 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Welcome to the Iran Brookshow on this Thanksgiving Eve. Everybody had a good day today. Looking forward to maybe the second best holiday of all. This and Christmas, how to rank them, both so good, so cool. And great food tomorrow, hopefully. Everybody's got great food. I've got great food. We're going out to a restaurant, a holiday restaurant, the restaurant we go to for holidays. And they have great food. And it's the only place in the world, only place in the world that I know that actually makes turkey that I like. Because turkey usually, I mean, let's be honest. I don't know what the founders of Thanksgiving were thinking, but turkey sucks, generally speaking. But this place makes as good a turkey as possible to make with turkey. It's still not my favorite meat, but it's damn better than any other turkey I've ever had. Anyway, I hope you're going to have a great day tomorrow. I hope you have a great weekend. And yeah, the beginning of the holiday season, this is a great time to be alive. It's a great time to be thinking. It's a great time to be contemplating life, to assessing where you are in life. And that's kind of the orientation for today's show. It's going to be a lot, a lot is going to be about that. So I figured this is the holiday in which we celebrate production, we celebrate the harvest, we celebrate the work that we put in to be able to put food on the table. We celebrate the great producers, the people who make possible. I at least celebrate the great producers, the people who make possible the modern world, the people who make possible the wealth that we have. I mean, thank you, whoever made the video comforting thingy that I use. I was going to say Zoom, but it's not Zoom, it's OBS. It's free. And we stream. That makes it possible for it. And the computer and God, the microphone here, the camera, Sony. Thank you, Sony. I've been reading a lot about Sony. Sony is a fascinating company. And everything else, I mean, this is a day tomorrow. You can start tonight, though. To really appreciate the life that you have, to appreciate the standard of living we all have, and to appreciate where all comes from. And we know it doesn't come from any, from the state, doesn't come from any mystical being, it doesn't come from, it comes from the human mind, it comes from reason, and it comes from great, great producers. So today, we're going to talk about production. Today's show is sponsored by Adam Campbell. I think Adam is here. Yes, he is. Adam Campbell is here. So Adam sponsored today's show. You, too, can sponsor a show. I've got a bunch of questions and good topics that we're going to cover that Adam has sent me, that he'd like to hear my point of view on. But it's a great topic. I've talked about it somewhat in the past, but this time in the context of Thanksgiving and in the context of just the context of Adam's questions and the context of just what a fabulous world we live in and what a rich world we live in, this should be fun. So I'm really looking forward to talking about this, something important to everybody's life, all of our lives, and after all, productiveness is one of the seven virtues of objectivism. It is a key essential element. We'll talk about that in self-esteem. It's a requirement, I think, for having a real self-esteem, a self, you know, the kind of sense of life and self-esteem that one needs in order to achieve happiness. So productiveness is not optional. Being productive is not optional. It's something that is necessary in human life. So let's first talk about the need to produce, the need to produce. And the need is very fundamental and very, in a sense, primordial, primitive, basic. And that is the fact that as we've talked about many times on the Iran book show, nature just doesn't provide us with the means by which we survive. We don't get manner from heaven. We cannot survive on berries and nuts. We actually have to act. We actually have to think. We actually have to create the values that are necessary for us to survive at the very, very most basic level, never mind the more advanced levels of the modern world. So we have to produce hunting. We have to produce agriculture. We have to produce clothing. Animals don't wear clothes. They can only live in an environment whose climate is appropriate to the skin that they have, the fur that they have. They go out of their climate. They can't survive. This is why climate change is really, really bad for some animals, not so bad for human beings. We can wear clothes. We can take them off. We can load up layers. We've got lots of options because we create our own fur, but we create it, which requires production. It requires changing nature, taking elements from nature and restructuring them, reconfiguring them to fit human needs. And that's what production is fundamentally. It's changing the world around us, taking the elements that exist in the world around us, in nature, and restructuring them to fit our basic needs as human beings. That's what production is. And production is necessary for human life, again, because we are not born with the tools. We're not born with the knowledge. We're not born with everything we need in order to survive. We're born with a mind. We're born with the capacity to think, to reason, and therefore the capacity to produce, but not with production itself. So to produce requires effort, requires will, requires reason, requires thinking on how and what, and it requires effort. It requires engagement. It requires a focus and being motivated to do it. Now, at an individual level, again, at the most basic survival level, we, as individuals, produce the things that we need in order to survive for ourselves. But that is very limited. There's very limited things that you can produce on a desert