 The Radical, Fundamental Principles of Freedom, Rational Self-Interest, and Individual Rockets. This is The Iran Brook Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Brook Show on this Sunday afternoon. It's been a while since we've done a Sunday afternoon show. So thank you for joining me. Well, Saturday, it's not Sunday. Saturday afternoon show. So thanks for joining me. I know your time is valuable, so I appreciate you spending a little bit of time here with us on The Iran Brook Show to talk about stuff, events of the day, things that are going on in the world, and so on. Today, a few things on the news. We'll talk about this water crisis in Mississippi. And does it have any implications for anywhere else in the country? Why is it happening? What are the causes? What are the solutions, and so on. Although it's a tough one to solve, easy one to identify. Well, let's talk about income inequality, some interesting data about income inequality, both in the United States and in China. So not connected to different studies, to different issues, but both interesting. Interesting. As you know, I have a book out on income inequality called Equal is Unfair, co-authored with Don Watkins. It's been out for a long time now. And this is new data, new data that I think reinforces some of the case that we make in that book. But also, yeah, reveals some of the issues that have to do with the welfare state, but also says something about culture. China, the data from China is quite interesting. So anyway, we'll talk about that. We'll talk about income inequality in US and China. And finally, what I think many of you waiting with great anticipation for is I will review, I mean, I don't know if I'll call it a review, but I will comment on review the Rucka Rucka Ali video on the history of philosophy. So we will review that today. And I'll do that in the context of talking a little bit about rap, because I don't think you can talk about that video without talking about the context in which it's made, which is the context of rap, or in this case, Rucka using rap. Using rap, rap as a means, as a musical means to convey ideas. All right, so yeah, I know a bunch of you have been waiting for this. Can't wait for another schism and objectivism, huh? Blood in the streets, that's what you want. Well, I don't think you'll get blood in the streets. But anyway, it'll be fun to talk about. And so that's the program for today. Happy, of course, to take your questions. Jonathan, thank you for the support. Really appreciate it. Jonathan Honing over there. And so happy to take your questions. We have a super chat feature where you can support the show. You can ask questions. I answer all the questions in the show. We've gone this week. We've gone a couple of times well over two hours in order to catch up with all the questions, because there were so many questions on the show. So feel free to jump in with questions or just to support what we're doing at the Iran Book Show. And of course, if you'd like to support the show more broadly or more systematically, then you can do so on Patreon. Just look for Iran Book Show there or on the IranBookShow.com slash support where you can use PayPal to support the show and to come a monthly contributor to the show. All right, so should we just jump into the water crisis in Mississippi? Mississippi, Jackson, Mississippi. As many of you might know, Jackson, Mississippi is the capital, shockingly, is the capital of Mississippi. Mississippi is the poorest state in the union. It has GDP per capita significantly lower than the median or the average in the United States, average or median, Mississippi is lower. The only part of the United States with a GDP per capita lower than Mississippi is my home Puerto Rico, unfortunately. So yes, so Mississippi is poor. Jackson, in spite of being the capital, is a particularly poor part of Mississippi, a particularly poor city of Mississippi. Jackson itself is about 150,000 people. It was, at its peak, 200,000 and 200,000 people. And it's gone down, so the population has shrunk by about 25% from its peak in 1980. So down to 150,000. That is common with a lot of cities that have been abandoned. Basically, what has happened in Jackson, Mississippi is white middle class, upper middle class have all left the city. They moved to the suburbs. The suburbs are incorporated as independent cities. The suburbs of Jackson, Mississippi are actually thriving and quite successful. There is a huge contrast. Jackson, Mississippi is unbelievably poor. And the suburbs are quite wealthy and doing quite well. You'll notice there's no water crisis in the suburbs of Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson, Mississippi today has gone from about 50-50, white and black to about 80% black as the whites have left middle class primarily as an issue of income and have left the city. But it is still the capital of Mississippi. So where are we? So what's being happening in the city of Jackson? For years now, the current crisis that you're watching on television right now in Ravel is just one of a series of crises that have been going on for probably well over 10 years, where the water basically has not been drinkable in Jackson, Mississippi for a long time. It now just there is no water because the treatment plant has been shut down because of flooding. But the treatment plant in the winter of 2021, that is a year ago, was shut down because of cold in Mississippi. Can you imagine that? It was shut down because of cold. It's shut down not that infrequently. The piping under the ground in Jackson, Mississippi is close to 100 years old. But what's interesting is, pipes in all over the United States are over 100 years old. And indeed, there was some argument to be made that we're very, very close generally in the US to water crises all over the US, particularly in the older parts, in the parts that were built a long, long time ago. Of course, the suburbs have newer piping, newer facilities, newer water treatment plants. But all the cities where the infrastructure was built decades and decades and decades ago, maybe over a century ago, they're real issues. They're really sure across the entire United States in terms of water. Simon, thank you, really appreciate the support. So what you have is a system that is crumbling. Another feature of the water system in Jackson, Mississippi. Now, like everywhere, water is provided to all of us not by private companies. There's no competition. Nobody's quite figured out a model. At least I don't know of any city in the United States that's figured out a model on how to create competitive water. Although some cities do have private water supplies, they all have some kind of monopolistic power and therefore are protected by government and therefore prices are also determined often by government. But it's all government. So one of the things to note about Jackson, but also about Flint, Michigan, about Detroit, about all these other cities that are having water problems, this is clearly a failure of government. This doesn't have to happen. This is just a question of money in the end. And to a large extent, as we'll see, an issue of price. It's expensive to keep up the water systems. It's expensive to replace them. It's expensive to update them. It's not easy to dig up the streets and replace pipes. It's not easy to build water treatment pipes. They are water treatment facilities. It can cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. But it's interesting that government, which is responsible for this, government, which is often sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, don't keep up with this. Don't update these things. Don't because nobody seems to care when the system breaks down. It usually breaks down. People move out. The people who are left are poor and have very little political clout because that's what ultimately determines who gets the investment and who doesn't get the investment. The political clout, not any economic principles. And what you see is a complete breakdown of government, a complete breakdown of government services. And then nobody writes about government failures. Nobody writes about the fact that government has failed. Every little supposed, pretend market failure, you get big headlines, you get newspaper articles, you get stories upon stories upon stories about the victims of capitalism. But as government fails again and again and again and again and again, this time in Jackson, Mississippi, previously in Flint and in other places, you get racism is blamed for it. And, you know, it could be racism. But it's interesting that it's much more likely that racism is to blame for something like this. When the government is delivering it, then racism to be blamed for a failure in the marketplace because the marketplace doesn't care about the color of your skin, doesn't care about your socioeconomic background. It cares about whether you can pay your bills or not. Government cares about whether you vote who you vote for, color of your skin, maybe socioeconomics. It is government where you see the manifestation of racism not nowhere near as much in the private sector. My guess is that there's a lot more breakage in Mississippi in government-provided services than in services that are provided by the private sector in a competitive market. There's a lot more breakage that might be legitimately, there's Mississippi after all, blamed on racism in the public sector and the government sector than there would be in the private sector. Private sector, the government sector, sorry, the government sector is a sector that is based on pressure groups. It's based on groups. It's based on who can pound the table loudest, who can allocate resources, taking from other people for one's own benefit. And therefore, it's bound to be influenced by all kinds of issues unrelated to economics. Now, one of the issues with Jackson is, and I think this is true of many water districts around the country, is that in