 The fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. All right, everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Sunday afternoon. Everybody is having a fantastic weekend in spite of the craziness out there. Today, we're going to have an open Q&A. Super Chat is available for anybody online listening who wants to ask a question. So feel free to use it. We also have our panelists here. We've got four of them right now. I expect we might get a few joining us as the program advances. Nick, if you're listening to this, if you send me, if you post there an email or a phone I can text it to you, then I will send you the link. So I see somebody telling you that a fixed link was sent out last Monday. You can look for it. You can find it. It's up there, so feel free to use that, and hopefully you can join us. All right, so we're going to start with a panel and then we'll go to join it. Whoops, what is that? We're getting some feedback. I don't know where that came from. All right, that's muted. Okay, let's start with Jonathan. Quick question, Yaron, maybe a little bit foolish, but is it the Yaron Brook show or is it Yaron Brook show? Because in the opening, it says, welcome to the Yaron Brook show, but often you just say welcome to the Yaron Brook show. So which is it? And thanks for all your help and your good work. I don't know. What do you want it to be? I don't know. I think it's the Yaron Brook show, I think, because just Yaron Brook show is, I don't know. I don't know. I've never thought about it. I think it's the Yaron Brook show and I think I just swallowed the the when I introduced the show. So it's just me talking fast. That was a great answer. Thank you so much. Too easy, Jonathan. You've got to challenge me a little bit here. All right, let's see, Jennifer. You were saying about abortion and the Constitution that it doesn't, you can't, the Constitution can't list every single right that you would have. Yep. But it's implied in the principles in the Constitution. But people were telling me, well, I was, I tried to compare it to slavery that the states can't just make slavery legal again. And they said, oh, there's an amendment. But the amendment wasn't the amendment put in there because of the history of what had happened and the war and everything. So they wanted it to be blatantly explicit this time because it seems like it was obvious if you they'd been following the Constitution in the beginning, they wouldn't have allowed it. That was a big mistake. So that's why they added that amendment. You don't need one for abortion. Yeah. I mean, of course, we don't need it for abortion. It's ridiculous. And what are they going to add one for contraception? And then we'll add one for gay marriage and we'll add one for, you know, that I have a right to choose whatever grocery store I want to go shop in. Right. There should be there should be a enumerated right. There should be an enumerated it just they're just being idiots. I mean, that's that's, you know, they don't understand what enumerated rights are. And then the other thing I get, and this is for the most sophisticated ones, they said, oh, yes, but the enumerated rights in the ninth amendment are supposed to be the rights that Americans had when the Constitution was signed. There were no cars when the Constitution was signed. So I don't have a right to drive my car. I mean, it's so concrete bound, anti intellectual, anti historical, because they're not looking at the history. And yes, the the the amendment around slavery was added because for forever, the Constitution is interpreted as not applying to slavery, and they wanted to make clear that that the the federal government that the Constitution applied to the states, and it didn't just apply in the 14th amendment didn't just apply to the federal government. So if the states violate rights, if the state violate the bill of rights, then the federal government's job is to prevent from doing that. So so that's what happened after after civil war. But yeah, it's just there is the ninth amendment because and if you read the federalist papers, because Madison was complaining that with the bill of rights, only these rights would be protected. But but but and look, there's only one right. This is the other thing, because the argument could be well, but the left wants a right to a job and a right to food and a right to but there's only one right. And what the bill of rights is doing is breaking that up, that one right into its constituents, into its applications. But the one right is the right to life. That's it. There's no other right, the right to liberty, property, pursuit of happiness are all applications of the right to life. And then the first amendment, and the second amendment, all the other amendments are just application of the right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, breaking them down. And but you can break them down to yes, I have a right to act. And then you could say you have a right to act in this way or in that way. You know, every one of those is constitutes a right. But it's it's it's silly to numerator at all. But I'm glad they numerator some of them, because that's the only reason we have some protection, right? Thank you. All right. All right. There is Charles, we had a Charles, cool. All right, let's see who is next. Daniel. I guess, following up on the same thing, how, how can the Supreme Court back to back rule the way they did on abortion and rule the way they did on the right of states to decide who can and can't own a gun for self defense? That nowhere in anything that I read, were they talking about the right to life or individual rights or anything else? It's all about, well, this justice said that and this 14th amendment should be interpreted this way and so forth. But no one goes back and says, why do we have any of this? No, there is no conception of individual rights in the court to the extent that there's a conception. It's a religious conception of natural rights, God given natural rights. But there was no concern. I mean, look, I said this many times because I found it hard to believe the first time I heard it, but then it made sense and I verified it that Antony Scalia, the darling of conservatives, the most intellectual of all our judges and so on, believed that individual rights were nonsense on stilts. He agreed with Jonathan Bentham. They just, where did they come from? They meant nothing. And if Scalia believed that, what are these other guys? I think the only person who has a conception of rights is Thomas. But Thomas' conception of rights is religious and very narrow and very dogmatic. And if you read his concurrence on the road case, you'll see he, well, there's no right to gay marriage. The founders would be horrified by gay marriage. So of course, they shouldn't be gay marriage. There's no right to contraception. There was no contraception in 1789 when the Constitution was ratified. So the Ninth Amendment doesn't apply to it. So he's an originalist in that sense. I encourage people if they're interested in this issue of interpreting a Constitution and how to do it, to read Tara Smith's book, God, I can't remember its name, of course, unconstitutional, unconstitutional law, maybe somebody can look it up and tell me, but how objectively you need to interpret the American Constitution without rewriting it, without being an object, just being an objectist. What is a proper legal approach to interpreting a Constitution? And it's not textualism or originalism. She critiques these. And it's not subjectivism, whatever I feel like. It's based on an objective interpretation of the Constitution. And she has a whole book on that. I encourage you to... Initial review in an objective legal system. Yes, thank you. So it's called Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System. It's by Tara Smith, Philosophy Professor at the University of Texas in Austin. I highly encourage you to get that book if this is of interest to you, how you would interpret that, how you would interpret it in the Ninth Amendment. And she places it in the context of a proper definition of individual rights. And you can't otherwise... You can't interpret what they're trying to do in the Constitution and what the Bill of Rights actually means without a proper conception of the Ninth Amendment and what the Bill of Rights is actually trying to do. And look, I admit that I would like to rewrite the Constitution. I think Constitution is flawed and I think it could be better. But that's not my argument. My argument is even within this Constitution, the proper understanding of individual rights, you would have a right to an abortion. But it might need... What the Constitution is lacking, and this is the great tragedy, I think, more than anything, is the definition of individual rights, is an explanation of what the Bill of Rights is there for, is an explanation, a more explicit explanation of what the unenumerated rights are, and whether they viewed it as a static thing, only the things that exist right now or whether they viewed it as a dynamic thing with these. So that... Something explicit like that would be a great feature. There is a project that John Stossel is working on that you might find interesting where he's interviewing people, or not so much interviewing people, is asking people to send him short videos of how you would rewrite the Constitution. What changes would you make to the Constitution? And I think he's going to air that video on July 4th. And I submitted a video that I think he's going to play where I basically say this, that a definition of individual rights is necessary. And then I talk about the four separations that I'd like to see in the Constitution, a clear separation of state from ideas vis-a-vis state and church. And then a separation of state from economics, a separation of state from science, and a separation of state from education. So I've submitted that to Stossel. I assume he's going to use it. He always uses my stuff. So look for that July 4th out of this Stossel channel. Thank you. Yeah, thanks, Daniel. Matthew. Okay, so I'll stay with abortion here. And then specifically the Democrats, right? So why haven't they done anything to address it yet? Why were we waiting for the Supreme Court to hold up? I don't think there is anything really for them to do, right? What they could do is pass a law that would make it national. It's not clear that they could get a law. When was the last time Democrats had a majority? It was probably under Obama. What's that? They got Obamacare through. They could have done it then. Yeah, but Obamacare is this weird. They got it through through. What was that trick they did through the budget? It was through the budget process. What is it? Reconciliation. Reconciliation. I don't think you can get because an abortion law is not budgetary. It doesn't have dollars assigned to it in a sense. I don't think you can do it through reconciliation. I'm not an expert on these things, but it strikes me it has to be a budgetary issue, so they snuck it through reconciliation. I don't think they could have done it. Now, they might have been able to do get a law across guaranteeing abortion through, I don't know, 14 weeks or something like that at the federal level because some Republicans in the past supported that. But I don't think they thought, what was the threat? I mean, you would think that maybe Bill Clinton in his first administration, when Republicans were more moderate maybe and where this was not that big of an issue, maybe could have got some Republicans to vote for something at least to protect through the first trimester. But they haven't, right? And I think this is a complete shock to the assistance of them. And remember that even through reconciliation now, I'm not sure. I