 fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest and individual rights. This is the Iran Brook Show. Alright everybody, welcome to Iran Brook Show and this, what is it? It's Tuesday, September 19th. Hope everybody's doing well. I mean a great beginning of your week. I am not at home as you can probably tell. I'm in New York City and yeah, in New York I did the debate last night. We'll talk about that. New York is a bit of a mess right now. One of the crazy, this is one of the most crazy weeks in all the year for New York, maybe the most crazy week. I don't know why anybody scales any events in this week in New York. It's UN week. This is when all the big shots from all over the world show up in New York and attend the UN meetings. So I've been sadly in New York for many a UN week and it's always a zoo. Half the city is blocked off, closed off streets are closed. Traffic jams everywhere. There is the diplomats staying at all the hotels, there's security people running around. There are cops everywhere. Again, roads are closed. You don't know which roads are closed. It's a complete disaster and on top of that it appears, I think, that I'm staying at the same hotel as Zelinski who is addressed to UN today. And that means we have security going into the hotel. You have to have your bag go through a metal detector. I mean, you throw an X-ray machine. You have to go through a metal detector. You get, you know, they wave a wand if you beep during the metal detector. The police everywhere in the building, on every floor, there seems to be a security guard. This morning I was walking out of breakfast and they wouldn't let me leave the restaurant. It was like, can't loop. You have to stand there. And there were security guards everywhere. And then suddenly, out of no way, this group of people in between them is a guy who I'm pretty sure is Zelinski and some big guy next to him. And they just surrounded by security people, swoosh into the elevator. The elevator goes down and then I see there's a dog, you know, a bomb-specific dog with it. Just a zoo. So anyway, this is, it's a real pain. But I do think I saw Zelinski. I think, who knows? And what difference does it make? But it is a pain. So I have to remind myself, no more New York during UN week. Before I agree to do events, I need a check to see when UN week is. Anyway, last night was a, let's see, what do we have here? I do have a poll going about whether you'd want to live in New York for a few years or a few months. And 59% say yes, 41% say no. All right, we'll see how this poll ends up after we get more votes in. Anyway, what was I going to say? Yes, I was going to remind you to use the Super Chat to ask questions. I was going to remind you of the ability to Super Chat both to ask questions, to show in the direction you want, and also as an opportunity to support what I do. We haven't had a show in a little while, so hopefully you've saved us some money. All right, and we, let's see, what else do we want to do? So today we're going to talk about two basic things. We're going to talk about the debate last night. I'll give you a recap of the debate last night with at least my perspective on the debate last night. And then I want to, just a few impressions of New York. I haven't spent a lot of time here, but I was here with my wife. So we walked around a little bit, give you a little bit of impressions about the city and where we were. All right, let's start with the debate. So last night I debated Brian Kaplan on the proposition that alcohol capitalism is definitely bad for humanity or something like that. So definitely bad is, I think, the key. And this debate was held last night. It was held by the SOHO Forum. I thought it all went fine. I won the debate for whatever that's worth. They take a vote before, they take a vote after, and whoever has changed more minds wins the debate. So it's about the change. So I changed more minds, and they did definitely lead to disaster for humanity. So that was the proposition. And alcohol capitalism would definitely lead to disaster for humanity. So I did win the debate. So we'll take that. I'm now two for one at SOHO Forum debates. I lost my first debate there to the host, Gene Epstein, on selfishness. I won a debate with John Mackey, and now I won a debate with Brian. I have to say, even though I won the debate according to that measure, I'm not particularly happy with my performance in the debate. And part of it is the format. These debates go by so fast, so quickly. 15-minute opening statements for a complex issue where you're trying to provide the justification for a limited government and objective law of defensive individual rights and the use of retaliatory force. It's just, there's a lot to cover. And there's a lot to establish. That is nothing, and this I find in every debate I do, I mean this debate may be less so, but in every debate that I do, just because of the nature of the audience, because as objectivists, we have so much groundwork to build. It's very hard to know what to capitalize on in terms of what the audience knows and what you can assume they accept. And because our ideas are so radical and so different, we have to build a foundation for the radical ideas that are up here. So if you debate even a socialist or anybody like that, you can debate a socialist from a conservative, even libertarian perspective. And that's relatively easy because you're just focused on politics. But I believe that you can't really debate a socialist or a communist or anything like that, you know, somebody on the left or on the right for that matter, without addressing the core issue which is the moral foundations. But to address the moral foundations, you have to at least