 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Tuesday night. It's night over here. It's already 8 p.m. in Puerto Rico. I hope everybody's having a fantastic week and you ready for another Iran Brookshow? All right. Reminder that on Thursday we'll be talking to Don Watkins about effective egoism. So I figured if we're going to talk about effective egoism on Thursday, and we know that Don got the term effective egoism from basically effective altruism. And that would be a good idea if we discussed effective altruism today and kind of covered a little bit about what it is and how it functions and how it works so that we could have a nice contrast when we talk about effective egoism on Thursday with Don Watkins. Reminder, those of you who speak Hebrew, I will be doing a show on Thursday also at 10 a.m. East Coast time. In Hebrew. 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Iran.org slash start here. You can apply today. All right. So today we're going to talk about effective altruism. Now, as I mean, I'm sure you've heard of the term effective altruism. It's been kind of in the headlines. If you follow kind of newsy events over the last year, in particular, regarding two events that I think the effective altruists would actually like to go away because they've got a lot of press on this and they don't get a lot of press for the things that they would like to get a lot of press on. But the one thing I think that really brought effective altruism kind of to the mainstream, if you will, is the FSB. It's the collapse, sorry, FSB. Where did I get FSB from? SBF. FSB is not even dyslexic. It's the same letters, but just mangled. SBF. SBF. And the collapse of his crypto entity, he was a billionaire one day and basically in jail the next. Committed fraud. Clearly, it seems clearly committed fraud. And it has been prosecuted and found guilty and spent is going to spend a significant amount of jail, time in jail. And SBF was a huge proponent of effective altruism. Indeed, he was a massive financial supporter of the effective altruism movement and the effective altruism causes. And arguably, he started his company and his whole crypto business as an effective altruistic act. We'll get to the context for that in a minute, how that kind of comes about. But the whole collapse of his empire, the bankrupting of his crypto exchange and ultimately him landing up in jail, all resonated with people through this idea that he was the most prominent, the wealthiest, the most actively engaged effective altruist anybody had ever heard of. And look at the corruption. So I don't think that's fair to effective altruism to condemn it because of the actions of one person. So I'm not going to. We'll condemn effective altruism for other reasons. But SBF brought it right to the headlines. And then again, over the last two weeks, effective altruism has made the headlines as a consequence of the role many advocates of effective altruism have played in the drama at Open AI. It's still not exactly clear what happened there, but it is clear that for effective altruistic reasons, it might have been that the board fired Sam Altman. It might be other people within the effective altruism movement who brought him back. But effective altruism has basically been portrayed as driving a lot of these events and behind a lot of this. Generally, as a as a philosophy, ideology of of tech, people involved in tech, although not just people involved in tech, there are quite a few academics at Oxford University and elsewhere around the world who advocates for effective altruism. It comes out of the work of some academics at Oxford, but originally from a Australian philosopher whose name for some bizarre reason is just escaped me. I count on having these available to me, but somebody in the chat will remind me of his name. So this is this is a movement that's been around for at least 10 years. It seemingly is a movement of, I'd say, Peter Singer, thank you and Peter Singer, the the the ethicist, the Australian philosopher, altruistic philosopher. Effective altruism seems to be a movement of young people. It seems to be a movement of tech people of super smart people. It is often associated with another movement that is very typical of Silicon Valley, which is the rationalist movement. And there are a lot of similarity and overlap between the effective altruism movement and the rationalist and the rational movement. Effective altruism certainly has had a big impact, I think, on Silicon Valley, on tech people, on the kind of tech projects that I think to some extent get funded. I think it's had a real profound impact on on the valley and how the valley thinks about morality, thinks about ethics, and thinks about, quote, doing good. So what I want to do today is I will I will look at I want us to look at two effective altruism projects. And then what I want to do today is try to understand effective altruism. From the perspective of one effective altruistic intellectual who I have a lot of respect for outside of his effective altruism focus. And that is Scott Alexander, who is got why astral codex 10. Why is this web page not cooperating? It doesn't really want to open. Come on, open properly. Anyway, so I want to talk I want to talk about astral codex 10. If you remember, I talked quite a bit about him during COVID and then afterwards I followed his substack for a few years now. I think he did some of the best work on ivermectin in terms of analyzing all the studies and then reviewing his work after the fact and and and and I'll tell you what I like about him. And that I think will be reflected also in. Oh God. Yeah, I'm having internet problems. I'm not sure why this new browser has problems with certain anyway. So we will look at astral codex 10's decision to donate his kidney and how he was motivated to do that by effective altruism. Why he did it what he says his motivations were because I think that'll tell us a lot about again effective altruism. But also I want to go through how he made the decision kind of walk through the thinking the data he looked at. Because again, I think this will tell us a lot about how effective altruism believes that we should make decisions in our lives, moral decisions in our lives. I mean, we'll talk about what it even views as morality, but how it assumes we should behave in our lives and what kind of approach we should take to that. One of the things I really, really like about astral codex 10 Scott Alexander is that he is very astute when it comes to analytics and when it comes to if you will decision science and when it comes to probability and statistics and econometrics, medical studies and things like that. And that was really good during COVID and other times, but it's also in other analysis. But it's also really interesting to see how he applies this decision making when it comes to ethics, when it comes to morality. So that we're going to spend most of our time going through this idea of the kidney, but just to give you some more sense about. So effective altruism basically is altruistic. So it says, and it's a particular form of altruism. The form of altruism, effective altruism adopt is utilitarianism. So it is a utilitarian philosophy. Basically, you should do, you should act in a way that maximizes the well-being of others. And how do you measure well-being, the variety of different ways? One of the things they do is they measure it through reduction of suffering. They measure it through extension of life, addition of life years where those life years wouldn't have happened. So preventing death, saving people from death. And so those are kind of the measures that they adopt. And the thing about effective altruism is they want to be effective. So they're very scientific. They're very data-driven. They want to see clear results. They only support charities that way you can see those direct results. And the whole idea is to live a life, not just in your charity, but to live a life that ultimately contributes to a better world and therefore ultimately maximizes the utility of society, that maximizes utility across society. That is the fundamental utilitarian idea and they take it very seriously. So for example, there's a website called 80,000Hours.org. And this is what the front page of this says. You have 80,000 hours in your career. That's probably what you're going to spend time at work. This makes it your best opportunity to make a positive impact on the world. If you're fortunate enough to be able to use your career for good, but aren't sure how, our career guide can help you. It has great new ideas for fulfilling careers that do good, compare your options, different careers and how much good they do. Make a plan you feel comfortable with. It's based on 10 years of research alongside academics at Oxford and it's a non-profit and they're providing this for free. They say, our career guide covers everything you need to know about how to find a fulfilling career that does good from why you shouldn't follow your passion. Don't follow your passion. And why medicine and charity work aren't always the best ways to help others. It's for the practical tips and exercises. And at the end, you'll have a draft of your new career plan. All oriented not around your passion, not about your interest, not around what really you think is going to provide you with the most fulfillment and drive you towards your values. But really it's geared towards how you will do the most good as defined as some kind of utilitarian maxim that some kind of maximizing the good of the most people out there. Again, based on extensive research and I'm sure we could challenge a lot of the research and challenge a lot of the thinking behind this. Some of the people, there's a lot of people associated with it, big names, Cass Unstein, and a bunch of people of Silicon Valley. And let me just say something before we get to this, that this is not some leftist, because I know there are going to be people just, oh well, more crap on the left. A lot of the people who adhere to this are considered themselves, I'd say, small L libertarians. A lot of the people that adhere to this are kind of a certainly right of center and a variety of different topics. For example, I think Brian Kaplan, the libertarian philosopher, is sympathetic. I think I'm not misrepresenting him by saying he's sympathetic to effective altruism, maybe more than sympathetic. Hananya, who I've talked about often, is quite sympathetic to effective altruism. So this is attractive to a lot of kind of people who view themselves as super rational and who have accepted what you would consider conventional morality, that is altruism. And this is a way to be rationally, in quotes, altruistic. So one idea about choosing a career, for example, which SBF took seriously, was one possibility is going to finance or going to something where, you know, you might all love it, but you can make a lot of money at it. You have really talented at it and you can make a lot of money at it. And that's good because even though the career itself doesn't, from a utilitarian perspective, doesn't help the world, you can then use that money to give charity and that'll help the world. So your career helped the