnes who has had a really, really rough 18, 19 and 20. Terrific invest up to that point and then hit a kind of a rough spot in 18, 19 and 20. And it's devastating because your investors leave, your AUM, your assets under management start diminishing and start shrinking. You're not making money for your investors. And let me tell you, losing your own money is nothing. And, you know, people say, objectivists were selfish in this narrow sense. I have no problem losing my own money. I don't, one, I owed of sleep. I don't lose when I lose my own money. Losing other people's money, that's when emotions really kick in. That's when you get really upset. That's when you're really struggle as an investor. And he, he lost, he wasn't really losing. He wasn't, it was more than he wasn't keeping up. I mean, Darius knows the dimensional funds guys and dimensional funds were struggled, had a few years where they haven't been doing as well as their benchmarks. And it's the same for, I think similar reasons that I think Cliff Asnes was struggling. And he gave a lot of interviews about how much, what the sport in him, what it's for him to do more research, check his facts even more closely, go back to the drawing board over and over again and make sure that what he believed was true is true. And then if he came to the conclusion that was true, to stick with it and keep going and wait. Now he's done phenomenally over the last three months since the beginning of this year, I think late last year in the beginning of this year. So some of that is, he's being, he's seeing redemption, if you will. But it's, you don't, you're gonna feel the emotion. You have to deal with it like any other powerful emotion. You have to figure out if the emotion is indicating a real problem or not. And then you have to check your premises and you have to, when the market gives you a signal that maybe you're not doing something right, you have to check your premises. But at the end of the day, sometimes you just have to, you have to plow through it and stick to your guns like we do in many aspects of our lives, the same is true in investment. Yeah, it looks like Darius wanted to say something. Oh, sure, I will. I mean, yeah, you know, I often have clients ask me, what are you gonna do to protect my money when the market crashes? Well, the answer is we've already done it. If you haven't already put the measures in place before the crash, then there's nothing you can do once the crash happens. So the key to me to manage emotions is to have a plan in place. If you have a plan for, let's say you're withdrawing, you're living off your portfolio, that's when market drops really sting. Well, if you have enough in reserves, like 30% in bonds or something like that, then you can ride out most crashes. That's the beginning of a plan. So it's one way to manage emotions is just to have a good balance between things like stocks that drop and things that are a little more stable. Yes, I mean, you know, last March, given that I have a particular strategy, and investors paid me to do a particular strategy, what really hurts is when something you could never imagine would happen, happens. And what happened in March, I could have never imagined happened. Now, maybe that's a failure of my imagination. Well, part of it was like that happens. Part of it was that on March 21st, 22nd, the Federal Reserve on a weekend said, hey, we're gonna support the economy. We're gonna start on Monday morning buying billions and billions of dollars of treasuries. A good friend of mine who was running an options company, specializing in treasuries got wiped out. He's gone. Yeah, so then, but again, that is something I think you can actually predict because you know that in a crisis, the Fed's gonna do stuff like that. It didn't in a way, but I have to, and yes, looking back, there's certain things that happened that I could have predicted. From us, you know, we've come to call Wednesday, March 18th, Black Wednesday, because for us it happened March 18th by the 22nd, we were starting to make money and we were recovering and made some of the money we had lost. But over three days, March 16th, March 17th, March 18th, we lost more money that I could ever imagine, ever losing in any period of time, never mind in three days. And the reason was that certain players in the market behaved in ways that I did not predict that affected my portfolio in ways that I didn't foresee. And, you know, they de-leveraged, de-leveraged, which affected my portfolio, but that was devastating. And then you go back to the blackboard and you say, what did I do wrong? And, you know, I now have something in place that will prevent that from happening in the future, the ways to hedge these things. But it was, it's devastating. And daily it can be devastating because daily you can invest in a stock thinking it's gonna go up and it doesn't. Now, most of us have, after a while, investing appropriate expectations, right? But there is, when you manage money, there's a, when you manage money like we do, Darius is very diversified and has clients, you know, has clients that put in, you're looking at the entire portfolio. So you really are risk protecting. I'm paid not to do that, right? I'm a piece in somebody's diversified portfolio. So it's a very, and so Jonathan, so it's a very different perspective for us. Right. Yeah, you're managing a particular strategy. I would say for the vast majority of investors, 2020 was actually a masterclass in long-term investment principles, you know, dramatic events that come out of nowhere, significant declines in stocks are actually fairly common, but they're always temporary and the stock market always recovers before the economy does. Now, all those