island all by yourself. It's just so time-consuming. It's time-consuming to build a hut. It's time-consuming to fish. It's time-consuming to do agriculture. It's time-consuming to hunt. There's not enough time to invent electronics and build a microchip and build yourself a computer. You just can't do it. But very early on, human beings figured out that what they can do is specialize. Very early on, even in tribal societies, there was the beginnings of primitive and basic specialization. Some people were physically strong and fast, and they would go out maybe to hunt. Maybe somebody else was very good with their hands and had great ideas on how to build weapons. And somebody else maybe strategized about the hunt. And somebody else ultimately specialized in agriculture. And women were very good at taking the skins of the animals that the hunters brought back and turning them into clothes and maybe using the meat that they brought back to cook or to produce food. But then, basically, there was a trade going on. I hunt you weapons. I give you food. You give me the weapon. There was concentrate. And as we become more and more and more specialized, human survival and human production is fundamentally guided by trade, by our ability to trade. We no longer produce our own food, our own clothes, our own things, not even in small groups. But today, the clothes that you wear is made probably in Vietnam or in Bangladesh. The computer is made in a million different places. It's maybe assembled in China. The iPhone is assembled in China, but it has bits and pieces that are produced in, I think, 50, 60 different countries. So the essential characteristic of production today is that we must produce in order to trade. And therefore, the values we produce, the values that companies produce, must be tradable values. There must be values that are appropriate for trade and what makes something appropriate for trade that somebody else wants it. That it is a value to others. That it is a value to other people. That is, production today is about producing not just anything you wish, not whim, not whatever you feel like, not work for the sake of work, but not even anymore producing the things that you actually are going to use in that sense, your values. No, you are going to trade for your values and you are going to produce values for other people, which links us all and creates, I mean, it's a truly, truly, truly beautiful thing, production is, production and trade, because it creates a harmony among human beings. It creates this beautiful, you know, symbiotic, not symbiotic is the wrong word, this beautiful relationship among human beings where we are basically producing for one another. Now, it's ultimately for ourselves, but the way in which I take care of ourselves, the way in which I accumulate wealth is by producing for you. It's by figuring out what I think, you know, Steve Jobs, figuring out what he thinks my values are, what he thinks I would value, will value, what I am willing to pay for, and he produces it for me. Now, as I say in my talks, it's ultimately for him, but if I don't value it, if he's wrong about the value the iPhone represents for me, he doesn't get any benefits from it. Indeed, it's a net loss, net loss. So production means production of something of value to someone, whether it's yourself or other people. There is no production for the sake of production. I mean, this is the mythology or the fallacy of so much of Keynesian economics, you know, all we need is to have people, you know, to reduce unemployment, we can hire them to dig holes and fill them back in. Dig holes and fill them back in. We'll pay them, we'll put the money to pay them, but that's not production, it's not trade, it doesn't add anything. The people who dig the holes and fill the holes back in are just moochers, they're just looters, you know, where does the money come from? How do they get paid? Because only by taking from those who actually do produce, only by those who actually do create, build, make, one has to produce something that is of value to oneself or to somebody else. And if we're talking about mass production, then it has to be to other people because you can consume more than X amount of any product. And indeed, when we go to work as, you know, when we go to work and work, right, then we are producing a value for the company that we're working for who is producing values to their customers. And the customers are providing the business with a value, money, which we get a portion of as employees, which then gives us the financial ability to go out and purchase the things that we value. And again, this is why there's such a harmony of interest. This is why it's such a beautiful integration. All of our interests are integrated, all of our interests in a sense are consistent. There's no clash, there's no war, there's no conflict. So production, whether it's producing a good by reshaping the environment or producing a service, which is providing somebody with a value that might not be purely material. In all of those cases, our interests are harmonized. I'm doing it to make a living. I'm doing it hopefully because I enjoy it. I love doing what I'm doing and you're getting something in return. Otherwise you wouldn't pay the money. Otherwise you wouldn't accept what it is that I'm doing. So again, production and trade, I mean, one of the great evils in the world is this notion of exploitation, this notion of quote, consumerism, this notion of a world of exploited and exploited and exploiters of people just, when worshiping and the great CEOs are meaningless, the great producers are meaningless, the great entrepreneurs are meaningless, they're just paper shufflers, they produce nothing, they create nothing, they build nothing. When our whole life depends on what they are