introduce the idea of rational egoism. You have to introduce something about self-interest. You have to introduce something about this idea that individuals have a moral and political right to pursue their own happiness. So not easy. So we have a hard time in any debate because we have so much to establish. And everything that we have to say, from metaphysics to epistemology to morality, is very different than what most people hold. And that's to some extent true of the debate yesterday, but less so because the audience was primarily a lot of objectivist and a lot of libertarians and most of everything familiar, at least somewhat with Iron Man. But there's just a lot of stuff to cover. So Iron Man emphasizes this and I talked quite a bit with Greg Salamiere before the debate and he helped me out a lot and sent me a lot of material. And I feel like I did an injustice to the material he sent me because I didn't cover much of it and some important points from it. And I knew I wasn't covering it and I just didn't know how to fit it in given the time constraints and given the direction, you know, the format, given the way it's structured. Anyway, for example, just to give you an example, there's a whole issue about using force and retaliation. So retaliation is important, right? Somebody does harm against you, whether it's violence, fraud, property theft, whatever it happens to be. They need to pay for that. It's not just about restitution. It's about, but restitution is part of it. But it's also about punishment. It's about justice. And part of identifying, part of that requires discovering who that person is and identifying him, finding him and penalizing him. And that requires a real thinking about how to do that objectively. How to do that in a way that A, gets the result you want. That is, you find the guilty party. And B, there's no collateral damage involved. That is, you haven't violated the rights of a bunch of other people in order to find the guilty person. Now, the worst thing is that you accuse somebody who's innocent of committing the crime. But the second worst thing is, almost as bad if not as bad, is that in finding the guilty person, you violate the rights and destroy the lives of a bunch of people on the way to figuring out who's guilty. And of course, we have. You know, the police have a lot of regulations that they have to follow. Unfortunately, I think in some cases, not enough of them. Like, you know, I don't think police should have, what was it, no knock, no knock kind of, you know, where they burst into homes, particularly for things that are not particularly even serious crimes. But there has to be objective standards set. And what constitutes an appropriate way to go about finding a guilty person and getting warrants, search warrants, listening in, getting wiretap warrants. You know, this requires going in front of a judge, presenting evidence, showing why there's probable cause, showing why whatever it is that you intend to do, which would constitute a violation of rights if the person on the other side were innocent. There is an objective reason to do in terms of the necessity of finding the guilty party or in terms of this person being the guilty party. So all of these things, let me see if I can, let me see if I can change the setting it would make. I know it's zooming in and out a lot. Let me change the setting to see if... Let me know, Mark, if this is better. You know, this looks worse. Anyway, let me know if this is better or not. So all of this needs a process, an objective process. And that's not easy. All of that is a challenge. All of that is something that really needs to be thought through, needs to be worked out. It's... there is a real... There's a lot of thinking that has to go into enforcing the law, both in terms of enforcing it objectively but then also how to use retaliatory force, rules of evidence, how to... you know, in a court of trial, how to find somebody guilty or not guilty. These are real achievements, I think, of our legal system. As flawed as it is, as problematic as it often seems to be, they're real achievements about process that are crucial. Now imagine if all of that now, you have multiple policing agencies, each one with a different process, disagreeing about what the process should be. And you have a victim and a guilty person who are belonging to different entities, different security agencies with different processes, different ways of doing things. Everything now becomes a negotiation. My police force, your police force. How do you ever find a guilty person? How do you ever prosecute a guilty person? And how do you guarantee that in the process, you're not violating the rights of people who might not be part of your security force, but who cares? They're not paying your bills, so why not violate their rights when there's somebody else's security force? So there's a whole world here of... The Danaka capitalists do not have an answer to other than waving their hands, well, they'll find a way, they'll negotiate, they'll all profit maximizing. There's ways around these things. But there are no ways around these things. And it's not... The profit maximizing solution... You know, this is coming from me, right? But the problem maximizing solution when you're dealing with issues of force and justice might not be the right solution, the just solution, the solution that actually protects individual rights. And you saw that yesterday with Brian. There is a security agency that protects and guarantees the protection of child molesters. What can you do? He said, nothing you can do about it, the world's not perfect, so some child molesters will not be prosecuted. Sad, but that's just part of reality. And his view is, well, you