Jackson, Mississippi, the water company basically provides Jackson with water. It doesn't seem like it's a very diversified business. It doesn't have other clients. Its clients are the residents of Jackson. And it turns out that in the United States, generally 90% of all the money spent on water infrastructure spent on fixing the water mains, spent on delivering water to you, clean water to you, doesn't come from taxes. It actually comes from the amount of money we pay for water, which is the way it should be. So in that sense, this is good, right? But it's also a problem in the sense that politicians who have to approve increases in water rates don't do it because it's unpopular. When the water is flowing, when the water is fine to drink, nobody has an incentive to go to the politicians and says, yes, raise the rates on my water so we can build an infrastructure for the 21st century. It doesn't happen. Politicians would have to raise water rates. People would complain. They'd have to explain. We're investing in the future. People would go to hell with the future. I want my water now and it's too expensive. Of course, people don't think long-term, or at least politicians don't assume that we can think long-term. Because the funny thing is that in Jackson, Mississippi right now, water rates might be relatively low. Of course, there's no water coming out of the pipe. But instead of paying higher rates for water, let's say, many families are paying $50 to $100 a month in bottled water to drink. And they've been doing this for years because even when running, water was running through the pipes in Jackson, Mississippi, as in Flint, as in other places. They were told to boil the water before drinking, not to trust it, close their nose as they shower. How disgusting is that? But that's life in many American cities today. The infrastructure's crumbling and then we're not willing to raise prices so that we can gain the revenue to invest in improving price, improving services. Because while investment in water is based, quote, on market, on the amount of money you pay for water, the water prices are a political issue that ultimately determined by the regulatory agency that runs the water system. So you think it would be easier to raise water prices with the explanation of this investment than it would be to raise taxes, but it's not partially because you get your water bill, you can see how much you're paying in water, it's right there in front of you and if that keeps going up, you're gonna complain. Now, Jackson, Mississippi has a added complication to this and that is they don't bill many of their citizens for water. Their billing system has been broken for 10 years. So for 10 years, they've been billing people the wrong amounts, they've been billing people some people they've been billing huge astronomical amounts, other people they don't bill at all, they haven't collected from a lot of people, the billing system is completely broke. So revenues are broke. Years ago, they hired Siemens, a German company, to fix their billing system. It turns out that was a fiasco. Now, I don't know why I was a fiasco, I haven't researched why the deal with Siemens was such a fiasco, but it's a massive fiasco. The billing system is worse than it used to be and indeed the city of Jackson sued the sued Siemens and won and got a massive settlement from Siemens. But this is Siemens we're talking about, a German company that is very good at what they do. I wonder why they had such a hard time implementing a simple billing system and metering system in Jackson, Mississippi. Maybe it has to do with officials in Jackson, Mississippi, not so much with it. But you know, they won the lawsuit. So I don't know, who knows? Who knows? But it is pretty weird. Yes, if you run a water company, government run water company and you can't bill your customers and yet you have to pry them with water, then it isn't shocking that you've got real problems and you're under investing in the system and you're not building and updating and constructing water treatment plants and new piping and all of that and the thing all breaks down and shuts down. It's just not surprising when you don't have enough money because you're not billing your customers. And if you consider the fact that residents of Jackson, Mississippi are paying 50 to 100 bucks in bottled water, this kind of bottled water, then you could charge them quite a bit. If, on condition, that you actually provide them with quality water that they can drink, save them the bottled water. But this is why we need a creative way in which to create competition in a delivery of water to the home. And we should allow for competitive piping. We should allow for people under those conditions to rip up the streets and lay new pipes. We should allow potentially for different entities that produce water to use the existing piping to deliver it and to take responsibility over the piping that they use. I'm sure the economists out there who figured out ways in which we could create a private competitive system to deliver water. And it would be nice to see some cities out there maybe compete or not compete, maybe experiment with such delivery systems to see how they work and how they function. But what we're seeing in Mississippi right now is a real government failure. If I were in Detroit or in Baltimore, even New York City, Boston, and many other older cities where the piping is over a hundred years old, you know, Jacksonville, Florida has had real problems. And I'm sure many of the cities in the Midwest, I'd be worried. I'd be worried. There's no question that this is the kind of infrastructure that American cities are not investing in. This is the kind of infrastructure where there's very little incentive to invest in. The pipes are buried, buried, and therefore they're buried from our minds. And we complain when rates go up and we complain when we don't have water. And almost nobody sees the connection between the two. But if you underpray something, what happens when you underpray something? You get shitty quality. You can't provide high quality at low prices. All right, so for example, I'll just give you an example from Jackson. In 2016, they found that the collection, right? You know, they were $26 million shortfall from what they expected to collect because of the modern building system. You can do a lot of repairs with $26 million. But if you can't have a building system, if government can't even create a building system that works, if they can't figure out who to bill and how much to bill and collect, you get societal breakdown. You get societal breakdown. The thing is with government failure is when government failure affects us all. It's not just the customers of a particular entity. It's everybody within that particularly geographic area. And that's where you get breakdown of law and order. That's where you get increase in violence. That's where you get a breakdown in civilization. It is interesting to ask how cities in Europe cope with all the infrastructure. And my guess is that Europe, because it centralizes everything, it just allocates, it runs everything through taxes and allocates just ever-increasing. See, Europe is just more efficient at redistribution of wealth and at using government resources. We are just unbelievably inefficient because we try to have these mixtures and we try to localize everything. And sometimes from the perspective of a welfare state, that doesn't work as well. Of course, from the perspective of true freedom, none of these systems work very well as compared to what the alternative would be. But it would be interesting. I have to research a little bit and find out what Europe does and how it manages. And maybe there's a water issue in Europe as well, but I don't think so. Just some of the numbers, nearly 16,000 residents, customers in Jackson owe more than $100 and are more than 90 days past you. Jackson water customers owe a total of $90.3 million. So you just see from, the numbers just don't add up. It's just constantly, there's a massive shortfall in the amount of dollars because there's no relationship between the quality of the service you get and the price you pay. What happens to these people? I mean, is water really shut down? Does the government really keep track of these things? Can it? Does it have the ability? So prices are too low. They're too low because the prices are set by politicians ultimately, not by a marketplace. Higher prices in Jackson, Mississippi would be difficult because Jackson is so poor, but other poor places manage somehow and the breaking of the water system is worse than having to pay more in water. The breakage of the water system actually results in poor people having to spend more money on water elsewhere. Prices matter. Incentives matter. Institutions matter. And what we're seeing is another example of government failure. And there are lots of them. So once in a while I'll point them out because everybody else points out all the other failures. And of course, all the discussion in Jackson, Mississippi right now is about racism. All the discussion in Mississippi right now is about poverty. There's almost no discussion in Mississippi right now about prices, about investment. The only assumption is the state should bail them out. The state should put in money. So we should redistribute money from richer parts of Mississippi to Jackson, Mississippi. There's no discussion of raising prices, improving building system, of actually fixing a broken system, a broken economic system. It's easy to blame the racists in, and for all I know they are, in the state house it's easy to blame rich white people in the suburbs. It's much more difficult to talk about the fact that the residents, the poor residents of Jackson, Mississippi are just gonna have to pay higher prices if they wanna get reliable water supply. All right. Let's see, that was water in Mississippi. Let's do a super chat question, a $20 super chat question from Dave, who paid