principles end up being completely, those time-tested principles end up being completely true in 2020. Absolutely, absolutely. Jonathan, anything you wanted to add? No, thanks again for all you do. Sure, thanks. All right, let's do a couple of super chat and then we'll do one more round. And then, all right, why are intellectuals uncomfortable with happiness? Because it requires selfishness or that selfishness leads to happiness. Which is their primary target for destruction? I mean, I don't know that there is a primary target for destruction and I think it partially depends on the intellectual. I mean, Sam Harris would argue that he's for happiness, but again, selfishness. Jordan Peterson is anti-happiness and anti-selfishness. So if you must be, if you're anti-happiness, different intellectuals are gonna have a different perspective on these things and define them differently. It's not clear that what Sam Harris means by happiness is the same thing we mean by happiness. But I think at the end of the day, what they're really uncomfortable with, ideologically, is self-interest. I think that's what unites them, right? What unites all the intellectuals out there really is that they've accepted implicitly or explicitly the morality among a code of altruism and among a code of selfishness. And that even somebody like Sam Harris who's preaching happiness is against self-interest, which is bizarre because happiness for what, right? For you, right? So it's, but partially he's saying the way to be happy is to recognize there's no such thing as you, which is bizarre in and of itself, right? It's the negation of self, his whole methodology. It's about the negation of self. So it's, I think ultimately it's about morality that they're uncomfortable with them, comfortable with the morality of self-interest. Is taking things personally a sign of low self-esteem or passionate commitment to justice? Well, it depends what you mean by taking things personally. You should take things personally when they're personal, when they're relevant, when they're important, right? When they justify. But does taking things personally mean you should get angry? Mean that you should get upset? Mean that you should lash out? So it's too vague of a term really to comment on. What you should be is a proponent of justice. And when an injustice towards you is committed, you should be upset and you should fight against it, right? At least to the extent that you think it's worth fighting against it, you know? At some point, there's certainly justices that happen out there that are just not worth the time. Effort, money, energy. So you have to balance all these things in the context. The context is one, your own happiness, your own success. Justice is not a, you know, out of context dogma, right? You have to, anybody who insults you have to take out the sword and go fight them, right? No, I mean, you have to take the fight into the context of your own life, into the context of your own happiness. I've walked away from a fight many times in my life because it wasn't worth engaging in it. And there was a lot more to lose than there was to gain and the justice didn't, justice for me didn't require it. So you have to take these things into the context. Getting angry is completely appropriate when an injustice happens. But freaking out over it is letting your emotions guide you instead of your reason, your logic, your mind. I think that covers that super chat. Why are self-absorbed people not selfish? Because being selfish is not thinking about yourself. Being selfish is not just caring about yourself. Being selfish means taking care of yourself. It means making your life your primary. It means engaging your reason in survival and thriving and succeeding as a human being. So being selfish requires certain principles. It requires, for example, to be rational. Being rational, engaging in the external world is not consistent with self-absorption. The idea of self-absorbing means denial of reality. It means you're absorbed with yourself to the expense of the facts around you. That's not selfish because it's actually detrimental to your own ability to survive and to thrive. Imagine you're self-absorbed while the tiger attacks you. You know, you need to be absorbed by reality in a sense of focused on reality. And then think about how do I make my life the best life that it can be within the context of reality? And narcissistic or self-absorbed people can do that. They can't look at objective reality, at objective threats, at objective benefits. It's all filtered through a narcissistic obsession about themselves. But that's not in their self-interest. So sometimes something can be very pleasurable, not in your self-interest. Cocaine, I understand, is very pleasurable. It enhances pleasure dramatically, but it's not good for you. Being self-absorbed is just not good for you. So the standard of what selfish is, is it good for you? Good objectively, based on the standard of survival, thriving happiness. And there's a strong correlation to the short-term versus long-term thinking. Narcissist tends to be short-term thinkers. Absolutely. You should check out, should I sell all my possessions by cosmic skeptic? Really frightening how much awful ethics gets such great traction. Yes, there's a huge anti-materialist sell everything. Let's go small. Small is good movement out there that's very self, very destructive, very destructive. All right, now the round, let's start with Jennifer. I do this based on how you appear on my screen, so. You were talking about handling emotions earlier just now. Yep. There's different physical ways that people can express emotion. You can smile and you're happy, crying, you're sad, whatever. And