could not deal with that security agency, you could shun them, you could do this, you could do that, but there's nothing you can actually do to stop child molesters because you wouldn't want to go to war with this other security agency because war is never a solution. Wow. Wow. I mean, the same thing would happen with abortion, the same thing would happen with, you know, any kind of minority... You know, the same would happen imagine if I started a security agency that just protected crooks. You paid me a lot of money, a lot of money, and if you robbed people from outside of this security agency, if you robbed people from outside, if you killed people outside, if you molested people from outside, if you did whatever to people outside, I, my security agency, specialized in protecting you. It's going to be very expensive, so you're going to have to pay me a lot of money, but I'll protect them. And Brian's attitude, which I was actually surprised, I thought he'd have a better answer for this, was, yep, there are injustices in the world. What can you do? The answer was, there are countries over there where this happens and we don't do anything about it, and that's true. And here, this is another point where I just didn't do as good of a job as I should have. While it is sad and disappointing that there are countries out there in the world where injustice is committed and we're not the policemen of the world and there's no moral duty to go and do something about it and you shouldn't invade countries in order to set them straight, primarily because of the loss of life on your side. There is a sense of which is over there and it's still sad, but imagine you live in the neighborhood. And now, your next neighbor might be a child molester who's been protected by a security agency and you can't do anything about it. And down the road, they might be a murderer or a bank robber or a home robber. Yeah, you can build the defense around your home against them but you can't otherwise do anything about them and your security agency is saying, look, we could, but that would start a war and that's expensive and you don't want your rates to go up. So we're not going to go to war against them so we're just going to live with it for a while. If it gets out of hand, maybe we'll do something. It's like, God, would you want to live in a world like that? Would you want to live in a neighborhood like that? Of course not. Of course not. So I could have made that much more real. Proximity matters, space matters, your neighbors matter, your community matter matters in the sense your country matters, what happens within your country matters. The other example that he gave, which related to countries which, God, right after I thought of this and I could have really, you know. So he said at some point, look, why would the security agencies go to war with one another? Countries live in peace with one another all the time. Look at the US and Canada, look at Norway and Sweden. I mean, I would bet he says for 100 years there won't be a war between Norway and Sweden or Canada and the US. Even though the US is much stronger than Canada, we could take over Canada. We're not going to. And there's a lot of things you could say about that. We're not going to because we have respect for individual rights. But this idea that countries that respect individual rights are going to always respect individual rights and they're going to be peaceful kind of forever is just not true. And what I should have said is something like you could have been sitting in 1910 and many, many, many people, many, many, many intellectuals were sitting in 1910 and saying there hasn't been a major war in Europe in 100 years, almost 100 years. Everybody's trading with one another. Prosperity is increasing. We're getting richer all the time. Life is pretty damn good. There's probably never going to be a war, a major war in Europe. This is four years before World War I. And I would bet that a significant number of intellectuals thought this. Or you could be sitting in 1920 after World War I and you could quite rationally and reasonably say, wow, that was so devastating. That was, you know, that was such a horror. That was such an unequivocal disaster. There will never be another war in Europe. I mean, people have learnt their lesson. I mean, millions and millions and millions of people just died. Why would anybody initiate a war again? Don't you see the damage? And look, Germany's now a democracy and most of these countries, the Austrian-German Empire is gone. It's now countries and it's now nations and they have institutions and the people would never vote in somebody who would go to war because war, it's so destructive. People die, wealth gets destroyed. You would be sitting in 1920. What did Wilson call World War I? The war that ends all wars? The war to end all wars? The reason was, it was so horrific. It was so horrible. And yet, we all know that within, you know, 18 years, 19 years, World War II, even more horrific, even more brutal, even more destructive between countries that were a decade earlier, quote, democracies. And they happened. So this whole argument about countries being a piece and that we can extrapolate that to security agencies is wrong because countries are not a piece. And second, a big part of why countries have been a piece for the last, since World War II, has to do with American dominance and we came close to nuclear war a few times. Not all the world was a piece. Parts of the world have not been a piece. So there's so many counter examples. It's such a, I think, you know, not a serious argument about, yes, once people accept, once people accept kind of peaceful coexistence even as a social democracy. And then