for my review of the Patriot. Dave said, glad to hear your review of the Patriot, just in terms of acting quality, Hollywood has declined enormously over the past 20 years. What did you make of Mel Gibson acting ability in relation to the evil British Colonel? I don't agree with you that acting quality has declined. I mean, I see TV shows right now, or movies, I mean, I don't see many movies because most of the movies are so stupid, I can't bear them, but I don't see the decline in movie quality, at least in, sorry, in acting quality. I thought, I think Mel Gibson is an okay actor. I don't think he's particularly profound, particularly good, he's okay in the roles that he's in. I think the evil British Colonel, generally Brits are better actors. But yeah, I thought the acting in the Patriot was good. It wasn't, it didn't strike me as outstanding, but it was all good. But I don't know where in modern movies put aside superhero movies, which I don't really count right now, where would you say you would identify horrible acting in movies today? Something in TV shows, it seems like the acting is quite spectacular. I mean, I just watched, now these are old directors in this case, old man on FX, I thought the acting was excellent. Have you guys seen Only Motors in the Building? It's quite good, it's fun. It's short, fun, short episodes, Steve Martin and what's his name, Short, and Gomez, Selena Gomez, I think. It's very entertaining and a lot of fun, so I encourage that. And again, I think the acting's quite good. So I'd have to think about examples of bad acting in modern movies. Maybe it's there, Dave, but you'd have to show me, yeah, I'm glad you, I think enjoyed my review of the Patriot, but I do think, as I said, the main flaw of the Patriot is that they had to create an evil British colonel in order to make the plot work. It couldn't work or it didn't, it couldn't work given their premise without that. And I would have liked to see somebody be convinced that fighting for principles was good without creating, was right and good and just without having to create such evil, such destruction and make it so personal. Cause it then demolishes the power of abstract ideas. All right, just to remind you, we have a goal of $650 for the super chat, $20 questions get priority as Dave's just did. So let's talk a little bit about income inequality in the United States and then a little bit in one study in China and then after that we'll talk about. Rap music and in particular, we'll talk specifically about Raka Raka's Ali's history of philosophy video that is done as rap. So, as you probably know, as everybody knows, I mean over the last 10 years, income inequality has become one of, one of the main talking points of the left. Although I have to say that over the last three years, you know, since Black Lives Matter and since the rise of kind of the new wacky left, income inequality is taking a backseat to issues related to race and gender and trans and all that stuff. So, because income inequality was more of a neo-Marxist thing, I mean Piketty who brought income inequality to the forefront in his book 10, 11 years ago, the capital in the 21st century or Das Kapital in the 21st century, as I like to call it. Piketty is a neo-Marxist and Marxist without the intellectual aspect of Marx but just adopting the economic arguments of Marx and without the kind of philosophical arguments, which is interesting, which I think most modern Marxists are, they drop all the pretense of philosophy and just talk about the economics. But, you know, it's interesting that over the last few years, the left doesn't talk much about inequality. You don't hear it anywhere as much as you did five, six, seven years ago. But anyway, the big issue was in the United States was seeing ever-increasing, ever-increasing income inequality, inequality between the rich and the poor, the middle class and the poor, the rich and the middle class. The whole spectrum is massive divergence and increasing genie coefficients, which is a measure of inequality and increasing inequality across the entire spectrum, which they tell us is horrible and disastrous and destructive and needs to be dealt with. And I've talked about in the past about why income inequality is not a problem in and of itself, why the real question is the causes of it, but not the fact that it exists is neither good nor bad. And indeed, you could argue that having inequality as a sign of, at least having inequality can be a sign of freedom, although it can also be a sign of non-freedom. So the way I like to think about it is freedom always results in inequality. And we'll see an example of this in China. Freedom always results in inequality and in significant inequality. And the fact is that most systems of authoritarianism result in vast equality among people, although there's always a small group that are super unequal relative to everybody else. All right, so in the United States we've been told over and over and over and over and over and over and over again that income inequality is a problem. It's growing, we're back to the late 19th century. I wish I were in the sense of because of economic freedom, because of the Reagan revolution and all the deregulation that appeared out of nowhere, I wish I could see it, but all that deregulation, all those lowering taxes, all of this has resulted in massive increases in inequality. Piketty has written a book and several articles about this and what's his name, Stiglitz, who's an overpriced winner in economics, has also written about this and many other American economists have got on their train and they're all pushing the biggest problem in the American economy is income inequality. At least until Black Lives Matter showed up and then it became all these other things. But it turns out that even by their own standards, by their own measures, by their own data, this is just not true, not true. So one of the problems with most of these studies is that they look at income inequality, the differences in income before taxes and transfer payments. And we talk about this in the book, equal is unfair, this is easily observable, so that you're just looking at wages or income. Now they often don't take into account things like benefits, they don't take into account size of household, they don't take into account, most importantly probably, taxes and transfer payments, i.e. welfare payments. And if you take those into account in a variety of different ways, income inequality is not increased. It's actually decreased by 3% over the last few decades. But now there's a new book coming out. New book coming out, let's see what's it called. The new book is called The Myth of American Inequality, pretty straightforward title. Myth of American Inequality, it's coming out September 15th. It was written by Phil Graham, the former senator from the state of Texas. And Elie, something Elie, John Elie, who is a, what is he, is an assistant. He used to be, he served twice as assistant commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, so a stat guy. And they have a new book coming out looking at the statistics of inequality. And one of their findings is, which is really interesting, one of the findings is that once you take into account taxes and transfer payment payments, that the bottom 60% of income, the bottom 60% of income, so anywhere from zero to 60%, the people that fall into that level of income, there's very little difference between them. Very little difference between them. That the welfare state, the war on poverty, has to a large extent equalized income of the bottom 60% of Americans. So if you look at government transfer payments of the bottom 20%, they have surged by 269%, 270%, between 1967 and 2017. While middle income households saw their real earnings after taxes rise by only 154% during the same period. So you can see welfare payments were rising at a far, far higher rate, far, far, far higher percentage than earnings of middle income. So what's happened is the poor have caught up to the middle fast. And this is, we'll see in a minute the kind of consequences this has. So here's some stats. This is from a editorial in the Wall Street Journal that the two authors wrote. And Phil Graham is one of the last good senators that I remember, particularly in economic issues. He was very good. He was good within the context of what is available. But I don't know that any senator today is as good as Phil Graham used to be. See you in 2017, right? Among working age households, the bottom 20%, so the poorest 20%, earned only $6,940 on average. That's low. But that's because only 36% of them were employed. But once you take into account transfer payments and taxes, those households had an average income of $48,806. So they earned from working $6,941. Now you can see, if your household income is $6,941 and we measure income inequality off of that number, wow. Other people who are making $60,000, that's a huge gap. But if it turns out that you get all this welfare in and you get $48,806. Well that is a lot more reasonable. That's how people live. You can't really live in $6,900. But of course they're only making $6,900, that's an average because only 36% of them are employed. Now if you take the second quartile, so this is 20 to 40%, quintile, not quartile, quintile. Quintiles are 20% gaps, right? If you take the second quintile, average age working households earned $31,811, 85% of them were employed and you can see the income inequality is huge here. They made $31,000 off of $6,900 for the lower quintile. But once you take into account transfers and taxes, they had income of $50,500. So they went from 31 to 50. That 50,000 is only 2,000, less than 2,000 more than what the bottom 20% were. Only 3.5% more than the bottom quintile. And then if you took the middle quintile, the one that covers is 40 to 60. So it covers true middle, right? Middle class. The middle quintile earned 66,453 and 92% of them were employed, not surprising. But after taxes and transfers, they kept only 61. So notice, this is the first quintile where household income actually went down once you took into account taxes and transfers. The bottom 40%, their income goes up once you take into account taxes and transfers. 