 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the free speech, free minds, free markets event. If you think about the title, free speech that leads to free minds, that leads to free markets, you can continue to flourishing individuals and flourishing societies. The event was made possible by the Einrand Institute and its generous contributors. So Einrand is known mainly for her influential novels of The Fountainhead and Atlusrug. Not enough people know about her amazing work she's done in the field of philosophy. Specifically, if I was to mention some, in the field of epistemology, the whole idea of constant formation and how we know what we know, how to form valid concepts, moving on to morality and the idea, the new paradigm of one's own life as the standard of value, and then extending that to the political realm of laissez-faire capitalism. She cannot be defined as a left or a right. Really, she created a new morality of a commitment to freedom, which is a precognition of a flourishing individual in society. I want to read one thing she said that is relevant to today's lecture or panel. These two, reason and freedom, are corollaries and their relationship is reciprocal. When men are rational, freedom wins. And when men are free, reason wins. So we at the Einrand Institute are about promoting Einrand's novels and ideas. We distribute hundreds of thousands of books every year and we run the world's largest essay contest in the world and we'll continue to do that with the help of our contributors. One of the things we do are events like that to really expose more of Einrand's philosophy and ideas on philosophy of objectivism. So if you want to learn more about what we do, go to Einrand.org or our YouTube channel that has many videos coming out every week now in our YouTube channel of the Einrand Institute. So for tonight's speakers, Yaron Brooke is the chairman of the board of the Einrand Institute. He can be heard regularly on the Yaron Brooke Show, a podcast which airs live on his YouTube channel and BlockTalk Radio. He's also a world-renowned speaker who tours non-stop, I know that, hundreds of lectures, meeting audiences and giving lectures around the world. Eric Weinstein is an economist, writer and a managing director of the Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel's investment firm. He writes on investments, capitalism, science and mathematics. And Dave Rubin is a talk show host, comedian and a TV personality. Should I say the best talk show? The best by far talk show, right? Host of the Rubin Report, a talk show about big ideas and free speech, heralded for its politically incorrect and honest approach of discussing complex issues and current events. Please welcome Yaron Brooke, Yaron's Weinstein and our host, Dave Rubin. Thank you. All right. Well thank you guys, I'm thrilled to be here. We've done a bunch of events with ARI and I always find that you guys are open to ideas. You're open to agreeing and disagreeing and I think we're gonna have some agreement and disagreement up here. Quickly I wanna say something about the two guys that I'm sitting in between right now. They truly both at different levels and at different times have affected the way I think and the way that I go about living my life. If you guys heard my little talk last night for a few minutes, Yaron was instrumental in me taking my show and going independent and Eric in the last two years has been probably the, how do I say this without making you blush? Make him blush. Make him blush, I should make him blush. Eric has sort of been the sort of intellectual backbone to a lot of the ideas that I talk about on the show and we're gonna dive into all sorts of stuff here and I thought first because let's do something that we have some disagreement on. I think all three of us actually have some disagreement on this and it's something that's obviously very close to my heart at the moment. There's a ton of talk about whether we should be regulating the tech companies. That Google and Facebook and Twitter particularly have gotten too big. They control too much information. There's issues related to shadow banning and subscription feeds and the algorithm and the James DeMor diversity memo, et cetera, et cetera. Eric and I have discussed this a bunch on my show. So Yaron, I'll throw it to you first here. Is it possible that this situation with Google because of the amount of information they control, the amount of infrastructure that they control, the amount of power that they have, that this could be a unique case that would get you to budge a little on regulation? Really? No. No. And look, let's recall that in the 1960s exactly the same discussion was going on about television. Exactly the same. You can look at the FCC minutes and they're talking about exactly the same over-influence of television and the dominance. We need a FANIS Act in order to make sure they're all opinions are heard. And it's the same kind of idea. Look, censorship is something government does because censorship is something that requires force. It is the dictating to individuals what they can say, what they can think, and what they can listen to, and what they can engage with. You have the option, even with Google, not to interact with them, not to use YouTube. I mean, the thought, right? But you cannot, you can choose not to deal with YouTube, but think about the implication of the government telling YouTube what they can or cannot show. Now, that censorship, that's taking a choice away from the owners of Google, from the company, in terms of what they can, what selection they can choose in terms of what they show, what they don't show, what they monetize, or what they don't monetize on their platform. It's their platform. It's not my platform. It's not the US government's platform. It's theirs, just like if I create a platform on my, you know, your own book show, I get to decide what we talk about. You get to decide who to invite as guests. YouTube gets to decide whose videos to put out there and whose videos not to put out there, and it would be censorship to actually regulate that and to dictate from above who and what and how they do it exactly. Yeah, so I think you know this. I basically take that position, and it kills me as someone that's being affected by this, right? I mean, I'm being affected directly by what we now know is manipulation. I mean, just in the last week, right? This internal Google memo leaked, and they have some strange definitions. They're taking the European approach to free speech rather than the American approach. But give me the counter, if you've got one. Well, I assume that agreement would be boring, right? Yeah. Okay. So, you know, I was just in the restroom before the hot mics went out, and imagine that somebody took out their phone and snapped a picture as I just did while I was busy at the urinal. And that person decided to post that picture or video to YouTube. That's an immediate difference from television. Television was in generally one-way communication. We now have multi-way communications. Everybody here is operating a television station or a newspaper in reduced form if you have a YouTube channel. So, it's clearly not the same situation. It's not exactly word for word what was going on in the 60s. The problem that I'm having is, is that a very good heuristic like the market, because the market does many things well, and in general we need markets to do all the things that they do better than any other mechanism. We need markets to function. But we can quickly fall prey to the idea that markets are in some sense perfect. And then we have this problem that you do have market defects. Even the most fervent defenders of free market economics have to realize that there are things like public goods. You may have a moral hazard problem. You may have a monopoly problem. Now, because it's like a chess opening, everybody's heard these arguments. So we should not play through the chess opening because that's a waste of your time. Because the monopoly argument is yes, these were thought to be monopolies and then look it out quickly. They crumbled. So the key question is, well, what's going on here? Is this in any way different? And I would say that partially the problem is where you're looking for the word censorship. And I would say you'd have to abstract censorship. Now the reason that very often we can get paid to fill an auditorium, we find out in the portion after the show, when we're speaking, people come up to us and say, thank you for saying what I couldn't say at work. And I can't speak inside my family. And I'm terrified, right? Right now, we are living through what I'm calling left cartheism. And I'm saying that as a member of the Democratic Party who's voted always Democratic, never Republican. Whoa. Well, if there was any mystery about what your own brook thought of the controlled Democratic Party, we know now. But the problem is that left cartheism is a terrifying event, just the way McCarthyism was a terrifying event in the 50s. And so you don't need censorship with the heavy hand when everyone is terrified that their reputation, on which they base their ability to conduct business, can be destroyed by a tiny number of people who operate positions of leverage inside the commentariat, inside the tech companies, inside of HR. And so what we're seeing is a dismantling of everything that we had built on enlightenment values, which are sort of a precursor to objectivism, perhaps, being threatened by an epidemic of control, principally from a left gone mad, and I might point somewhat stupid, countering a backward right that also has emerged from out from under the carpet where you sweep all the unpleasantness. So we've got two extremes at the moment that are controlling normal people who wanna have normal conversations about normal things, leading to a terrifying situation. And we don't know what's going on with a thing like Google. The firing of James DeMore, the fact that you can't avoid Google. Like, I think this is just simplistic. I can only avoid Google if I can avoid having other people. Can you guys put this up on Google? I can't stop all of you. It's gonna take all of my time. We have a very difficult relationship with these companies. I kept my kids off of Facebook, but other people posted pictures of my kids on Facebook. There was nothing I could do to control it. So the usual problem with libertarianism is that this beautiful idea that the right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose doesn't really cover the gray area between your fist and my nose. And so it's not as simplistic as we would like it to be, but I feel like what we have to do is to not lapse in to simplified heuristics because many things have just changed. We have to abstract them. We have to figure out how Google and Facebook behave, the way railroads might have behaved in some ways, not in others. Then we have to look at the Sherman and Clayton anti-trust acts. We have to look at their enforcement, non-enforcement, the grounding in economic theory. It's a whole medulla. It's not easy, right? But we have to take on the challenge of our times. And that's the challenge of our times. That's why I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, I mean, I agree that it's a challenge of our times and I agree with your evaluation of what's going on inside Google and many of these companies. But you don't fix a problem, I don't believe, by a blunt instrument like government and by using force. I also, I mean, part of our disagreement is gonna be on just how we view markets. So I don't view markets as something that we, whoever we are, use to solve problems, right? So we got a problem, market's great for this, we'll unleash the market for it. I view markets as what occurs when you extract from the world coercion, when you extract and you create a system of property rights and you leave people alone, what they do is markets. And I love markets not so much because of the outcome. I love the outcome, the outcome's great. But because the essential characteristic of a market is that it's free. That it's free of the course of role of government. So if there is a problem with Google and so on and clearly there is, I mean, we all agree on the problem, then we've got to find ways without using coercion, without using force to solve that problem. And it might be, and who knows what that solution is? I certainly, you know, I think Dave Rubin is part of the solution, right? I mean, he's created a massive audience for an alternative point of view that you can't hear anywhere else. Joe Rogan is part of the solution. There are many solutions. But we are on Google. I mean, there's nothing wrong about being on Google. So some of your stuff is not being monetized. So this wonderful service that Google provides, which is amazing to me, right? I can put up content in Google. They run out and find advertisers to advertise on my show. I do nothing and cash comes in. Now, that's amazing. Thank you Google and thank you YouTube for doing that. So some of the content, they decide because it's their platform and their advertisers and they've got agreements with advertisers about this, then not monetizing. You know, mostly when I talk about sex, they won't monetize it. Right. I think it's because... Or a lot of people are going to you for sex talks. Yeah, well, it happens. Fund policy and sex are the two things they won't monetize. But for the most part, nobody's