he went on to say how horrible governments are today, how horrible countries are today. And yet they're peaceful. I mean, the whole thing, I mean, on the one hand he holds, government is just this horrific gang, this horrific, you know, disaster. Governments today, they don't protect individual rights. They're evil and terrible, but they're going to be peaceful. I don't get that. But the worst was admitting that there will be security agencies that basically protect evil people, people who violate individual rights. And there's nothing really you can do about it. So other things, I mean, there's so many things I could have said, should have said. It's very, a debate like this is so much second guessing. But, you know, my opening statements, my opening statements, I cut, I don't know, a big chunk of what I was going to say because, you know, ran out of time. Now I knew I was going to run out of time. So it doesn't surprise me. But trying to figure out in a debate like this what to say and what not to say, and it's never satisfying. And at the end of the day, what really needs to be done, I think, because a debate like that will never really satisfy everybody because you can't fully make the arguments that you need to make. I think that what needs to be done is a significant essay basically taking apart the arguments point by point and really dismantling them. Because you can't, you know, the back and forth in the debate is, it's whatever comes to you at the moment. And the nice thing about an article, an in-depth article that really dismantles it is you can really ponder it, you can really think of it, you can really come up with the best examples. But there was a lot of back and forth between me and Brian. During the debate, I don't know that I made the best points possible during that. But, you know, I made an impact on the audience. So for what it's worth, more people in the audience who are undecided who started out agreeing with him switched. I have to actually have the detailed, let me just see, I have the detailed results of the voting. Let me see if I can pull those up for you. I have it here. So before the proposition, remember the proposition was an alcohol capitalism would definitely be a complete disaster for you many. So for the debate, 38% of the audience said yes. 33 said no. They were an alcohol capitalist. And 28, 28, 29% were undecided. So that's kind of an interesting breakdown. So, you know, more people on my side at the beginning of the debate. After the debate, 49% were yes. 49% said disaster. 41% said no, it's not a disaster. And only 10% were undecided. So I convinced, in a sense, 10% to switch or to go from undecided to my position. But Brian convinced 8%. I convinced 10.7, he convinced 2, the margin is 2.7. So it's not like it was a slam dunk. It's hard to tell how exactly these kind of things play out. But anyway, I had an impact on 10% of the audience switched. I'll take, if I could get 10% of my audience, every talk or every debate that I do to come to my side, I am quite happy with that result. To come to my side who weren't there before, I'm quite happy with that result. But again, in terms of answering the issues that relate to NCAPs, we need a much more detailed, thorough refutation and analysis. Rand has done some of that, but I think it needs to be done in more detail. Let me see. Just to remind you to ask questions. We're still about $100 short of where we should be if you want to support my work, my debate work, my speaking, the shows. And this is the way to do it. You can do it on the Super Chat. Luckily, just a few words on New York. As I've said in the past, I love coming to New York. It's a great city visit. I would have loved in my past to have spent months here. That is to experience living the city. That'll never happen. I'm not interested anymore. It's something I would have liked to have done in the past but could have never really afforded it. But what a great city it is. I mean, just to be surrounded by the skyscrapers, the surrounded by human ambition. And there's a surprising number of new skyscrapers up. So it's not just the past. There were periods in New York where there was nothing going on. It felt like, okay, it's all about the past. But now, you know, I'm in my hotel as in a brand new skyscraper. There are two brand new skyscrapers right next door to this. I was out at Hudson Yard. Went up and there's a balcony at the top, 101st floor there where you can see the whole of New York. I fear flights. It was not a fun experience for me. But it was still a beautiful view. So it was great. But there's some really interesting architectural buildings there. There's some really nice buildings there. And then we went on this, they took the old train, above ground train tracks that went through this neighborhood, Chelsea basically, in that part of Manhattan. And the train doesn't run there anymore. And they've taken the track which is high above the street. And they've turned it into a park. So it's a narrow park. So it's got a walking path and a lot of greenery. And we went and I've never been up there. And we went up there and it was really nice. It was really, it was super relaxing. There's a lot of interesting architecture to see on the way. A lot of modern buildings that have super interesting features. And people are, you know, it's very busy. A lot of people there. But it's your above Manhattan, your above the street. It's very calm up there. You can look down, but you can also look at the various neighborhoods. You can look at the various skyscrapers. It was fun. It was fun. Other aspect of New York City that is really amazing is, you know, there's an endless amount of restaurants here. An endless number of unbelievably