40 to 60 is the first one where it comes down and it comes down to 61,000. So once you take into account taxes and transfers, right? Once you take into those account, into them account, 48,000, 50,000, 61,000, almost the same. Come on people, quintiles are not that hard to follow. One, two, three quintiles. That shouldn't even challenge your crow. Epistemology, three, three you can keep track of. 20% lowest, 20% second lowest, 20% middle. Now, once you take into account household size and you look at average income per capita, then actually the lowest quintile has a higher per capita income than the second quintile once you take into account transfers. So the people who are not working are making more money than the people who are working. 32,574 per capita versus 33 per capita. So you can see that the people who are not working at the very lowest quintile, only 9% of them are working. I'm making in America, sorry, only, what is it? Only 36% of them are working. Only 36% of them are working. That quintile is making as much money in terms of income as people who are working 92%, 85%. What you get here is a real inversion. What you get here is a situation where for many Americans, it's worth it not to work. It's worth it to be on the doll. It's worth it to receive a variety of different benefits, transfer payments, because the cost of them in terms of income is zero and potentially working is less beneficial than receiving welfare as a consequence. You get high numbers of young people who are poor by definition almost, not working, not participating in the workforce. So the bottom quintile, the bottom quintile has 2.4 times as many working age members, I'm sorry, the second quintile has 2.4 times more working age people working than the bottom. People are working harder, longer, more people are working, and yet they're making the same amount of money. Now, there's a massive injustice here. People are working hard, barely surviving, somehow scraping it together in that second quartile, quintile, and yet other people who are not working are just where they are. Now imagine if you're a working class American who's in that second or third quintile and you look at the people who are not working in America, and you're seeing them basically the same place you are, and all they do is complain because their welfare checks are not large enough because supposedly they're systemic racism because of all kinds of things. You're gonna be pissed off. You're gonna be unhappy. I think a lot of the angst that exists out there, you know, partially there's Thai suicide rates among working class Americans, the high opioid use among working class Americans, and the attractiveness of somebody like Donald Trump to working class Americans has to do with this sense of something is deeply wrong in America. If I work hard all day and other people are not working at all and we're making the same amount, I'm being taxed. My taxes are going to pay for them, but they're not working and they can work. I mean, it's frustrating, demoralizing. It explains the low workforce participation rate that we're seeing as welfare increases as government programs, and this is government programs at the federal, state, local level increase, why work? And notice that in 1967, before the war on poverty was announced, in 1967, 68% of working age people in the bottom quintile worked. In 2017 it was 36%, I don't know what it is today. So the lesson many people learnt from welfare from the war on poverty is, I don't need to work. I can get money without working. Now, you could have predicted this. This is not rocket science. This is not a surprising result. Incentives matter, but there you go. It is what it is. It is a result. This is what happens. The welfare state, as I've said, over and over and over again in debates and is destructive. It's destructive to the character of people. It's destructive to the self-esteem of people. It's destructive to their incentives. Now, if you're ambitious and you're self-motivated and so on, you can get out of poverty and you will find a job and you will work hard and you will do everything that you need to do to get out of there. But the handing of people checks, the giving them of checks, the demoralizing impact of that, not only is demoralizing to people receiving the checks, they're not ambitious. They don't, you know, particularly the weaker ones. But it's primarily demoralizing to the people whose money is being taken away from them to provide those checks who themselves are having a hard time earning a living. People just above some kind of poverty line. And it's demoralizing to that middle class. So what we're seeing in America today is not an increase in inequality, but an increase in equality at the bottom. And that increase of equality at the bottom is actually eroding self-reliance. It erodes worker pride. It erodes labor force participation. It is a government-generated income inequality. And government-generated income equality always and everywhere results in disaster. And always and everywhere is a sign of a lack of freedom, in this case, through the welfare state. One way within the context of a welfare state you could solve this, not that I'm for this because I'm against a welfare state on principle, is to make it a requirement to work if you're gonna get wealthy, if you're gonna get any supplement first work, if you're capable of, if you're... But the tragedy is you've got working-age people who are just not working. And there's no cost to that. There's no penalty to bear. And that has vast social consequences and it has vast political consequences. And I think to shift to populism, both on the left and the right, are big consequence of the fact that we have such an expansive welfare state. All right, let's shift a little bit to China. This is just, I thought this was an interesting story with regard to income inequality. And it shows kind of the two things. One is the culture matter and sometimes culture within families or among families matters. It also shows that freedom results in inequality and this relates to China. So China before communism was a fairly feudal society in which there was a certain class of people who were educated and who had a lot of income and who owned a lot of the land. Communism, and one of the reasons, I think the Chinese people embraced communism is not because they believed in communism or not because they thought theoretically this was the right system. I mean, most of them were uneducated and didn't know really what communism was. But it was because the previous system had been very unjust. Feudal systems are unjust systems that exploit people. Of course, communism is more unjust. Neither one is the solution. But that's a whole other discussion about feudalism and the transmission from feudalism, communism, which we saw both in China and in Russia. It's interesting that no country that's gone through college capitalist industrialization, semi-capitalist or somewhat capitalist period has ever gone communist. Communist countries have either gone basically from feudalism, Russia and China, to communism or brute force to communism. Forced by the Soviet Union to adopt communism like some of the Eastern European countries. But no country's ever taken the Karl Marx route, which is, in based capitalism, in based industrialization, seen a revolt of the workers transferred to communism. That has never happened. Another one of the many, many things on which Marx is wrong. So once communism rose in China, which you saw is a flattening of equality, that is, inequality disappeared in China. Land ownership basically went from a few people owning all the land to everybody owning a little bit of the land and ultimately to complete collectivization of farming and of land. It was a, you know, it was the most thorough reform in thousands of years of Chinese history, completely demolishing the feudal system, but adopting instead a system to the extent anybody owned anything they owned little, plots of land, and ultimately those who all collectivized so nobody owned anything really. In the process of all that collectivization, hundreds of thousands of land, lords, land owners were murdered. Tens of millions of people died of famine once farms were really collectivized. And for a period there, China was an incredibly equal society. Everybody was equally poor. I mean, some people were a little bit more poor and some people were a little less poor, but everybody was poor. And then we got this liberalization starting in 1978 and through the 1980s where, at least from an economic perspective, a lot of freedoms were allowed. And people got rich and inequality grew significantly and there's nothing new in that, we all know that. But what is interesting, what is interesting in this survey that was done or the study paper that was written, is a paper that looks at Chinese who come from families of the land owners, families that come from several generations of educated people, of money people, who during the years of communism, obviously all that, some people call human capital, but all that investment in education and investment in knowledge and investment in networking among people, all that was useless because there was forced equality in everybody. But what is interesting is that even among children who were born like post-communism or at the very tail end of communism, there is significant inequality now between the children of the people who, the children of the families that have history that goes back to the land owners from the families of non-land owners and even these kids are generally wealthier than members of the Communist Party. So the real advantage that you get is coming from a family that valued education, that valued work, that