there's a lot of differences in people and there's differences in men and women too and how they physically manifest. So is it valid to have different ways to do that as long as you're not hurting yourself or someone else? Like you might throw a pillow against the wall if you're really mad, but if you throw a Ming vase or if you throw it at someone's head, that's different. Yeah, it's very different, yeah. Yes, I think absolutely. I think different people have different ways in which they handle emotion. They have different ways in which they express emotion. Some people feel it more intensely than others. Yeah, as you said, men and women, I think, deal with emotion very differently and experience emotion, I think, differently. So how you deal with it differently is fine within the context of reason. What you're doing is not irrational. What you're doing is not self-destructive. What you're doing is not destructive to others. What you're doing is not destructive to... You're not doing something you'll regret later. Hit a pillow on the wall, right? But you might regret destroying all the plates that your grandmother left you, right? My grandmother left me no plates, so I have nothing to destroy, so... But yes, so it is a question of how you deal with it so that it's not anti-you, that it's not self-destructive. That's the key. A lot of optionality in terms of what that is. All right, Matt. Okay, so my first son was just born a couple of weeks ago. Congratulations, that's great. Thank you. And I think at some point over those couple of weeks, I thought about the world in which he lives in and when I was in my childhood. So I think over the next 50 years is, what do you think about what's more likely getting an objectivist enclave, a galt's galt going somewhere on earth or the moon or Mars? Do you think any of those are gonna happen? By a condo somewhere on earth right now, or the moon if it was available? I mean, the easiest answer to that is to say, the thing least likely is the one that I would bet on, which is Mars, right? So the furthest away from the devils on earth is the most likely where it would happen is on Mars. But then, but I'm not so sure. So the way I think of it is not that there's gonna be an objectivist enclave. The way I think of it is, is there gonna be a place on earth? And let's assume earth because I don't know what's gonna happen to the moon and Mars. Is there gonna be a place on earth that is in the direction of a free world, an objectivist world, right? Cause I think these things happening criminally. I don't think there'll be an objectivist revolution. I think there will be movements towards more liberty, more freedom. People in the culture will be more rational. There'll be better art, there'll be better science. And people will constantly be thinking about, oh, what's so good about this period? Why is there better art? Why is there better? And they'll slowly start identifying reason and rationality and self-interest as some of the things. And that'll be growing and that'll be influencing more. So I think of it incrementally like that. And I think it's more likely that happens than you have an enclave because I actually think that enclaves are likely to be destroyed by the bad guys. I think the bad guys are vicious and bloodthirsty. I mean, and they're willing to do anything to destroy their enemies. And I think that it would be perceived as an enemy and would likely be destroyed. But I think it's much more likely that a certain country, a certain area on planet Earth, a certain culture somewhere, I don't know where, is moving in the direction of, has a better culture, has all the elements in place to lead to ultimately that objective world. I don't think we'll have it in 50 years, but I think we'll have a culture moving in that direction in 50 years. Yeah, it won't be some place that is intentionally started for that purpose, but will almost accidentally evolve in the direction of thanks to good principles. Now, if somebody can start a colony on Mars and get a nuke up there that can be delivered to Earth, then I'd vote for Mars. Because I think you need a defense mechanism. If you're gonna do this, make sure you can defend yourself and make sure you're willing to be ruthless in defending yourself. I recommend you read Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which is... Yeah, but even in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, he leaves The Moon by the end because even that has turned out that it's not gonna go in the right direction. I mean, Handline is very pessimistic in the end. About any culture that survives beyond a few decades, it's gonna become a status. So you have this hero bouncing around planets to keep looking for freedom and keep establishing a free society. And then it goes rotten and they bounce the next one. And because I think Handline at the end of the day misses the crucial role of philosophy, misses the reason why they can't stick to freedom. Even though in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, there is a character who's a Randian, which is a direct reference to objectivism. But it's gonna be interesting. In that sense, I hope I can live another 50 years so I can see how it plays out. I mean, the thing about death that pisses me off the most, it's not any fear of death or anything like that. It's like all this stuff is unfolding in the world. There's a story and I have to leave in the middle. It's like leaving in the middle of a movie or leaving in the middle of a... Now that's too forever. So you'd have to live forever to see how the story unfolds. But the thing about pisses me off about dying is, whoa, wait a minute. I'm curious about what happens tomorrow. I don't wanna give up