stopping me for speaking, nobody's cutting me off. And the fact is, they could if they wanted to. They could shut me down. They did it with Alex Jones. It's their platform and if they started doing that to more people, we'd really have to seriously think about are there alternatives? Luckily, we don't yet have to think about all the alternatives because we can still use YouTube. So, and I worry about antitrust because, of course, antitrust is a very blunt instrument. It is a very non-objective instrument. I mean, I oppose the 1890 Showman Act. I think it's a disaster and a moral act. I mean, Iran had a great line about the showman. You know, you're always in violation of the Showman Act, right? If you sell a product really, really cheap, like Microsoft did with Internet Explorer, then you're dumping, you know, you're doing something illegal and they go after you, Microsoft learned that lesson. If you're selling a price at the same price, a product at the same price as everybody else, then you must be colluding because otherwise, how do you know? How did that happen, right, that everybody said? And we get lots of cases of collusion. And if, of course, you're selling a product more expensive than everybody else, then the only way you can do that according to classical macroeconomics is if you've got a monopoly. So the nice thing about antitrust is it allows the government bureaucrat to go, I'll go after those guys. No, maybe those guys. Because almost everybody is violating at some point in some way, the antitrust law is also written in, like inside a trading, it's written so vaguely that we're almost always in violation of them. So to give that kind of power to anybody over business, rather than allowing the markets to work and to solve these problems, and sometimes it takes longer than we like, and sometimes the solutions are stuff we don't want or don't expect, but to let people freely, free of coercion, voluntarily figure out the solutions to problems, I mean, that's the way, I think, the only moral way I see of solving these problems, I think that any use of force is wrong and results in unintended or unintended consequences that are disastrous. Does it tell you that something in this case is particularly bizarre because everyone is thinking about this, everyone is talking about it? There's a weird thing here where it's like we're all using these products and we know that every other week there's another story about how they've been hacked into or our information is leaked, et cetera, et cetera, and yet the solutions seemingly have not come yet, although I know that it seems like perhaps there's some stuff on the horizon. Well, there's this concept that I don't think has a name, which is a QWERTY monopoly, so if you remember QWERTY, it's the weird keyboard configuration that we can't get rid of because it was supposed to slow down typists so that the keys didn't jam, so the letters are in the worst possible places, so right now you're probably using a QWERTY keyboard to keep your keys from jamming on your typewriters, and that's one of the reasons it's so hard to dislodge because network effects play the role of a QWERTY path-dependent advantage and once you've locked it in, then the idea is it's very hard to dislodge, it's not impossible, and I have no doubt that eventually competitors will emerge with or without antitrust, right? But part of what I don't like is the whole romanticization about non-use of force or non-initiation of force, because quite frankly, I don't wanna pay my taxes, I just, I don't know, you guys may love it, but for me it's not a big feel good. Pretty sure they don't love it either. Really, okay, so if you don't love it, but on the other hand, your tax dollars are often argued, should not be, you should not have a gun put to your head in order to extract your money to pay for things like basic research. That's a very understandable perspective. On the other hand, I view it differently, which is I'm not allowed as a mathematician or as a physicist to lay claim to the fruits of my labor as under the intellectual property system, and so I'm in a bad spot, and I think that those aren't your tax payer dollars, they're my physics dollars, right? Because my physics dollars bought the development of the semiconductor, they won World War II at the end, they created the worldwide web out of CERN, and so all I want is a little bit of a licensing fee so I can extract money out of all of you for coming, for using all the great things that we developed. So when you say, well, why should my tax dollars be used to pay for your physics habit, my point is, are you kidding? Why should my physics dollars be supporting your lavish lifestyles when I'm not able to charge? You got the best deal in history for extracting a rent from me because I'm unfairly disadvantaged. So there's all sorts of ways of turning this around. You can look at public goods, you can look at any place where price and value gap in a market, and the problem, of course, if we're all, again, let's fast forward because the easy stuff is uninteresting, the question is, the problems of fixing it using a tool, whether it's blunt or even surgical and incisive, versus the problems of leaving it alone. And it's, in some sense, it's type one versus type two error. There are two different ways to go wrong. And in general, the reason that objectiveism is so powerful is that it gives a permanent thesis or antithesis in the dialectic so that everybody who wants to use the tools has to confront the people who don't want the tools used. And the question here is, would we be better off in a universe in which something like objectiveism prevailed generally, or is the use of objectiveism is its highest and best use as part of a dialectic to constantly bring us to a more meaningful synthesis between two different systems with two different sets of problems? And I would also say that in terms of the non-initiation of force, it's always strange to meet Israelis who believe in the non-initiation of force because of the 67 war. I mean, there's situations in which you can pretty much see what's coming and you gotta do what you gotta do because surviving a calamity is much better than a self-extinguishing strategy. So I think that all of these things require refinement. They require a location within dialectics. And these tensions are fascinating. What's going on with Google, I think, is that we're slowly waking up to the idea that free speech, free markets, are not sufficient paradigms. In the case that we built these machines where these are now merely heuristics, we can't figure out what is the best way forward to capture the essence, the intent of free speech in free markets because what we are agreed on on this panel, I think, is that ultimately any system that doesn't value the radical individual with a better idea than the rest of society and shackles that individual to collectivism is not optimal. We need some situation in which the radical individual can say no to tens of thousands or millions of people and produce something of great value and great beauty and grace for all of us or for themselves. And any system that doesn't have that aspect to it is not a system that I want to be part of. The key question is what should the substrate be below that? And the objectivism has never been tried at a national scale so far as I know. But the question is what is its role at the dinner party of interesting ideas? Should it take over the dinner party? Should it be invited? Is it so dangerous that it needs to be kicked into the shadows? And that's what I think that we're here to explore. But what unifies us, I think, in part, is the, and I said this in a tweet before I came. I felt very strange being invited to an INRAND Institute event because my two critiques is that, one, she was not sufficiently aware of the problems of multi-level selection. Sometimes we act at individual level, but we can also act at family level, group level, national level, mimetic levels. But the other thing is that I found her insufficiently radical and defensive individualism. Right? That, thank you. He's gonna explain this one. Her heroes are sort of sympathetic. They're people who wanna do brilliant, beautiful things. And if you read an article that I wrote called The War on Excellence, I am against excellence, many of you are for it. I believe that excellence crowds out genius. And a lot of the geniuses that we deal with, let's say the transistor in which everything rides now, you know, it was largely a development of Bill Shockley, the famous eugenicist. Our three-dimensional structure of DNA was understood by Jim Watson. I just spent a week with him not too long ago. Let me tell you, that guy has points of view that you cannot take anywhere. We have to celebrate these people. And you know, we were just talking in the green room about my time at Hebrew University. It was very interesting to me that we talked about the Beberbach conjecture. We talked about the Stern-Gerlach experiment in Pascal Jordan's Jordan Algebra. So all these people are Nazis, right? We celebrate Nazis in Israel with the names on their achievements. It's an absolutely radical idea that we don't, sometimes we say, may his name be cursed, but we still use the name. We don't sanitize it. You know, when I visited Rome recently, I went to the Arch of Titus and I held up my middle finger because it celebrated the destruction and looting of Jerusalem. But I don't want to burn it down, right? So the idea that we should burn, you know, the Merchant of Venice because it's against my people, all of these collectivist impulses have to be silenced. We have to figure out how to fight them and make better cases and make these voices go quiet, not through force, but through humiliation, right? Because these are terribly destructive ideas. The world has birthed all sorts of fantastic things. Many of these things were created by people whose hands were not clean. And if we keep trying to sanitize everything that human beings have done and make it all brilliantly heroic, we're doomed. So we need a more radical defense of individualism than I think Ayn Rand could afford. So I think that, Eric, on a macro level, there's probably a lot that you agreed with there and probably on a micro level a lot that we could probably spend the next five hours having you dissect. So maybe just to finish this portion if there's just one or two things that you want to just dive into on that. Wow. Well, I mean, I have to defend Israeli initiation of force. Certainly the concept of initiation of force, you know, does not... That's what you're gonna latch on to? I did just quickly, just because I'm Israeli. I mean, what are you talking about? Cannot preclude, the idea of self-defense cannot preclude preemptive strikes. I mean, that's obvious. I think somebody's running at you saying, I'm killing you, I'm gonna shoot you. When you shoot him first, that is well known as an act of self-defense and nobody worries about that. And that is the same thing as the Six-Day War. So yes, concepts need to be defined clearly and it's important to find one's self's clearly. So the idea of non-initiation of force is not just whatever. It's something very clear, you know, and it includes the idea of somebody threatening you and somebody actually legitimately coming after you. But I don't quite get this supposedly radical individualism. Of course, we celebrate great achievements. We don't always celebrate great achievers because the achievers don't deserve celebration because they're Nazis or they're bad people, but we don't, you can separate out the person from the achievement that they have made. So I don't view that as some expansion of the concept of individualism, but it's core, what does individualism actually mean? Which I think is more important. Individualism actually, at its core, means that the individual values his life as the primary. That the primary of a moral code is how do I live my life the best that I can live and that we create a political system and this is why individualism is kind of a bridge concept between morality and politics. As a political system, we create a political system that allows the individual to make the choices, make the decisions, make the rational decisions to pursue the life that he wants to live, right? They pursue the values that are gonna lead to survival and ultimately thriving and foraging. And the way to do that, if we understand that the way human beings survive, the way individuals thrive, the way human beings succeed in life is by use of reason. And if reason's real enemy is forced, if the reason's real enemy is coercion, if reason's real enemy is the authority of the Catholic Church to say no, the earth is flat, no matter what you say, then what you have to extract from human interaction, what you have to extract from the way we engage with one another in a social context is forced, is coercion, and what remains is an marketplace, right? What remains is are we interacting with one another on a voluntary basis? Now, was taxes in this, I mean, that was such a long monologue, I can't even remember. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, that's fine. So to me, that is the moral justification of a marketplace. It's not the utilitarian explanation of how well we do in multiple places, although that of course works out. I mean, every example, while objectivism has not been tried, to the extent we try capitalism, to the extent we try a system of property rights where people are pretty much left alone, it leads to enormous success. And no matter what culture, no matter what race, no matter what place in the world, it's incredibly successful. But the underlying moral justification for it is freedom. It's individual freedom. It's this idea that in order to guide our lives, to make our lives the best that it can be, we need to be free to think, to speak, to act on our thoughts, and to pursue the values we believe are necessary for us to be successful. I'll just say a word on taxes. I moved to Puerto Rico, so you know my opinion about taxes. I don't like paying them, and I don't pay them anymore, so I've solved that problem quite effectively. But I think the taxes are a means by which to distribute these people's wealth to a physicist. Now, why? Now, you gave a good explanation about how much value you create, but is there no market mechanism by which you could actually extract that value? Is there's nobody in the marketplace who would actually value the basic research that's done? Where did basic research get done before government used tax-funded money in order to do the basic research? The basic research got done at universities, some of them in the old days really private. They're not so private anymore. And you know, big businesses, Bell Labs, was a pretty cool place that did pretty amazing. Shackley, who did the transistor, I think did it in a private company, invented the transistor. Certainly, a lot of the birth of Silicon Valley comes out of a few companies that did a lot of basic research, you know, to get us to where we are today and technologically. But of course, the university is an important place that should do basic research. Do we need taxes for that? Do we need to actually curse people and go out there and force them to do this? No. And it would be wrong even if we did. So there's ways to compensate mathematicians and physicists that don't involve stealing other people's money, which I think at the end of the day is what taxation is. Leave people free, let us interact voluntarily and solve these problems in the way that I think a lot of the movement you guys have started proposes by discussion and debate. I just love this because if I could charge people for the fast Fourier transform, man, I'd invite you to my island. You don't have to live on that city of Puerto Rico. It'd be a better island. Yeah, so the problem is that I get excited when you start talking about property rights to basic research. I just can't get that conversation started. Well, I don't think you have to get it started in terms of property rights to basic research. What I do think is that if basic research is done by private companies, then private companies extract the value from that basic research and compensate the people who are doing the basic research appropriately. Otherwise, they go to another company and do the basic research of somebody else. It's just such a target-rich environment. I don't know where to start. Well, maybe we should, without getting too lost in the weeds on this, on this one. Yeah, well, I think what's interesting about this, just because we have a limited amount of time here, is that obviously you guys have some pretty significant disagreements on this stuff. But we're on this stage together. And for some reason, there's a set of people right now that are able to do this, that are able to have conversations like this that are diving into these ideas. And they've sort of put us where it's like, you guys are basically allies, even though you have massive differences on these things. We agree what a conversation is. Yeah, and I think that it sounds almost silly. This is huge, right? The number of people who don't agree on what a conversation is, I have no question that if Yaron and I go at it over and over and over again, we will both come to a common description of where we agreed and where we diverged and what would be, we could self-referee a fight. Okay, yeah, that was a good one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I overstepped, you know, but I don't think you were properly appreciative of what I said, you didn't exactly say it. The problem at the moment is that there is a new concept of what a conversation is that is terrifying. And so it is essential to not take such a broad-minded perspective that you say, I will listen and seat anyone on this stage because I want to hear all ideas because of a diversity of opinion. There are these things that I call anti-ideas or suicide ideas that are not really ideas that are just there to screw up the possibility of a conversation. So for example, why are there only Jews on this panel? Okay, no, no, no, we tried to get a Nigerian, but couldn't make it all men, okay? That seems to be true, although I've decided to identify as a woman for the purpose of it. Just for the sake of diversity. Just for the sake of diversity. I like that. These kinds of weird cognitive denial of service attacks are not actually ideas, they are not part of conversation. They are attempts to force one's way into a conversation. And I often sort of say, you know, what do you do when you have a dinner party and somebody says, well, we didn't invite anyone from the suicide bombing community. Well, if you invite someone from the suicide bombing community, what you have is pink mist. It's not very interesting. Everyone's blown up and you didn't get a chance to hear the diversity of ideas. So you have to understand that diversity, when extolled as a virtue, has to include the exclusion of certain perspectives. There is bad diversity and you have to drive bad diversity to as low a frequency count as you can in order to get the benefits of good diversity. And it's extremely important to realize that what unites the people on this stage is that there is no diversity about what constitutes a conversation. I think, quite frankly, it's very strange that the INRAN Institute invited me here. Pleased as punch, happy to have my mind changed. I agree with all sorts of things that she said and absolutely adamant against other things that she said. And this is not threatening to your own's existence. Like, my word, how could you be on my stage to get off? This is ridiculous and we have to drive the children that are controlling the conversation to understand that if you want a place at the adult table, you've got to cut this anti-idea shit completely out. Well, yeah. Yeah. Just very quickly though, when we started working together, the first thing that you said to me was as long as we agree on free speech, I don't care what our differences are. Well, yes, I mean, I think of all the values out there, of all the political issues out there, there's none more important than free speech because if you believe in something, the only way I think that's legitimate to change other people's opinion is by speaking to them. It's by reasoning. And this is what I think the underlying fact that it unifies us, right? We accept reason as the standard. We accept reality that there's an objective reality and we can, and this is why we might say, yeah, that was a good point. It matches up to something real, right? And so as long as we accept reason as the standard, it's not, oh, you offended me, you can't say that because I'm offended and my heart is broken or whatever. That emotions are not part of the conversation. I mean, they are because we get passionate and excited, but they're not obstacles. They are, at the end of the day, it's about truth and it's about reason and it's about discussion. And if we eliminate free speech, if you can't have the conversation, then truth is out the window. It's whatever the snowflakes decide and that's whatever it is. Some of it might be true, some of it might be false, but it's whatever randomly they figure out and there's no conversation, there's no truth-seeking, there's no science, there's no pushing the envelope on any topic, there's no changing the world, which is, I wanna change the world. I can't change the world by force, right? I could, but it wouldn't be the kind of world I want. So the only, so the way to change the world people's minds, the way to have the conversation, the way to engage is through the use of reason, through the use to the argument based on facts, based on reality. All right, so let's move on to something else that we can have some arguments on. That's fine. Yeah, well, don't worry, I'll get you on that. You can find some more arguments on. So let's talk a little bit about just sort of the politics of the day, because we're only two and a half weeks or so away from the midterms here. I'm hesitant to even say Trump because it's so nice to have a conversation where nobody says Trump, but I think we all take a different position on Trump. I kind of view him now as a necessary evil that I think has basically been a net good in a weird way. I think you're pretty anti-Trump for a lot of reasons. You happen to work for a guy, Peter Thiel, who supported Trump very publicly and spoke at the RNC and donated money and all that, but you were a Bernie guy. So we all have sort of different positions on this. The phrase that has come up when we've talked about this is you wanted a panther in a China shop and you get a bull in a China shop. That was Dave Rubin's insight. That was pretty good. I said that we needed a surgical removal of some of the cancer in our political system. And Dave said, you're kidding yourself. You're angry that there's a bull in the China shop. You wanted a panther that kind of knocked over things very selectively and that that was, in fact, a just a completely implausible scenario. And I thought that was actually a great point. So I reconsidered my perspective that only bulls were available when I was shopping for panthers. But look, I think this guy is an absolute existential risk to the fabric of our country because of the way in which he goes about exploding reason. We have a problem that it's very, he's the first person to break out of the system. And so, you know, colocovote for that. But like in terms of the damage to the shared values, the shared experience of the American experiment, which is I suppose a collectivist issue that there is sort of the written Torah and there's the oral Torah and there's the written constitution and there's the oral constitution. This has been massively destructive of our oral constitution, our understanding of ourselves in our society. Whereas like the Clinton-Bush Obama thing was the slow destruction of our society. So we somehow, we were on a bad path to disaster that was happening slowly and then we took the Trump off-ramp and like, you know, the concrete ran out and there's just this amazing jump that you have to do where you have to gun the engine. So maybe we survived this thing and maybe it saves us from Clinton-Bush Obama, but man, are we really gambling with the full stack like this? I just can't even imagine that this is like on the approved list, but like, okay. I called on Ben Shapiro's Sunday special for a return to a very occasional above-ground nuclear testing just to remind the younger members of our planet what we physicists and mathematicians were able to do because it's been pushed underground so it's sort of like, well, that doesn't happen because it hasn't happened since 1945, so it won't happen again. This is madness, complete and utter insane madness. And I say that as a person who was livid with not only the Clintons, but like the whole machine, the New York Times, NPR's distortion of the truth. I say this as a guy who's been on the left. That the intellectual and epistemic rot that was perpetrated from 1980 to 2016 is just incredible and we are going to have to think our way out of a mountain of idiocy if we are ever going to restore our country. So what does a party then look like that would make sense for three people like us? What is that if, because people ask us this all the time, it's like, who do you guys support? I don't think any of us gets everything we want. I mean, you have to start with that. We're not gonna get everything we want because we wouldn't be in the same party if we did, but I think we get something much better than what we have today. So I think a political party that we could all support, if not join, but we could all support somewhat is a political party that respects individualism and rejects this tribalism of the left and of the right. It's a political party that has a respect for markets, not as much as I would want, but maybe somewhere between us that says... Pretty pro-market. Yes, so for the most part, we have strong markets. It's a political party that says, look, we're gonna have to shrink them and spending, right? It's insanity what's going on and if you project the numbers into the future, you're gonna have to find ways to optimize all these things. And it's a political party that certainly says that we respect free speech and we are adamant about it and that while the New York Times might be crazy and we agree on the New York Times and maybe in some way we agree with Donald Trump and the New York Times as scary as that is, it's not the role of the president of the United States to start saying which media is approved and which media is not. I think that's unbelievably dangerous. One of the worst things of this presidency is the idea that somehow, if the New York Times writes something that is bad, but Fox News, that's always okay, right? Now, I think that both, Fox and both houses, I