valued wealth creation, or at least somewhat, right? I thought it was interesting that people can rise up from nothing and even as they rise up, they're gonna be differences. Some of those differences are connected to their culture, to their family, to the value things like education have. All right, let's see, God. Very little super chat activity today, I don't know what's going on, but you guys are asleep at the wheel. All right, Josh, Josh is participating, one of the few. Josh, thank you. Let's see, you mentioned some negative reviews about the longevity research from Davidson Clay and others. Can you expand on that and point me to an objective source of info on it? Hard to find a balanced discussion. Thank you for your work. I think this is part of the problem. I think it's very difficult to find a balance because I think the research, the science is cutting edge. It's new. I think that there's a lot of conflicting information, there are a lot of conflicting studies. There are people who are incentivized because they sell products, because they are in this field to highlight and make a big deal out of every study that might mention something that's good, but not to mention the studies that show the opposite or not mention studies that then follow that reversed the previous study. But I think a lot of this is just the newness of it and the cutting edge aspect of it, that this is difficult stuff and it's difficult conceptually because it's difficult to understand the biology of aging and what it means and what it is. And then it's difficult then to understand the mechanisms by which it happens because there's no agreement about what aging actually is. I mean, that's what's stunning, right? You think that aging would be something we all agreed upon. Oh, this is what causes it. Nobody understands all these conflicting views about what causes aging. Well, if there's conflicting views about what causes aging, they're gonna be conflicting views about the pathway, the research pathway to figure out how to solve aging. And then, of course, research is very difficult and you've got statistics are very difficult. I told you that during the COVID crisis. And then you've got a real, what do you call it? I forget the name, it's called something crisis where they can't duplicate the results. So you run a test and you show, oh, look, this has this impact on mice and then other people run exactly the same test and nope, in my mice, it doesn't happen. And replicability crisis. And this is a crisis throughout the science and certainly social sciences, but also in the hot sciences. And we just saw the study in Alzheimer's where they fudged some of the results. So there's a real replication crisis out there. Now, I'll try to find the video where they talk about specifically the Sinclair study and it's actually a couple of objectivists, including an objectivist scientist who works in the field of aging, who has for years said, look, I just think this is harder than you guys think. You know, it's solvable and we're working on it, but it's harder than you think. It's more complicated. Aging is a more complicated process and Sinclair thinks that anybody out there seems to think and it's just gonna take time. And so far, I think he's been right. So I'll find that video and talk about it or link to it at some point on one of these future shows, but I don't think you should be surprised by it. And this particular scientist, this particular objectivist scientist thinks, you know, Sinclair is completely out of his depth and doesn't know what he's talking about. You know, but I don't know. I just don't know. There's a lot of, Mike, thank you, really appreciate the support. There's a lot of, it's new. This is the nature of new science. It's hard to tell. So yeah, this is, so last Wednesday, I think it was, Lee Pearson, Lee Pearson on the ARC UK YouTube channel did a show we interviewed and I hate to say that. Can't remember the guy's name. I can see his face as usual. Can't remember names, but he did an episode. It's called Cutting Edge, the show that he does on this. So I encourage you to watch that. That's the show I was referring to. And Lee does a lot of work in epistemology and has for years now, what is it? 20 years, I think, being involved in researching the research, trying to figure out what research into aging makes sense and what research into aging doesn't. And even Lee, I mean, every couple of years I ask him what's going on and yes, Robin, Robin's something. Thank you, Apollo Zeus. Ashley, you know, what's the latest? And every two years he has a different, oh, this is the solution. This is it. And then objectively, two years later he said, no, I was wrong about that. This is now it. This is the problem with the anti-aging research right now. It's still very, very, very difficult. It's still early. And because of the nature of the studies, which is primarily statistical and less about understanding the cause of relationship, you still have problems. Okay, Murslav has the answer as he often does. Murslav says, his name is Robin Mockit. Dr. Robin Mockit, who I've met over the years many times. But I know that Robin has been skeptical of a lot of the anti-aging science that has been going on and convinced that it's just harder, that it's just gonna take longer. But I encourage you and Apollo, maybe you've watched the episode with Lee, you can tell us, well, I'm accurately depicting Robin's view on this. But so I look for Robin Mockit, Dr. Robin Mockit and in a talk with Lee Pearson. And I think you'll find what you're looking for there, Josh. All right, Colt, Colt says, thank you for covering the topic on income inequality. This is something I definitely need to share with my friends, though this makes me a little sad now because I've got to go to work here in about an hour, good work. Thanks. So I recommend the Wall Street Journal article. Oh God, let me see if I can post a link to it. I will, let's see, yes. Yeah, let me post a link to it so that you can copy URL. I'm putting it in the chat, I'm putting the URL to the Wall Street Journal article. You have to go through a paywall, sorry, but that's the Wall Street Journal. I pay the Wall Street Journal to read these articles, it's worth it, the editorial page in the Wall Street Journal, I think is the best editorial page in the country. And you get a lot of this kind of quality stuff there. But so Colt, I just posted that link, you should read it. And I think it offers a lot of good arguments, a lot of good value. As I said, Phil Graham is someone with track, keeping track of because he was good as a senator and I think he's still good. Mike, thank you, Josh, thank you, really appreciate the support from you guys. So some people are stepping up on the super chat, but it's maybe because it's a Saturday, we're still short, a lot of money. All right, let's see. Let's talk about what I think many of you are here to wait to hear about. Let's talk about rap and in specifically, Rukka Rukka Ali's history of philosophy. So let me first say a few things about rap broadly, both as music and here I'm gonna be a little tentative because I'm not an explorer of music, but I'm gonna tell you my opinion, right? So rap, and then, you know, and rap not just musically, but also culturally, I wanna talk about both those things and these are sensitive, but they are what they are. So I don't like rap. I don't think rap is good. I don't think it's good music. Colleen, thank you, Colleen just put $100 in. I really appreciate that, thank you. I don't think rap is, I won't say it's not music. It's got a musical, a dominant musical element, the dominant musical element. There's also the primitive, in my view, of all musical elements and that's a beat. It has a beat and it works that beat and that's all it's really got. You know, maybe some more sophisticated hip hop rap has some melody, but melody is not what drives rap. What drives rap is a beat. So it's boring musically. It's uninteresting. It's, you know, it's as music pretty pathetic. Now you could argue that rap is, that what you have is really recited poetry and they recite the poetry to a beat. Okay, but then let's treat it as poetry then and then you should be able to read it as poetry. And I suspect that if you treated rap that way, it just wouldn't be very good. Just on the basis of poetry, although it may be as much better than a lot of modern poetry because a lot of rap at least rhymes, right? Well, rhythm is a beat, right? Rhythm is from a beat and that's all it has. It has a rhythm. I know the rap and hip hop and not the same one is built in the other. Hip hop is a little bit more sophisticated. I don't like either of them. I don't find either of them particularly enjoyable or particularly sophisticated. It just as music, it's shallow and I think boring. John says, isn't rap technically chanting? It's chanting to a particular rhythm, to a particular beat. So to the extent that it's music, I don't like it. I don't like it. To the extent that it's poetry, I don't think it's very good. I don't think it's very good. And then you have to bring in the content of the poetry, the content of the words and the whole culture of rap. And I find the culture of rap fundamentally destructive. It fundamentally destructive. It has elements that are nihilistic. It is materialistic. It is, I think, part of what has held back many of the communities that have embraced rap, primarily among African-Americans, but also among poor whites. It is a celebration of materialism. But at the same time, it tends to celebrate misogyny. It's treatment of women is horrible. It's anti-gay. It's anti-police. It's anti, you know, any kind of, it's in some sense it's even anti-work. It has become to symbolize kind of a culture which is anti-women, anti-gay, anti-capitalist, but pro-material wealth, which just appears. Of course, the rappers sell their music and they make a lot of money off of it. So it does not, in my view, offer any real values, any