world through the amount of money that you produced, and you can use that money for charity, which helps the world. So it's, again, all focused on what impact can I have out there in the world on other people, on their lives. And again, it's all systematized. So there's literally a website, an extensive website, really well, you know, a nice website, you know, it's well done. You can tell these are smart people from Silicon Valley that probably have marketing degrees and stuff like that. And a lot of articles, a lot of videos and a guide and a thing to walk through and figure out what career should you choose to maximize your potential impact on the world out there. You know, and of course, one of the interesting things, and I'm curious how Brian views this, Brian Kaplan, is they're not economists and many of them have a very, very weak understanding of economics. But you would think, you would think that one of the primary things and effective altruists, if you really cared about life and wealth and living in poverty and helping save lives and stuff like that, is one of the things they would be strong advocates for is economic freedom. Now some of them are, but it's certainly not uniform. They are, again, this is to the credit, they are most of them are pro-economic growth. They realize that economic growth is good. They don't always connect economic growth with freedom. They don't always economic growth with individual rights because I don't think the conception of individual rights they would have one. But they are very much behind the yes in my backyard movement. They are very much behind the pro-build, pro-growth, pro-tech, pro-the future. So they're not part of this demerist, for the most part, demerist climate change is going to kill us all. AI, you know, maybe on the AI front they are, but for the most part they tend to be very pro-science, pro-technology, pro-growth. So the progress movement that I know Jason Crawford who I've interviewed on the show before is very much a part of the progress movement has a lot of effect about us in it. So these are not your typical lefties who want to shut everything down for the sake of Mother Nature or Mother Earth or something like that. These are people who want, at least claim to want, human life on planet Earth to be better. But that's it. That's their moral imperative. There's another page that you can go to if you're so inclined. Give what you can. Give what we can.org. And here you can go and you can pledge, you know, whatever you can, however much you can, a meaningful portion of your income they would like, a meaningful portion. But they will accept only 10% if that's what you want to do. They will accept 10%. And they will make it very easy for you. They will auto-deduct it from your checking account or whatever. And then they will allocate it to the most efficient, effective, effective altruism, charities possible. And they, again, beautiful website, a lot of information. They specify all the research they've done, how that research works, what that research is focused on. They've got giving guides. They've got the whole thing. I mean, wow. I mean, I really wish some of our objectives websites were this good, you know, this detailed, this effective. I mean, these are pros. They know what they're doing. All right. So that's kind of a broad, you know, sense what effective altruism is, how it's known. Again, the idea is a utilitarian idea to help the world. So let's delve into this idea of, which I'm sure you've all had thoughts about, you've all considered, which is, and I don't know why this is doing it. I think Substack has some kind of quirk in it. Let me try something different. I've got this website open with, okay, it opened it now. All right. So here's the thing about, if you're an altruist, particularly if you're an effective altruist and driven by science, all of us have two kidneys, but we don't really need two kidneys in order to live. You know, with one kidney, we do fine and we'll get into some of the stats around one kidney in a minute. But the reality is we have two kidneys and we could give up one kidney and a lot of people do this for family members and they donate a kidney. Somebody has a kidney disease. The kidneys are failing. They need a kidney transplant. Kidney transplants are very effective. There's a lot of science behind them. They've been done many times. They add significant numbers of years for the person who's receiving the transplant. The body, we now have techniques on how to do this transplant without the body rejecting the kidney. And, you know, we know that this is done. Now, years ago, maybe 10 years ago, somebody showed me an article about a guy who took his altruism seriously and donated a kidney and we laughed at how nutty and crazy he is and how, wow. I mean, it seemed to me at the time, alright, this is like, you know, nobody does this. This guy's weird. This guy's completely insane. I know people who do it for loved ones, family members, and even then it's hard because you have to match blood types. But for somebody to just donate a kidney to a stranger, just donate a kidney to go to whoever, that's weird and unusual and sacrificial and altruistic and doesn't make any sense. To me, when my life is a standard, it doesn't make any sense. And I thought, okay, well, you know, there are people who take the altruism seriously, but they're not that many, right? It turns out that that guy wasn't an aberration, at least not today, not in the world we live in today. This is quite popular among the effective altruist community. The many of them have donated a kidney because it makes sense if you're an altruist and they take their altruism seriously. So here's the thinking behind this. So I want to go through, hopefully you find this interesting, but I want to go through, I do anyway, AstroCodex's 10s reasoning. He says, years ago you had an article by a guy who had given up his kidney, donated a kidney. And I'm glad you're keeping your kidneys, Jennifer, absolutely. I'm keeping mine without anticipating anybody's going to need them. I just like having my kidneys. Anyway, he describes Matthew, what's his name? Dylan Matthew. Dylan Matthew is well-known, I guess he's also well-known in the EI effective altruism community. Six years ago Matthew's donated a kidney and he described it as, quote, the most rewarding experience of his life. And this is the paragraph that really had an impact on AstroCodex. And then he said, as I'm no doubt the first person to notice being an adult is hard. You're constantly faced with choices about your career, about your friendships, about your romantic life, about your family. That have deep moral consequences. And even when you try the best you can, you're going to get a lot of these choices wrong. And you more often than not won't know if you got them wrong or right. You just won't know because you don't have an alternative universe where you did the other thing. And maybe you should have picked another job where you could do more good, notice the standard. Maybe you should have gone to grad school. Maybe you should have moved to a new city. So I selfishly deeply gratified to have made at least one choice in my life. Then I know beyond a shadow of a doubt was the right one. That's his choice to give the kidney. Anyway, AstroCodex then says he read this and was inspired by it and it really moved him. And so he started to look at the stats, you know, what's involved in giving a kidney. I mean, this is what effective altruists do. They look at the data. So he says, okay, well, the risk of death and surgery is 3.1 in 10,000 or 1.3 in 10,000. If like me, you don't suffer from hypertension. So the risk of death is 1.3 in 10,000. For comparison, that's a little higher and a little lower respectively than the risk of a pregnancy-related death in the U.S. The risk isn't zero. This is still major surgery. But death is extraordinary rare. Instead, there's no good evidence that donating reduces your life expectancy at all. So you could do this and not reduce your life expectancy. And the risk of dying is only, I emphasize only 1.3 in 10,000. I don't know, 1.3 in 10,000 for an optional procedure because this is major surgery. I mean, that's not trivial. It's not zero. It's not 1 in 100,000. Optional procedures? I'm curious. Other forms of medical procedures that people do that are optional, plastic surgery, other things. I wonder what the risk of death is in those circumstances. That would be interesting to measure. Anyway, you see how the thinking was 1.3 in 10,000. That's not a lot. It's like dying and giving birth and that almost never happened. And then it says the procedure does not increase your risk of kidney failure. But the average donor still has only a 1 to 2% chance of that happening. The vast majority of donors, 98 to 99%, don't have kidney failure later on. And those who do have kidney failure, you've only got one then, get bumped up on the list to get a donation themselves because they gave a donation. They get bumped up to the top of the list to get a donation. So this is the data. So then he goes deeper in. But to get the CAT scan, I'm just giving you this as a sense of how these people's minds work. But it turns out that to get a kidney transplant, you need to have a CT, a CAT scan of the abdominal. And it turns out that CAT scans we know have radiation. The radiation of a CAT scan like this increases your odds of dying from cancer caused by the radiation by 1 in 660. You know, it's still low, but it's significant. It's not clear how you measure that. It's not clear exactly what that means. It's not clear how right that is. When I read this for the first time, it kind of scared me a little bit because I've had several CAT scans. Now I'm really worried because several CAT scans, that means, you know, anyway, I don't have cancer. I'm pretty sure of that right now. I've done pretty much every test to tell and I don't have cancer right now. But we'll test again next year and see, right? Anyway, so, okay, but so that's kind of a risk. Okay, so he talked to the doctor and the doctor said, okay, if you really consider about that, we can do an MRI instead of a CAT scan. Woo, all right, there's one risk eliminated. And then what about, you know, what about this kidney failure? And you know, and he goes through the whole analysis of how much of the kidney you need as you get older and what are the chances that your kidney will fail because you've only got one and it's working harder. A whole statistical analysis and the bottom line is there were a lot of studies about this and the chances, according to him, the chances of you actually dying because you only have one kidney instead of two are basically very, very small. Again, pretty negligible, pretty negligible. So he decided this year to do it. You know, it takes a lot of, you know, you go through hell in order to just be accepted as a donor. Blood tests, scans, psychological evils, psychiatric evils, all kinds of evils. They take you through, you know, it's a major hassle. You know, he got it done in New York City, he had a flight in New York from California twice. Just that would turn me off the whole thing. I mean, just the time, think of