mean, unless you recognize Fox as a Republican arm and New York Times as the Democratic arm or whatever, so it's the idea of free speech. It's hard to tell what a foreign policy, we haven't even talked about foreign policy at all the way we would get on foreign policy-wise, but it wouldn't be one day calling a guy who has a button on a nuclear bomb a complete nut and then the next day saying you're in love with them. I just don't, that's just not a foreign policy that is coherent, it's nuttiness and the guy is obviously nutty. It's like a dating strategy that the pickup artist got to neg him first and then make the flat out of them. Yeah, with nuclear bombs in the background. Let's play this game and see where it comes out. I mean, I think it's crazy. I think we would view Putin probably differently than what Trump views Putin and Saudi Arabia, maybe differently than what you wouldn't see, maybe our party members dancing in the desert quite with the sheiks as Trump did. But it would be, there's no good word. I mean, I would love an individualist political party, a political party that stands for the individual and yes, we're gonna disagree on a lot of how to apply that, but if the principle is we wanna create a world in which individuals are free to pursue their life, to make their life the best that it can be for themselves, then we're still gonna have massive disagreements, but at least there'll be some alternative to the collectivism that's so dominating our political landscape today. So that being said, we briefly discussed this in the green room. Are we in unique times right now or just between the political crumbling, the media crumbling, our academia seemingly crumbled, the rate at which technology is changing and the amount of news that we get endlessly all the time. And as you said, we're basically walking around the TV studio in our pocket. Is this actually unique or does it just feel unique for all of those reasons? How is this time unique? I mean, we're in the middle, we're in a weird, low grade, no name revolution and we've been there for a few years for sure. This is the collapse of a long bubble, right? And you can look at the bubble from probably the early 70s at least. So it's a nearly 50 year bubble that's dominated by Baby Boomer thinking about how to take over from an era of real growth between 1945 and the early 70s into this era that I've called the gimmick to the new gimmick economy where we've kept the plates spinning as every rich family does where the family business starts to fail. You've got a lot of assets and so you have a lot of abilities to keep the system going at a felt style to which a small subset have become accustomed. But you have to mortgage the future, of course. And that bubble is now coming to an end. It sort of came to an initial end in 2008 and then there was a zombie period where we bailed it out through magic and hocus pocus and it sort of worked. And now during that period, we weren't allowed to come up with new ideas. So we had these old ideas like banks can self-regulate which clearly had their asymmetries that make that impossible even if in some idealized world it could work. We've got a situation in which Wiley Coyote has gone off the cliff and he knows that as soon as he actually makes eye contact with the fact that there's nothing supporting him, that's when he falls. And so that's where we are now is that in order to undo the complex of completely wrong ideas foisted upon us by everyone from Reagan to Obama that we are going to find that we are in some kind of free fall very quickly. And I don't think people have thought about what it looks like to come out of a long-lived intellectual bubble where all of your heads, and my head included, are filled with rot. Like ideas, intellectual malware is present between all of your ears. And we don't know how to do the semantic removal of this malware in our minds without losing the entire structure of society. If you look at your hotel window in New York and you see all of these people moving around, I remember it was in a hedge fund in 2008 looking down in New York and thinking, okay, all of these people are gonna wonder why am I coming to work at some point? You know, I'm not getting paid, the contracts are breaking down, you know, they're not clearing in the markets. Are we gonna force people to drive a cab and to operate their bakeries and who knows what if we have a market meltdown? Markets are absolutely important. They're the only structure that can possibly govern something this complicated and this loosely coupled. And our faith in our markets is rightly shaken when they have to be managed this aggressively by a group of people that we don't really know, they don't understand, they have crazy incentives. I do not wanna be on the hook for non-recourse loans to banks, right? And the fact is that they found out that when you use magic words like non-recourse loans, the American public is in a daze for two weeks as the train goes through. I think we're not aware of the fire that we're playing with because we've had an incredible run since 1945. And it's just been amazingly peaceful, amazingly prosperous, even with all the bad things that have happened. This is not normal. And it's been a beautiful dream to share with all of you, but it's also a dream that has been undergirded and supported by intellectual rot and madness foisted upon us by a group that we don't understand or agree with, and they don't have the answers. And this substrate is going to disintegrate on us, and then we're going to be left saying, okay, how do we pick up the pieces? And that's the thing that I'm most interested in talking about, which is what do we do after the baby boomer bubble bursts? That's a lot of B's in one sentence. Yeah, I mean, that's fascinating to me because for as well as I know you and as much as we talk about this publicly and privately, I've never heard you put it in such dire terms. I sense perhaps you're going to give a slightly rosier version of the future. Not necessarily. I basically agree with what we're heading. And I fear making macroeconomic predictions like this because it's seemingly, I've heard these before, right? But it seems like we're getting close and close at the edge all the time. I will disagree on economic history. We'll disagree probably on who the bad guys are. I would start with the bad guys. I would start with Hoover and FDR as setting up the whole structure that we are suffering from today. I mean, if you look at the securities laws of 3334, they're what screwed us up all the way through into today. Well, I just want to make sure that we're actually communicating on this. I believe that a lot of the problem, as much as I love blaming bad guys, bankers in particular just love it, but a lot of this actually has to do with science and physics and if you look at a work of a guy named Derek DeSola Price, who in the 1950s said, if I plot any indicator of scientific or technological progress, it's on an exponential curve that can't continue because very soon we're going to have more PhDs than human beings on planet Earth and we know that that's not true. I'm a few people with double PhDs, but it's realistic. We probably ran into the first version of the singularity in around 1971, 72. If you look at the data, I think Tyler Cowan's vision of this and I should do this in the other direction. GDP and median mail income both increased in lockstep and then suddenly median mail income flatlined, like until the present and growth as measured by GDP and there are lots of problems with GDP measurement kept going up. So we have gone through phase changes in the nature of the economy and it's not a question of well, it's always gloom and doom. Gloom and doom has already happened. You can see it in the data, things change structure and what I'm stating is, is that we're infrastructural change and so either we come up with non-fossil-led growth that's broadly distributed technologically led and not gimmick-oriented or we figure out how to live at steady state or some kind of declining situation. Both of these things are known to produce very different outcomes, one of which could be war. Yeah, so I would disagree with those. I think at the end of the day, I think we'd be screwing up our economy for 90 years as government has become bigger and bigger, more and more regulatory, more and more controlling, more and more involved. You mentioned banking and the inability to self-regulate. Well, sure, because once you begin with deposit insurance, it's over. As soon as you have deposit insurance, you've screwed up the system. But why do you have to have deposit insurance? You don't. There are many mechanisms to replace deposit insurance but once you have it, deposit insurance is the government guarantees your deposits but then the bankers have initiative to take on too much risk. So then you have to regulate the amount of risk they take because you're, you know, the government is at the end of the day getting a pay. So then you have, you overlay those regulations but those regulations are not benign. They create all kinds of incentives themselves. So then you have to overlay another level of regulations, control the incentives that the first, and it just spirals out of control and Dodd-Frank is just the latest layer on top of this massive structure of regulations that exist to control every little bank transaction that happens. I like to call banks in the United States public utilities because they're basically run by the government and everything they do is basically run by the government. 150 government employees, government regulators go to work at JPMorgan every day. They sign off on everything those evil bankers, willing quotes do. We've created a possible situation of a mixed economy that leaves certain sectors somewhat free and then wants to leap on them and regulate them. This is one of my big concern of Google and YouTube and so on is this is one sector that's being left alone and we've seen innovation what Peter Thiel calls innovation in the electron space. We've seen innovation in electrons, we don't see it in atoms. Why don't we see it in atoms? I mean, I think we don't see it in atoms because we've regulated away, right? Atoms is the big stuff, railroads and cars and airplanes. We've regulated innovation away from there. We've got one sector where there's still innovation because government has kept its hands off of it for the most part and now in the name of free speech, we want to start regulating it. We know what's going to happen because we know what the tendencies of the regulators are. We know their incentives, we know how they think, we know what they do. Once you introduce force into that kind of market, it will crush it, it will dominate it and we'll get no innovation in that space. Again, so what I would like to see as an exit path out of this is unwinding all the garbage that has been overlaid onto the system for a hundred years since, since President Wilson and starting to unwind that and release, I think, a marketplace that can produce the kind of growth that we saw in the past. I see no limitations of growth. I don't see any reason why this economy couldn't grow at substantial higher rates than it is today at much higher productivity rates. If you unleash those, if you unleash the capacities of human beings to actually produce freely and to trade and innovate freely in every space, not just in electrons, but in atoms as well. Have you been to Burning Man? No, I've not been to Burning Man. How many of you have been to Burning Man to see that? I've heard stories. Okay, there's something in the back who's been to Burning Man. Very good. This is ridiculous. If you guys are coming here and you care about the individual and you want to see a relatively lightly regulated environment in which people max out their creativity, get yourself to the Nevada desert at the end of August because it is awesome. And it is so, you know, one of the slogans of Burning Man is keep Burning Man potentially lethal. Because the fun that you're having is, you know, you're out in the desert and people are on every kind of psychedelic and a giant dragon comes by that can, with two flamethrowers in its nose, blaring music and offering drinks. And mostly people don't die. It's pretty amazing. The key, though, you're on, is that Burning Man is so expensive. It's so difficult to survive in the desert. And you have to do all this organization. It selects against people with low IQ, low executive function, inability to manage risk. And so the idea is that it's only possible because it's not convenient. It's, you know, this is the old puzzle about North Dakota's high SAT score. Somebody wants to ask the governor, like, what's going on in North Dakota? He says, well, 40 below keeps the riffraff out. So you have this wonderful situation that there are situations that we see where by getting rid of people who can't compete, you can have a relatively self-regulating environment because everybody who needs all the guardrails and all of the edges sanded and all of these are out. The problem is we're dealing at scale and it's not clear to me whether we can have everybody in on the risk system. We have bread dependence. So that's where I'm gonna agree with. I agree. I know that was the part I was throwing to you. So we have bread dependence for sure. But it's also the case that we can't necessarily easily take on all of our problems. If you decide to have