tomorrow. So 50 years is a slight outside possibility, right? If some of the biotech guys listening to the show do their job right and we get some real innovation, there's a chance I could live 50 years from now. More likely 30. So... All right, Jim. All right, real quick. Go ahead, I'll mess up. Yeah, go ahead, Matt. That's fine, go ahead. So real quick, easy one. I liked your recent video about Atlas Shrug being the greatest novel, but I was thinking the whole time, isn't it the greatest work of art, period? Why just novels? What would be a greater work of art? I think it's hard to compare works of art because they do different things. And the only way, see, the only way it's the most philosophically consistent, obviously, philosophically, it's the greatest work of art because, but... Sculptures can't have a philosophy in the sense that a novel does. And within the realm of sculpture, there is perfection. Just like in the realm of literature, you could argue that Atlas Shrug is perfection. There is perfection in sculpture. And to say the one is better than the other one is statically is just from a static perspective. I don't think you can make those kind of comparisons. Okay. Yeah, I mean, how would you compare Rahmani Nafsak and Piano Concerto and Atlas Shrug? I mean, we don't even have the language to compare them. You can say this is the pinnacle in music. This is the pinnacle in literature and literature as a philosophical element, which music just doesn't. It has a sense of life, but no philosophical element. So from a static perspective, both are great. So that's the sense which I think you can't really compare. All right, Jim. All right. I'll introduce this by saying everything private is becoming public. So this thought is dawned on me recently. I've been musing on it that a big way that statism is being layered back in to America and throughout the West is by a swapping of private for public. I think if we look to what our founding fathers intended or even just look to the 19th century. In the 19th century, I think that your average businessman would have been somebody who in their family house on a busy street would set up a shop in the front of the house. People would come in and buy whatever it is they made or did and go. And they might hire people temporarily and they might hire people long term, but it was all private. And when we look at the history, certainly since then, there seems to be this gradual defining of everything that used to be private as public, including to this very day, we're seeing examples of where politicians feel comfortable with telling you how to behave in your own home God forbid you have a party in your own home during the COVID pandemic will make sure you can't get electricity in your house or listening in on your private communications and in the UK will arrest you on a tweet or something saying something using some unpleasant language or such that if everything becomes public, if nothing is any more private, how could you expect to have any sort of individual freedoms? I mean, I think there's a problem with the term public though because it's meant in a variety of different contexts, right? So a public corporation is not public in the sense that the roads are public, right? It's private, it just happens to have a lot of owners, right? The information Google has on you is not public, it's Google has it even though there's a sense in which you could think of it as public. So it depends what you mean by public, but in the sense that the government is everywhere and that's what we mean by public, the government owns everything then absolutely. We're moving away from freedom, we're moving away from private property, we're moving away from privacy, real privacy. And it is, there is a sense in which that's the way statism and collectivism works. Collectivism is a rejection of privacy, the rejection of individuality, rejection of private property. And as individualism, capitalism, private property and decline, collectivism in the public interest, the public welfare and the public ownership in quotes rise and become more and more important and more and more influential and dominate everything. That's absolutely the case. But there is a question, I've been thinking about this because Iron Man said somewhere, I forget the essay, that civilization is the process of the public becoming private, not in the sense of government, but in the sense of what you share with your fellow human beings, right? So if you think about sex, sex was not a private activity 300 years ago because you lived in a one bedroom place, your kids were there. You know, going to the bathroom was not a private activity. You went out in nature or you went to communal baths where people, if you go to Rome, I mean, people are sitting right next to each other having conversations while they're on the toilet, right? This is what it used to be. And now we have little rooms dedicated just to that activity. And we have private bedrooms where we have sex, you know, and it's, we cherish privacy. And, but there's a sense in which in the 21st century we're giving up certain aspects of privacy for values. And it's interesting. And I don't know how many, how much people actually think about it and how conscious it is and how self-interested ultimately it really is. But there is that issue, put aside government, there is an issue about just, you know, how much are you willing to share? I mean, I think this, I don't know, this obsession with selfies is weird. Like I want everybody in the world to see me in everything that I do, every place that I go all the time, strangers, I put it up everywhere. It's not just my family, it's constantly nonstop. Selfies, selfies, selfies. I mean, there's