building, what they are creating, what they are making and that we trade off of it. This idea that we should envy other people, that we should resent other people's success when their success can only be achieved by making our lives better. So production, whether it's a product or service, is for trade and therefore inherently harmonizing. So kind of that's what it is. It's a reshaping of our world around us. Creation of something new, a creation of a value that is valuable to somebody. There's no such thing. This is an important objective of this point. There's no such thing as a value divorced from the question of for whom and for what. Iron Rand talks about this. For whom is the value? A value might be for me, for you. You might have different values. And for what? There has to be purpose. Purpose, remember, is a cardinal value in Iron Rand's ethics. What is the purpose? What do I need the value for? What is it there to achieve? So produce something, there always has to be if a whom and for what? What is the purpose? So that is what production is. And we as individuals, in a sense, must be productive. And we must be productive because I think nature has wired us and we are wired in particular ways. Wired us to a world survival, seems kind of obvious. And production is necessary for survival. So even though today, in the world in which we live today, there are many people who live off of the state, who mooch off of the state, or who kids who never go to work and stay with their parents until late adulthood, playing video games in the basement. Even though technically you can survive without producing, you're missing something. You're missing something fundamental to what it means to be human. Because to be human means to take care of yourself at some level, to contribute something to the trades that are going on, to contribute something to your own survival. And therefore, people who sit in their basement playing video games, people who do not work, people who live off of welfare, can never attain proper self-esteem. They can never attain the proper sense of themselves. What they never attain, if you will, is the confidence, the knowledge that they can take care of themselves, that they are suited for this world, that they are one with both their biological nature and the environment in which they live. They grow up completely dependent on other people, whether it's other people vis-a-vis the people who pay their welfare checks, other people vis-a-vis their parents who pay for them to sit in their basement. So they grow up inherently almost second-handers, not dependent on their own mind, not dependent on their own reason, not dependent on their own effort, not dependent on their own work, but dependent on others for everything. And we're just, I mean, there might be a being somewhere in the universe where that is okay with, it's not with us because we know we don't fit in the world. We know we couldn't survive. We know we're not living consistently without nature. And that is destructive to our happiness, to our self-esteem, to our self-confidence, to our ability, to our sense of life, to just our sense of I'm okay in this world. This is a world for me. I can take care of myself in this world. So it's, it is working is not, I mean, producing, at whatever it is that you do, however it is, however much you, whatever activity you choose to be productive, it could be art, it could be taking care of kids, it could be taking care of a household, it could be going out there into the world and starting a company, it could be any one of those things, it could be just going to a job that you love and are excited about. Any one of those things are going to enhance your confidence. Yes, I can participate and while I'm not producing the things that I wear, I'm not producing the things that I surround myself with, my production makes all these things possible. So production in that sense, so even though you're producing values for other people, you're working for other people, you're producing goods that other people will buy, you're not doing it as a sacrifice, you're doing it as a trade. You're doing it within the context of a win-win relationship and again, this is why altruism breeds resentment. Sacrifice breeds resentment. Sitting in the basement of your parents playing video games breeds resentment. Being un-welfare breeds resentment. Working, producing, creating and then trading breeds love, respect, harmony, self-esteem. Now, so we live in an advanced society in which production is all geared around trade. You know, it is true that about 300 years ago, it was still true about 300 years ago, that a vast majority of human beings grew their own food, often produced their own tools, often produced their own weapons, although there was some trade and certainly in the Western world, there was already quite a bit of trade. But it is shocking how many people still think that self-sufficiency is somehow noble, that growing your own stuff is somehow noble and good, that countries building walls around themselves and not trading with anybody else is somehow a virtue, is somehow good because the insularity of the tribe, when what you're giving up is the ability to produce and to trade with eight billion people. Openness, globalization, global trade is one of the most beautiful things in all of human history. And the results are staggering in terms of the benefits to mankind. That compared to living on a subsistence farm where you're never gonna be rich, you're stuck, you're duit poor. And again, it's such a tragedy that we're living right now in a time where globalization is found upon, trade is found upon, a buy, local buy from your, you know, grow your own food whatever, that is noble in some way. It's also a tragedy, of course, that in this release of the Infinellis