real values at all. Now nobody paid me to review rap in general. I'm doing this in the context of reviewing the Raka Raka Ali video. So, you know, there is a stereotype of a rapper, but the stereotype I don't think is far from, unfortunately, the truth. This is what the rappers capitalize on, you know, what makes them popular. I mean, when I listen to some of the current music by both men and women rappers, I find it horrifying, the language that they use, the, you know, this is poetry, but it's really low, the vulgarity of it, the, you know, the way they talk about sex, trivialized sex, again, all about materialism, both sexually and otherwise. And, you know, a treatment of, as I said, women, gays, or anybody who's a little different, really badly, and that context is important when you're using rap. You're bringing that context forward and you can do it differently and try to use rap to make fun of rap. But it's tricky. It's very tricky because the baggage the rap brings with it, the baggage that rap brings with it, I think justifiably, is associated with this attitude. Language and attitude. And by the way, part of it is kind of a, there's even an element of racism, or at least using the existence of racism in the culture as something, I don't know, sometimes to play off of a lot in rap. So I'm not a fan of any aspect of it. And I'm not a fan of using it as a tool to make fun of other things because unless you somehow remove yourself from the context within which rap exists, this cultural context, this stereotypical concept, context, because otherwise you're accepting some of this, you're accepting some of the things that rap embraces. And this, I think, is the main problem I see with the rap of Raka Raka Ali. Now let me, before I say anything, let me say, I like Tully. Tully is the man behind Raka Raka Ali. I like Tully a lot. I think he's smart. I think he's super intelligent. He's a nice guy. I like talking to him. He's a good guy. He's one of the good guys. So that is the context, right? So he's a good guy. I like him. This is not meant as a critique of him. I don't like his music videos. He knows this. I've said this before. And I don't like it partially because of the way it's embraced rap to make the point. Now granted, his music videos get millions of views. Nothing I've done comes anywhere close to getting the amount of views that Raka Raka Ali gets. So he's hit on something in terms of the market. And in that sense, you know, he's doing very, very well and good for Raka. And I, but that's part of the problem in a sense. Part of the issue out there is that, okay, well, let's talk, let's talk specific about the history of philosophy. So the history of philosophy is a video Raka did. You can find it on YouTube. Just put Raka Raka Ali history of philosophy. It's on two of Raka's channels. On one channel, it's got like 15,000 views, but on the other channel, it has 2.2, I think last time I looked, million views. So this is a video that's got a lot of views. This is amazing to get 2.2 million views. That's pretty impressive. So first, you have to give him that. Now, the video on the history of philosophy, let me first say, I think there's a lot of smart contents in this video. It takes a real talent to be able to condense, I think the video is six minutes, to condense kind of the highlights of the history of philosophy and thread them. So not just highlights disintegrated, but thread them through a six minute video. It's quite clever and quite interesting. This is not a boring video. So it has some really good lines. It has good integration. It fits in together. It's making a point. It's not just providing you with the history of philosophy with a bunch of concretes. Again, there's a theme. It's building up to something, to the place of reason, and to the enlightenment, ultimately it ends with ran. So this is not disjointed. It's integrated. The rhyming works, like that there's real rhyming here as you'd expect from rap. In many respects, this is quite good, right? It depends on what you view the purposes. You're not gonna learn philosophy from it, but it's kind of an entertaining presentation of the history of philosophy. It's essentialized and fairly accurate. There's nothing specific I would critique. I wouldn't try even. I mean, I will critique in a minute, but not the actual content. It's, you know, there's a lot of good in this, and it's quite interesting and certainly entertaining. However, and you know, this is what I don't like about this and I don't like about many of the other videos. It uses all the bad stuff that rap uses from repeatedly being anti-gay and including anti-gay language in this and making fun of gay people and using the F word and saying, shit, I didn't count how many times, which is good because there's a lot of just shit in this thing, it's just on and on and on and at some point, all right, we get it, there's at least one use of the N word, maybe more for what? What's the purpose of it? Why throw it out there? Because you're doing rap and that's what rap does. It's playing into that stereotype, I get it, but by playing into the stereotype, you're embracing it in some sense and you're accepting it and you're legitimizing it and I don't like that. I don't like that it's being legitimized. I don't think it should be, I think there's too much good in this to be turned off and I'm turned, certainly turned off by all the profanity, by all the anti-gay, anti-women, that is the symbolizes, right? And I don't know how many times, gay is mentioned, I don't know how many times I said shit, niggers at least twice, maybe more. I think it undermines. It undermines the presentation of ideas, it undermines what I think could have been really good and I might not have been as entertaining for a young audience and maybe you wouldn't have got 2.2 million views, right? But you would have had more integrity because the very nature of the history of philosophy is you're talking about a history of something really, really important, a history of something which has a lot of meaning, a history of something and where you're trying to condense it like this, that's quite an achievement to condense it and to have a theme through it and rhyme it and all of that and then I feel like it's being under, you know, there's no reason to say the N word. I know you want me to say the N word and you want me to say the F word but there's no reason to say it because some people find it offensive and there's no value to be gained by saying it and offending some people and the rest of you going, oh yeah, you aren't said it, isn't that cool? There's nothing cool about it. There's just nothing cool about certain words and expressing certain words if they offend other people. Now, if you want to offend them, that's fine. If there's an objective reason to use that word versus other words and their offense you view as completely irrational but the N word comes in the context of real racism not pretend racism. It's not just offensive in a modern world, it's been offensive for a long time because from an era where racism was real and not as self-created. So there's no reason to talk this way in my view, right? Now again, but this is part of what rap does. It isn't rap unless these are the words they use or at least it's not the stereotype, it's not the culture of rap unless this is the word they use, right? The fact that some people, black people like to use the N word doesn't make it legit. It doesn't make it appropriate for me to use it. I don't think it's appropriate for them to use it because it's used by them again in a context that's ultimately kind of racist and the very fact that they can say it and I can't, that in itself is ridiculous, right? So the only context in which I'd say the word is in the context of you're not allowed to say it. Now, comedy is often a way to make fun of that which is worthy of making fun but I don't think in this case and in other videos, I don't think Rucker is making fun of rap, he's embracing rap and by embracing rap, he's embracing the stereotypes. And now I know Rucker is not anti-gay, anti-women, any of these things, materialistic, any of these things. He's not, I know him, right? I know Tully, he's none of those things but he gives the impression of being that which I don't think helped the cause of presenting the history of philosophy, I think it undermines it because I think a lot of rational people would watch that and say, why does he have to use those words, right? So it's, I don't like it. There's no reason to say that, you know, Kant's view of reason is a faggot. You can present Kant's view differently, right? Or that Aristotle critica Plato amounted to Inelie raping him. I mean, yeah, I mean, I don't find it funny, maybe again, because of the context and because it's just not funny. So are you supposed to take it seriously? I guess not but in rapper, you're supposed to take it seriously. Are you having fun with it? Is it really fun when it's so nasty and it's nasty? And for some people hurtful, why do it this way? So it's obviously not coming from his ideas but it's not coming from his beliefs but it's the use of rap, I think, and his way of using rap that necessitates it. I don't like it. Haven't liked it from the beginning. I think Tully knows that. Hopefully he's not offended. I'd like to stay on good terms with him. He's a good guy but there you go. You asked, I answered, somebody paid me. And I think it's good. I mean, I don't know how to do this exactly but it would be good in objectivism. If we could criticize each other in a respectfully and accept criticism and accept that we're not gonna agree on everything and be willing to disagree on certain things is still be friendly. And I'd like to see that in objectivism. Frank says, vulgarity is low energy thinking. Yeah, I mean, I don't like vulgarity. You know that. I don't like vulgarity in anything. I don't like it in my movies. I don't like it in my music. I don't like it in podcasts. I don't