good restaurants. We ate in a number of fantastic places. Whoops, the power just went out. There we go. I plugged it back in. We ate at, it's charging, maybe it's not. One second, right? Charging. We've eaten at a couple of really nice restaurants. We're eating at another really good restaurant later today. Fantastic food. You know, the streets are vibrant. There's a lot of energy in the streets. You know, I'm more on the, I don't know, the Fifth Avenue, the shopping side, the entertainment side. I'm not near where the business side is. But, yeah, I mean, New York is just a, it's just a great city. There's just so much to do, so much to see. It's such a great vibe here that, yeah, my wife and I, having a blast, really enjoying it. And I covered you to visit, and I covered you to visit. I've got a poll going. Would you like to, would you like to live here for a while? Months, years, whatever. And, yeah, so we got 63, say 63%, 64% said yes. 36% said no. We got 85 votes. Not a bad sample. So two-thirds of you would say you'd like to be here, third. Interesting, one of the things at the debate was I met a number of, met a number of people in the after party for the debate, in Epstein's home. Two or three people who came up to me and said, maybe more, came up to me and said that I had a significant wall in the shape their life has taken, both in terms of either introducing them to objectivism or changing, you know, encouraging them to make something of their life. There's a guy, you know, maybe he's listening now, who, again, it's a small world. I'm going to see him again in Austin in a couple of weeks. But he said, he was living in Dubai. He's originally from Europe. Wasn't really liking Dubai, didn't know where to move, and listening to my shows. And because of my shows, decided he was going to move to the U.S. and he's going to move specifically to New York. And he lives in New York now and loves it, just loves New York and is having a blast. So that was good. A law professor, a guy who's a lawyer, who teaches law at Villanova, I think, Villanova University and uses videos from the Iran Book Show, has his students watch the videos, and that forms a big basis of discussion in his classes. So that's a blast. When you come up and tell me stories like that of the impact I've had on your life or the way you're using the materials or the way you are now having an impact and helping make the world a better place out there, that makes all the difference from my perspective. So I'm going to change the setting here just to see if that makes any difference. You know, that, because I'm noticing that it does, it keeps trying to zoom in, zoom out. It doesn't know where it wants to... I don't know what's going on. I think this might be better. We'll see. So maybe not. No, it doesn't make any difference. I'm not sure why it does that. I thought it would be a depth of field issue, but I've changed the depth of field pretty dramatically from the two options and it doesn't seem to make any difference. It could because this is behind me and it's focusing on it and my colors and the colors there are very similar and it doesn't know if to focus on face, but it's actually worse now. So I'm going to go back to the setting from before. All right, let's see. Let's take your questions. And today's show is not going to be a long show because I've got a hard stop. But, okay, Glenn, $100, thank you, Glenn. Keep fighting the good fight. Your leadership is important. Thank you, really appreciate that, Glenn. Wes says, thanks for advocating a rational philosophy. It amazes me how indifferent Ann Capps and others are about injustice. Like, we can never eliminate them 100% or whatever. It is pretty shocking. I mean, and it's because they don't have a real sense of morality. Notice when Brian was asked about the monocode that in his mind justifies his political philosophy, it was just some kind of utilitarianism, intuitionism, what he senses is right, what people sense is right. For me, right or wrong are both intellectually, you know, intellectually really, really powerful ideas and as a consequence, they resonate in terms of emotion. That is, I'm very, very passionate about the good and I'm very, very passionately against the evil. For me, these are really, really important things. When I see somebody violate somebody else's rights, it's horrific and I get a sense with Ann Capps and Brian is an example of it. First of all, they're all very, very smart and this is, you can't not be super smart to be an Ann Capp because you have to hold these floating abstractions and to hold floating abstractions and play with them and connect them and make them some kind of integration in your mind, you have to have real firepower because it takes that, right? It takes that. It's interesting how people who have less, I think less of that kind of abstract ability are usually more grounded in reality and usually more tied to reality. If you look at David Friedman, David Friedman was brilliant but he's completely detached from reality. He's the ultimate in holding floating abstractions and being detached and he has the same kind of attitude towards evil, if you will, same kind of attitude towards violation of rights. So I saw a talk he gave once a few years ago where he talked about private law because his old ideas, well, law evolves and private agencies, they all have private law and they all evolve in different ways and private law should be competition. And as an example of the development of private law, he gave Sharia law as manifest in one of the tribes in Somalia because Somalia is like Anarchy, right? There's no central government in Somalia. And he gave this as a positive example and when I think Sharia law, I