the time you're consuming to do that. But he figured, you know, it'll extend somebody's life by, let's say, 10 years. So it's 10 life years. To extend somebody, to extend, to buy 10 life years through charity, you would have to probably give up about, donate about $10,000 in Africa. You know, so it's $10,000 of this or maybe you could do both. You could save two people 10 life. Seems like a worthwhile thing to spend all this energy and time and effort. There was one line here that I thought was really interesting that surprised me that he would admit it. Let me see if I can find this. Because, let me see if I can find this. It was important, I thought. Because it tells you a little bit, I mean, here's a good line. Not the line I wanted, I'll find out one as well. Oh, here it is, here it is. One of the things he says is, you know, when I talk to my EAA friends, effective altruism friends, the reaction was at least, and told them that he was getting a kidney transplant. The reaction was at least, cool, wow. But pretty often it was, oh yeah, I donated two years ago. Want to see my skull? Most people don't do interesting things unless they're in a community where those things have been normalized. I was blessed with a community where this was so normal that I could read a Vox article about it and not vomit it back out. So here's a community that supports people donating their kidney. It's a community that supports altruistic acts. And that's important to him because he wants the support of this community. There's a number of things in this article that he writes that are very second-handed. Like you donate a kidney, you get instant altruism credit. There's no other motive that could drive you to donate a kidney other than altruism. So you get straight out altruist credit for doing it. So he thought that was really cool. Again, a second-handedness that I guess should not be surprising that it comes from an altruist. Here's the way he writes about the trade-off. He says kidney donation is only medium effective as far as altruism goes. Medium effective, interesting. The average donation buys the recipient about five to seven extra years of life beyond the current factual of dialysis. It also improves quality of life from about 70% of a healthy average to about 90%. Nondirected kidney donations can also help the organ bank solve allocation problems around matching donors and recipients of different blood types. So it's somewhat beneficial. He says that this is great. My grandfather died of kidney disease and 10 to 20 more years with him would have meant a lot. But it only costs about five to $10,000 to produce this many quality life years through bog-standard effective altruistic interventions like buying mosquito nets from malaria regions in Africa. So you're indifferent between giving a kidney or giving $10,000 from mosquito nets in Africa. It's about getting you the same stuff. I mean, think about the mental gymnastics that you're going through in order to justify ripping your body apart, going through major surgery. He describes his recovery from surgery which is not pleasant at all. It's major abdominal surgery. Now, of course, effective altruists measure everything. They look at the most effective thing, how they're using their money, the most effective way, constantly evaluating alternatives, which is to the credit. It's the goal that is very problematic. He writes to quote, I worry that people use suffering as a heuristic for goodness. Remember, we've talked about this a lot when we talked about altruism, that ultimately for many people it's suffering that is the heuristic for altruism, for goodness, for good action. Well, he writes about the same thing. This is kind of an altruism that takes the other seriously, is not focused on the suffering of the individual. Although if they really cared about the other, again, you would think they would focus much more on economic freedom and economic liberty as they primarily focus, but anyway. So he says, Mother Teresa becomes a hero because living with lepers in Calcutta slums sounds horrible. So anyone who does it must be really charitable, regardless of whether or not the lepers get helped. This is by the way Kant's argument. Kant makes the argument that if you meet somebody who's happy and successful, beware because they're probably not moral because they're probably not altruistic. They're probably selfish and that's a dangerous person. So happiness, success, well-being is associated with selfishness. Suffering suggests charity, helping others suggest not thinking of yourself. Now he says, he goes on to say this heuristic, the heuristic of suffering isn't terrible. If you're suffering for your charity, then it must seem important to you and you're obviously not doing it for personal gain. Now that's interesting. How, again, the mental gymnastics. It's important to you, but it's not for personal gain. What does it mean if something is important to you but not a personal gain? Does he associate personal gain only for money, about money, or is personal gain a broader concept? But if it's important for you, to you, doesn't it also mean that you view it as a personal gain? If you do charity in a way that benefits you, then the personal gain aspects start looking suspicious. The problem is the people, like if you're enjoying yourself, you're having fun, you really love what you're doing, you know, helping other people, then it looks suspicious. The problem is the people, I'm quoting from him, the problem is the people who evaluate it from a suspicion to an automatic condemnation. It seems like such a natural thing to do and it encourages people to be masochists, sacrificing themselves pointlessly in photogenic ways instead of thinking about what will actually help others. In other words, the standard that you should practice is what other people think and says other people have this bad heuristic, you should match that heuristic. And he says this isn't good, not because you don't care about what other people think, but because you might not be as effective and altruist as you should be in terms of helping other people. Then he says, getting back to the point, kidney donation has an unusual high ratio. This is unbelievable. Kidney donation has an unusual high ratio of photogenic suffering to altruistic gain. So why do a effective altruist keep doing it? I can't speak for anyone else, but I speak for myself. It starts with wanting just once to do a good thing that will make people like you more instead of less. It starts with wanting just once to do a good thing that will make people like you more instead of less. It would be morally fraught to do this with money, since any money you spend on improving yourself image would be denied to the people in malarial regions of Africa who need it the most. But it's not like there's anything else you could do with that spare kidney. So in other words, he's doing this to make people like him more, to make people admire him more. Now this is surprising of Astro Code X10. He's a psychiatrist. He's well respected, well regarded. He's got this unbelievably successful sub-stack. He's made, I'm sure, a lot of money off the sub-stack and very, very well professionally. He's married, seemingly happy. But at the end of the day, think about deep the second handedness must go if he's giving his kidney. Because it has an unusual ratio of photogenic suffering to altruistic gain. He really values the photogenic suffering. I mean, the fact that other people admire him for it. And then he says, still, it's not just about that. All of this calculating and funging takes a psychic toll. Your brain uses the same emotional heuristic as anyone else's. No matter how contrarian you pretend to be, deep down it's hard to make your emotions track what you know is right. A lot of objectivists would sympathize with that. And not what the rest of the world is telling you. So the nice thing about this is there's no, you don't have to calculate. The amount of research you have to do is limited. It's pretty simple. You give up a kidney, doesn't do you much harm by giving it up. And somebody else benefits and it's clean. It's simple. It's straight out altruism without all the heuristic brain damage that these people go through. Now, of course, he describes this time at the hospital, which is very unpleasant. He describes the solid effects, side effects that are very unpleasant. I just don't see how you don't weigh this at all. But at the end of the day what matters is he helped somebody else. I do find this interesting. At the end of the article he writes, in polls, 25 to 50% of Americans say they would donate a kidney to a stranger in need. Which is weird because there's 100,000 strangers on a waiting list for kidney transplants constantly. Many of them, 5,000 or 40,000 die each year because there aren't enough kidneys. So there's 5 to 40,000 people, strangers in need that your kidney could help. So it is interesting that they say that. Are they saying it a virtue signal? But these are anonymous surveys. Are they saying it a virtue signal to themselves? Which I think a lot of virtue signaling is not about other people, but it's to yourself. It's virtue signaling to yourself. It wouldn't take a large percentage of those 25 to 50% to take a seriously donated kidney to a stranger and solve the problem. Of course the problem could be solved as AstroCodix 10 acknowledges simply by creating a market for organs. As Millay is claiming he's going to do in Argentina, make it legal to trade in organs, to sell your organs. And then you would solve this problem for good and to AstroCodix 10's credit. He acknowledges that. I guess what's sad about this whole thing? I mean he's got another article where he describes all the good effective altruists have made in the world. They have the calculation. They know how much money they've given as a movement. They know what it's gone for. They know how much lives have saved. They've saved 200,000 lives. They've reduced the occurrence of malaria significantly. I mean they have detailed lists of this stuff. I mean they've saved about 200,000 lives mostly from malaria. Treated 25 million cases of chronic parasite infection. Given 5 million people access to clean drinking water. Supported critical trials for both malaria vaccine that has been approved. And one that's in track. Supported additional research into vaccines for syphilis malaria. And other things. Supported teams giving development of economics. They're also big on animal welfare. So they're big on not having animals not suffer in commercial farming. They're big on AI and all the other protections and restrictions on AI. Although one of the biggest effective altruists people out there is this Eliezo. Something who is, I attended a kind of a panel that he was on. The war is going to end. AI is going to kill us all. There's no question about that. And you have a very doom and gloom. But yet he's credited for a lot of the AI development. A lot of the people in there. And I admire him. The effective altruists have created all kinds of control to prevent AI from going nuts and killing us all on top of that. They've done stuff in biotech. They've done stuff in a bunch of different