don't know how they might have some anti-abortion Democrats. I'm not so mansion is pro-abortion. But we do have some pro-abortion Republicans. But I don't think they would vote on this. I think it would be political suicide and they would just not vote. They're cowards. We know Republicans are cowards because if they weren't cowards, they would have impeached Trump. So certainly if they didn't have the boss to impeach Trump, they're not going to have the boss to take on abortion. But I guess a follow up to that is, I mean, what do the Democrats expect somebody like me to do? They expect me to just run to run to my local polling office and vote for one of them. I mean, they're absolutely ridiculous. And this is an issue that they're right on, but they're right for a lot of the wrong reasons and they're pathetic at advancing the case for it. Absolutely. And they're wrong on it exactly for the reason that they're wrong on everything else. Again, they don't have a conception of rights. Their conception of rights includes the rights for food and a job and a right for minimal wage and a right to all these things. So they have a false conception of rights and therefore they can't defend abortion. And they even realize and so the whole tragedy here is that this is an example of what happens when you lose the concept of rights. And both left and right have lost the concept of rights. And abortion is just one example, a whole political problem right now. All the growth of government and the economic regulations and economy and all that. All of it is because of the loss of the concept of rights. I mentioned in the last show, this decision about Lochner, which is 18, I don't know, 90 something. I don't know exactly. But it's the last Supreme Court decision that recognized economic rights and recognized the right to contract that wasn't superseded by some common good or public interest. That's 100 something years ago. And Alito was kind of saying, yeah, Lochner, that's a horrible decision. I hate Lochner. We're not trying to re-establish anything regarding Lochner. So this is an issue of rights, God forbid. So the Republicans don't want to talk about rights because they're all now basically what's his name. There's this legal professor from Harvard, Vimule. Vimule, I think it is, who they're all now common good conservatives basically. They all now want, they interpret the constitution based on what they think the common good is. And the left is the same as the right in that sense. It's just the left tends to be more wrong on economic issues than the right is, but more wrong. It's not that the right is right on them. It's really, and yeah, Biden is talking about doing some administrative, I don't know, what he can do though, but you know, some kind of emergency. I mean, the only way I think they could do it is by basically doing a democracy, right? I mean, being authoritarian. And it's what the right would like their presidents to do. And now it's what the left would like their presidents to do. And this is where we're heading. All right. Thanks, Matthew. Charles, can you hear me, Charles? You're muted. Can you hear me? Yeah. Can you hear me now? I think one of the issues, and I've kind of gone back and forth on this issue in particular, I think it has to also to do with competing rights in the sense that when does the, when does the baby or the fetus essentially gain rights? And you know, I think that I was thinking about this and you know, I think that you could say that it doesn't exist in the world yet. But in, and actually I think from a medical standpoint, you know, it is probably actually existing in the world in the sense that it can experience things like probably hears voices or can hear music or some sort of can hear a heartbeat, you know, breathing from the mother, you know, movement. So it probably is actually experiencing the sensations in the world, even though it's in the womb. So there's, I don't know that there's any delineation between not experiencing the world in the womb, because there probably is some experiences there and being outside of the womb. So is it more when those sensory and motor skills kind of become and potential consciousness becomes present? And when is that, you know, is it the second trimester? Is it the third trimester? Yeah, I mean, I don't, but I don't think that's the, the, I don't think that's the delineation. I don't think that's the point of separation. The point of separation is when it becomes an individuated human being, when it becomes a person, when it it's self, you know, self-sustaining, self-generating, when it's not part of another biological entity, it might be conscious, it might be conscious of to some extent its environment, to the extent that it has that environment, it might be to some level aware. Yeah, but animals are aware as well and animals are not human beings. It's not a separate individuated human being until it is born. So birth is the separation. You know, that's, I think that's, that's what makes it a human being. Now, it doesn't mean it's nothing before birth. It means it's something before birth. It's almost a human being. It's approaching that. It's, it's potentially a human being. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a alive. You can't say it's not alive. All our cells in our body are alive. So it's certainly alive. But rights are political, rights are political moral concept. And morality and politics don't apply to it yet. Morality and politics apply to it only when it becomes a separate entity from the mother. And it's not yet a separate entity. It has its own DNA. Yes, I know it's a different DNA, but it's still connected. Lenny Pekov says, plugged in, plugged into the mother. And if it's part of the mother, it's, it's, it's an extension of the mother. When it's separated from her, that's when it gains these political rights. That's when morality applies to it. That's when you can't hurt it as a breach of morality and a breach of, of, of political. You remember also, rights protect action. The fetus is not acting. It's, it's there in a, in a sustained animation. It might passively receive certain information from the world out there, but it's not acting in the world. It's not trying to survive. It's not doing anything. It's just there feeding off of the mother, getting all its nutrients and everything else from the mother. Maybe it has some conscious awareness of the world around it, but that's it. So since rights only apply to action and self-generated action, then again, it's not, it's not rights don't apply to it. Whatever you call it, rights just don't apply it. Rights are political concept. They're not something that you have in it. As soon as you gain awareness, whoops, they come to rights. No, rights are something that happen in a social context. It's a, it's a political concept. It applies to you only under certain terms. And one of those terms means you have to be a separate entity from the mother. Well, I, you know, I think it's interesting. I probably have a couple thoughts on that that. I mean, I agree with like 99% of what you say. So, you know, this is like not the greatest topic for me, but I do think that there probably is a, I view it a little bit differently, I think, just in terms of the concept of when the rights generate. You know, I understand your, you know, kind of viewpoint on that. I probably am a little bit more on the side that there is something intrinsic with regard to humans that we have certain rights that, you know, whether that's not slightly from a higher, you could say not slightly from higher power, but also you could say that there is something about humans in terms of like they're being conscious that gives them something that it should be protected. And it's outside of like necessarily a social context. But yeah, I mean, it's at least I ran has a very clear definition of what individual rights are. And you know, it is a it is a it is a context. It is a concept, a moral concept that applies to human beings in a social context, and it protects their right to action, it protects their ability, their freedom to act, the freedom from coercion in acting on their own behalf in a self generated way. And that just doesn't apply to a nonindividuated entity. So you could you could challenge definition of rights, but then we'd have a we'd have a discussion about what rights are. But I highly recommend reading Rand on on abortion. There's a section in the iron man lexicon, or if you just put in Google iron man abortion. And let it pick up as some good, I think I linked on Twitter to a good video, or audio of Leonard pick up talking about abortion, which which provides maybe a slightly different. I mean, same conclusion, maybe slightly different way of presenting it than mine. Thanks, Charles. Let's see. All right, so we're going to take some super chat questions. I'll start with the $20 ones, and do those and then go back to the panel. All right, Colt, Colt asks, there seem to be a good balance between the federalist and anti federalist. The Constitution was finalized. But who would you but who would you have cited with and how would you have handled it if you were at the convention? Wow. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I would have side with Madison. I think Madison is the I find one of one of the more interesting of the founders and intellectual and knowledgeable and philosophical. So on the on the in the federalist papers, I would have side with Madison. In terms of how I would have handled it at the convention, you know, I would have fought for as consistent a defense of the principles of the Declaration of Independence as possible. And I would have fought for against the compromise of a slavery, you know, and that would have meant war, and it probably would have meant war earlier. So, you know, earlier than 1860. So, you know, who knows, it's impossible to put yourself in a stock of context like that. But I think that the biggest failure of the Constitution was the compromise of a slave because, you know, it led to the to 400,000 Americans dying. That's that's a big deal. That's a big deal. I don't I think it could have been handled sooner, earlier, and and better. But yeah. But it's hard to project backwards in that sense. Thanks Colt. Hopper Campbell, you and you have strong and precise positions on every issue except guns. You haven't given us a straight answer, but it sounds like you're sympathetic towards heavy restrictions and control. Isn't that preventive law? No, I don't think it's preventive law. I think there are certain guns that their possession constitutes a threat to your neighbor. And again, at the extreme, if I buy a tank and roll it into my backyard, I think my neighbors are justifiably threatened. I initiated force against them. It's a threat. The fact that I have a tank in my front yard, even though I haven't pointed it yet at anybody, because there's no other purpose for a tank other than to blow shit up. And, and, you know, if it's a toy tank, if it's a neuter tank, fine, but it's a fully armed, ready for combat tank. The purpose of that entity is to destroy and to kill. And you don't need a tank for self-defense. That's what you have a military for. That's what you have a police for. And therefore, you know, there's no purpose for you to have a tank. So tanks are out. You can go hunting with the tank. Sure. No, give me a break. Right. So tanks are out. So now the question is, what is in and was out? And I'm not, and I'm not, I think I have given a precise position. It's just not a position that lists which, what do you call it, which guns are okay and which guns are not. That I haven't done yet. And I'm never going to do. The basic premise needs to be, in my view, is that weapons that are deemed necessary or acceptable