a child, the umbilical cord is wrapped around the throat and you don't have a high income and you've got a kid with cerebral palsy, you've got an interesting situations. And now are you gonna regulate who can have sex, unprotected sex with whoever else? All of these things are unclear. Now all of you Iron Randians have thought about these things. You all have very interesting answers so I don't wanna spend time on the low level thing. What I do wanna say is first of all, you guys gotta go to Burning Man. Second of all, very often you have to select against the people who can't handle the risk or you have a system that moves towards the kind of nanny state and highly regulated structure. And the most important thing is we need places to misbehave, right? It's very important that the people who want to misbehave at a very high level have somewhere to go. And the big problem isn't regulation someplace. It's the concept that no place shall escape regulation. We have to regulate tech and hedge funds. Any place you could have fun, you know, porn. We gotta regulate the hell out of porn. Geez, you can regulate our porn for God's sake. So- Well, we've done hedge funds already. We're about to do technology, so- Well, that's the thing, right? So you need the place for high agency people to go do high agency things with other high agency people in a very lightly regulated environment. And what I suggested at some point to the head of the Heritage Foundation is take every healthy company, decide that you can hang a 5% or 10% national interest exemption off of the side of this thing for people to do unregulated stuff that might do amazing things for the world. Because I don't think we're gonna get a very lightly regulated society. You need some place to go to misbehave. And the most important thing is we have to get our top people. Like, we're really gonna regulate the hell out of Elon Musk. The one person who's working in the atomic layer, it's like, oh my God, maybe he's having too much fun with women and drugs. Let him have fun with women and drugs. We need the cars, we need the batteries, we need the space travel. But this is what concerns me, is why shouldn't everybody be having fun? So this, in a sense, elitism, right? This idea that only Elon Musk should be had fun, but the woman who wants to open a nail salon and is driven and maybe she has a low IQ, but she can run a nail salon and she's hired people and she's got that counting done. And obviously nail salons provide value to people because, you know, they go everywhere, so you guys must consume their product. I don't, but you guys must. And we license her and we put her through hell to start this nail salon. And why? Why shouldn't she be able to live in that same unregulated environment where she can have fun, provide a value, and make some money instead of being driven often into poverty, because you can't afford the opening fee that a licensing- I want her less regulated. Yes, I'd say less. I want force out of it. I don't see why the government has any role to play in what we engage with voluntarily, no matter what our IQ is. That is, I don't see the government having a policy for high IQ people, you know, create a space for them to have fun and not have a policy for low IQ. Now, it's true that some people are gonna have problems with, you know, health and whatever, all of that. There gotta be solutions for that that don't involve somebody showing up at your house, in a sense, with a gun and taking your stuff away. There gotta be solutions that we can create voluntarily to solve those problems. And those are edge problems. They're not major problems. The number of people really can't take care of themselves in an economy. I mean, I remember Jordan Peters was saying, people with low IQ, you know, what are we gonna do? They're 10% of them in one of the parallels that we've had. And I was thinking when he was saying, I was thinking of sitting in the Chicago I don't know, 30, 40th floor of the Chicago finance firm, very comfortable, and watching on the skyscraper these guys cleaning windows, sitting on this narrow little thing and cleaning the windows. You couldn't pay me, there's no number that you could pay me to do that job, right? You know, it scares the Jesus out of me. There's no way I would get up there. And probably, I don't know what their IQ is, but my guess is it's lower than mine. But great for them and they're earning a living and it's great. And yes, one day a robot will do it and one day there'll be jobs that we can't even imagine that will require the same kind of skill sets and risk taking in a way that us intellectuals can't imagine, right? Cause we won't do those kind of jobs. So, you know, it strikes me as bizarre that we're overly worried about, oh, those people over there can't take care of themselves. Yeah, I think people are amazingly, I mean, we were in China in 2004, was it a six or something like that? And we went, and I was very skeptical of China and we went to Dongguan, China. Dongguan, China is a city that didn't exist and within 10 years it had eight million people. And everybody in the city was on the move, right? Everybody was doing stuff, right? They weren't, you know, who knows how smart they were, but they weren't doing sophisticated stuff. Everybody was doing stuff. Millions of people working hard to make a living, often on their little scooter, they had the whole family dragging, I mean, risk taking that I couldn't imagine, right? And they had, and they were succeeding and they were achieving stuff and they were building stuff and it was amazing the energy was palpable in this place. It's probably what America felt like in the 19th century. And they were just striving to make their lives better, to improve their life. And I want people to live those kind of lives. I want people to be engaged, I want people to embrace, I mean, at some point you guys talked about, or maybe it was you, with Ben, about the value that comes from actually working, right? And it's great to see people engage in that kind of work. And I think when you leave people alone, that's what they do. It's when you coddle them, oh, you can't do it, you know, it's too much risk for you. Let me take care of you. That's when you lose them. But we were in agreement on that. So it's not about coddling, it's also not about like high IQ. There are lots of people with lower IQs are much more effective than people with high IQs, believe me, if you've been to a math department, you know this is true, right? The issue is about most of us are going to require having data rather than alpha to some process. So if it's electrification or indoor plumbing or a new road system or digitization or virtualization. Most people don't know what beta and alpha mean, sorry. Okay, alpha, you've got some highly idiosyncratic thing that you know how to do and it's awesome. Beta is you have exposure to something that's generally going on. Like, hey, I heard crypto is really good, okay? So you're doing that crypto thing and if crypto is going up, you're getting rich just because you're in on crypto. You don't understand elliptic curve cryptography, but hey, you've got some bitcoins that worked out for a period of time. Most of us are not going to get paid by having alpha, right? We're not going to be the next Elon Musk. What we are going to do is we are going to say, I wanna be part of a vibrant society, I've got a little idea and I'm gonna attach it to a bigger one. So that's why it's not about elitism, it's about let the people who are gonna have the really big ideas, the alpha, contribute them so the rest of us can get some goddamn beta and lead really fulfilling lives because it requires a fair amount to make a living with betas. I mean, alpha's really hard, but beta's hard enough as it is. No, it's a great point. And only a few people in any society in any given point in time in society provide alpha, really change the world in that sense and really move us forward. And yes, you wanna give them as much freedom to create that alpha as possible and we should all benefit from that freedom as well. I don't wanna give them exclusivity on freedom. Well, on that note, I sense that at some point tonight everyone's gonna wanna get out there and get some psychedelics. Eric can actually point you in the right direction. So, to not belabor this, let's open this up to a Q and A. I'm sure some of you guys have some questions. We're doing a mic over here. Try to keep it a little bit brief so we can get to as many as possible. Questions go right over here. By the way, if we could get people to applaud for brevity both of the questions and of the answers, it'll create a great incentive structure. They thought you were asking for applause. You realize that. I got it. You got them. Clever. What are we doing? Oh, we're doing them up here. All right. How's it going? Great. Thanks for the conversation. It was great. First of all, when are you Israeli? But when are you coming to Israel to do an event like that over there? We've been trying to figure this out. We've talked about it. So, Dave and I have talked about doing something in Israel. So, we'll keep talking about it. Hopefully, in 2019, we can do something. Getting to Israel is expensive, I guess. That's the only limitation. But yes, we will at some point. We'll do a tour in Europe. We will do something. Dave is doing a tour in Europe with Peterson. I'm doing a tour in Europe just solo. And I'll do something in Israel. Trust you guys to do it. Regarding the first subject, you talked about the good sensor. I feel I get sympathy to your position, but I think there's no one is trying to do something about it. Meaning, I think right now, Intellectual Dark Web and all that, you have the opportunity to collude and maybe drive traffic, be an influencer with, I don't know, with Joe, with Sam, with Jordan, all of those people to get to the alternative platforms that just can't get enough traction right now. And I think you guys are in a great position to do something about it and get that traction and then it will be more like a market that doesn't have that failure that is so obvious, so. Yeah, trust me, we're working on it. There's a lot of discussions happening, as Eric alluded to in our last conversation two weeks ago, the billionaire class is now paying attention to this. And you're right, the amount of traffic that we could all drive if we all picked the same idea. I mean, that's really what this has been about. We've been bouncing around, oh, can we, should we all jump on minds.com or bit shoot or this or that? And it's like if we can coalesce around something that works for us each individually, but also can move a lot of people, then that's what we should be going for and it's coming. And Alex Jones' sudden removal, the most interesting thing was how quickly all of the platforms collaborated on that. Yeah. And we saw the shot across the bow at the data and society report about the Alternate Influence Network, where Dave and I are obviously gateway drug to neo-Nazism. So I think just to be blunt, let them try to come for us at this point because I'm fucking sick of this shit. And I don't swear a lot, but they don't have as much power as they think because if they're going to come after us, it's gonna be naked and obvious and one of the reasons I created the concept of the IDW, the Intellectual Dark Web, is that there are too many of us to take out all at once. And so if they're going to try to get Peterson, Shapiro, Rogan, Ruben, you know, once they want one, two, et cetera, it's like good luck. And this is the beauty, you know, they're all market solutions and you've seen them. I mean, it's just a matter of getting motivated enough and they will be a solution one way or the other. It's not pleasant, the process is not pleasant. They will give us such a boost if they try to come for us in the same fashion. Exactly, and that's great. And I'm still waiting for the invitation. Thank you very much, see you in Israel. Hi, my question's for you, Dr. Book. I watched your show when you talked about Elizabeth Warren and you talked about the economic history of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I was wondering if you could give a brief history of the 80s and 90s because you stopped at the 70s and I took an economics class from my teacher as Keynesian so I never really got anything good on economics, so. I mean, it's very difficult to do a brief economic history of any period of time. I mean, we might disagree, we might not, I don't know. But I think there were certainly certain trends in the late 70s and early 80s that were positive, overlaid by a bunch of very negative trends. And I'd say that the most positive trends in the late 70s and early 80s was massive deregulation, which I think ultimately was a good thing. And most of the deregulation, I've said this many times, most of the deregulation is surprising to many people, happened under Jimmy Carter and not under Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan benefited from, if you think about airlines, trucking, brokerage services, and a bunch of others, they all happened under Jimmy Carter. They all happened in the 70s. But people think of them in terms of Reagan because he was such a good speaker, right? He gave a great speech about free markets. And I think as a consequence of that deregulation, primarily as a consequence of that deregulation and a consequence of getting a chairman of the Federal Reserve