something really weird about that and something that denies a certain sense of self-respect and a certain self-privacy of certain things. I don't want the whole world to know. It's connected I think with the prevalence today of amateur porn, right? Even sex is no longer private. People want to share it. They want to share everything. Everything that they do has to be shared with the world. It's bizarre. As long as it's voluntary, that's an improvement. Well, that's a libertarian argument. No, not as long as it's voluntary. Volunteerism is not the issue. I mean, I'm not criticizing any particular activity, but the point is that the issue is not voluntary and not voluntary. The issue is selfish and not selfish. The issue is rational and not rational. The issue is, is it good for you long-term or isn't it good for you long-term? The issue of the political issue of whether it's voluntary or not is a separate issue. The much more fundamental issue. And given how much is voluntary in our lives, the much more important issue is, is it rational or not? Is it selfish or not? So perhaps one conclusion just broadly is that the subject, the whole question of public versus private seems like a fruitful subject for objectivism to consider. Yes. All right, that was yes. Yeah, question about the business that you and I are an investment management business and hopefully this isn't too boring for others. So traditionally smaller investment management firms, we would distribute profits to the owners. One of the things we are grappling with on our management team is how much profits to retain, retain earnings for reinvestment or innovation and growth. Any suggestions kind of for a framework of how to make that evaluation for an investment management firm? What policy for how much the profits to distribute and how much to retain? No, really partially because I think it very much depends on the context and the owners, right? And how old are they? Do they view this as a business that's going to continue forever? And are they building something that they want to see continue for a long time? Or, hey, I mean, the fact is... Those are great questions. In 10 years, I think in 10 years, I don't care about, I mean, I've got younger partners if they want to continue the business fine, but I'm taking my profits and going home, right? I don't want to retain anything and I don't care about the earnings in 10 years. I want to do other stuff. So I think it's very, age is very relevant, the age of the partners. Long-term planning is really relevant. Is this a business, what is the horizon for the business? Is it 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, right? Of course, the longer the horizon, the more you want to retain earnings. The younger the partners, the more you want to retain earnings, right? The older the partners, the more they want to take the benefits of everything they've worked hard for and go and buy a yacht or whatever it is that they want to do with it, right? It also depends on how relatively wealthy the owners are, right? So a lot of people, let's say you're a billionaire, right? Then consumption is not an issue for you. So unless you want to go explore space like Elon Musk or what's his name, Jeff Bezos, you don't need billions, right? So why not keep them in the company and grow them for the fun of it, right? And watch them grow, right? Or take them out to diversify or something, but if you're at a point where you're making, I don't know, half a million dollars a year, then the extra income makes a big difference. It could make a difference on the kind of house you're going to buy and the kind of yacht you want to buy whether you travel first class or business or coach there are a lot of considerations. So there's certain income levels when incremental dollar makes a big difference. And there's certain income levels where the incremental dollar doesn't make a difference. So the more you're making, the more you're going to retain, the more you've already got wealth, you've already got. So all these factors have to go into the equation and then it's the character of the people, right? It depends on the particular values. That makes sense? Yeah, that's helpful, thank you. Sure. Daniel. Lots of market questions today. Let's talk about payment for order flow. According to Elizabeth Warren, it's evil for a couple of reasons. First of all, if someone else is getting paid for my order, then obviously I could have gotten a better price regardless of looking at any data and what the data might say. And second of all, it doesn't allow proper price discovery. Instead of seeing my order as a resting order in the market, whoever gets my order matches it in their book and the market sees it as a trade that prints to the tape as opposed to an order that hasn't yet traded. What about it? Is payment for order flow really evil? I don't know that people know even what that means, right? Let me try to explain what payment for order flow actually means. So Robinhood, and I did this in the Finance 101 that I did in the Robinhood GameStop show, but I'm not sure I went into all the details, but GameStop, you make a trade on GameStop. You wanna buy 100 shares of Amazon. GameStop doesn't actually own any shares of Amazon. They can provide you with the shares of Amazon. They go to a marketplace where they put up, hey, we've got a client who wants to buy 100 shares of Amazon and that is matched in this marketplace with somebody who wants to sell 100 shares of Amazon and usually the market maker, the person who matches the supply demand might have an inventory of Amazon because it's traded a lot and they might actually match that. So this happens in this marketplace, right? Even this is