things. So they have a whole list of all the benefits. You though you though you though ski something like that. Yes. So according to Astor code extent, they've done a lot of good in the world in terms of by their standards, helping others for the dollars that they invest. And you're good. I mean, if you're going to give the charity, do it effectively, figure out what effectively means to you. I still think the most effective charity possible to if you care about human life and you care about poverty is to promote liberty. And to promote freedom. But here you get concrete human lives. You get concrete chickens who are not suffering anymore because they're free range now. Here you get concrete saving the world from AI. So obviously they value that more than others. There's also a portion of effective altruism that cares about the distant future like a million years from now. And that is completely paralyzing and ridiculous. It's hard enough to do the heuristics, the math, the probabilities on being effective today in a period of time you can project into the future. They don't want to project generations in the future was completely ridiculous. So here's the thing. What's really tragic about this movement is you're really a lot of very smart people, but they're not just smart. The people who take their ideas seriously, the people who want to do what they believe is right and good. They are diligent and they are thoughtful and they are, you know, they want to align their emotions with their values. And they want to, they take whatever ethical code they have, this idea of utilitarianism, which I think is fought with contradictions and conflicts and problems. But put that aside, I'm sure they've got answer to everything with a good answer, not a different question. And then they go all in on it and they're committed to it. And overall, their ideology is not the kind of ideology where you fear people going all in, like, you know, the Nazis were all in, the communists were all in. These people are less harmful, put it that way, at least to the rest of us. They might be harmful to themselves, but to the rest of us. And they're smart. They love science. They love technology. They want to apply a reason. They are part of what's called the rationalist community, which is, again, an attempt to apply reason primarily through statistical analysis, unfortunately, but facts, data, knowledge to problem solving. The problem they want to solve for is morality. And the tragedy here is, I mean, really the tragedy here is that they've just accepted a conventional morality. They've accepted a false morality. They've accepted, you know, I think the best version, maybe, of this false morality, a false morality nonetheless. They, and many of them, let's be clear, many of them have been exposed to INRAND. This is the kind of community that has probably read INRAND, met objectivists. Again, Jason Crawford knows a lot of these people. Certainly no of INRAND, no value shrugged. And yet, and I think maybe part of that is Astro Code extends admitting that he cares what other people think, a certain conventionality, a certain second-handedness, which almost always goes with altruism, because altruism is, of course, about the other, and therefore you care about what the other thinks. It's the other you're trying to please. But it's a shame. It's tragic. I mean, one of them says these people are not very creative, but they are. Outside of their effect of altruism, they are. Many of them are founders of internet companies. Many of them are innovators. Many of them are tech entrepreneurs. A lot of them are at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence right now, at AI. These people are creative. They're not creative when it comes to this particular area in their life. But I view it as tragic more than anything else. I see the immense human potential that exists here. The talent that they have. And they're devoting it to something that is completely wrong, self-destructive. Not even benevolent. I'm not going to give my kidneys to a stranger. For the simple reason that, you know, it's not worth it for me. The hassle, the pain, the risk. They might claim there's no risk, but I don't completely buy their stats of living with just one kidney instead of two. I intend to live a long life like, you know, I might need to. Particularly as you go along, your kidneys become less effective and two is better than having one. And if one goes out, I don't want to rely on somebody else donating a kidney to me. And what if, as Jennifer says, you know, somebody I love has kidney failure. And then I would donate the kidney because their life is important to me. There's so many possibilities that relate, that work in my personal values versus helping a stranger, helping a stranger is not that important to me. I'm way too focused on my own life, my own values, my own happiness. Choosing a career so that I can maximize the benefit to other people, why? Choosing a career that benefits my own happiness. So the whole framework is wrong. Oh, utilitarianism is wrong. But here's a group different than, let's say, the Christian altruists, the Mother Teresa type altruists, who are not necessarily suffering or explicitly suffering or suffering to the extent that a mother Teresa would suffer. But it's still acting altruistically. And what's amazing about them is doing so consciously. Most people have their altruism, but they don't dwell on it and think about it and strategize around it and plan around it. These people do. I don't know. I guess I'm impressed by their commitment. Wish we had more rational egoists, effective egoists, as Don will describe them, who were this committed. And I wish our movement was this big, had this kind of money, and was focused on teaching people to think in the right way so that they could bring themselves out of poverty. Think in the right way so they could demand their own liberty and their own freedom and make the world richer. Think the right kind of way so that first and foremost could make their own life happier, better, more effective. Oh, Gene says, I'm just going to read this because this seems super relevant. Gene says, funny, effective altruism was part of my path to objectivism. An objectivist friend pointed out how Bill Gates, the businessman, did way more for the world than Big Gates, the philanthropist. That was a huge mental shift. Yeah, and here's the thing. Your friend got it from me because I'm the one who made a big deal out of that comparison in my talk on the morality of capitalism, 12, 13, 14 years ago, and since I've repeated it 100 and something times. So that is my stick, the Bill Gates stuff. So tell your friend to stop stealing my stuff. No, please steal my stuff as much as you can. The more you steal my stuff, the better. And I take it as a compliment. But anyway, the more important thing is, yes, that's one step in the shift. But the second step in the shift is it's not about changing the world. It's about your own life. It's about your own happiness. It's about your own success. It's about the one life that you have that ends at some point and is gone and disappears and you don't get it back. Might as well when you're living it, make the most of it. That's what it's about. And that's not captured by that Bill Gates example. The Bill Gates example is to show that people seem to care more about hating selfishness, hating the benefit you get than caring about the good you do out there, which is a point Scott Alexander makes in his essay as well. And why he says the nice thing about kidney is they can't say I benefited from it. I did not benefit from it. So you can make the claim that his is pure altruism, which is what makes it wrong, which one makes it evil. It's a wrong choice to give a kidney to a stranger. You better have really, really good explanation for that is rationally in yourself interest to do it. I don't see it. I don't see it. Not given how difficult it is to do. How long you have to spend in hospital, how many side effects you have, how long it takes you to cover from them, the pain you go through, how many tests you have to do upfront, the time you have to spend on it. And then most importantly, the fact that you live with only one kidney. And yes, on average, maybe it doesn't matter for like for expectancy, but who said you're going to be average? The whole point is not to be average. And maybe given that you want to live to be 120, I certainly do. Given that you, what if it was you always for me what that had kidney failure right now? The fact that I have kidney failure does not place a moral obligation on you to give me a kidney. I might ask friends, people who value me, people who would want to do it because it's me. I would never ask a stranger. By what right do I have to his kidney? What sick moral code says that my suffering is a claim against his health? My suffering is a claim against his life expectancy. All right, so interesting gene. I'm glad I'm glad you made the transition from effective altruist to iron man to objectivism. This is great. I love stories like that. All right, let's go to a super chat. Please consider asking questions, particularly $20 and above. We still need to raise about $320 on the super chat to get to our goal. So ask $20 questions so we can get there quickly. A bunch of you have asked $50 questions. So, you know, that's great. Gene says, no worries that same friend got me to YBS. Sorry, he's forgiven for stealing my Bill Gates example. I'm kidding. But that's great. That's great. This is the thing. This is how ideas spread, our philosophy spread, how you ultimately change the world. And now maybe now you can accuse me of being an effective altruist. But this is how you effectively change the world, one mind at a time, by you guys sharing something, by you guys introducing a friend to an idea that you might have got somewhere, somehow, from somebody. Sam Cox is asking a question. I'm going to take it again because it's right on the topic. And it's his first super chat question. So, thank you, Sam. Congrats. Sam says, giving a kidney to a stranger does not take into account the stranger. The character of the stranger. Is he worth your sacrifice? Now, let's be clear about how I use language. Now, I ran use language. Nothing is ever worth your sacrifice. Sacrifice means giving up a higher value for a lower value. Sacrifice means moving away from life, closer to death. It means being worse off. So the real question is, is it worth your effort? Is it worth your suffering? But by definition, a sacrifice is never worth it. I mean, I know we use sacrifice a little different than many people out there. But you're absolutely right. The character, there are people out there who, if I knew the character, and I knew who they were, and, you know, there was reason to believe that I could get significant value from them. I guess I consider it. Certainly, if there was somebody I loved, certainly, if there's somebody I admired, I cared for, and I knew I would do it. I would contribute a kidney. But a stranger, no, it just wouldn't work. Oh, you know what I forgot to do? Let me just see if there are more kidney questions and effective altruism, directly questions. And