for self-defense, given the context in which you live. This is why I think the exact nature of those weapons should be determined locally. Should be fine. Weapons that are clearly offensive are not necessary for self-defense. And I don't give a damn about hunting, right? Hunting is not the purpose of having weapons, and unless you can make a case that, you know, and of course, weapons of self-defense can also be used for hunting. So I don't consider hunting a separate category. The protected right is the right to for self-defense in terms of weapons. So if the weapons are not necessary for self-defense, the tank, a big machine gun, and then the question is when is an automatic weapon okay, and when it is not? It depends on the context. It depends on the violence in your neighborhood. It depends on where they are, you are in the wilderness or in the city. It depends how quickly the police can come to help you. All of those are contextual, would depend, and therefore those specific laws should be done locally, given the local context. So that's one. So there should be a differentiation between weapons that are protected, i.e. self-defense weapons to be determined by the locality with authority to do it, and weapons that are offensive and therefore should not be protected. And then in addition to that, I think that the government has, because weapons are used for violence, they are the primary purpose is a use for violence. I don't see a problem with registration, and I don't see a problem with having some kind of legal age restrictions. We have age restrictions on drinking, we have age restrictions on other things. I don't have a problem with some kind of age restrictions. So I don't understand the obsession with guns. I've said this a million times, I don't get it, why you think guns are so important. I don't think guns are important. I don't think you're going to defend yourself from the government with your guns. I don't think it's ever going to come to that. And if it is your toast, I think that if you want to launch a revolution, the last thing you want is to rely on the guns that you can buy in the open market. You're going to have to steal some big weapons so you can launch a revolution. So legality is irrelevant. If I'm thinking about a revolution, my rights don't irrelevant because it's a war and rights are out. The whole idea of rights is out, you grab whatever weapons you can. So protecting rights so that you can launch a revolution, I mean all of that is the whole idea of having guns in order to launch a revolution is inconsistent in my view. When the time for revolution comes, we'll steal the guns, we'll steal the tanks, we'll steal the F-18s, we'll steal whatever we need, we'll steal the aircraft carrier, we'll steal whatever we need in order to win. At the best I'm going to do on gun control, it's not going to be a defining line because I'm going to leave that to the philosophers of law. I ran her self-set. This is a complicated issue that required philosophers of law to really articulate it. My job, the best that I can do is articulate what I think are the principles that are involved and then leave it to the professionals to articulate the particulars. All right, last super chat and then we'll go back to the panel. What do you think of people who have a type vis-a-vis sexual partners such as being attracted to blonde or Persian or Asian women? I think it doesn't trump rational consideration like values. It's totally fine. Yeah, I mean, I think it's fine. It's not always completely understandable what it is that drives that and it's always good to know what drives your preferences, particularly about something as important as sex. You might want to really think about what it is about the appearance of a Persian or blonde or whatever that attracts you to people from to whatever to your sexual partner. It'll teach you something about yourself and I think it's important in terms of what you're looking for and self-knowledge. But it's fine to have those kind of preferences. But again, self-knowledge is important. So knowing why you have them is incredibly valuable and then, of course, knowing that there are things that are more important than looks broadly and that has to do not just with type, but just generally with looks. All right, thank you, Richard. All right, let's go back to our panel. Jonathan. Aaron, I know you often say things like height are metaphysically given. You've talked about, for example, LeBron James and his metaphysical ability in basketball, etc. I'm curious though, while you can't change anything metaphysically about yourself, if you could, what would you change? And fixing your back is not one of them. You could change something about yourself metaphysically. What would it be? And I can't fix my back? That's cool. Cool and unusual punishment. Because I would, I would fix my back. That would be the first thing I would do. But what would I do? I'm tempted to say I'd make myself smarter. I don't know if that's that important to me. But make myself smarter would be one. Make myself more athletic in the sense of more coordinated. I'm fairly athletic, fairly coordinated, but it's not as much as I would have liked to be, particularly going up. And that's related to the back, right? A little bit. All right. Can I get a follow-up? Yeah, you can. Of course you can do it. Am I missing stuff? What am I missing? No, it's all right. It's all right. Quick follow-up. So I remember Dr. Pico, I believe, endorsed John Kerry years ago or talked about John Kerry and maybe even Bill Clinton way back years ago. So my question is this, is this election cycle or kind of the Trump era, has it caused more schisms around politics than in previous years within the Objectivist movement? No, there's always been schisms and things like that. And that's normal. But I'm wondering if the Trump era brought more than, because I don't remember as much back then, but maybe I wasn't paying as much attention. Thanks. I think that the Trump era brought... I'm still trying to relate this to the metaphysical questions. I missed something in the metaphysics. No, I just moved that. Okay. I'm curious what was going on there. All right. So I think the Trump era is unique in that it wasn't just a disagreement about particular strategy of election. It wasn't... So let it pick off. In both, in 1992, voted for Bill Clinton. And then in 2004, voted for John Kerry. I voted for John Kerry in 2004. I wasn't a US citizen in 1992. And the reasoning, his reasoning was, you know, both times the Bush was president. So he hates the Bushes. But what he despised about the Bushes was the nothingness, the fact that they were zeros, the fact that they were empty, the fact that they were nothing. And that he voted Democratic with the idea that if the Democrats win, maybe that's a shock to the system for the Republicans. And maybe the Republicans will get better as a consequence. And arguably, that happened in the 90s. So Republicans lost in 1992. And they got to act together. And they won in 1994. And they were marginally better in 1994. They had a contract with America. They had some principles, even though, you know, they were weak and not the right, maybe principles. And it didn't happen in 2004 because the Republican one, in spite of Leonard's vote on my vote. So there was a strategic reasons. I think a lot of people disagreed. A lot of people were really angry, particularly in 2004. I remember there were people were furious. But there wasn't an explicit schism. And I think, so I think that two reasons for that versus Trump, two reasons for that. One, there was no social media. So one of the things I realized post social media is, for example, how many people hated me, right? So for a long time, I didn't know there were a lot of people who hated me, even about stuff I said about Bush, and even about stuff I said about the war, and about my morality of war, and about stuff I said about terrorism. It turns out that a lot of people hated me, but there was no way for them to communicate the hate to me. Maybe once in a while they'd come and bother me at talks, or maybe somebody would send me an obnoxious email. But generally, there's no form of communication where they could actually communicate the hatred of me to me. Social media changed all that. Suddenly, when people were upset at you, they let you know. Instantaneously, immediately on Facebook, and suddenly there were schisms. And people reinforced each other, and I'm going to do a show on social media and how it does this, right? How it reinforces schisms, these kinds of schisms. Because it's not just that I now don't like your decision on who to vote for. I now have 10 friends who agree with me against you. So I have numbers on my side. And now we can all argue against you, and you might have 10 friends. But now it becomes this dynamic, and it almost becomes a sport, if I insult you and your friends insult me. And it goes on and on like this. And that in the Trump era, what you got is a combination, one of the existence of social media. So we could see the schisms not on a monthly basis, not even on a daily basis, but on a minute by minute. Okay, that guy, he hates me now. That guy, okay, he's coming around. That guy is gone off the deep end. He's not an objectivist anymore. I can write him off. I cannot write. I mean, that's what was going on. And that's what's still going on to this day. On the abortion issue, there's that, right? People are self-selecting where they are on this. So I think one social media makes the schisms more real in real time and exacerbates the schisms because there's social reinforcement. People reinforce. You know, somebody might think, I think Yuan's wrong there, and then Joe might come. No, no, no, Yuan's really wrong there. And then a third person might come. No, no, he is super wrong. Let me show you. And then they, now it's a little gang, and now they're reinforcing each other. And it becomes more vicious. And now it's a real schism, right? Second, so that's one reason. Second reason is I just think that Trump was more, on the one hand, more bad than the previous kind of election cycles where we voted against. Like, for example, I ran didn't vote for Reagan. A lot of objectives voted for Reagan. Even Lenny Peacock voted for Reagan. So he and I disagreed about this. And they, you know, they might have been some people offended by it. There might be some disagreeing, but generally they all viewed Reagan as, you know, in somewhat of a positive way, although I'm not sure where and if it did. Trump was so much more divisive and, you know, the people who he appealed to, I think was so much more, it revealed much more of their conservatism of the right wing tendencies that, that overrode whatever they had bought in to, with regard to objectivism. So the schism wasn't about Trump. The schism was about philosophical ideas that had been underneath the surface when we all were kumbaya and all agreed. And Trump brought all the differences out. So it's a combination of that plus social media that gives the impression that that causes more schisms that brought about more schisms in the era of Trump. Like, that's my best guess. Thank you. Oh, well, it's more than a guess, but my best evaluation. Alright, Jennifer. I know you've been to England a lot. You talked the other day about sports teams and people rooting for sports teams and such. Well, did you ever notice in England they tend to be, they seem like they get really nasty to each other, like more than they do here, like with football? Do you, have you ever noticed that? Do you have any idea why that might be? Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you know, if you go to a to Raider's game, they used to be in Oakland. I don't know where they are now. They're in Las Vegas or something. I don't know where they are. Maybe they're back in Los Angeles, but Raider fans are pretty nasty. They're pretty dangerous. So, but generally, yes, football fans in England, maybe broader in Europe, can be very violent and quite nasty. I think that has more to do with the collectivism, the collectivism they bring to the game, the tribalism they give to the game. They're much more and most in it. The identity is much more tied into it. It's typically, they grew up in the city and they've lived in the city their whole life and their whole life has been around this particular team and they, you know, it's just part of their identity. My Graham talks about that, about how terribly they behave over there. It's just shocking to me because you don't really see that here. No, but you don't see it much. You see it a little bit here, but you don't see it much in England. You see it quite a bit. You know, football hooligans is a known phenomenon. It's not unusual. Thank you. Sure. All right, Matt, Matthew. Yeah, I want to bring up spooky, evil, big oil record profits. I love profits. Record profits even better than ordinary profits. Yeah, get your ghost emoji ready. Here we go. So, you did a show on gas prices, oil prices. I don't recall in the show that you ever really went into, you know, oil prices and record profits versus profit margin. Can you dig into that and how, you know, maybe you could have record profits, but have a lower profit margin than maybe the year prior or in the past and just kind of dive into that for a little bit here? Yeah. I mean, it's important that we differentiate between who we're talking about, right? Because all companies, they do a lot of different things, different activities, have different profit margins, have different levels of profit. So let's start from the end of the supply chain. So let's start with the refiners, not the end of the supply chain, but from an oil company perspective, the end of supply chain. I guess you could start with the guy pump, you know, the place where you pump the gas. But the refiners, I don't think necessarily are having, so here's the thing with the refiners. They have to pay very high prices for the oil that they refine, because the fundamental price that has gone up is not the refined oil, it's the underlying commodity. It is the oil itself, the oil being pumped out of the ground. That's the price that's gone up. And it's gone up because the supply of that has been constrained. So there's a limited supply, lots of demand by people like refiners. So the refiners are paying, what, $120, $110 bucks a gallon for the oil coming into the refinery. And then they add, they mark up to that when they sell it to the gas stations. Now, the refiners right now are refining at basically full capacity. So again, there is a constraint, there's a constraint on supply. And demand is high. It's higher right now because it's summer season, it's higher right now because we're out of COVID and people are traveling more. So it's much higher than usual than it has been in the last couple of years. And yet the refining capacity hasn't increased to a large extent because of not in my backyard, because for environmental reasons, all kinds of stuff like that, the capacity of the refiners, including the fact that they shut down some capacity during COVID, again, because of the war on fossil fuels, who the hell wants to invest in more capacity. So the fact is that they now have some pricing power. So they can mark up the price of gasoline more than they have been able to in the past. They don't want to mark it up too much because then people will actually not drive and they don't want demand to collapse, but they can jack it up a little bit so that they profit margin, which the profit margin is the difference between revenue and expenses divided by, so that's the profit divided by revenue. I think profit margin is profit divided by revenue. So it's a gap between profit. It's probably pretty high right now. I don't know if it's historically high. I don't know if it's record high, but it's pretty high even at the refinery level. Just again, you've got a lot of demand, limited supply, opportunity for producers to increase prices. Now what about the oil that they get? So one step backwards, and it's not just one step because there are multiple steps in delivery, but one step backwards, the oil coming out of the ground. Why is oil at $110 a barrel when it costs to actually take it out of the ground? It costs the Saudis, God, I can't remember the numbers, but something like 10 bucks. So Saudi, because the Saudi or feels a shallow, they don't have to frack, fracking is expensive. It's relatively easy. For the US, I think for frackers in the US, again, these numbers might be wrong, but they're not hugely wrong. It probably costs 40 bucks, 30 bucks, 40 bucks to take the oil out of the ground. So you can see that the Saudis are running pretty cool profit margins, right? Cost them 10 bucks to take it out of the ground. They're selling it for 110. They got $100 profit margin. And the frackers are doing pretty well. It costs them 40 bucks to take it out of the ground, let's say, and they're selling it for 110. So they're making a good profit margin. And that's where the historical profits are showing up. All companies who are pumping oil out of the ground, wherever it is around the world, they're selling it a higher rate significantly than what it costs them to get it out of the ground. Again, the reason for that is the fact that we have not significantly increased oil production in the world over the last few years. Indeed, we've seen a shrinkage in the amount of money going to oil production, going to drilling for oil and not investing in equipment and not investing in forming companies. And the reason for that is, why would I invest in drilling a well that will have to be producing for 5-10 years for me to really make money to justify the investment? Because remember, these profits on annual revenue, they don't include the capital expenses that went into drilling the wells. That's a separate calculation. So I have to pay back the capital expenses when your profit margins are high, you could pay back faster. But I'm not going to drill a new well unless I'm convinced that it can pump oil for the next 5-10 years. But when I have ESG and the President of the United States and pretty much my investors all saying, no more oil. We're going to stop producing oil in the United States. We're not going to let you drill. We're not going to let you do this stuff. I'm not going to invest. So typically what would happen is prices go up. I make a lot of money. I invest in it to drilling more holes. I pump more oil. Supply catches up to demand and prices start dropping. But they're not going to drop now because nobody has an incentive to drill more oil in the free world. And we're kind of boycotting everybody in the unfree world, but of course the unfree world is restrained. Russia's oil shows up in the global markets, but it doesn't have the capital to invest in oil production. The Saudis don't want to invest in oil production because they run a cartel that is basically holding prices high and they can turn it on and off based on their own. So they're not driven by economics. The only entity that can actually increase oil supply in the world significantly is the United States right now. And nobody's interested. Other countries could too. Europe could start fracking. God forbid, European start fracking and actually joining the world supply of carbon fuels, but they won't. We could see fracking in other parts of the world. It's not going to happen because of the environmentalists. So all of this, so all companies have historical profits. And the reason for that is environmentalism and the whole and the cartel, right? I mean, it's OPEC's doing this, right? OPEC could increase the supply of oil tomorrow like that, but it doesn't want to. It likes these high oil prices. The reason Biden is going to go to Saudi Arabia and dance with the princes and grovel and bow and I don't know kiss their feet or whatever you need to do is to get them to open the spigot because for them, it's just a spigot. Again, oil in Saudi Arabia and generally in that area in the Middle East is very shallow, very easy to get to and they can produce as much as so they could lower the price of oil quite a bit in the world markets if they decided they wanted to do that. All right, thank you. Sure. Charles. Who is your favorite like non-objectivist philosopher in the modern area? Let's say since the Enlightenment and what would be your reason like who would you choose? I mean, not counting like John Locke from the Enlightenment. No, you could. Yeah. Probably Locke. I'm trying to think if there's anybody more modern. Not really. There's probably some philosophers working today who are not originators of ideas who are fairly good. I talked about one the other day when I talked about the transgender issue. The only one I could think of is Locke because of the emphasis of rights, his definition of rights. I think he did a fairly good job. It wasn't perfect, but it's a step in the right direction. His attempts at a reason-based epistemology doesn't quite get there. Again, he makes a lot of problems, even his attempts in morality. He's generally moving in the right direction, but he's not there. He gets a lot wrong, but you got to give him the credit for all the good things he did, particularly given when he was alive in the context in which he was. He ended the reign of the intrinsicism, the detach from reality. He was an empiricist, so he brought philosophy back to the senses and back to reality. I think he should get a lot of credit for that. Who would be your favorite novelist, decide from Rand, and who would be your favorite books? Yeah, that's easy. Hugo. I love Hugo, which reminds me of him. I should reread some of his books. 93 is probably my favorite Hugo book. I haven't read it in years. I need to reread 93. And then I love Lemmy's Robles. And I love Lemmy's Robles because it's so long. So you get to live in that universe for so long. So it's fabulous. So I love Hugo. It just brings you into his world in a way. And you have to read him with a modern sensibility in a sense that skip the essays. He writes these essays and he writes these long descriptions that are just not that interesting. So I skip those. Go for the action. So fast forward. And what do you think of Thomas Sowell? I like Thomas Sowell. I think he's written some important books about culture and race and ethnic groups and all of that. And he has a solid, good understanding of economics. I don't think he's a great economist. I don't think he's one of the great economists. He's a good economist and he has a solid understanding of economics. But I think his main contribution is as a social thinker and his work on ethnic groups and immigration and that interaction with economics I think is fascinating. I don't think he's an original thinker when it comes to economics. Let me put it that way. And who would be your favorite interviewer that you've done a podcast with? And who would you like to repeat another podcast with if you had a choice? I think it's probably Lex Friedman, would be my guess. I think Lex was the best interviewer partially because it was three hours. I mean, it's just such a pleasure to just be able to have a long conversation and follow up on points and just talk for as long as you need to talk to get your points across and not worry about time constraints. So that format is very enjoyable. Thank you. Joe. Thanks, Charles. All right, let's do some super chat. Richard, if we deregulate immigration and get rid of welfare, minimum wage, et cetera, would it make sense to allow new migrants to vote? In such a