simplification because it's more complicated than that. What buying the order flow means is, now there's competition in the marketplace, different firms provide the service of matching buyers and suppliers, it's not the clearing, the clearing is another entity. So of matching buyers and suppliers and remember the buyer and the seller are getting different prices. Most people don't realize this. If I buy 100 shares of Amazon, I don't know what Amazon is trading at, 20 bucks a share and somebody else is selling 100 shares of Amazon, this selling it for less than $100 a share because the party that's matching us is taking a piece. Otherwise, they wouldn't be that much. Imagine if there was no party in the middle, imagine if you were to run around to find somebody to directly sell 100 shares of Amazon too. That would be unbelievably difficult. Even if you created some kind of matching software, you'd have to verify that the 100 shares of Amazon are really 100 shares of Amazon, you'd have to match the count. You'd have, there's a lot of complexity here. Plus the regulatory system doesn't allow for that much innovation. So maybe we'd have innovative ways to do this, but regulation probably prohibits them. The way the system works is the way it's worked and too bad Jonathan's not here because he knows this history really, really well. But the way the systems worked for 100 plus years, there's an entity that matches the buyers and the sellers and they take a cut. It's called the big ask spread, the bid ask spread. Now what this entity does is it goes to Robinhood and says to Robinhood, look, if you give us all the orders, the buy and sell orders, we'll give you a percentage of the big bid ask spread. In other words, we'll pay you for that, but their profits come from the bid ask spreads in a sense they're giving them a percentage of the bid ask spread. It doesn't change the bid ask spread. It's not increasing it or decreasing it. All it's doing is it's sharing in that, right? Now the argument is, oh, we could have a smaller bid ask spread if this entity wasn't having to pay Robinhood. Yes, that's true. But then somebody else would have to pay Robinhood. And this is what people, it boggles the mind, right? Robinhood is giving you the ability to trade for zero. Nothing, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody has to pay. Like we use Google for zero, advertisers pay. And we pay in a sense that we get advertising. I know it offends a lot of you that you have to have this advertising on Google, but that's because you're getting a search for free. Like they used to be, you could get, maybe it's not on Amazon, maybe it's Hulu, where you could get Hulu with no advertising and Hulu with advertising. Hulu with advertising is free, Hulu without advertising, you have to pay for it. So if you wanted to search with no advertising, you'd have to pay Google. Nobody wants to pay Google. We'd rather take the advertising. The same thing is true. You can go and work with another broker who charges you. And Daniel might remember the days which used to cost like 50 bucks to do a trade. Absolutely. 50 bucks to do a trade. And it used to be regulated by the government. How much you could charge. And in those days, if I remember right, when deregulation happened, the actual rate was 70 plus dollars per trade. If you wanted to trade, I mean, my son told me recently that he owns one share of, I can't remember what company, one share of a company. Like you couldn't in those days own one share of a company because you wouldn't pay $79 to trade one share. Only rich people could trade in the market because only rich people could spread the $79 over enough transactions to make it work. Yeah. So, brokerage fees were deregulated in 1974, five, six, somewhere in that period, mid-70s. Since then, the prices have gone like this. And by the way, bitter speds have shrunk, not expanded, they've shrunk. And high frequency trading has done what to, this is another pet peeve of Elizabeth Warren, like people. High frequency trading has driven bitter speds even lower and transaction costs even lower, to the point where we can go and trade stocks for zero dollars. Well, the way Robinhood can give us that service is by selling the order flow to a market maker. And they don't sell it to one market maker, they sell it to a few, said it'll happen to be the largest market maker that Robinhood sold it to. So the accusation was that Sedilla had undue influence on Robinhood. But no, there's still price discovery because who is discovering the price? The price discovery is primarily by the market maker. If they suddenly see lots of people buying, then they start raising the price. If they start to see lots of people selling, they start, and that is all manifest in the bitter spread. And of course, other people are observing the order flow and you can see the order flow, you can go online and the services will provide you with the bitter spread, how much demand there is on the buy side, how much there is on the sell side. No, I mean, if anything, this is making everything more efficient. Now the only way around it is to stop zero commissions. And maybe I don't know what would happen in a truly unregulated world. I mean, so much, and you know this Daniel, so much of our financial markets, the way exchanges worked today, the way market makers do their business, the way everybody works is driven by regulation rather than market competition. The stars, it's really sad. And so hard to tell what the world would look like if there was no regulation. And the truth is there's actually good information in that order flow. And so probably there would be a different mechanism where a Citadel would pay you directly better than