think of the brutality towards women. I think of female genital mutilation which is consistent with Sharia law. It's quiet, really, of this particular type of Sharia law in Somalia. I think of cutting people's hands off for theft. I think of stoning women for adultery. I mean, just the horrors, the horrors that this kind of legal system involves. And to them it's like, yeah, there's no difference between that and America and this is why they hate the US. This is why it's all moral equivalency. All governments are the same. They're all as evil. All systems of law are equal. It's just so... And I'm not saying Ryan holds that although he was very careful neither to say he does or he doesn't. He kind of tried to have it both ways. But I find that horrible. I found that shocking that somebody as smart as David Friedman could use an example. So obviously unjust. So obviously involving an ethical behavior. So obviously involving a legal system that was clearly unjust. It's just another example of private law, what the hell? And that's what I sense. Morale is not real to them. Morale has no standing in their mind. It's just politics. And in that sense, it's just politics. And it's just a matter of a game of, you know, moving around abstractions in your head. There's no reality to it. If I lived in a country where the... in a geographic area where the attitude towards any kind of evil was, well, I mean, we're not going to go to war over that, civil war over that. I mean, again, imagine if Lincoln's attitude was that. And this is why... this is why, by the way, so many Ancaps are pro-Confederacy. They think the civil war is an abomination. That's over there. It's... you know, they have their defense agencies. Southern Confederacy. We have ours. Why not split up? Let them have their slavery and we not have slavery. Huh? Defensive individual rights? Neighbors? You willing to just... I don't get it. They really... I mean, there's a sense in which they really don't care. And justice just happens. It's just all a game. It's all a political game for them. And that is sad more than anything else. It really is. It's... And I don't get that. And again in the debate yesterday, I could have brought that out more. But... I'm pretty shocking. He made this point about... If you get to a point of a truly limited government like Iran wants, then they'd be binding arbitration and then everything would move to basically private courts. Why would they be binding arbitration? Why is binding arbitration the right path to take? You know, do I want to know what kind of court system it is? Am I always going to go for binding arbitration? Why? If the state has a good and, you know, what do you call it? Objective court system? Legal system? Why would I resort to some kind of corporate run, maybe corporate influenced and reputation? Everything is reputation. As if companies don't do really, really stupid things in spite of reputational effects. I mean, I'm all for reputation. I'm all for that. And mostly markets work in that way. But when you're talking about criminal justice, when you're talking about, you know, arbitrating the disputes about the most important things in my life, I'm not going to sign binding arbitration. Now I have to admit, I didn't catch on to that fast enough during the debate. I would have gone right after that. Do I really want to leave it up to a court that is ruled, governed by I don't know and how many companies would actually require a binding arbitration to get employees, if the best employees said no, then they would change their policies. So I said something around that but I could have hammered that much stronger. But it's just not true. It's just not true that the resulting equilibrium strategy would be a binding arbitration strategy. Yeah, I don't know what happens if somebody doesn't follow binding arbitration. I guess it depends on the relationship between the security agency that that person have and the security agency of the person who is arbitrating and how they negotiate that deal after the fact. I don't know if there's no final authority. Where does it all go? And the only reason arbitration works today is because there's a final authority and because there's justice. So again, it's not I think I missed a lot of opportunities to go after his argument even more than I did. Shazmat says, your point that health care and education should not be thrown away despite being corrupt was very important. That is the main reason that ANCAPs want to abolish all government. Yes, I mean, yeah, government isn't working today. So it violates rights. It does a bunch of bad things. Oh, so there's a bunch of good things. But it does a bunch of bad things. So let's abolish the whole thing. No, let's fix it. Make it better. It used to work better. So we know it can work better. And now today it works better in some ways than it did even then. So it's good in the past and it's good in the present. Let's combine them and make it better. Make it significantly better. Make it much, much better. You know, they want to scrap it. But you wouldn't do that to other institutions that you know are being corrupt. Again, because that's not, the issue for them is it's just this, again, this logical game that they play. And it just seems to them that this is the outcome. It has to, you know, it's kind of a game theory thing. This is the outcome that makes sense. This is where it has to be. Not really. It's in tour debate. Is there any point in addressing truth? How we know. It depends on, it depends on the debate. But yeah, sometimes you have to go there, but it's very hard to do again because there's a whole theory, epistemological theory, and what can you assume they know how much time do you have