world, the immigrants might have better views than the native born population. Yeah, the way America's heading. Yeah, I mean, pretty much bring anybody. No, I mean, I don't think so. And I don't think so because I think, I mean, I don't know, I have these views on voting that I don't know that any other objectivists have a view, have this view. So please don't associate this with objectivism. This is not objectivism, this is just Iran's views on voting. I think voting should be, you should have to take a test to be able to vote. And so that is true of native born Americans as well as immigrants. You should be able to show a basic understanding of the American system of government, of the Constitution, and of the Constitution and the laws of the country, not the kind of test that they give today, where you can basically memorize a little booklet, and you can figure it out. But something that actually demands that you really understand it. And I think 95% of Americans today would fail. And they shouldn't vote because they don't know what they're voting about. They don't understand America. Why should they vote about America? So I would want, I would want even for Americans, I would want a test before they voted. I would let anybody in. No test to bring them in, because I don't think, again, the government shouldn't get involved in ideas, but it should get involved in, do you understand the system of government if you're going to participate in it? If you choose not to participate in the system of government, not vote, fine. Your rights are still protected. You're still going to live here. Everything is great. I don't consider voting that important in a free society. I don't consider voting. There's a duty to vote. Everybody should vote. I mean, whenever I tell people, people ask me, who do you vote for president? I said, nobody. Oh, they treat me like I'm a treasonous. I just committed treason by not voting. I don't consider it that important. People who want to vote should be able to know the fundamental way in which the government is working. And Landon says, agree, but don't trust the government to make the test. Of course, but we're talking about when we, in some future utopian place where people are beyond that. We've deregulated everything. We've got rid of welfare. We've got rid of everything. That ain't happening until the government is a very different thing than it is today. The government doesn't have to write the test. We could assign it to some political philosophers. Again, I agree. I don't trust the political philosophers of today, but that's why I wouldn't do it today. I would do it in the future. All right, which it says, as an aside, I find that I'm attracted to immigrant women, not so much any particular look or race, but generally I found that they tend to be courageous and ambitious people far more so than average. I agree with you. I think that's true of immigrants generally. I am very pro-immigration. I don't understand the attitude towards immigrants. All the immigrants I've encountered, or most immigrants I've encountered in my life have been hardworking, ambitious people who came to this country to make their life better. Now that's because I've encountered them as people who are working. I've encountered them in their jobs. I find so many Native Americans to be entitled. The work is hard and not as committed to their work. I agree completely vis-à-vis immigrants. There's a lot there to be admired and respected. Peasants in the Third World who have the balls to get up, who've never been to America, who've never been on a boat, who've never been on an airplane, who've never marched across the desert and are willing to get up and leave their crummy lives and take their lives under control and cross the desert and get on a boat or get or whatever and come to the United States, not really knowing anything about it other than what they saw on television. Those peasants are mine and your ancestors who did exactly that 150 years ago. My ancestors were ignorant peasants from little stettles in the middle of no way in Eastern Europe and they had the balls to get up and travel and they did and they changed the world. I think peasants from so-called Third World countries today have the potential to do exactly the same. Richard says anti-abortion is anti-life and anti-sex. It comes from a nihilistic and duty-based morality that drags us back to the dark ages. I'm pro-sex, pro-life, pro-abortion. Good for you, Richard. Yes, I think for a lot of people it is an anti-life anti-sex. I still get people who write to me saying, well, you know, the woman had sex and she deserves it. She got pregnant. She wasn't careful, like as if accidents don't happen. And it's this, yep, you have sex. Some of the consequences of those consequences are something you really don't want for the rest of your life when there's an option not to suffer those consequences. Unbelievable. And that, of course, relates to the first trimester primarily because when you make a mistake, you can abort in the first trimester. Okay, two questions and then we'll go back to the panel. Richard is on a thing here. Richard says, I agree. I think it would be a good idea to acquire basic understanding of American institutions to vote, even for native-born Americans. I also think now would be a great time for YBS on sex. Oh, God. I don't know. I mean, we've seen some schisms about a lot of things that I've said. I'm worried about the schism to happen around sex. I think I said I wouldn't do a show on sex full-on on sex until I was a little bit older. I can't remember when Leonard Peacock did his show of sex, but maybe whatever. I think add five, 10 years to that, and then I'd be ready for a show of sex. I've talked about sex often, and there is some video of me talking about sex where I did a panel with a sex worker and a feminist and me, and we talked about all kinds of things where they need to sex. You can find that online. I think if you put you on book sex, you'll find that video. Richard, an abortion is a transaction, is eight transactions. We have a contract clause in the Constitution that forbids a stay from abridging contracts between individuals. Freedom of contract extends to abortion rate. Yeah, but I understand what they're saying. They're saying is you can't have a contract with a hired killer to kill a human being. That is not a valid contract. You can't have a contract to violate somebody's rights. If a fetus has rights, the contract you have with a doctor is not legitimate, is not a legit contract. It's not a contractual issue. All right. For those of you in the Super Chat, all questions for now on $20 or more, I've got enough questions. I don't know how long we're going to go today, but we've got a lot of questions already. Jonathan. What are you looking forward to most with Ocon coming up? Oh, God, I haven't even thought about it. What am I looking forward most with Ocon? Getting my talk over with because I'm going to have to pull off this optimism talk. I'm really looking forward to seeing the We the Living movie, the high definition We the Living movie. I love that movie. I think it's the best movie of an Iron Man book. To see it, I think it's been re-edited, but just brought up to high definition and improved. That movie is really spectacular, so I can't wait to see how it's improved. I'm looking forward to Austin Shakespeare's performance of Scenes from the Fountainhead based on scenes that I ran wrote for a play of the Fountainhead, for a potential play of the Fountainhead. That would be cool. I'm looking for those. Then I'm generally looking forward to the talks, to the various sessions. I don't have any particular ones. There's some speakers who I have who have presented me their talks so that I give them feedback on just the mechanics of speaking and on the content. I'm looking forward to seeing how much they've integrated my brutal comments to them in terms of improving the talks themselves. Ocon is super busy for me. I land up having meetings for lunch, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I land up being at most of the talks and then schmoozing and everything else. I find that Ocon just goes by in a huge buzz as a work conference. I have almost zero time to relax at Ocon. One of the things, and that's why I emphasize the art stuff, because that's when I can relax. The other thing I'm looking forward to is the poker game. Last year, I made it to the final table and a father-son team, although they deny this, conspired to defeat me and the son won. I'm looking for revenge. If anybody wants to join me in conspiring against those who should not be named for conspiring against me, let me know and we can team up and beat them. Are you going to be there, Jonathan? I will and I look forward to seeing you and a lot of your listeners as well. Absolutely. I'm looking forward to seeing you. It's great. Another thing, the more I talk, the more things I remember and enjoy about Ocon is just seeing a lot of people and seeing a lot of people who I haven't seen in a long time. I haven't seen Chicago in years. I haven't seen Jonathan in a long time, unless other than when he comes to some of these conferences. I'm going to see a lot of you guys. I'm going to see a lot of old friends. Ocon is a great time in that sense, but it always feels rushed to me because I'm also a rookie. Hi, Jennifer. I'm done for today. Thank you. All right. Matthew. Yeah, so investing, mutual funds, stocks, and I guess how they react to inflation. I think in the past, you've said that you're most surprised with inflation that stock prices are falling, but that's not necessarily true across the board. Some companies have the ability to raise their prices and the price of the stocks respond to that. I guess what's the difference in the long run? Don't all those stocks come up as prices adjust up? So no, so a couple of things. I'd say three different elements here. I think three. We'll see if I add elements on top of that. I believe at the end of the day, investors in valuing stock value those stocks based on future cash flows. They value stocks based on the expectations for the company to produce profits in the future. Assets invest in themselves, grow the company, produce good results. Then they take the value of those cash flows, those after-tech cash flows, and they discount them back to today. Whether they do this formally, I think this is how prices in the end are set by people who disagree about the price because they use different discount rates and they use different expectations about cash flow. But that's basically a driving mechanism. So when inflation goes up, interest rates go up. When interest rate goes up, everything else held constant for a minute, just for a second, we're going to hold everything else constant. Then automatically, prices are going to be lower because the discount rate is higher. That is, the value of the future cash flows has gone down. With inflation, $1.10 years from now, with high inflation is worth less to me today than a dollar is worth with low inflation, 10 years from now. So inflation matters in that sense. So that's effect number one. It's the discount rate, effect number two. Some companies have the ability to raise prices during inflation to match the inflation rate. So now you've taken this thing that applies to all companies, and now you're choosing, okay, which companies can offset the decline in the discount rate with higher cash flows? Not all can, depending on, because inflation is not uniform. Remember, we say inflation right now is, I don't know, 8.6%. Over the last 12 months, it's been 8.6%. But how much has gasoline gone up over the last period? It's gone up by much more than that. So gasoline has gone up by 100%, 200%, something like that. So some companies have