who wasn't as wimpy as the previous ones in the 60s and 70s were, we got a boost in economic growth during the 1980s and 90s, but it was gonna be temporary because nothing was done to change the structure of government, the scope and the scale of government. So what you did was you overlaid debt on top of debt on top of debt while all this good economy was going on. You got that through the 90s. And there was some moment of glimmer of maybe hope where the budget was actually balanced under Bill Clinton. Notice these all Democrats where things go almost good. And it was a tiny glimmer and then it completely explodes because we start spending like crazy again. And of course, we start regulating. Everybody thinks again, it was Jimmy Carter who deregulated and it was Bush who regulated like crazy. So people think again, there was deregulation before the financial crisis. No, there was not. If you think about Saul Benzoxley, think about the way the regulatory agencies functioned in the 2000s, it was terrible leading up to the financial crisis. And then I agree about post-financial crisis. It's been nuts, it's been insane that Federal Reserve and Central Bank is all over the world doing weird stuff and an artificial stimulus that didn't really stimulate much but kept us kind of going, bailing out everybody, banks, auto companies, changing the rules of the game, contracts, it really set a new low in terms of America in our response to the post-financial crisis. And I would say just take the 1973 test, ask yourself absent communications and semiconductor technology. If you look around any room, how do you know that you're not in 1973 and forget stylistic details? So that gives you an idea of how much gimmickry was necessary to keep this growth game going because in fact I don't think the modern era was particularly exciting except for like fracking semiconductors and communication which has been awesome. But that's the reason everybody pulls out their phone and says, no, this is amazing. Yes, that's all that's left of your previously limitless future, right? And so it's amazing, but that's really where things collided. Yeah, I mean, think about automobile, the inter-equipped bushing engine hasn't changed much. Think about airliners, the airlines actually, I mean, I've seen this chart, airplanes get slower every decade. They don't crash. They don't crash, but they get slower. And then the last real innovation was the supersonic, the Concorde, and it's gone. Now there's work now on supersonic jets so hopefully one of those will be successful. But at the level of big stuff, there hasn't been that much innovation, but I wouldn't, I mean, I'm less negative on the last 30, 40 years, primarily when you go outside the US, right? Because what's happened outside of the US is so magnificent if you care about human beings that you have to celebrate it. I mean, billions of people have come out of poverty, billions of people are living dramatically better lives than they did in the 19, certainly in the 1960s where the Chinese were dying of starvation. Two cheers, but yeah, it's been, yes, I wouldn't give it three because I think it could be a lot better. No. Yeah, let's keep, let's keep, yeah, just keep going. Hi guys, this is great. Thank you so much for doing this. I know this wasn't meant to be a debate, but I was hoping that you'd speak a little bit more about altruism. Your own has very famously, you know, taken the Iran position that altruism is evil. Eric, I'm a little confused though about your position. I know you were a Bernie supporter, but you're also in the business world. Can you talk a little bit about your views on altruism and what we are to do with all those other people that you're just talking about? Well, first of all, I just, thanks for the question, very short, so thank you. Short, don't get confused by things that people advertise as altruism. Altruism can be many things. One thing it can be is a peacock's tail. I'm so goddamn successful and so rich that I can afford to be altruistic, right? So you're actually being selfish in a weird way, but actually great things can be accomplished on behalf of that. You can also think about inclusive fitness from a Hamiltonian perspective. There are all sorts of ways to get to beautiful and decent acts that don't require mumbo jumbo and nonsense. And what I think is, is you can have a child's relationship to altruism, or you can have an adult's relationship to altruism. And what we need to get rid of is the child's relationship to altruism because that leads to madness. So I'll just, because there's a lot to talk about here, but I'll just be brief. I mean, it's important to define terms what we mean by altruism because it's used so widely and so briefly, but the philosopher coined the term, Augustine Comte, really meant, living for the sake of other people, that your own happiness, your own sense. And in many senses, it's still being used in that way, but in a disguise come away because nobody actually wants to live that way, so it's being used as an excuse. I think one of Einwren's real greatest achievements is rethinking ethics and really re-conceptualizing what we mean by a lot of these terms. And but re-conceptualizing what ethics means, what's the purpose of morality and what kind of values should be attained. So for her, a lot of kind of the Peacock tale wouldn't be self-interest. So a lot of the kind of stuff we do because we're convinced that we're supposed to help other people, so we help other people to appease un-earned guilt, I would say is not self-interest, you get rid of the guilt, that's the self-interest part, is get rid of what's un-earned. So Rand really focuses us on morality, says, you know, rationally pursue your own self-interest, figure out using reason what is truly in your long-term rational self-interest, not easy. I always tell audiences to be selfish in a Randian sense, which I think is the only sense, is hard work. It requires real thinking, it requires real engagement with your life and with reality. And altruism, the idea of living for the sake of other people, for the sake of other people is evil. Now that the concept of selfishness and self-interest does not preclude helping other people and assisting other people in a variety of different interesting ways, right? But it has to be grounded in an idea of what it means to be me and what it means to be successful and what my values really represent. That wasn't for gravity, I don't think. Thanks a little bit, guys. This sort of piggybacks on the awful last question about altruism. Some psychologists, I see problems with codependency all the time. And when you talk about regulation and trying to control things or even just somebody coming up here and shouting you guys down for all being male, that almost seems like a way to control something outside of you because you can't control something inside of you. So to what extent do these issues come down to not just something philosophical but something psychologically going on with people? Let me just hit this quick because I've been on tour with Jordan Peterson for the last four months and I think this is the essence of everything he's talking about. This is why he says clean up your room. He doesn't mean that your room has to be in the order of, you know, that every pen and every piece of dust has to be right but you've got to fix your life first. That the world won't magically fix itself and these people often, I mean I think you see this a lot with these social justice warriors, there's a reason that they often look like such a mess because they're trying to put controls on the world that's out of control. The world is in chaos but they have to get a little order to their own lives first. And I see that very, I mean this is why I think Jordan's message has really hit especially with young men but I think it's with young women as well that you've got to fix yourself first then you can get to start fixing the world. So I do think there's a personal component here that has to be addressed. Otherwise you're just running around, you're not fixing anything actually if you're not fixing yourself you're probably actually just adding to the chaos. If I could just briefly bring up penguins. Penguins don't have a strategy very often for going it alone. And parthenogenesis is not something that humans have access to so far as we know. So we are dependent on each other for procreation. We're not designed, my friend Peter Teal points out that the big blind spot of Ayn Rand is her treatment of children because you can't treat children as autonomous individuals that are fully responsible for themselves. We are the most case-elected species on the planet. Nobody else is deferring reproductive maturity for like 13 years. So we don't have the luxury of pretending that we should all be completely self-reliant. We should define co-dependence however as the marginal difference between healthy co-reliance and some kind of dysfunction. So there is a minimal amount that we have to depend on each other and there is an amount above that where once you realize that you're not fully viable you're going to have to co-opt somebody who has complementary skills. And we should push more people as per Jordan's admonition to if they realize that they're low in conscientiousness you're going to try to control other people because you're not gonna have the skills to make it. So better to do a personal inventory and check yourself because that's really what the clean your room thing is is that you should be at least able to look at your room and say the government hasn't been in here. Why is it a complete mess? It's the copay for participating in an advanced society. Thanks for the question. So I think there's a huge psychological component. There's no question that the motivation of many of these people is, I don't think it's just dependence but I think it's a low self-esteem. I think it's the fact that they don't believe in themselves in a metaphysical sense. They don't believe in their own capacity to survive and to trade effectively with other people and they lash out as a consequence. So I think there's a huge psychological component that we're gonna have to address. I think one of the reasons Jordan is so successful is that whether you agree with the way he addresses it or not, there's a hunger out there for psychological knowledge and how to address it and that needs to be explored further. We need a lot more psychologists out there and people who really know psychology to be out there helping people gain the kind of self-esteem that allows you to face reality and deal with the world and deal with other people and deal with the environment where you need to trade value for value or you're not gonna do very well in life. Thanks. Thanks. My question is do you believe that the fight against totalitarianism and tribalism in the long run is a losing battle because what you're fighting against is essentially human nature and what I mean by that is it seems that there'll always be a large part of society that wants to thrive by taking from other people by opposing their will on other people and that's just in our DNA, apes do it, early man used to do it and yes. So let me briefly, the idea of individualism and the idea of freedom and the idea of progress and the idea of economic growth and all these ideas are really, really, really young. They're about 200 years old, 250 years old. I mean, they had a little flourishing increase but then they went away and then they're really young. So I don't, this idea that human beings are always tribal always says yes, that's history but these new ideas have made huge changes in how we think about the world and they haven't changed everybody and it's gonna take time to get the word out there and for people to integrate these ideas and to change accordingly. So I'm optimistic. It depends on what you consider the long run. I'm pessimistic about maybe the next couple of decades. I think the tribalism's on the march. I think that these collectivistic notions are dominating and I think war is possible. I think there are a lot of negative outcomes that within the probability spectrum, you've got to take into account. But I think truth wins out in the end and I think good ideas win out in the end and Aristotle was lost for a thousand years but he was rediscovered and good ideas even if we go through a bad period of time we'll ultimately triumph. I'll give you a slightly more memeable answer which is Neo wins at the end of the matrix, right? Luke blows up the Death Star, David beats Goliath, like all the stories, all the stories that inspire us that keep us going are the guy, the individual winning and fighting for what he believes in not just leaving it up to everybody else and letting the mob win. So it's on us. I don't think it's just not written but it's on us to do what's right. I guess from my perspective, if you look at the concept of white in America it shows you a triumph because the idea of no Irish need apply, right? Like Irish? I can't even see Irish anymore because we're all mutts now and we're increasingly going to be more modified. So at some point I went to London with my then girlfriend and she said, what's it like being over here? And I said, well, it's interesting the number of interracial couples that I see walking on the street. She says, you mean like us? I looked at her, holy crap. I had no idea it was in an interracial relationship. So I do think that