like it. I just don't like it. I don't see the point of it. I think it's unnecessary and it offends. And it distances, I think, many people from the content. And the content could be good. And suddenly you're introducing vulgarity which causes us so. That is my view. All right. It's a little funny that, you know, just saying there for it can cause people to laugh and it says something about the repressed nature of our culture. And I get it, and this is, I'm not talking about now Rucka, I'm talking to more generally. I get it that Lenny Bruce, when he said therefore in his shtick, that was really funny because you weren't allowed to say therefore, you could go to jail as Lenny Bruce did go to jail many times. But also because the 1960s were a period of 50s and then 60s were a period of the beginning of sexual liberation. It was a period in which a lot of those norms were being shattered. It was a period in which sex was finally being talked about. It was a period where talking about sex was radical. And Lenny Bruce took advantage of that and he pushed that envelope. And I think in that context, it's good and it's right to do. But God, it's the 21st century already. And I still see so many comedians using, using vulgarity in a world of pretty sexual liberated people using vulgarity to get a laugh. It's a cheap laugh. It's not pushing anything anymore. And of course now they can't just say therefore they have to say things that are a lot more radical than that in order to get a laugh. But it's still, but people still laugh. And part of the reason people still laugh is because we still live in a repressed society. But it's not the language that's the fact that they laugh is an expression of that repression. And, but there's no reason for that repression as there was I think in the 1950s where it was an anti, it was a real anti-sex culture. Today that's gone. There's no reason for it. Yeah, you can be provocative without being vulgar. I think there's too much vulgarity in the culture. Wap is a big part of that, a big part of that. I mean, the dancing too is purposefully vulgar. They've taken beauty out of dance and they've taken, they've taken romance out of dance. And they've turned it into much more of a materialistic celebration of the animalistic aspects of sex. Humping is what it's turned into. It's crude and it's materialistic and it's taken the beauty out of dance and out of sex. Somebody says that he's presumed not a fan of George Collin. I am a fan of George Collin, at least some of his stuff. George Collin was brilliant. I mean, a lot of his stuff was super amazing. I don't remember George Collin being particularly vulgar. Maybe I'm missing something. All right, let's go run down the super chat questions. We're about halfway to our goal, much better than we were a few minutes ago, but still way behind. I love that dances are sexual. I think dances that are sexual can be really beautiful, but there is a, there's sexual and then there's sexual. And I think a lot of the dancing that hip-hop videos that the videos associated with modern music trivialize sex, materialize sex in a way that I don't think Latin dancers do. I think Latin dancers are not just sexual, but romantic and sensual. Sensual is the right word. They're not illustrative of the sexual act. They're more sensual and inviting of sex. All right, Dan asks, hey, I loved your interview with Lex and Malice a few years ago, re-competing governments. He gave the example of the British ambassador to the United States as living under two governments in the same territory. Could you answer that? I mean, look, it's a silly example because two things, one is, no, he's not living under two system of governments. Indeed, if the British ambassador committed a crime in the United States, he's not under US law. The Americans cannot arrest him. He's got diplomatic immunity and they would have to ask Britain to extradite him to America in order to be tried under American law. So indeed, the British ambassador in the US is functioning under British law and British Britain treaties and British commitments. Now I don't like that system. I think he should be under American law and he shouldn't have diplomatic immunity. If he commits a crime in America, he's under American law. You shouldn't get any privileges. Now I can imagine reasons why they want this, but he's not under two governments. He's under one government. Second, okay, so you can find some exclusion some special case where one guy can be under two systems. Maybe even there, I don't think it works. So what, is that generalizable? Is that a generalizable principle to other things? It's not. But again, diplomatic immunity contradicts that. What does it mean? If he speeds in America, is he gonna get a ticket? Maybe quite a pay for it? Of course not. Just, you know, you can see how many diplomatic cars in New York park illegally and get tickets and they never pay those tickets. Somebody says George Carlin was super vulgar, remember the Seven Dirty Woods segment? Yeah, but what's he doing there? I mean, that is a brilliant segment, but he's using those words to make fun of a stupid government regulation, the FAA's regulation banning Seven Dirty Woods. So he's using it, A, in the cause of free speech and he's using it to point out something very specific. Sorry, the FCC, not the FAA, FCC's. He's using it to ridicule something very specific and it's incredibly effective. He's not using the words to get a laugh. He's using the words and saying the words to illustrate the stupidity and the absurdness of some government regulation, some government system that doesn't make any sense. He's not saying F this, F that, you know, just because he knows that if he says F words, somebody in the audience will laugh. He's got a specific, legitimate purpose to using it and that's a big difference. It's a big difference. So I have no problem comedians using vulgarity. If it serves a purpose beyond the vulgarity, if the vulgarity is not standing on itself as the source of what's supposed to be funny and you can make fun of a lot of things, if what you're making fun is not the virtue but advice, in this case it's a vice of seven dirty words, which is stupid. So if you wanna see stupid things out there, if you wanna take stereotypes out there, if you wanna make fun of those stereotypes, yeah, I mean, I have no problem even using racial slurs and if there's a purpose, if the purpose is to knock them down, if the purpose is to make fun of them. But I think a lot of rap is certainly not doing that and I think a lot of the modern humor is not doing that. When the modern humor is using vulgarity or racial stereotypes to make fun of the stereotype so that we can question that stereotype and think about, well, then I think it works but if it's just done in order to be shocking, I don't like shock humor. I don't think it's legitimate. All right, let's see. Okay, we've got a bunch of superchats. Let's see, Hopper Campbell. Why did I ranch say Emano Kant was the world's first hippie? I don't remember saying he was the world's first hippie although she might have. I mean, I think what she's implying is that Emano Kant's ideas were the ideas that led to the hippie generation, that led to the hippie mentality when once Kant divorces reason from reality. He legitimizes subjectivism. He legitimizes knowledge from another source. In this case, emotionalism, whim worship which is the characteristic of the hippies. And that's what Rand is identifying. So for Rand in many respects, Kant is the origin of every one of the evil ideas of the later 20th century. And the hippies are rejecting reason because reason is impotent, because Kant showed that reason is impotent. Then what's left? Religion, one form of emotionalism or pure emotionalism, just doing whatever you feel like doing. Those are the hippies and that's what Kant makes possible. He severs consciousness from reality. He severs your mind from reality and he does it philosophically, not in reality like drugs do, right? All right, anonymous user says, additional support because you deserve a thank you. Really appreciate that. Andy says, happy to catch a live show and happy to see them starting up again. Starting up again and then they're gonna, then I'm gonna travel again. It's gonna be hard to do as many. James G says, lots of Taiwan shooting Chinese drone down. I think it's good. I think the Taiwanese need to be aggressive in protecting their airspace and they need to show the Chinese, the Taiwanese need to show the Chinese, they will not just roll over that they and they have the capabilities. I don't think this will lead to China invading Taiwan. China will invade Taiwan when China's getting ready to invade Taiwan. I don't think that's now, I don't think it's anytime soon. So good for Taiwan. James, have you heard of passport bros men? They no longer date US women. These men generally earn 60K and up. It is a growing fast. How will it impact the US? I don't know, I don't know what this is. They no longer date US women. Is this because they date women who are from poorer countries so that they can impress them with their wealth? I mean, what's behind this? I guess I'd have to know more about what passport bros men is. Hard to comment otherwise. Valdrin says moderate left is now better on most important issues in immigration, respect for intellect, support for Silicon Valley culture despite, yeah, yes, and even on economics, they're not that different than you write. And on many of the other things, they're better. So, yeah. I mean, the problem is that moderate left, there's not a lot of them. And they don't have a lot of influence because the nutty left keeps pushing in the other direction and the democratic party at least keeps folding to the nuts. Let's see, James says, continuation, I see the relationship process break down when US men are looking for foreign women. Sweden wants to block Thai women from their men. Look, I don't know. So there are a lot of men who are, I