massive ability to raise prices. Other companies are not going to be able to raise prices. And yet, when you're discounting back, you're discounting based on the value of the dollar. The value of the dollar is declining by 10% a year. That's estimation. So it's going to affect different companies differently. Like gas companies, it could be, and it is indeed the fact, that the increase in cash flows is greater in terms of its impact on price than the discount rate rising. But for other companies who have less ability to raise prices fast, who are more constrained, maybe live in more competitive markets, freer markets where people can adjust the supply more freely. They, you might say, eh, will they be able to match the 10%? Probably not. Maybe they'll only be able to increase prices by 5%, by 6%, right? So, because the average is 10%, it's not everybody. So they might take a hit. Some companies, because prices are going up and wages might not be matching that, people are going to start cutting back on some of their spending. Let's say they'll cut back on vacations. She said, okay, hotel companies, not only, maybe they can increase the room rate, but they're also going to lose a bunch of customers, because people just won't be able to afford to go to hotels. So for each industry, for each company, it's going to have a different effect. It's not going to be a uniform effect. So that's effect number two, the effect on cash flows. The third effect, that's effect on uncertainty, on risk. Okay, inflation is going up. What's the Fed going to do? If the Fed increases interest rates really, really high, is that have the potential to cause a recession? I think so. What's the probability of recession? How does recession impact each one of these companies, right? And what's the risk of recession for each one of these companies? What impact, how do I price that? Usually that increases, if risk goes up, the discount rate goes up. So that's a third effect, but it's more than just recession risk or bankruptcy risk in some cases. It's the fact, one of the evils of inflation is particularly inflation that is moving around a lot, up, down. I mean, what really hurts from a macroeconomic perspective is the uncertainty that inflation creates about what prices are going to be in the future. So I can't invest. So businesses are going to be hurt on the investment side. Their investments are not going to be as productive. I have to take that into account. So you have to take all these pieces into account. And for each company, it's going to affect them a little differently. And only then can you come to a conclusion about what impact it's going to have on prices. Generally, the decline in the stock prices, the broad markets, has been because for most companies don't have the pricing power to keep up. Even if they do, inflation is going to hurt their investment ability and their ability to sustain cash flows because of investment. So the discount rate has gone up. Cash flows are not going to match. So prices have been adjusted. A second increased risk of inflation has gone, recession has gone up, increased risk of bankruptcy has gone up, increased risk of not being able to pay your debt, which is bankruptcy. All of that, I think, has driven the broad markets downwards. With maybe a follow up here, what's your view on liquidity and more liquid positions right now? Yeah, we have inflation and probably recession on the horizon. So as bankruptcies start to happen, are you in a better position if you're liquid and able to take advantage of some of those falling prices? Yeah, definitely. It depends what you mean by liquidity and where do you put the money in the meantime? And you have to recognize that if you're in cash, you're potentially losing 10% every year for being in cash. But yes, I think people who are going to be liquid when some of the uncertainty goes away and we get better visibility into the future are going to be in a better position to invest and benefit from this. But I also think about liquidity in another sense, and that is when markets get into real financial distress, like we saw in 2008, like we've seen in other periods, like we saw in Europe during the Greek crisis and other places, then sometimes you can't sell positions you want to sell because they're no buyers. So there's just no buyers at any price. The markets freeze up. I mean, you remember in the oil market during COVID, people were literally paying other people to take the oil from them because they couldn't store it and there was no price at which they could clear, no positive price that they could sell the oil. They had to basically give it away. People were paying to take the oil off your hands, which is sorry, you were paying people to take the oil off your hands, which is just a bizarre circumstance that has to do also with regulations. But yeah, the situation where you just can't sell. So one of the things you want to be thinking of in terms of the assets you hold is to be careful not to be stuck with a lot of positions where there might be no buyers full because that would kill you. And often when you have a lot of bankruptcies, you see liquidity in the market really shrinking. People just not participating, even at massive discounts. You saw that with mortgage securities during the financial crisis. One of the reasons the Fed stepped in and started buying a bunch of them is because of the mistakes the Fed and everybody else was making, there was just no buyers. Good, thank you. Joe, Dan, Daniel. You know, I think there's a lot of reasons to think that Janet Yellen is an intelligent person. But when she comes out and says, the only way to fix our oil problem is to go more renewable. And you look at what's happened in England where they pushed it through and have really suffered from that. What's the reason? And this is not the first time that the government has put in a program and it's failed. And they said, well, the only problem is we weren't all in. We did it in a small way. And if we just expanded the program, it'll all work out. It's like you're losing money on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume. What is this? I mean, my view is that, well, first, partially it's evading, it's dishonesty. And they explain it to themselves, there's a greater good here. There's a cost. So somebody sat down at Yellen down and said, look, Janet, you represent this administration. This administration believes in renewable energy. We're not going to change that even during a crisis. This is the time where our principles are tested and we're going to stick to those so-called principles. And it probably wasn't Biden, it was probably one of his ideological juniors. And look, this is what it means to be a team player. We know you don't believe this. It's obviously bad economics. We all know it's bad economics, but there's a bigger long-term play involved. There's a bigger long-term goal here. We're trying to save whatever. Western civilization long-term and that's going to be painful and we can't worry about the economy. We can't change our tune. This is what you have to say. And if you become, this is why I could never go into politics or never work for an administration, any administration, is because when you become Treasury Secretary, you're accepting that you're going to have to say what is expected of you to say. Otherwise you shouldn't be part of the administration. So you cannot be there without lying if you hold any kind of principles, if you believe in anything connected to reality. But this is true of all of them. Think about all the people now coming out and saying all these horrible things about Trump who worked for Trump. Why did they work for Trump? How did they work for Trump? Where's the integrity? So Janet Yellen has no integrity. None of these people do. They don't believe it as a virtue anyway. And she'll say what is necessary to say for the long-term goal of the administration, whatever the hell that is. Thanks. Charles. Well, I guess I'll link his lines. What do you think is going to be the outcome of all this? Is it going to be something that's going to linger for five, ten years with stagflation? Or do you think if they increase the interest rates enough, we know it's going to be a debt crisis because we can't pay our bills, essentially? What kind of response on that? I think in the short of run, we're going to see stagflation. I think we really have stagflation. I mean, the economy is stagnating right now. It's maybe not in a recession technically, but it's stagnating. I think we will go into recession, whether it's late this year or early next year, I think we'll be in what they call technical recession, which is two negative GDP numbers, two quarters in a row of negative GDP. Long-term, I've long said that I think what we're going to have is stagnation. I think that as long as Biden is president, that will be associated with inflation, because I think that the only way to reduce inflation is for the government in a credible way to start taking some steps to convince the markets that they will reduce government spending. Maybe if Republicans win the House and Senate, they'll kind of deal with Biden to reduce the deficit. That's a potential. And that would then, I think, reduce inflationary pressures somewhat. But otherwise, this is going to take a long time. And by a long time, I mean five to 10 years of stagnation. And many of those years with inflation as well. Inflation might not be eight, nine, 10%, like it might be now, it might be more four, five, six percent, but it'll still be inflation. It won't be zero and it won't be two. And what do you think the chances are of having a debt crisis where either we default because we... Oh, the U.S. government having a debt crisis? Yeah. Or a monetary crisis where we end up having hyperinflation, one or the other. I think we're more likely, it appears, that we have a debt crisis. I don't know how we get out of that. And it's hard to tell when that will happen. And baby boomers are retiring. The deficit is only going to increase. It's going to increase substantially in the decade to come. But I think I'd be surprised that we didn't have a debt crisis in the next 20 years. And maybe the way it manifests itself is hyperinflation. I just think that as long as the Fed is even semi-independent, it will fight inflation. Maybe I'm wrong, we'll see. But we could see a situation where nobody's willing to buy American bonds and the government just has to default on some of them. I don't think that's a solely a bad idea. I actually think that's the best idea. The best outcome is for the U.S. government to default on its debt obligations. Unfortunately, it's much better than inflation. And let the people who hold government bonds suffer the consequences because they bought government bonds. They took a risk and here they are. So I actually think the way to get out of the mess we're in is through default and starting over, in a sense. But starting over how? And again, I think that kind of default is more likely to lead to authoritarianism than it is to more freedom. So I'm not very optimistic about the next 20 years. And so in terms of making decisions on where to invest or where to keep money or for a store of value, would you think gold, real estate, stocks? I mean, would you make decisions based on that? I mean, I try not to give it advice on the show. It's a little tricky for me. But gold will hold its value in times of crisis generally. You're not going to make money, but you might not lose quite as much because it is the asset of desperation and emergencies. So it holds its value up in crisis. Real estate, people have to live somewhere, particularly real estate that is rental real estate. People might find it hard to buy because of mortgage rates. I think