part of what's going on is that totalitarianism can't really win in the long run. It's actually the unnatural thing. And the tribalism, there's adaptive and maladaptive. We have to stop being so simplistic and just saying everything tribal is bad. You have to appreciate that part of what binds you guys together may be a mimetic tribe that's committed to freedom. And so it's very important not to reflexively take somebody else's maladaptive tribalism and then suddenly have to destroy your own where people are always asking us to throw other members of the IDW under the bus just to prove that we're non-tribal. And usually my response is piss off because we're trying to do something decent. Imagine if the Red Squadron or Gold Squadron or whatever it was that took down the Death Star had to answer the charge of, well aren't you behaving like a tribe? Like you're damn right we are because we're gonna blow up a Death Star and that's gonna in general decrease the amount of totalitarianism in the world. So it's important to have sophisticated concepts of these and I highly recommend using the words adaptive and maladaptive in front of any concept like tribalism because you get a much better answer. If you could do the other thing you're gonna be lost in a terrible heuristic. Thanks for the question. For the record, the Red Squadron was all white men but now in the new movies it's a really diverse group of people, so. Hello, much like Dave just referenced The Matrix I'm going to use a story to unpack my question. So in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand describes a society that is hellbent on altruism. A society where you see individuals that are putting other people for themselves and it is ending up with a result that is having a lot of negative effects on society. That is kind of leading to this collectivist, kind of weird, you would call tribal, way of thinking that is very maladaptive. And so it led to all kinds of, I kind of forgot the middle of the book but it led to a lot of issues. And so Ayn Rand then presents a solution which is Dana Taggart, Hank Reardon and John Galt. And so I'm wondering how do we incentivize and how do we highlight those individuals that are much like Taggart, Reardon or Galt so that we can finally maybe find a group of individuals that do not have this intellectual malware that you speak of that they can be the future leaders of our society because from my point of view what I see is growing up I really, I despised authority really because they really disappointed me, I looked at them, I felt that they were treating society terribly, I felt they were being very careless with the way that they treat things. And so how do we nurture a group of individuals that will respect individualism, will respect objectivity so that they can run a society that is not hell-bent on altruism and authoritarianism? Well, I mean there's a lot there. I mean I don't think anybody, any of those people would want to run a society so to start with that. But how do we nurture people? I think the only way to do it is through education by talking, by speaking, by getting people to read books, by engaging in ideas and by communicating. There's no shortcuts, there's no magic bullet that I can say one sentence and everybody just gets it or use some kind of other mechanism to just get people to, it's slow, it takes time, but it's education, it's having these conversations, it's exposing the world to I think the right ideas and it's part of the wonderful thing that Dave is doing is he's opening up these conversations to expose people to a wide variety, some ideas I don't agree with but that's okay because it's the idea of engaging in ideas and using reason to discuss these ideas and having the standard of fact and reality that ultimately I think those people will find it. Yeah, I would say it's on you, relentlessly fight for what you believe in, honestly, even if it's everything in the complete polar opposite of what I believe in. I mean I see this now on this tour with Peterson. We've done about 60 cities, thousands of people, every single show's sold out. We've got 20 cities now coming up in Europe starting next week and it's like the amount of people that are sharing these videos, talking about these ideas, people that hang out after the shows to meet other people to then go to the bar and continue discussing this stuff. It's everything that I think we've started to now create with the IDW where we're actually driving conversation that I think is the antidote to this collectivist chaos that we're veering off in. However you can get involved, start a YouTube channel, start whatever you can do to be a little piece of this, be a piece of it. Sleep with them. If you have heroes, no, I'm not kidding. Let me just take a moment. After 9-11, Janine Garofalo of all people showed up on television and she said, I just have one message to the first responders who rushed into the buildings, those who survived. I just wanted to say one thing, hello, fellas. I was like, what? Okay, upregulate things that you believe in. Doesn't have to be sleep with them physically, but buy the books, spread the message. If you hear terms or words that resonate with you, repeat them and you don't have to do it in a self-destructive fashion. It's great if you're in a position where you can survive the full brunt, to some extent the reason we're on stage is that we're the advanced wing of this thing, so we have to take the hills like special forces and special forces can't get the job done. The regular army has to come in behind to hold the hill, okay? So it doesn't require crazy sacrifices, let the people who are into psychotic levels of risk manage that, but take on the risk that you can and upregulate and propagate, sleep with the ideas and make sure that they have reproductive fitness and they will gradually take over the world. And if you find somebody super attractive is doing something really great, sleep with them. You guys know what to do. Okay, so the American public was sold a bill of goods, paternalistic and collectivistic bill of goods at least 90 or so years ago, could be shorter depending on which perspective you take. So I have a two-part question. You talk about disrupting this path dependency, it would be ideal to flip all the regulation away and have this wonderful freedom so people can actually experience the consequences of their choices and learn from those experiences to develop a risk. But that's probably very implausible. So my two-part question is this, which sector or domain do you think is the most important one to start with disrupting education, healthcare, social security, which one's the most likely that you think we should target first as your backup forces and what's the most successful disruptive strategy, a full reform and repeal or a full repeal or some kind of gradual reform where people can get accustomed to switching from a lot of regulation to gradually weaning them off of it? That's right, I think that's probably more for you. Yeah, that's a big question. I mean, what was the first part? I hate two-part questions. The first part was which domain. I'm an eight-part. Which two? Which field? First one is which domain do you think is most effective to tackle first and second is which strategy? Partially it's a true question because in order to reform anything, the kind of change that has to happen in people's ideas and minds is such that when they get to that point, they'd be willing to reform everything. I don't think, so I would say if there was one area where you have to reform, I'd say education, but nobody's gonna privatize the schools and really have private schools and they say, oh yeah, but we believe in regulating everything else. I mean, that's not gonna happen. At the point where they agree that schools should be private, they would wanna regulate, they would wanna abolish everything else. So I think education is the most important, so I would start with education. I think the best way, I think everything has to be phased. It's very difficult to go from zero to nothing and I think the best way to phase out government reform and education is to basically allow government to fund education through education saving accounts. I think that's the best methodology I've seen so far, but not have the government run the schools that is have entrepreneurs compete for the money and that parents have in their accounts and do education like that. So that would be my quick answer and then slowly over many, many years or many, many decades phase out the government funding of education. And I do think most of these things need to be phased in. So let's say I wanna abolish social security. You can't do it tomorrow, that's ridiculous, right? So what you would have to do is find a way to slowly privatize it, to phase it out. Within two generations, maybe there's no social security. But you don't just say, all of you who thought you were gonna depend on social security, you can get it, forget it, it's not gonna be there because that would be nutty and would be unjust and would create a society where everybody would turn against you and you wouldn't be able to get anything done. So, and if you take banking, for example, deregulate the banking sector is a massively complex task. There's nothing simple about it because anything you take away is gonna create problems somewhere else. And so how do you unwind that? You would need specialists to actually think about it and the problem we have today is that the people who do this stuff don't know what they're doing. They're not good economists, they're not good thinkers and therefore when they deregulate or they add regulation or whatever they're doing, they create more problems than they were before. And often deregulation gets to blame. Oh, look, you deregulated and something bad happened. Yeah, because it was such a stupid way of doing it and it's usually re-regulation. They usually just change the rules of the game. They don't actually get rid of stuff. I would say education as well, but let me just tell you where the pressure point is in case you wanna really do something. There is a population that nobody wants to deal with called learning disabled kids and they are actually mostly our super learners. And so the destruction of our learning disabled community, these ADHD dyslexic kids, how many of you guys have a learning disability? Hands up, what's wrong with you? Thank you, you're in the back. Okay, it is incredibly important, first of all, to get the school system the hell away from our learning disabled population. Those are our super learners and we have to get rid of teaching disabilities which are recast as learning disabilities, absolutely. You have to knock out the BA because the BA is in general the administrator's degree. The administrators let you in to the college. The real jewel of America's research universities is the graduate departments and you need to be able to go there much earlier. In general, people can be ready as early as 14, 16 to start research and the sooner you get to the point where you're not being spoon fed something where the subject has been rearranged to make it maximally time expensive so that the teachers have jobs, right? Almost every subject can be rearranged so that it can be learned incredibly rapidly. And so this is the issue of piano versus guitar. Piano, you do all of these scales, you have to learn to read two staves, blah, blah, blah, everybody learns to hate it except for a tiny few. On the other hand with guitar, like very quickly somebody shows you three maybe four chords and you can play 95% of all the songs that ever meant something to you. So you can rearrange every subject in general to make it take much less time. So education is the place where we can squeeze, right? And cause them to submit because they've got a terrible situation with people who shouldn't be teachers who don't really love teaching, don't really love knowledge. We've got kids who thirst for knowledge who are being misclassified and all you need to do is to create enough people getting through the system who are emboldened because when you look at Joshua Letterberg figuring out sex and bacteria at age 19, when you look at Jim Watson doing the double helix at age 23, when you look at Wolfgang Polly writing a book on general relativity at 19, your kids have incredible things that they are ready to do now and you have to look at them totally differently because this infantilization is taking way too many years and that's the place to put the pressure and just squeeze on the esophagus and they will cry mercy. We'll try to go a little briefer here because I know- Two more questions, speaking of squeezing, two more. You know, let's, we'll do them all real quick. We'll do one minute on each one just to- Okay, one minute on each. Yeah, cause I want to get to all four, yeah. Mr. Weinstein, you mentioned earlier that for certain conversations to be allowed to develop you'd have to preclude certain people from partaking. For instance, you wouldn't invite the suicide bomber to the talk, but shouldn't you for the same reason be against any attempt to, say, regulate social media companies in the sense that the inclusion of this class of bureaucrats who decide based on their own bias which counts as too much news from one source and too much from another. Wouldn't that also be destructive to the conversation in very much the same way the suicide bomber would? Yeah, this