to elaborate and to explain. It's quite difficult to actually do it. But sometimes it is. It depends on the debate. It depends on the topic. It depends on what is, what you're being discussing. I mean, I don't think there was in the debate yesterday and I don't think there may be, and I don't think there is, typically in the debates that I do. David says, cryptically, that there are ways to increase one's IQ. I think most ANCAPs would benefit from that and I have also been wondering what you would think about it. I think there are ways to increase your IQ, but I also think, I've talked about this many times, IQ I don't think is a particularly good measure of intelligence, of the full range of what intelligence is. And I don't know that IQ captures your ability to think, which means your ability to connect abstractions to reality. And that's certainly an area where I think ANCAPs, almost everybody out there could do better, but ANCAPs are good in the theoretical abstract level, but have a really hard time tying what they believe to reality. John says, could you discuss governments and geographical jurisdiction as in different countries and subdivisions within one country? I mean, it's a big topic, so I'll just say this. I think that you want more, you don't want a world government, you don't want a world government because you want optionality, you want to take into account the possibility of a government going bad, and you want to have a possibility of moving somewhere else. But on the other hand, it's silly and ineffective and inefficient to have too many countries. What you want is, I don't know, in the world, and I think I've estimated maybe having 30, 40, 50 countries at most, that gives you enough safeguards to be able to jump to another country if yours goes bad, or if another country is doing something significantly better than your country, or if you have other opportunities given another legal code. But it's important to have large countries because they're massive benefits to scale. There's massive benefits to having the same system of laws, same governance, same understanding, same language, same culture, over vast geography you get enormous economies. Economies are scaled as a consequence. So, should they be in the United States and Canada? I don't really see why you share a language, you say much of the same culture, I don't see any problem in that becoming one country. Much of Central America could be one country, much of Latin America could be maybe two countries, the Portuguese and the Spanish. Africa's a little bit more complicated, but I don't know that there's any steadfast rule in terms of size, but size matters and having scale is a huge benefit. In terms of within a country, I think there's some advantage to having states, a constitution to govern the entire country and then states that can vary laws to some extent within the scope of the constitution. That allows for some experimentation and some discovery in terms of what are the best ways to do things. I think that's all I'm going to say now, but it is a big topic that at some point is worth elaborating on. Did you get a chance to talk to get to know Brian Kaplan, any chance he can come on the show to discuss immigration and all the issues? I love you both and I think that would be a great conversation. Brian's a nice guy, I enjoy talking to him. He's obviously super smart. I think his work in immigration is excellent. I think some of his other work is excellent, so I admire much of what Brian does. I read a lot of his stuff. I think a lot of his stuff is a lot I mean, his other stuff is a lot more solid and a lot better thought out than his work on then his views on government and on governance and on alcohol capitalism. I think Humor was a philosopher from Colorado, University of Colorado in Boulder. I think it's a negative influence probably on Brian and I'm sure Brian and I will interact in the future. I might have him on the show to talk about immigration. We'll see but yeah, I think Brian does some good work very, very, very wrong. Completely wrong on the issue of government and the issue of anarchy. Liam says, do you think more people suffer from rationalism or evasion? Well I think rationalism probably well, I don't know. I don't know. They're not comparable because there's people to be rationalistic often evade. I think rationalism and empiricism are usually what's contrasted. An evasion is a part of both is a part of both. Sol says, how correct was the labor theory of property rights as John Locke stated and how much of an improvement was his conception of individual property rights over the best version before him. I think it was a huge improvement. There wasn't a real thought out developed conceptualization of property rights and certainly not before John Locke. There was some attempts primarily by some philosophers in the Netherlands, Poependorf and oh, I forget the name of the other guy. I forget his name. Anyway, but John Locke integrated a lot of that knowledge and contributed a lot of his own and was a big, big improvement, a big step forward. How correct was it? A lot of it is correct, but it's too focused on labor. It doesn't recognize the world of reason, the world of the mind. Enough. So it's mixed and the consequence of that is that it could only go so far in a sense of providing the foundations for liberty foundations for good economic theory but more importantly good political theory. And I think you need to kind of complete the mission, complete the task of grounding liberty and grounding property rights and grounding individual rights and providing a political system that defends them all. Noah, what do you think are the best educational books for aspiring entrepreneurs, business