real estate that is rented out is going to do okay in an inflationary environment. It's easier to raise rents on a regular basis than it is to raise the price of a home on a regular basis. So who knows? There are probably pockets within the stock market. This is kind of what Matthew was getting at that pockets in the stock market to do okay. But it's not easy and it's not good. It's a horrible investing environment. It's really bad in terms of trying to preserve the value of your capital and be successful as an investor. It's not a good place. Any thoughts on overseas investing or would you? I don't know which place is better. I just don't know. It doesn't look like I used to think Asia was getting better, but I'm not sure anymore. It's something to keep an eye out. Are there economies in Africa that are starting to grow and starting to come out of starting to respect property rights? Maybe that's a place. Is Europe in better state than the United States? Probably not. They're probably just as bad. So I wouldn't invest in Europe. So you've got to look at emerging markets and see are there particular emerging markets that you think have a lot of upside partially because they're starting so low. They're starting so cheap. Thank you. Generally, a well-diversified portfolio has done the best over the long run, but is the past always an indication of the future? I'm not convinced. All right, let's see. Let's do some of these super chat. I just want to ask, have you ever visited the tomb of the unknown soldier? I have. I'm pretty sure I have in Israel and I haven't in the United States. I have in various places I've been to. Yeah, I mean, I get affected quite a bit by these things. As you know, I was a soldier and what soldiers fight for in a rational word least is very meaningful to me. Richard asks, what do you enjoy most about O'Fawn? What's O'Fawn? O'Kahn? And objective conferences in general, I greatly enjoyed the career panels at Iron Man Kahn in 2017. I met some of my heroes there. I think the thing I enjoy most is meeting the people, just hanging out with people and meeting them and old friends, new friends, other intellectuals, other speakers. It's for me, it's mainly the social aspect of it. I can watch the videos of the talks afterwards. Richard again, I would greatly conspire. I would gladly conspire with you, Ron, in any poker game. Can't promise I'll be great, but I've won a few games in my time. All right, we'll talk at the conference, Richard. Remind me. Richard says, I've seen mortgage backed securities that are 40-year bonds. How does that work if most home mortgages are over a period of 30 years? What you probably saw is not a bond, mortgage backed securities. Yeah, you can construct a mortgage backed securities that includes, you know, they have to be some 40-year mortgage. I don't know exactly. I don't know how you would construct a bond with different maturities, but some of those maturities would have to be 40 years. Otherwise, you couldn't construct a bond. So maybe Daniel or Jonathan know, but I don't know. Let's see, friend, Harper says, using ARI and UK members describe a dream team for White House staff, president, VP, various secretaries, and so on. Oh, God. I don't know. Won't, by definition, almost all the secretaries be non-existent because the government would shrink so much. So I don't know. I guess I would be president. I think I'm going to take on that responsibility. Who would I make my VP? I don't know who I would take on as VP. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe Don Watkins. I would make my VP. Alex would be energy secretary, and his primary job would be to completely deregulate everything, propose bills to Congress that would deregulate everything you can deregulate at the regulatory level, and then write a bill that basically shuts down the energy department. And all you have to do in three and a half years. So that's the timetable. I don't know. The philosophers would have to be in my advisory. Don't they have a national defense? What do they call it? The economic council of advisors or whatever. So I would have a philosophical council of advisors. I would put Encon and Harry and Ben and the philosophers on that council to advise me on some of the big issue questions. I put Elon, the Secretary of Defense, and Treasury Secretary. I'd probably appoint myself. What the hell? Why can't I have two positions? And I want to shut down the Secretary of the Treasury anyway. I don't know who would be good Treasury Secretary. I'd have to think about that. Yeah, I don't know. It's so fantastical and so impossible and so crazy that, yeah, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. Richard says, I'd gladly serve as Iran's VP, but otherwise it would take a lot to convince me to go into politics today. Well, not politics, just as an administrative job as a department had to shake things up and fire everybody and deregulate and do all that kind of stuff. I'd put Tara as Justice Secretary or maybe one of the lawyers. You could have Adam Assoff or any one of the lawyers that have worked through. Yeah, they'd be real competition for the Justice Secretary, but you could man the Justice Department. We're basically Institute for Justice people. Just fill it up with the Institute for Justice people. So we got Larry's on our board. Steve, who used to work at the Institute, both of them from the Pacific Legal Foundation. You just got the Pacific Legal Foundation and IJ, make them part of the Justice Department and let them sue on behalf of the Justice Department to get rid of all these licensing laws and all these other stupid laws that are out there with Tara Smith, the Attorney General. What about John Allison's Treasury? Just throw that out there. Yeah, John Allison, that's right. John Allison would be a great Treasury Secretary. That's right. Yeah. You could also give it to Jonathan. Hell no. Hell no. All right, enough fantasizing. All right, let's see. Richard says, in the UK under Blair, they briefly had a secretary of deregulation and welfare reform. I gladly take that job too. All right. Richard is volunteering for a bunch of these jobs. That's good. That's good. I think we'll do fine. I think we can man all the important positions and most of the positions will be positions that the primary responsibility in them is to get rid of that position. That is to destroy that whole function of government. Figure out how to best eliminate that as a function of government. Fire everybody, change the laws, change the regulations. It'll be a massive effort by all these people in government to self-destruct partially why it's unlikely to happen. All right, let's run through these quickly. We're about $188 short of our $650 goal, but we don't have a lot of time for a lot of questions. So if you're going to do something, do it big. All right. Liam says, did I in Rand give any talks in Russian? Did she not like speaking Russian? I don't think she gave any talks in Russian. Not that I know of. Did she like speaking Russian? I don't know. I don't think so, but I don't know. I don't know. You'd have to ask some of the people more familiar with the biography. Hopper Campbell, in regard to your comment yesterday, the defund the police movement isn't dead. Cops today are pretty neutered. I think from defund the police, from less money to the police, that movement is pretty neutered. I think that movement maybe is not dead, but is in decline. Most of the cities that I read about that cut their police budgets after 2020 are increasing their police budgets now and so on. Now, it's still true that the police are still afraid in terms of criminal prosecution if they shoot somebody by accident and things like that. So there is some of that going on, but I think in terms of funding for the police, I think you'll see funding for the police go up in the years to come, not go down. And I think that's already happening. Again, a lot of those cities have reversed course, have returned the funding and actually increased funding in some cases. Michael asked, are there no school shootings in New York City, San Francisco, Boston, because they have strict gun control laws? No, I don't think so. Look, school shootings are very, very, very rare. If you look at the number of schools in the United States, if you look at the number of shootings, it's very, very, very unusual to have school shooting. I haven't seen any evidence that suggests that it's because of gun laws, that you see it not happening in certain places. I think it's much more likely it has to do with the particular kind of nihilism that is so not only discussed with the world, but also sees no upside in life. Remember, these people are completely and utterly suicidal, and I think that happens more in rule and suburban than it does in, I don't know. I'm not sure. You'd have to study it to really give an answer to that, and I haven't studied it. Richard says, come on, people, let's get going. You're on. What do you think of opera? What is a good way to start getting into the game? I love opera. I'm a huge opera fan. I love going to the opera. The best way to get into the game is to start listening to some just short arias, just the greatest hits of opera. Just start getting yourself used to listening to that kind of singing, to that kind of melodies and kind of music, and then take some of the easier operas, I'd say Verdi, Puccini, and go see it live so that you can benefit from the drama of it on a stage in an environment. That's how I would get into it. But first, let your ear get used to the music and play it in the background, try to listen to it, try to focus on it, experiment with it, and then go and see a live event so you can see the drama of it. And if you want recommendations for live ones, ones that are easy to kind of you'd enjoy maybe just watching a lot of the Verdi operas like La Troviata. And you have to remember often the stories are very simple, simplistic, maybe even stupid, but in the context of the time that even those stories were told, they have an important theme to them. And it has to do with certain awakening that was going on in the 19th century around issues of sex and morality, the relationship between the two, and all kinds of other issues that people were trying to deal with family. A lot of it had to do with the place of women in the world and how to deal with female emancipation. So the opposite dealing with that, a lot of it is about daughters who disobey their husbands, their fathers who go off, run away with their lovers and usually that ends badly, but these are kind of morality plays that are still struggling with the morality of Christianity. And yet with the individuality where people are taking individual initiative and going and doing things. But the key to opera is the music and is the singing and is the ability, what you appreciate in opera is the ability of the human voice, the ability of a singer to use that voice, to express deep emotion in a way that you just don't get in other art forms because the range that they have to work with is often much more limited and often the range of emotions that dealing with is much more limited. So the real impact of opera is in the ability of music and voice to convey deep, powerful emotions and a range of them. Sometimes in the same song, same aria, you get a vast range of emotion that is super powerful, Verdi and Puccini are particularly good at this and a relatively easy to listen to. Don't go for your first opera to see Wagner's ring cycle, right? Or even just one of the rings or even Tristan and Zolder that last four hours and is difficult. The music is difficult, it's difficult, it's too hard. So focus on what I would consider the easiest of. Richard continues, I appreciate the opera answer. I will start with Puccini and