is one of these things where it's like, if you have a demarcation problem, don't you realize it can be used against you? And how do we know who's in and who's out? The short answer is, if you worry so much about the edge cases, yeah, I'm sure there's some edge cases but mostly somebody announces that they've got bad intent like at a microphone, we've all been on stage and somebody says, very interesting talk but I was wondering like, okay, I can already tell. Here comes the suicide question, right? And then I've just stopped, like I was on stage recently at the exploratory and then somebody said, why are there only white men on stage? Now the organizer was on stage and he was Korean so I thought that was hysterical. And I just said, look, I don't need to be on stage. They invited me here because I had interesting things to say, I'd love to sit down. Do you want to take the mic? Does anybody in the audience want to take the mic? If you have something more interesting, please come up on stage. Ending in five, four, three, two, one. Okay, nobody, thank you, right? You just have to realize that the edge cases on this question are pretty rare. Mostly people either want to have a conversation or they want to shut down the conversation and they'll tell you within a few seconds which they want. Hi. So, mine is a slightly narrower question so in 2008 I was working for Lehman Brothers when somebody decided that not today I don't want to bail you guys out. Two things after that. One, I thought the arm, Fanny and Freddie were just going to melt away. It was going to be the end of those two. And that hasn't happened at all. It's in fact, if anything, it's gone the other way. The other thing, I actually now work for one of the rating agencies that came up when the big three had their reputation down the drain. And the idea was that you could get the inherent conflict of interest in the rating agencies where the issuers paid the rating agencies would somehow be addressed. But the company I work for, I like the company a lot but they couldn't solve it. I mean, and so to an extent, I think that this is slightly wider in principle is if taxation is theft, like I think it is. And I had this idea that voluntary taxation will work. And it might not be really the same idea but is there a solution to this conflict of interest and is there really a way to say, okay, everybody can pay? So let me give you my two minute rating agency story. I mean, the rating agencies are completely not a disaster and they've been a disaster for 20, 30 years. I lived in Orange County, California and three weeks before Orange County, California went bankrupt, I think it was 1994. They had a triple A rating. You know, a month before Enron went bankrupt. They had a triple A rating. The rating agencies are pathetic, so why do they exist? Because in a market economy, if you do bad stuff, you get wiped out by competition. Well, it turns out, if you dig, that there are only three rating agencies because the SEC has only approved three rating agencies. So they have to be approved by the SEC in order to rate securities. And the SEC basically keeps out competition. They've only approved three. And you say, okay, well, why does anybody pay attention to rating agencies if they're so pathetic? Because there was a law called ERISA that was passed in 1973 or 74 that basically says, if you're a large institutional investor like an insurance company, a pension plan, you can only invest in securities that are rated by the rating agencies. So they've got a built-in client base that cannot use anybody else and they have no competition. So again, you can't blame that on a market. You can blame it on the structure that we've created, which is bizarre, nutty, and crazy. Can you imagine a free market solution to this? Yes, I can imagine many, but you have to have a free market and we don't have one. That was really good. And the only thing I would add to that is I wrote an essay on the concept of CAFE, which is the system of lies that undergirds professional wrestling. It's very relevant in light of what your own has just said. I thought it was a masterful discussion. Thank you. All the way from Canada, and you get the last question. Oh, one more. Oh, one more after, so all right. Yeah, so this question is actually about basically the slowdown in innovation that we've seen in recent years as compared to other time periods during the 20th century. I was wondering, to what extent do you believe that government's regulation, or rather perhaps lack of deregulation, has played a role in this visible slowdown? I mean, in my view, it's played a massive role in the visible slowdown, and where you see innovation. And I'm actually more optimistic about the iPhone. I think the iPhone's a big deal. I don't think it's a minor deal, I think. Having all the information in the world in my fingers is huge, and all of that. But I think that the reason that's where the innovation happened is because that's where the government left things alone, at least starting in the early 80s with some more deregulation of telecommunications and allowing for competition of telecommunications and never really getting to regulating chips and software and things like that. Although think about it, right? We're so concerned about all these things. If regulators didn't do this, bad things would happen in the world. We are programmers programming nuclear power plants, airplanes, everything, and programming is an unlicensed profession. You don't need a license by the government to do programming, and yet they control almost everything. So yes, I think it's mostly an issue. I don't think we lack the genius. As you can see with somebody like Elon Musk, who I disagree with on a lot of issues, but wow, what a mind, and what an innovator in terms of big ideas. I think if we had real free markets and many of these disciplines in many of these areas, then we would see a lot more innovation and we would see the flying cars that we were promised, or at least, maybe not flying cars, but something. I mean, I think that there are certain areas where your own is almost certainly right, which is, I would say biomedical would be first on my list. I'm very fond of Benjamin Jesty as an example who decided after noticing that the milkmaids didn't get smallpox, but they did have cowpox, decided to take a bunch of pus out of his cow and inject his sons and his wife with it, which seems insane at the time, but it turned out to be pretty good as a way of avoiding smallpox. So we need an accredited, like we have accredited investors, we need accredited patients. You need to be able to experiment on yourself, and the medical professions need the right to do this. Otherwise, man, we just need to go to other countries and do radical ass shit with DNA and medicine and tri-stuff, and some people will die for sure, so we should do it ethically and we should do it carefully, but this idea of riskless medicine is stupid, and we have been sitting on top of genes without getting to really significant gene therapy, so there are areas in which I'm absolutely of the opinion that regulation has probably done something bad to us, but the other problem is that you have this thing called umveld hacking, where we were all in some mesoscale phenomena. We're not dealing in this room with galaxies and we're not dealing with nanoparticles. We're just perceiving the middle scale, and as science allowed us to see more, it slowed things down, it sped things up. We were able to see more so we could do more. Now, the problem is you get down below, let's say, protons and neutrons, and we know there are quarks, but nobody's figured out a way to do anything with quarks, so if we go below quark level, it's unclear whether it's going to make better toast or self-sealing envelopes or something like that, so it's important to realize that we reaped a huge bonanza from the 20th century just by umveld hacking, and that's unlikely to recur, so that was like just having beta to scale. Now we need beta to genius, and it has never been more important to unshackle the geniuses in your society. Let them misbehave, let them be errant, let them be aberrant, let them be unusual. Leave them the hell alone, except for a tiny number of things that you don't want them to do. We don't want to empower them to be murderers and complete assholes, but in general, they want to do radical stuff, they're gonna make a lot of mistakes, and we have got to stop treating them as if there is no privilege for trying really crazy stuff. We need to reward it. And this goes back to your point on education. We need to allow them to become geniuses, to manifest a full genius at an early age. Hi, so regarding the case going on with Harvard being accused of racial discrimination against Asian Americans, as an Asian person in college, I personally don't want to go to a school where half the kids are Asian, so how do you balance that value of merit and the value of diversity in that situation? I mean, I'm gonna say it. I don't, I think Harvard should be allowed to discriminate on any frigging basis they want, and they should suffer the consequences. I don't think the government or any of us have any business that's a private university, now they should be really private in the sense that the government should stop funding all their buildings and everything else, but they should be private and they should be allowed to discriminate, and you should be allowed to make a choice about which university you want to go to based, among other things, about those kind of policies that they engage in, so the baker should not have to bake the cake. I in general agree with that. I would say that, I want to ask you a question. Why is it that you don't want to go to school with mostly Asians? Well... Because I hear Asians say this with some frequency. I think that it's a little understated how certain cultures can kind of point out the flaws in their own culture, so for me when I see a mass group of kids who all act the same way and showcase the qualities of being Asian that I don't quite affiliate myself with, I don't want to be surrounded by that in my classes when I feel like I could be exposed to other people and other opinions. Yeah, so I'm gonna just tell one tall tale out of a family trip. We took my family to Italy and my son said something which I just charmed the hell out of me. He said, gosh, I wasn't aware of Christians having accomplished quite so much. And he was a little bit self-aware and tongue-in-cheek about it, which is why I related the story, but I think that we passed the ball back and forth between cultures. I mean, the Greeks have never quite equalled their ancient selves, but they may come back because Lord knows they proved it to us once and you look at the Parsis in India and my God, what a tiny number of people they've accomplished so much. It's probably the case that we should do something to make sure that all of these positive traits nobody's got a lock on genius and creativity and all of these things or they wouldn't be here. The issue that I have is we've got very narrow standards for choosing how one gets into a university for the most part and while I don't wanna regulate who can get in and not, I don't wanna live in a world where if Asians are the top performers, then bring on the Asians, but let's make sure that our metrics are actually capturing everything because what most self-aware Asians will tell you is that there's not enough irreverence in the culture. I wanna teach Asians to discover that between their index and ring finger lies the middle finger and the middle finger is the secret, the secret of how America is going to continue to out-compete people who can score higher on tests than we can, right? So if I can teach American Asians to use these precious two middle fingers that are granted to every human being, right? That is the key formula and what we need to do is to make sure that the people who are good at the middle fingers are in contact with the people who have yet to use them so that we can have cross-pollinations and gains from trade and that's really my hope. Thank you. On that note, if you wanna understand what the strength of ARI is, it's that you guys brought in a mathematician who voted for Bernie Sanders and the main takeaway here is doing psychedelics and giving the middle finger to other people. That's what you took from us? That was my main takeaway. What have we been doing this a lot lately? It has to be a bit of summary than that, Dave. No, I think this is exactly what it's all about, that we can have these conversations, we can talk to you guys who wanna engage in these conversations and get out there and fight for the ideas you believe and can I say one last thing about that? I've pretty much disagreed with INRAND my entire life but I've had huge respect for some of the things that INRAND was trying for so that the goals are very much the same and huge respect to every group that is strong enough and self-confident enough and disciplined enough to invite people, sight unseen. Your own and I didn't have a pre-talk, we had no idea what would happen and the idea is that the self-confidence that this movement has had is an inspiration to all, even those who don't exactly agree with her so obviously the lady was doing something right. Thank you guys, you're welcome. Thank you guys. Thank you guys. Nice. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Good job. Thank you guys. Nice.