managers? I'm already reading the hard things about hard things about hard things. Best educational books for entrepreneurs, business managers. You know, I don't know. I really don't know. I apologize. I don't really have a strong view on the best books for entrepreneurs. So sorry. I mean, I think we'd have to show up if you haven't yet. Philippe Hi. Philippe and Yuri here. You changed our lives for the better. Thank you. We soon expect great financial success. That's amazing. We'd love to invite you to a yacht to sail the Mediterranean. What would you be free to do it? I don't know. Drop me an email and we can discuss it. But that is great. I'm super glad to hear about your financial success and super glad to hear about my role, my possible role in it. So keep on being successful, Philippe. Finally, J.J. Jigbi says oh well quote, some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them. Yes, I think. There's a sense in which I think that is true of an alcohol capitalism. God, I had a thought a minute ago about something it slipped my mind as something I was going to say. Yeah, the property rights question ruined me. One of the things that came out was I brought up copyright in a sense intellectual property rights and there's another one. What do you deal with that? And again, I don't think they kept care. A, because they don't believe in copyrights, patents, intellectual property rights. I think those and that's a real problem. A whole realm of property rights they don't believe exist. But then what happens if you have one security force and I mentioned this, that wants to protect copyrights and one that doesn't and the one defends the people who are violating the copyrights of the others they just get away with it. There's just no way to enforce it. You get, you know and the solution is negotiate. Well, what do you negotiate? You negotiate half a copyright? You get some royalty? Any royalty if they have enough guns and they make costly enough for you to go to war with them. So again, the whole thing is so bizarre because it cares zero zilch for justice, for truth for individual rights. It's a system that negates individual rights. It's a system that negates property rights and that in that sense it is an immoral. It's an immoral political system and no, once you have a limited government, true limited government it would not evolve into it would not evolve into into anarchy. Not if people cared about justice not if people cared about their own rights. People say, I need to be I need to be clear if I'm a night watchman an Israeli big state guy you're very confused, be consistent. I'm always consistent. I don't know what you're talking about. I am consistently about limited government. I don't know what a night watchman means I don't think it's a good analogy I think it's superficial and silly. I'm certainly not a big state guy. I believe the government should have a police force a military and a judiciary and I think those are complex functions and they require they require real thought in implementing them acting on them and you know, doing them in a way that is just and right. Protecting individual rights is not simple or straightforward and it requires real thought, real processes it requires a legislation legislature it requires an executive branch it requires a legal system these are complex things and a night watchman just assumes that it's a god that's there to defend you. But neither does it mean that the government should provide you with health care, education or anything else it just means the government is there to protect your rights and needs all the institutions and all the systems and all the laws that are acquired in order to protect your individual rights and that's the only function of government. Jamie says I was at the debate last night thanks for coming to New York City when Kaplan felt short was the idea that nothing is guaranteed in reality but we should still strive for standards yes, but this is the point where if you really put if you really went deep with that what that really means is I stood for morality I stood for justice I stood for standards that there is such thing as living by a moral code and striving for justice striving for defending individual rights it doesn't mean you always succeed right people do commit crimes but then if they do commit crimes they must pay a price they must suffer the penalty for it so I stand firm on the idea of justice I don't think it's right to think of it in terms of guarantees I think you need to think of it in terms of justice and he didn't care about justice yeah we do the best that we can that's not how a political philosophical issues about political issues no, we should always strive to do what's just will we make mistakes sometimes? sure that's not the essence the essence is the justice alright, thank you guys really appreciate the superchatters we met our goal, I appreciate that I will see you all as you know I'm traveling I mean New York, I fly to Madrid tomorrow well I'm going to be in London tomorrow night just overnight at the airport so I might try to do a show tomorrow night from the airport if I'm up to it see how tired I am and then I'll probably do a show on Friday on Thursday or Friday or both from Madrid we'll see there one or two of them might be new shows depends if I have the time to do the research to get you accurate news that's why I didn't do it today I didn't have the time to catch up on the news hope you enjoyed the show don't forget to support the show on a monthly basis www.uranbrookshow.com or Patreon, I think Patreon is our preferred method these days or subscribe star and I will see you in the days to come thanks everybody, have a great rest of your week