then I need to do this movie of you. The question is about altruism, which I'm going to save, and I'm going to get to, I promise. I just want to see if there's anything about kidneys and directly an effective altruism. All right, let's do this. So, yes, I want to do one more by Movie View Views that I promised. I haven't got a John's Movie View yet on sci-fi coherence, but I do want to do Alexi's Movie View, because he asked it a long time ago, I think the 4th of October. On the movie First They Killed My Father, a movie I saw a while back ago, I saw it again last night in order to refresh my memory. I mean, this is an extraordinarily powerful movie. I highly recommend it. It is a movie that everybody really should see. If you want to get a real concretization of what egalitarianism will do, what a philosophy and ideology that rejects the individual and rejects private property will do. And I'm not going to give the whole movie away, but the movie is told from the perspective of this beautiful 7-year-old girl in Cambodia following the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. She comes from a middle-class family. Her father works for the government. He's a policeman, so he's a target immediately. They are sent to work camps. I won't tell you what happens to everybody, but a 7-year-old girl, just a quality of suspense, does survive it. It's just beautifully made. It's very atmospheric. There's very little dialogue. There's very little music. It's very quiet. The movie is very quiet. It's very intense as a consequence. Often in the background, you can hear the Khmer Rouge yelling, there is no such thing as an individual. There's no such thing as property rights. You have to forget that you're an individual. You have to forget your individuality. It's stunning, the brainwashing. I mean, Pop Pot and the Khmer Rouge were so bad, so murderous, so horrific, that ultimately the population of Cambodia was saved by the Communist Vietnamese, who viewed Pop Pot as an aberration and basically fought him off and to some extent liberated Cambodia. It took communists to liberate the Cambodians from egalitarians who were worse than communists. The intellectuals who made, or the leaders who made this possible, Pop Pot and the people surrounding Pop Pot, were all intellectuals who studied in Paris, studied with communists and egalitarian philosophers in Paris and took their ideas very seriously. Maybe like these effective altruists, they took them very, very seriously and were committed to acting on them as a consequence. Not shown in the movie as much. There's not a focus on egalitarianism, just on the horror of what's going on. They killed anybody who had a degree, anybody who could read, anybody who had glasses. They killed people of ability because they couldn't get everybody to the same level because how do you get them to that level? The only way is to kill the able. They killed people who were too good at growing food, too good at anything, got killed. And nobody was spared. People who lived in the cities, people who lived in the countryside. The movie starts with the emptying out of the main city in Cambodia, whose name slips from my mind right now. But just an empty out, everybody in the street and go. The movie hints at the responsibility of the United States for the whole situation. I'll leave that to historians to determine how truthful that is. And blame Henry Kissinger. I think many historians do blame Kissinger for it. The bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, which was not clearly justified and was done in secret and weird. But the heart of the movie is the sheer brutality of any ideology and regime that stops treating individuals as individuals. The brutality and the necessary death by starvation or by other means, an ideology that does away with private property completely. And again, interesting because the Vietnamese did away with private property too. At least in those days, I think today they have pseudo-private property like China. But they're the ones who liberate the Cambodians. The movie is beautifully shot. It's directed by of all people, Angelina Jolie. It's one of the few movies she's directed. But it's done very, very well. I think she was very, very effective in this. Again, this emphasis is on anti-individualism, anti-poverty rights of the Cameroons. I'm surprised because she's quite... Well, she can be left. She's certainly anti-Israel and poor Palestinian. But I highly recommend it. It's really, really well done. It's not a story of the Cameroons. It's not a history. You kind of lose any sense of time. It's not clear how much time passes in the movie. And I don't know historically how much time passes from the Vietnamese occupation from the Cameroons to the Vietnamese occupation. It has to be a few years in the movie. It doesn't seem like a few years. But it doesn't really matter because the story is really about this one family and this one girl. And from that perspective, it really is beautiful. So sad, powerful, but not gratuitously violent at all. I mean, there's some horrific scenes there. There's some chopped limbs and brutality of war kind of stuff. But it could have been a lot worse given what the Cameroons did. So I highly recommend it. It's called First They Killed My Father. It is on Netflix. And it's about two and a half hours long. It's a long movie. But you won't notice it. It really flies by. And it really is just visually stunning. And again, the acting, a seven-year-old girl, she carries the movie really, really, really well and quite amazing, very emotional. Yeah, what can I say? I mean, the whole story of the Cameroon, which the movie only tells a little bit of, is fascinating. We tell that story in Equal is Unfair, my book with Don Watkins. So I encourage you to read the book and read the story. But watch the movie. Art has an incredible ability to affect you and I think inspire ultimately because at the end of the day, this is a movie of survival and in spite of everything and maintaining your connection to reality, connection to your own mind and your own humanity, your own morality. And this little girl really, really does that in a heroic way, in a really heroic way. Particularly smart, particularly courageous. Based on a true story. Based on a true story. So somebody says usually people use sacrifice as a trade-off, but it's not. And people don't use it that way because a trade-off is a trade. And so they use it as a package deal of a trade-off and as of giving up something more important. So did what Jesus did, was that a trade-off? No. Do people think that what Mother Teresa did was a trade-off? No. I mean real, real sacrifice, the sacrifice that gains moral credit. What often people term as self-sacrifice is not a trade-off. It is a, it's a negative trade-off. It's a trade-off where you lose. It's a sacrifice. It's where you lose. That's the, that's the central nature. What's the difference between a trade and a sacrifice? A trade is win-win. A sacrifice is lose-win. If it's win-win, it's just a trade-off. An investment in the future, like Jordan Peterson uses it. Like Jordan Peterson uses it. Then it's not a sacrifice. Then it's just an investment. It's a trade-off. It's a trade. I give up money now so I can have more in the future. That's not a sacrifice. That's called an investment. Mother Teresa was an evil woman and Hitchens is right, but he's more right than he knows because her whole philosophy is an evil philosophy. All right. Liam, $50. Thank you, Liam. Still quite a bit to go on the, on the goal. So, but plenty of time. Feel free to ask questions. Again, we've got lots of five to $10 questions. So think about 2050. And if you just want to do a, just want to support with a sticker, that's good too. $5, $10 stickers, $20, $100. All good. You can do any of those. So, Liam, altruists seem to think evil is more powerful than the good. So they always cower in the face of it. Many leftists often give money to bums on the subway. Not out of compassion, but because they're afraid they will be assaulted if they don't. I think that's right, but I don't know that that's driven by the altruism part of them. That is, I would separate people are generally afraid and people have this belief, which I think is really false, that if you don't help the poor, if you don't help the poor, if you don't have a warfare state, if you don't give them arms, then they will rise up against you and they will hurt you as a middle class or rich person. I think that's false, but there are people who are motivated by that, at least to some extent, that are motivated primarily by fear. Although that might all be a rationalization for their altruism. So, you know, and I don't think that's leftist. Actually the people who support welfare because they're afraid or give people money in the subway to a bomb because they're afraid are typically affine conservatives. Affine conservatives to support welfare and you push them why they go, oh, because otherwise they'll be a revolution and they'll rise up against us. So, yeah, I mean, look, altruism is a philosophy and morality that is incompatible with reality and with human nature and as a consequence, it's going to induce fear. It's going to support fear. That doodle bunny, was this a Pearl Harbor type moment where the Israel's knew their tech was coming, although maybe not as extreme as it was, but let it happen to be able to have Hamas attack first so they would have enough international good will to reoccupy Gaza? No, no, no, no. Absolutely not. That is an ugly, horrific myth. First of all, it's not completely clear that's what happened with Pearl Harbor. It might be what happened with Pearl Harbor, but it's not irrefutable. It's not definitive that that's what happened with Pearl Harbor, but it is 100% not what happened in Israel. First of all, Israel does not want to reoccupy Gaza. Israel has no interest in reoccupying Gaza. You know, just more Israelis are going to die and what's the point of it? What does Israel need Gaza for? It's not like there's any, I don't know, gold there that they can take, or what are they going to do with Gaza? Gaza is going to be a massive headache for them and they know it. Israel has occupied Gaza in the past. They gave it up for a reason. It was a massive headache. No Israeli wants Gaza. Not even the right-wing fanatics want Gaza. They want the West Bank. They don't want Gaza. So if they were going to do something like this, they'd do it in the West Bank. Not in Gaza. So no, the chances of this being a pohobah type thing are basically, but not basically. They are zero. You also need to understand Israel. Israel is not a country that takes lightly its own people's deaths. This is a country that values its people and is very serious about not putting people, you know, not purposefully organizing the deaths of their own people. This is an intelligence failure. And I know that it's easier to believe in conspiracy theories than it is to believe in human failure. I don't know why that is, but it is. And by the way, I'm not sure it's an accident. Well, I don't know. But it might not be an accident that some of this intelligence around imminent Hamas attack was delivered by a woman. Women