mid-market. And that's what the studies show. They look at the execution prices people get. They're averaging mid-market or better than if you just go to somebody, you know, TD America, everybody's going, you know, if you go straight to the exchange, you can't get as good of a price as you can going to Citadel. So what do you care? I mean- Because the fact is that it's a business of scale. These businesses make a tiny fraction of lots of trades. And what they're buying is lots of trades, partially because they want to make a little bit on them, but partially because the information is valuable to them in order to set bid-ask-beds as they move. And they make money off of that. But that's a beautiful thing because it makes the market more efficient, not less. Absolutely. And finance is an, the transaction of finance is an economies of scale business, particularly right now. Now, maybe again, maybe in an unregulated market, there would be ways for us to match demand and supply more efficiently. I'm sure there would be, but we don't live in that world. And this is about as efficient as markets can be given the constraints that they face. I'm still impressed at the idea of just having practically unlimited liquidity thanks to market makers. It's incredible to me. It is, it is. So though some of the stocks I trade in have very, very, very limited liquidity. So, and I like it that way because that's where the efficiencies are, right? That's where you make your money. You make your money when illiquid stocks, it's hard to make money in liquid stocks, I think. I mean, it's hard to make alpha excess profits in liquid stocks. When city trading for less than $10 and it's a million bid up, yeah. Let's see. All right. So we've got a few quick super check questions and we'll call it a day. Oh, man, a big one right off the bat. How did St. Thomas Aquinas efforts to bring Aristotle back work? Do you know? I mean, I'm not an expert, but basically he was already considered the genius of the time, the philosopher of the time, had a lot of credibility going for him. So when he said the Catholic Church, you guys need to read Aristotle and we need to take his ideas seriously and we need to bring it in to our dogma in a sense. Everybody took him seriously and he brought it into an analysis of scripture but also into an analysis of reality. One thing he did was bring reality into the Catholic Church and including the reality of individual happiness and the need for individual happiness. The challenge and the reason this took so long in a sense is that the Catholic Church took Aristotle as dogma and treated Aristotle as if he was another God. And so they, for example, accepted Aristotle science, not the methodology, but the actual science that he did as dogma even though it was completely wrong. All of, I think almost all of Aristotle's actually so-called discoveries scientifically are wrong. What's important about Aristotle science is the methodology engagement. So then it became what's called scholasticism which is using logic to analyze text, analyze scripture, analyze phenomena. Sometimes it was good. Most of the time it was how many angels can sit on the top of a needle and dealing with that logically. But as the methodology came into that world, the culture started to change. This is my point about the objective is culture in the future. Very, very, very slowly reason and logic starts entering the culture. To the point where when the Renaissance hits and the Renaissance again doesn't hit in one day, it's a slow cultural evolution. They are ready for man as a hero, Greek sculpture, Greek art and the beginnings of science. But it's a slow evolution. But I wanna do, I'm gonna do more shows about this, about the history of these things. I wanna do a series of shows on the cave and the light and I'm gonna start rereading that book and bringing into the shows. Cause I think there's, that is a book about cultural change on the grandest scale possible. And I think there's a lot for objectivism to learn from that. How much to get me, Iran, to read right a poem? I don't think you can get me to write a poem because I can't, I can't write a poem. I could write something that pretended to be a poem but I couldn't write an actual poem. I just don't have the skill to do that or the talent to do it. I'd love to read poetry. So, you know, 100 bucks would get me to read a poem. I love poetry. I love poetry when it's read, right? I don't actually like reading poetry as much as listening to poetry as other people, listening to other people reading poetry. And when I like to read poetry, I like to read it aloud. I like to hear it. And I think that's fun. So if any of you would like me to read a particular poem online, I'm happy to do it. Hey, Iran, just joined. Have you ever seen Hassan Piker's anti-capitalist videos and streams? He's extremely influential for a lot of young people. No, I haven't. Look him up. I don't think exhibitionism is a new phenomena. It's just an amateur porn, et cetera, on new ways to manifest itself. I don't know. I suspect it's not a new phenomena, but I think that I think we went through a period where we viewed sex as something private as a culture and I think that's changing in unhealthy ways. The extent of it, not the phenomenon always existed. I think it's an extent issue. But I don't know. I'm not an expert on exhibitionism, so I don't know. All right, cool. Thank you. Thank you guys for supporting the show. So generously, thank you all guys for being here. Thanks for the super chatters. I'll be on, I don't know, next week. I think Monday and Tuesday, but I'm not sure yet. So we will have to figure this out. Thanks guys. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you. Bye.