Verdi, I enjoy seeing you rocking out the intro music. Does it help pump you up before the show? How do you get yourself revved up at the start of the day? So yes, the music definitely helps rev me up at the start of the show. I'm often super tired because it's 8 p.m. and I've had a full day of work and it's not easy to get the energy and the music definitely gets me at least. It puts me into the context. It puts me into the thing. So some music has that impact of giving you energy. How do I get revved up in the beginning of the day? I don't. I'm not a morning person. I hate mornings. My mind doesn't work in the morning. I couldn't do the show in the morning. Well, I could, but it would be much harder for me to do the show in the morning. It takes me like an hour with a cup of coffee to really wake up after I've woken up. And only then do I slowly start, I don't know, usually working out. I usually do my hour with the coffee, me and the coffee, looking at the view and maybe reading some stuff on the phone. And then I go work out and then I have a shower and then finally I'm awake. Eat something and then I'm awake. All right, one more from Richard, which is single-handedly committed to getting to each one of these is 50 bucks. So he's selling it handily, going to get us the 650 bucks. I think he's done almost 600 of the 616 that we're at right now, almost anyway. Richard says, I want more YBS and a happier Iran. YBS is in the most value to me. I'm selfishly trying to get us to hit the goal for today. I would like some help, but I'll do it myself if I must. Thanks, Richard. I appreciate that. You're getting a little bit of help, so we're only $22 away from the goal. We're getting five tens, but hopefully we'll get somebody to do a question for 20 bucks and we'll just get there. All right, Fendahapa, any objectivist you know, make a constitution as it should be. One was teased at the end of Atlas Shrugged. I feel it would be healthy if there was one to share. People have talked about it. People have wanted to do it. No, nobody's done it. Nobody's doing it. It's hard. It's massive amount of work. It's very difficult to do it right and objectively, and it's very difficult to get motivated to do something like that when the likelihood of it being applied in our lifetime in the next 50 years is very low. You'd have to have a sudden skill. The founders were giants. You'd have to be really good and you'd have to have a legal mind. You'd have to think legalistically in a healthy sense of legalistically. Can a philosophy of law state of mind to be able to do it? So we'll take somebody like that, but hopefully somebody will do it. I agree with you. It would be cool to have. It would be very hard. Nobody with that skill set has tried to do it. Liam asks, we may not see an objective revolution on our lifetime, but I think we will see a major spike of influence in the next decade. I can see major figures like Elon Musk tweeting Iron Rant quotes. I hope so. I'm looking forward to that. We will see. Let's hope Elon Musk doesn't get corrupted by the right. I do think we'll see influence over the next 10, 20 years. It won't be culture changing yet, but it will be culture influencing. I think it already is. James Taylor says, finding Iron Rant was like coming home. Beautiful, absolutely, because it's consistent with our nature, with what we are and who we are as human beings. Michael asks, do you see the religious right getting significant strong over the next few election cycles? Like Americans won't tolerate woke. Will they not tolerate bans on contraception? I do think the religious right is going to get stronger. There's a very large group of people in the United States who won't resist the ban on contraception. There's very few people who are going to defend woke. I mean, you guys think because it makes the headlines all the time that woke is popular. Woke is not popular. As I said, whenever woke gets to the election ballot, even in the most leftist places on earth, it gets defeated. Woke is not popular, but religion is popular and religionists are popular. Richard is almost single-handedly basically taking us to the limit. Thank you, Richard. I'm happy to give this and more because of the value again from YB, YBS, and ARI. Over the past seven years, YouTube won't allow me to give more, but I'm happy to do it because of the value you've added to my life in Korea. Thank you, Richard. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you for the support in this show and in all the other shows where you've been a major, major supporter using super chat. All right, why it? Someone did a parody of video of you saying something contradictory things. Is it fair to say you sometimes make multiple sides of an issue to be nuanced? If you're nuanced, you're not taking multiple sides. You're explaining the different perspectives and I do that a lot. I try to present the other side often, but there are a lot of positions where my position on it is not click out like we just had on gun rights. You could easily take, just chop up my stuff where I say, oh, people should have guns. You could do that, but that's not interesting and that's just a parody video. It's somebody being dishonest with it, but if you're interested in my position of guns, it's nuanced, which means it's not, here's a bright line. This is okay. This is not and that's not my position. And then if you talk about, I don't know, if we talk about trans, I tend to have a sympathetic view of them or at least a view that I sympathize with them. It's sad. So I'm not going to condemn people who are trans, but at the same time, I think something's wrong and I have a particular view about what a man and a woman is, but so I don't know what issues I said contradicting things about. It's also true that I might say dumb stuff on the show. I mean, I say so much, but so many things. Have I ever contradicted myself? Yeah, I'm sure I have at some point. There's just no way you could produce as much content as I do and not said some things that on reflection, you would probably think are wrong. So if you point out things where I'm wrong at, that'd be great and I'll correct my position. I'll try to clarify my position. If you found, if you take that video of me saying contradictory things and you take the issues, I don't want to see it, but if you take the issues and ask me about them, I'll try to clarify my position. But yeah, you could take my, how many hours have I produced here over the last seven years? The mind boggles are just a quantity of material. Yeah, you could probably have a field day if you wanted to creating parody videos. Anthony asked, did I ever comment on Neil Armstrong? Well, she commented on landing on the moon. I can't remember commenting specifically on Neil Armstrong when she was a fan of the whole landing on the moon and the technology and the courage of the astronauts and what they represented as the best in man and how they did it. I don't remember Neil Armstrong's name coming up, although vaguely I seem to recall that she did, but you'd have to look at the essay where she talks about Apollo 11. Hop up, Campbell, stop being up tanks. No one is talking about tanks or red herring. You're addressing normal firearms ownership and whether the state could demand proof of efficacy and issue licenses to own firearms. Yes, I think the state can ask for proof of efficacy and issue licenses for firearms. Yes, I think that's right because the only purpose of a firearm is to kill another human being. And if you want to do it in self-defense, you should be able to show that you have the efficaciousness not to kill your neighbor. You're not a complete dutz and you're going to kill whomever. So yes, I do think given the state's monopoly over the use of retaliatory force that the state has some involvement in regulating firearms, exactly what those regulations should be, how they should be, I will leave that to legal philosophers. By the way, a lot of libertarians think you should be able to own tanks, F-16s, nuclear bombs, whatever you want. Landon asks, agree, but don't trust the government to make the... Oh, we did that already. Landon again, no, all was totally good. I was impressed. No idea what that means. Sorry, Landon. Frank asks, white supremacists complain about the browning of America, but won't this ruling make it so POC babies? What does POC mean? Non-white? I don't know what that means. Will it be born? Then they'll complain more. I don't even want to touch that because I don't even know what it... Who cares? I don't want to ever take the perspective of, oh, POC is people of color. I mean, I long for the day where we're all people of color. I know now we're going to get like 50 people unsubscribed, but go ahead. Because I think that ultimately that's what's going to happen to human beings. Our gene pool is going to completely get mixed and we're all going to be mixed. We already are mixed. We just don't want to admit we're going to be really mixed. We'll all be really mixed. And I'm looking forward to that. I think that'd be great. And where these superficial, stupid differences between human beings based on nonsensical won't really make... They won't make even perceptual sense. Never mind cognitive sense. Before listening to you on, I was lost and drifting now after four years. I have a loving wife and child, got my new Audi. Oh, shit. You got an e-tron? Oh, I am so jealous. The wife and kid you could keep, but the e-tron, it's like I keep telling my wife, that's the car. That's the one I want. If I'm going to have an electric car, that's the one I want. And it's like, she's like, not in Puerto Rico, you're not getting it. It's like, there's no way to drive it here. Wow. All right. I'm coming to visit. He lives in Norway. I'm coming to visit. I want to ride. Thank you. I really appreciate that. I'm glad I'm having that kind of impact on people's lives. It's part of what makes us fun. It's definitely an important part of what makes us fun. Same Norwegian. I still want to marry... I still want you to marry us. Oh, but you have a wife already. So how am I going to marry you guys? Oh, maybe you're not married yet. Maybe you're going to have a wife. You have a wife to be. Let's do it. Now that you have an e-tron 55, I might give you a discount on my fee for marrying people. But yes, summer 24 in Denmark, I would love to do it. So I do provide the service of marrying people. I've done it for friends. I think I have done it for pay. It's fun. It's a lot of fun. And yes, love to do it. Let's make it happen. All right. That's a great way to end this. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for being here. Thanks to our panel. Thanks for the support. You guys are all monthly supporters of the Iran Book Show. So thank you for your generous support. Thanks for all the superchatters for today, particularly Richard. Thank you. There was a lot of money. I really appreciate that. Keep asking me about opera. I want to talk more about opera. I think I should talk more about opera. I have stuff to say about opera and I just need to get into the right mindset. I need to watch a few operas. I haven't seen an opera in a little while. I need to watch a few operas and really get into the mindset. And I think I've got some interesting things to say about opera, including about the stories and why they're not as dumb as they seem to be given the context of when they were written. All right. Thank you, everybody. I will see you all on Tuesday. Some of you I'll see in person on Friday at Ocon. But definitely we'll have a show on Tuesday. Thank you, Matthew. Thank you, Jennifer, Daniel, Charles, Jonathan. Somebody's left. But thank you guys. And I'll see you all soon. Bye, everybody. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye, Iran.