are often not taken seriously. It's interesting that in the CIA, it was women who provided the intelligence and were pushing for a kite is going to attack us. There's an attack brewing. There's an attack coming. We should take this more seriously. And they were poo-pooed and dismissed. This is an intelligence failure. Nothing more than that. And a political failure. And by the way, Israel has had many opportunities to occupy Gaza. Hamas has attacked them many times. So, no. Again, the probability that this was a poor hobby event, kind of event is literally, literally, if you know Israeli intelligence, if you know anything about the Israeli military, it's zero. You know, Yom Kippur War, Israel did delay calling up the troops not to offend Americans because they were afraid America would turn its back on them if they were perceived as pre-empting. And in that, they sacrificed a lot of Israelis. But that was pressurized from the outside. It would have never been done internally. So, no. All right. Clark, thank you for the $50. I really appreciate it. All right. We need six more $50 contributions, guys. Got 90 people watching. You know, $5 each, $4 each, and $3 each. We'd be there. Value for value. Remember. All right. Clark Young says, dissented destroyed Newsom in that debate. Gavin's simple, slimy smile and glare alone made me puke. John would make a decent president. Nikki Haley may be better, but I would be fine with DeSantis in the White House. It's refreshing to see some competency. I think he's competent. There's no question about that. I worry about his attacks on businesses, on corporations, Disney being a good example. I worry about his disrespect for private property and private decision-making. The mandating that private businesses mandate vaccines as an example, like on cruise ships. I worry about his general disregard for basic, like individual rights in the name of fighting the left. And because he's competent, I worry about what he could do as president, being competent and having these very, very, I think, negative ideas. He was excellent on energy. You could tell that basically he was reading Alex Epstein's talking points. Alex Epstein was advising his campaign, and he obviously took that advice seriously on the whole climate change stuff. So there was some really good, he did a much better job, I thought, than Vivek in presenting Alex's talking points. He came across much more legit. And look, I would certainly prefer DeSantis to Trump, but then I'd prefer, almost prefer the devil to Trump, or I think Trump is the devil. But I certainly prefer DeSantis to Trump. I probably prefer DeSantis to Biden, but I just think Nikki Haley's a lot less dangerous for liberty in this country. I worry about the erosion of liberty from the right, from a competent right. One of the things I really worry about a second Trump term is that he'll be more competent because he'll surround himself with people more committed to his agenda versus their own agenda. So I really, really worry about Trump actually getting away with his authoritarian tendencies, whereas before there were adults in the room reining him in, there will not be adults in the room this time. There'll be little fascists in the room this time encouraging him and giving him the tools and the abilities to do it. DeSantis is some way in between. I don't like a lot of what he's done. He's dangerous. But again, better than Trump, but not as good I think as Nikki Haley. We'll see what happens. It's not up to me. It's up to you guys. You guys vote. All right, James Taylor. Is Candace Owen picking up on the growing anti-Semitism on the right and thinks playing to it will somehow boost her rating? Stephen Crowder seems to be playing to this younger, more bigoted crowd as well. Yes. I think that's part of it. I don't think it's all of it. I think they believe it. Look, Christianity has always been anti-Semitic. It doesn't mean all Christians were anti-Semitic, but Christianity is anti-Semitic. The Catholic Church was anti-Semitic. Martin Luther was a rabid anti-Semite. And if you're anti-elites, a lot of Jews among the elites, if you're anti-left, a lot of Jews among the left, if you're anti-academics, a lot of Jews among the academics, it's easy to see a connection and to associate a lot of the evil you see in the world with Jews. I also think that for a lot of people, the Palestinian cause, for a lot of Christians, the Palestinian cause makes sense. A lot of Christians, even though they reject woke and intersectionality, come from a philosophy that is the source of intersectionality. It's the source of intersectionality, right? Because it is the first morality, really, that basically places virtue with the weak, virtue with the meek, the meek shall inherit the earth, virtue with the suffering, and virtue with suffering for its own sake. And so it's not surprising to me that many Christians become anti-Israel, because Israel is strong, and they gravitate their moral sympathies towards the suffering. But yes, I think Candice... Candice is also very confused. Candice is also very influenced by a lot of the new right ideas and this is just one of them. She's being sympathetic to... I mean, of course, Charlie Koch is the one who really brought her in, and Charlie's being on this kind of anti-Israel thing, and the anti-Ukraine, and pro-Russia, pro-theratarianism. Again, you could argue that Israel is a liberal country, and they're very much against liberalism. So, yes, Candice is a very negative influence out there in the world. Michael, is the PLO just Hamas' light? One of the heads of the PLO stated Hamas will always be a part of the Palestinian political national fabric and part of the struggle. What struggle? To live like violent animals. I mean, the reality is that the PLO has to say that. The reality is that 70% of Palestinians support Hamas. Palestinian society has become more and more religious over time. It used to be very secular, and the PLO is a secular organization, a nationalist secular organization, and the... But over the last 30, 40 years, Palestinians have become more religious, and therefore more oriented towards Hamas. The PLO cannot say Hamas is evil, Hamas is bad, because they now lose whatever support they have, because they know that the people they govern are religious, much more religious than they are. The PLO Hamas' light in the hatred of Israel, the Hamas' light in their advocacy for violence, they're not Hamas' light when it comes to religion. They're generally secular, and they're not quite as fanatical because they're not as religious as Hamas is, and they are much more open to compromise with Israel at least as an interim step, right? And Israel's claim to eradicate Hamas, the problem with it is that Hamas is so popular in the West Bank even if they get rid of every single leader, even if they kill thousands of Hamas' troops, unless they crush the will of the Palestinians to fight and to resist, new leaders will come about, new people will adopt the ideology. The ideology will not die. The ideology is very popular and widespread in the Gaza Strip, in the Gaza and the West Bank. James says, do all these neurotic altruists and people afraid to fail, not realize, if you're not willing to be a fool, you can never become a master. I'm not sure what that means exactly, but look, I want to make clear these are not people who are afraid to fail. These are people in Silicon Valley. These are entrepreneurs. Many of them are in startups. Many of them have failed many times. So I don't want you to think that at least effective altruists are not like the Mother Teresa altruists. They're not like the Christian altruists. In that they are of this world, within this narrow, really bad ethical context, they try to justify and use science for what they do. And they are entrepreneurial and they're pro-economic. Growth in many of them are small libertarians. They're just really compartmentalized. But they're not anti-risk taking, quite the contrary. These are the people who are taking on the risks, many of them. Jennifer says they're a new breed. Yeah, they're a new breed of altruism, which is really bad for them, because it means that they don't get to enjoy the fruits of their own ability, which is sad. Andrew says he goes through painstaking empirical analysis to warrant the sacrifice of giving up his kidney. But doesn't his moral standard of value call for giving up more body parts next? How would he answer such a call? Well, he'd do the same empirical analysis, right? You can't give up a liver because you only have one. I don't think he's willing to give up his life, right? So I think he thinks a staying alive is a value. And so he's not willing to give up his life. Other body parts, he might, if you could make a convincing case that it wouldn't involve him dying and it would benefit others and it wouldn't raise the probability of him dying too much. But he's not suicidal. There was this guy, the first guy I met, the first guy I met, the first guy I read about who had given up his kidney said at some point, look, if somebody much smarter than me and more productive than me and more greater benefactor to humanity than me needed my other kidney, I guess I would have to give it. I don't think Scott Alexander would think that way. I think he weighs his life in this utilitarian balance quite heavily. Maybe not as happiness, maybe not as flourishing, but his life. You know, two eyes, ears, feet, hands. I mean, yeah, you could probably make an argument to him. I'm not sure that feet, ears, hands save people lives. Maybe an eye for somebody to see for the first time. You know, he might, you might be able to convince him. I don't know. It's, it's crazy. It's crazy. Larry says, my first fiction, four stories illustrating the importance of making your best choices in life is tied off folks in the road, 159 pages on Kindle or paperback. Let me know how much you charge to review it. I don't know how long it is. How long is it? I mean, I reviewed Meribens short story. I think it was, what did I charge Meribens? Maybe she's on. I can't remember how much I charged it. 250, 500, something like that. So it depends on how long it is. But something in that, Bobbock probably, if it's short stories, probably four short stories would probably be at least 500. Daniel says, do you think that modern intellectuals and professors hate Ayn Rand because grappling with her ideas would involve acknowledging the fact that they are stunting their students' minds with which doctrine? Maybe I charge Meribens 500. We can find out from Meribens how much I charge to, and depending on how long yours is, we can, we can adjust. I don't think so. I don't think they care enough about their students to worry about it. I think it's more about themselves. I think that it would involve acknowledging that they're wrong. They've been wrong for a long time, that the papers they've written are wrong, the books they've written are wrong, that their whole way of thinking about the world is wrong. I think that's much more, they care much more about that than they care about what they've taught their students. I mean, if you guys think that professors care that much about what they