think, ultimately too insecure to date and ultimately marry women who have a strong personality, women who are raised in the West, women who expect a life of their own, not of service to the man, women who have careers, women who might make more money than the men. So I think that a lot of men don't want that. They don't want that kind of woman. They want a woman who will cater to their, all of their needs, cook for them and take them home and do whatever they wanna do and have kind of the traditional view of relation between the sexes and they don't want a woman who is, they're equal. They don't want a dagny tag out. They want a woman who's not they equal. So many of these men look for places like Asia and certainly Thailand is a source of this. Not all Thai women are like this and most of them discover that Thai women are not like this at all after they marry them. Or Eastern Europe or South America or whatever, they look for places where there is the perception of whether women still have this role where they are subservient in some sense, in some important sense. And they wanna have a relationship with those women. So they import Thai women, they import Vietnamese women, import women from Latin America or from Eastern Europe. I think it says a lot about these men. I don't think we should stop it, but yes. Now women who it is off-putting when women reject their femininity, reject their sexuality, reject the feminine aspects of being a woman. But that's not every Western woman and that's not every Swedish woman. It's not every American woman. And I think it's pretty pathetic of men to give up finding a woman with a real personality. And by the way, I wouldn't say that all women from Thailand or anything like that are not the equal. Many of them are. But many of them get into these marriages and get into these relationships to escape Thailand, right? But many of them have real personalities and they're really good people and many of them are very strong. So it depends, but people who on purpose, it's not just that they don't date local women. They don't date women from the Western world because women from the Western world are being corrupted by feminism. And to some extent that's true, but there's still enough women who haven't been corrupted by feminism and yet are strong in the Western world and these men don't want that. They don't want a woman as they're equal in significant ways. They want women who will be subservient to them. And I think that's a shame. You should look for a woman who matches you, not just who cooks your dinner. Illmatic by NAS, Reflection of Society Equals Wrap. I don't really understand that. Sorry, James. James says, listen to Lupe Fiasco Food and Liquor Album. All right? Jeremy says, how is it fair to condemn all of hip hop because some artists are vulgar or bad? It's like condemning Rachmaninoff because of Wagner. Well, I don't condemn Wagner. Never mind Rachmaninoff. I condemn Wagner's personality. I don't condemn his music. His music is not vulgar. But hip hop and rap, I'm not condemning it all. I don't like it for musical reasons. And most of it, most of the lyrics, most of the behavior, most of the music videos, most of how it's projected into the culture is vulgar. Now, is every one of the rap singers out there vulgar? Probably not. I still don't like him. Is every one of the rap artists out there bad? Well, I haven't said they're bad. But to the extent that they use vulgarity, to the extent that they use these stereotypes, to the extent that they live up to those stereotypes, let's say, yeah, I think it's bad. To the extent that they don't, good for them. In any case, I don't particularly like the music, right? Because I don't think there's a lot of music there. But enough of them, behave in these kind of ways, illustrate these kind of values, to make the stereotype somewhat legit. Again, no, you don't have to condemn every single hip hop artist because of that. And I don't, I just, but there are too many of them who do fit the stereotype. And if you're going to do hip hop or rap, don't use the stereotype. Don't play into that stereotype. And I don't think it's healthy for culture where that adores these artists, given the values they're projecting. I mean, those values, I think, undermine the culture that admires them's ability to do good in the world for themselves. Listen to Luper Fiasco, not a lot of vulgarity. So Luper Fiasco is a rap singer, I take it. But you see, I'm not interested in rap, even if it's not vulgar. I'm just not interested in rap. I don't find it an interesting medium. And maybe the poetry is interesting. I've yet to find particularly inspiring poetry in rap. So anyway, I knew I'd get in trouble in this one. LMF says, I recently watched a recording of Jordan Peterson at Ocon. I thought, Jordan Gregg didn't make it clear enough that he's evil. Are you happy with how it went? Or do you wish you'd handle it differently? No, I'm not particularly happy with how it went. I said at the time, I did a whole show saying I wasn't particularly happy with how it went. Not because I thought that it was appropriate to invite somebody and put him on stage to show he's evil. I don't think that, I don't think you do that. But I don't think that we did a good enough job in presenting the positive case for objectivism. That is, I didn't think we differentiated ourselves enough and clearly enough and sharply enough from what he was saying. I wouldn't say it wasn't too polite. It was too in the weeds and it didn't elevate differences sharply and quickly enough. And I think we could have done a much better job doing that. And as I said at the time, and I said that at the time, so this is not new, I never thought it was particularly good. I don't reject the idea of trying. I don't reject the idea of trying, but I don't think it was executed well. I don't think either I or Greg did a good enough job in sharpening the differences between us, which is what should have been the goal. The goal is to show how we're different, not to show him as evil. You don't invite a guest to show him as evil. It's one of the reasons I don't invite guests who I disagree with on the show. My purpose in life is not to show people, but the purpose was to show his supporters and a real alternative. And I don't think we did enough of that. Thank you, Roland. I appreciate it. Megan Ribbons thoughts on second moon launch scrub. I don't have many thoughts on that partially because I don't know the details and what caused it. So I don't, it's unfortunate. We need more SpaceX. We need less NASA. We need more SpaceX. And we need to privatize more and more of NASA so that NASA, the government agency gets out of the picture more and more and find ways to fund all this through the private sector. And the more we do that, the more successful missions to the moon and Michel and Stomars are going to be. Francis, philosophy requires years of focused study. How effective do you think entertainment media like song on selling a general audience? I mean, a song is just there to entertain and it's there to stimulate. So you're not gonna convince anybody with a song. You're not gonna be able to change anybody's mind with a song, but you might cause somebody to say, huh, who's the sign ran that he says at the end? I've never heard of I ran or I ran. What's a God? That's weird. Let me, let me look into it. If you like the rap, then you might associate something positive with the name and therefore, so it's marketing. I view songs as marketing. You're letting people know of something's existence, of a perspective's existence, of a view's existence, not convincing them of that existence. And in some cases, Rush, for example, the rock band, it worked incredibly successful. A lot of people, a lot of people discovered I ran because of Rush and became objectivist because of Rush. Well, they didn't become objectivist because of Rush. They discovered I ran because of Rush and therefore became objectivist after that, after they read I ran. And a lot of people discovered I ran because of Rush and didn't become objectivist. But the key is this is a way for them to discover a different set of ideas. That's the purpose of marketing. Marketing is a valuable component of selling ideas. And I think a song, something short, something catchy, something that people are going to watch can help sell ideas. But it can also, if it's done badly, turn people off ideas. So you have to do it right. All right, let's see. So we're way behind on Super Chat. Oh, Frank just helped out a little bit on that one. He says, can't imagine having some of the good ideas I get without your serious reason. Thank you. I appreciate that, Frank. Thank you. Yeah, I'm here to stimulate your ability, stimulate your thinking, not your ability, your thinking. I'm not here to replace your thinking. I'm here to stimulate your thinking. So thank you for that $50. I really appreciate that that got us significantly closer to the goal, but was still quite removed. So we're two thirds there, but not quite there. Anyway, thanks everybody. Tomorrow we'll do another show. We'll do a lot of shows in the next week and a half, because as I said, I'm going to Asia after that. And there'll be a gap. There'll be a period where I won't be able to do a lot of live shows. So we'll try to do extra live shows. We did it last week. We'll try to do it this coming week. We'll see how that works exactly. But thank you, Frank. Thank you to all the Super Chatists. Thank you to everybody who supports me monthly on Patreon and on PayPal and everywhere else. So thank you to all of those supporters. I very much appreciate you making it possible for me to do this. I love doing it. I think I'm having an impact. So if you validate the fact that I am having an impact, and yeah, we still get a lot of people watching. So that's great. All right, thanks everybody. I'll see you tomorrow, probably same time, 3 p.m. East Coast time, probably the case. And if not 8 p.m., but probably 3 p.m.