teach, you're naive. They don't. Same with modern intellectuals. They care about what they write. They care about their own perception of themselves. They care about what other people think of them. That's the other problem with Ayn Rand, is that other people would think they're crazy, that other people would dismiss them, would not take them seriously, and other people weigh heavily on whether people's view. You saw it with even Scott Alexander here. Other people's view of them is very, very important to them. They're very second-handed in that sense. Ditto, Bunny. Do you make a distinction between what they call pathological altruists and ordinary altruism? I don't know what pathological altruism is. Yeah, I mean, not really. Altruism is altruism. It's a place in the world being of others above your own. There are people who do this are completely dedicated to it and people call it pathological and they give their kidney away and they do all kinds of other things that are kind of crazy, Mother Teresa. I think ordinary altruists, I think in common usage, is often relates to benevolence and opening doors and being nice rather than true altruism. I think pathological altruists are the true altruists. But altruism is altruism. It is an ideology, a philosophy, a moral system. And as such, I think it's an evil moral system. And it is the kind of moral system that undermines individual human life and it manifests itself in lots of different ways. It manifests itself in effective altruism, what some people call pathological altruism, but it also manifests itself in just day-to-day guilt that people feel about taking care of themselves, the day-to-day guilt they feel about not giving enough to charity. The fact that people give to charity more than they probably should, the fact that people do things for other people more than they should, that they take care of their families more than they really want to, more than they really value that they admire Mother Teresa when they shouldn't. All those things are part of the fact altruism has in all of us and the fact that even those of us who want to live egoistic lives have this altruism tugging on us because we've automatized so much of its elements. So altruism comes in all kinds of ways and varieties and levels. Kim, thank you, Kim. What if, given how painful and comfortable giving a kidney is, I wouldn't even give it to someone I value, shouldn't I reassess my priorities? Well, it depends on how much you value them. I mean, there are a lot of people I value, I wouldn't give a kidney to. It depends how much I value them. I'd give it to my wife. So if somebody you love, somebody who contributes in the most immense amount to your life, somebody who contributes a lot to you, who you would not, who you would not have as good of a life without, then yeah, then I think it's worth thinking about why am I resisting this so much? Why am I, what is it about this procedure that is, am I letting my fear dominate me? Am I being really rational? Am I really considering my value hierarchy? So you really have to, I mean, it's worth thinking about who are the people you would, who are the people you wouldn't. I mean, I don't know that you need to go through this exercise, but if you're curious, why I would, why I wouldn't? And if there's nobody you would, is there nobody you really, really love? Is there nobody that crucial to your life? If there are people that are crucial to your life, why wouldn't you give it to them? Am I over-weighting the challenge of surgery too much? Yeah, I mean, it's worth thinking about because it could be that you should reassess your priorities, but it's not necessarily so. You have to do thinking and nobody can do it for you. Clark says, do you think the Israeli population has shrugged off its altruism for this Gaza conflict? They don't seem to be caving to political pressure. They are wiping Gaza out. They're not wiping Gaza out. They're caving to the pressure. Many Israeli soldiers are dying because Israel will flatten the place from the air. Right now, they're entering Southern Gaza without the kind of air support they should have. Quite a few of these Israeli kids are going to die for no reason as a consequence. Because of the Biden administration and other pressures, they're enforcing rules of engagement that they really shouldn't, out of altruistic reasons. But look, it is true that even a generally altruistic society is willing sometimes to defend itself brutally. Certainly the United States and Europe in Britain during World War II. Now, these were not particularly altruistic societies at the time. But there was altruism there. Christianity was there certainly. But think about even Christian society was willing to kill thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands in the name of God. So their altruism only went so far. And they were willing to put their altruism aside for greater cause. If you are Protestant and suffering, it didn't count because you were going against God. Or the opposite, right? Catholic, if you were Protestant. So people have throughout history been willing to put their altruism aside to either defend themselves or to fight for some cause that they believe justified the violence. Harper Campbell, for the altruists, it's the side that is competent where it is incumbent upon them to restrain their behavior in dealing with the other complete savages. I'm not sure I understand, Harper. Sorry. Michael says, subject, is it possible Trump goes to jail, is forced to drop out of the race? Nikki Haley becomes president and her and Millay engage in radical free market policies. It's possible. It's not probable. And it's not probable that Nikki Haley, if she became president, would engage in radical free market policies. I think she's a radical free market. I think she's generally tilts to the free market side. I think she's better than most Republicans on the issue of free markets. I think she's better than DeSantis on free markets. I think she's better than Trump on free markets. So she's better than the rest of them. But is she a radical free market? No, I don't think she is. And I don't think she'd implement radical free market policies. And I think it's unlikely she gets elected, but that's because Republicans are idiots. It's not an accident. It's called the stupid party because they have a chance to elect her at DeSantis over Trump and they're going to blow it. At least it appears that way. How would you grade Israel's response to 10, 7, so far? Daniel says, I would give it a B minus. I thought it would be a D, so B minus is high. It was too slow getting going. Not enough has been done from the air to protect Israeli soldiers on the ground. Because it was too slow, I think it let some of the leadership of Hamas kind of get organized in terms of hiding in a way that maybe they wouldn't have been if Israel has acted much faster. But of course, I don't have intelligence. I don't know for a fact. I think Israel should have been much more brutal from the air from day one and should have gone in much sooner than they ultimately did. And I don't think the ceasefire was justified. But I give it a B minus. It's not a disaster. Usually it is. Daniel says, why do you think Hezbollah hasn't attacked Israel from the North yet? Because it's afraid. Hezbollah is in a relatively weak position in Lebanon. Lebanon is basically a failed state. It is a crumbling economy. People are sick and tired. Lebanese are sick and tired of Hezbollah to a large extent. They blame a lot of the problems in Lebanon on Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a precarious situation in Lebanon. I think Iran is also a little worried. Iran is afraid that if it goes too far, it's testing the water. It keeps poking America and Israel. But it's afraid if it goes too far, Israel and the United States will gale up on it. And it's not ready to fight a war with the United States. It would lose very quickly and in very devastating fashion. And it doesn't want that. It wants to be able to build nukes first. It's learned the lesson. The lesson of North Korea is you build the nukes, then you engage in whatever you want. Then you can do whatever you want to do because they won't attack you. I think Hezbollah is not completely ready, but it's primarily worried about its internal challenges within Lebanon. They don't want to completely alienate the Lebanese people and they would because Israel would take the war to them. If the Lebanese people would suffer from it, Southern Lebanon would become a fire zone, a completely uninhabitable. And Beirut, Hezbollah's headquarter would be devastated. And the Lebanese people have had enough of that. And I don't think they would completely tolerate it. So Larry says he would do it for $500. Let me take a look at folks in the road in terms of the length and get back to you. And if that works, then you can do the $500 on PayPal at your Unbrook show. So bring it up next show. I'll check it out in the meantime on Amazon and let you know if the $500 works. Michael says DeSantis is much better governor than he is a presidential candidate. His advice is wanting to be Trump, but you can never win by copying someone else. I think that's true, but I'm not sure it was that good of a governor. No reason to believe he was a great governor in particular. He was okay on COVID, not great. And he was wrong on many things on COVID. He plays up to all the conspiracy theories since then as governor. And he did some things that were just horrible and his Disney thing. Now, you could argue that is all part of the campaign. That is all part of the tech in Disney is part of running for president, but he did it as governor. So I don't think he's that good of a governor. People were moving to Florida in large numbers, large numbers, well before DeSantis was governor. DeSantis is not responsible for the fact that Florida does not have an income tax. DeSantis is not responsible for the fact that regulation in Florida is relatively low. DeSantis is certainly not responsible for the fact that Florida's weather is fantastic, particularly compared to the Midwest and the Northeast. Again, most of the people I know moved to Florida well before DeSantis became governor. So you can get credit for the wonderful state of Florida, but the fact is that the marginal change that DeSantis made in Florida is marginal. Jennifer says, it seems like I keep hearing more and more that mental illness causes people to do street drugs. Do you think that is used as an excuse to stave off personal responsibility? Yes. I mean, it's probably true. There's probably a lot of mentally ill people, but it's also true that it's hard to tell what the causality is. I wouldn't be surprised if drugs cause you to become mentally ill. And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of mentally ill people use drugs in order to get rid of, you know, to be able to cope with their mental illness. It goes both ways. Why is there so much mental illness? Why is there so much drug use? I think that has to do with a culture of altruism, a culture of lack of personal responsibility, a culture of mediocrity, a culture that doesn't teach people how to think. So yeah, but I don't think, but I definitely think that a lot is done in order to stave off personal responsibility. You know, people addicted to drugs. Well, how'd they get addicted? They made a choice. People don't want to go there to that choice. James Taylor says, you give up reason. You give up self. Absolutely. Liam says, will your shows in Hebrew be translated? I don't think so. It's too expensive. Google, I think provides, or not Google, YouTube provides a translation service so you can get subtitles in English. I think it'll work. We'll test it out the first time and see. It won't be a perfect translation, but I think it'll be good enough for most people. Frank, do you think Norman Finkstein hates Israel the way an Italian American would hate fascist Italy? Or how a Russian would hate USSR? He's embarrassed. Yeah, I mean, are you comparing Israel to fascist Italy and USSR? I mean, I don't know. I think he hates Israel for all kinds of corrupt psychological reasons. And I think he hates Israel because it's good for his career. He's made a career out of being the guy whose parents survived the Holocaust and he hates Israel. He never fails to mention his parents. So I think it's a combination of things. I think it's a combination of things. Woo, all right. We're going on two hours. We've still got a few questions. We're still about $170 short. 90 people watching. It's $2 a person. If you find value in the show, please consider contributing. All right. Let's see that doodle bunny. What's the best way to care what others think of you? Is it even realistically possible? What's the best way not to care? Is it even realistically possible? We live in our hierarchies and climbing the ladder in life means caring how you present yourself to others. Well, which others? And in what context? Of course you care about what others think of you if they are a value to you. You care what your wife thinks of you. You care what your boss thinks of you in the context of your job. But you don't act in order to please them. You act based on what is right and hopefully they're the kind of people who are pleased by the fact that you're acting right. So you care about that about them. You care that they're people of justice. And if they're not, then the best thing is to get away from that situation. That is, if the hierarchy is such that it's going to promote you not by doing a good job, but by, quote, kissing the ass of your boss, pleasing him, making him like you, then screw that company go somewhere else. So you care about what other people think about you in context, in the context of you care that they value you if you're worthy of valuing. And if they don't, your response is not shit. My boss doesn't like me. I better kiss his ass. Your response should be, oh, my boss doesn't value what I do. I'm doing a good job. I'm pretty sure. I verify. I verify it. I'm doing a good job. He still doesn't like me. I should look for another job. I should look for another boss. He's wrong. Or I should go to the boss's boss and see if I can get some, you know, move in the company to a different situation or whatever. Right. But you don't, you don't change who you are to accommodate them. You change who they are so that they appreciate you. I don't care what people think of me. I mean, if I cared what people thought of me, I'd be pro-Trump. I'd be, you know, I'd be anti the one Ukraine. I'd love Jordan Peterson. I'd have a much bigger audience. Right. So you can't, but I can't wait. I can't wait about you guys. I want you to like me. I want you to like me so much that you make a contribution towards my show. But not at the cost of changing who I am. Not at the cost of compromising my values. Not at the cost of saying something I don't believe. Not at the cost of my integrity. Hopper Campbell, don't these envious losers get tired of trying to destroy the world all the time? Must be exhausted. I'm not sure who you're talking about. But there are plenty of envious losers out there that that applies to. I guess not. I guess that's the shtick. James, I just read that the only non-governmental mass killings in the 20th century were the Hutus slaughtering the Tutsis in Rwanda. Non-governmental mass killings in the 20th century. Yeah, I guess so. I guess the thugs everywhere else got in power before they did the mass killing. Even with the Hutus and the Tutsis, the government must have had a role in it because why wasn't the government protecting the Tutsis? So government had to be involved in some capacity of the other. Daniel, remember that Angelina Jolie has read I ran and spoke for everybody about Rand's philosophy. Google it and find it. I know she wanted to play Dagny in Atlas Shrug. She wanted to make Atlas Shrug, which she never did. But a lot of people read Atlas Shrug, though a lot of people read I ran and say positive things about them. It doesn't make it so that they understand the philosophy or they can apply it consistently. Unfortunately Angelina Jolie is a real mixed bag, ideologically. Richard, but the movie is good. So I highly recommend her movie. First, they killed my father. Excellent movie, powerful, draining emotionally, but very powerful. Richard Kenningham said Jude's hospital adds solicit funds by showing happy children successfully treated for cancer. What do you think of altruism motivated by relief of suffering? Again, is it altruism? Again, what is motivating you? I mean, I find as election Jews quite motivating. I like children. I like the idea of helping children avoid cancer. I like the idea of helping them when they're young rather than when they're old, because when they're young they have so much potential. I would support, I don't, but I could support kid imagines supporting. They say Jude hospital for non altruistic reasons, for completely selfish, egoistic reasons. But you can imagine some people are motivated from altruistic reasons. They don't really care about babies that much. They're not that important to them. But I'm supposed to sacrifice for children that are supposed to be good and giving for non-rational, not egoistic reasons, then it's altruism. You can give for a variety of reasons, but it has to be rational. It has to be based on your particular value. If I hated children, it wouldn't appeal to me. I don't actually love children. I understand their potential, understand the potential of human beings and why it's valuable to help they be productive, healthy human beings in the future. MP creates. Some people say comedians are like a canary in the coal mine for the broader culture. What is your opinion on comedy as an art form? What role does it serve in an objective society? God, that's a big question. I mean, generally, I like comedy. I think it's an interesting, I guess it's an art form. I think that what you laugh at says a lot about who you are and what your values are. I think today's comedians tend to be vulgar and not funny. I don't find the funny anyway. But some are funny to the point, and some make fun of things that deserve making fun of. So I do think, I don't think there can be any coal mine, but I do think they are one expression of a culture. So when comedians start making fun of woke, that's good. It's a sign that woke has become, it's acceptable to make fun of it. And that's a good thing. But I often find that they make fun of things that shouldn't be made fun of. I often find that they make fun, that they will like too much on vulgarity as humor. You know, if you say the F word, people laugh. You just instinctually laugh. It's funny somehow. I think from the days of Lenny Booce, but to actually be funny, to construct humor is really, really hard. And to do that well, wow, I mean, that's quite an achievement. Florida Nix says, any thoughts on GTA 6 trailer? I haven't seen the GTA 6 trailer. I don't know what the GTA 6 trailer is. What is GTA? I don't know. You have to be more explicit with me, these cultural references. I'm a simple guy. I don't know. Florida Nix says, how much would it cost for you to watch a three minute video that points out the absurdities of the Jones Act in a funny but serious way? 100 bucks? What do you want me to do with it? Recommend it afterwards? Yeah, I mean, that would be great. Okay, last question. A little short of our goal, guys, but we'll make this the last question because it is late and I am tired. Daniel says, you mentioned that altruism manifests itself in many subtle ways. Is there a connection with keeping people stuck on the perceptual level? Is it Rand's essay The Missing Link makes this point? Yes. But I don't think people keep other people at the perceptual level. I don't think there's like a conspiracy to keep people at the perceptual level. I think that people at the perceptual level kind of is a personal choice. It's kind of a default. Thinking requires effort. And suddenly being at the perceptual level is connected with altruism because altruism reduces the incentive to be conceptual, to be conceptual is to see the contradictions, to see the hypocrisy, to see the compartmentalization, to see the evil in the world from an altruistic perspective, to see the fact that if you're going to be an altruist, you're going to suffer. But if you're not an altruist, you're not moral. So morality equals suffering. But wait a minute, don't really want to suffer. All of that are the kind of, they reduce the incentive to think. They encourage people to be at their perceptual level. There's a lot more to say about that. And The Missing Link is an important essay that I wrote that I encourage people. It explains so much of the modern world. I really encourage people to read. By the way, GTA 6, I guess, is Grand Theft Auto 6. I never played Grand Theft Auto. I don't know much about it except that it's about violence and property crime. I don't like the glorification of violence or crime. I try to prevent my kids from watching and playing Grand Theft Auto. I'm pretty sure I failed miserably in trying to prevent them from doing that. I don't endorse it. I don't like it. I don't like the glorification of violence. I don't like the idea of a first party playing a game where you are acting out evil actions. Anyway, a lot of people from India in my chat recently, I'm not sure why and where they've come from. Andrew says, what do you think is going on psychologically when someone claims to feel good from doing a selfless act? I think a lot of it is that it's an emotion. They feel good about feeling. They think they should feel good and they kind of, in a sense, rationalize the good feelings. I don't know what they really feel. I don't know if they know what they really feel. A lot of these people suppress their emotions quite well. So it's not clear how genuine the feeling really is and how genuine they are in telling you that they feel it. Some of them do feel it, but even that doesn't mean anything really. All right, everybody. Thank you. I appreciate all the superchatters. Thanks for all the questions. We went two hours today. It's not bad. And let's see. Tomorrow we'll have a news roundup in the early afternoon here in Puerto Rico. Tuesday, three shows, Hebrew news roundup, interview with Don Watkins. See you all tomorrow. Have a great rest of your week. Yeah. Thank you. Bye, everybody.