Movement, a whole other topic, but that the means by which human beings survive, which is fundamentally going out there and changing nature, fundamentally going out there and taking stuff from nature and reconfiguring it to suit our needs, that has been condemned as viewed as evil and destructive and horrible and something that we as human beings should stop. Well, if we stop, we die. If we stop, we no longer survive. Now, of course, one of the great things about the way free people evolve is that we constantly seek to make ability to produce and trade more efficient. And of course, one of the great innovations in all of human history to do exactly that is money. Now, we today think of money and I think 99% of people think of money as just something the government gives us. The government creates. It's just there. It's just always been there. But money had to be produced. Money had to be created. Money is a product of innovation. It's a product of people trying to figure out how to do things more efficiently. Butter is not efficient. Trading your cow for chickens, your cow for cheese, not efficient. How do you provide change? Half a cow, a quarter of a cow? You can't do it. So, money is this great innovation that facilitates production and trade. It facilitates ability to produce efficiently, effectively, and it facilitates ability to trade with eight billion other people across oceans anyway. Once money is accepted and money today is accepted pretty much everywhere. So, money is this amazing innovation, amazing product that is necessary for us and is linked directly to production. Money historically evolved to be gold. Gold had to be produced. Gold production was directly linked to the technology of every other thing that was produced. It was very difficult to mine for gold. In days where the economy didn't grow, the stock of gold barely grew. Once we had machines, stock of gold grew faster. Once we got even better machines, stock of gold grew even faster as the economy grew faster. This is the beauty of a money that actually has to be produced. One of the great tragedies of the last 150 years or so. Is that, well, not 150 years, sorry. One of the great tragedies of the last 3000 years or so is that because of its importance, because of how crucial money is to both production and to trade, because money facilitates, I mean, think about money facilitating the ability of me to produce values for you and to be compensated for it so that I can go and get my values that is only really made possible by money. I produce stuff for you. I get money from you. I go out and buy the things I need for me. That's a beautiful thing, right? But money is so important, so crucial that really from the beginning, governments couldn't keep their hands off of it. Tribal leaders, kings, whatever the regime, the authoritarian regime of whatever period of time couldn't keep their hands off of it. And they dominated and they monopolized it and they took it over. And in spite of the fact that time and time again, it is the market that innovated about money. Paper money is a market innovation. Electronic money is a market innovation. Government always swoops in and nationalizes and takes it. And by nationalizing it, taking it, it diminishes the effectivity of money and therefore diminishes production and trade. It centralizes control and centralizing the planning of money and money is the most important good we have because it facilitates all the other goods. So all of it diminishes our production, our trade, our standard of living, our quality of life. The more government dominates the money supply, the more it diminishes our quality of life and our standard of living. The more it manipulates it, the harder it is to produce, the harder it is to know, am I getting a fair price for what I'm producing? Am I paying a fair price for what I'm getting? How do we even come up with a fair price? Market signals are gone, supply and demand is gone, money is just what the arbitrary group at the Federal Reserve decides it is. All right, so production is necessary for human life. Production is necessary for human flourishing. To produce is necessary for individual happiness. To produce is necessary for individual self-esteem. To produce is necessary for individual life. Producers are the people who make the world a better place to live in for all of us. To the extent that we produce, we are making the world a better place to live. And to say that, to say, I'm making the world a better place is not altruistic. It doesn't mean I care more about you than I care about me, on the contrary. I need to produce for my own self-esteem and happiness, but I also need to produce in order to get the money so that I can pursue my values. I can create a beautiful environment around me so I can go on wonderful trips so I can buy the equipment that makes it possible for me to produce more. So again, the idea that you're making the world a better place to live is not an altruistic phrase. It is a fact of reality. It is a fact of reality that is necessary. It's necessary to make the world a better place to live. In a world in which production and trade are the way, you know, the way in which we live, it doesn't, it's no meaning to the concept of trade where you're losing, right? Trade is by its very essence, win-win. Trade is by its very essence making the world a better place to live. Both parties because it's a win-win transaction. So production means making the world a better place. That's from a completely egoistic perspective. What I care about is my ability to produce, to produce what, to produce values for use. I can trade for them. All right, so, you know, again, it's not altruistic to talk about it in those terms. In a true free market, in a market in which people are free to pursue their values and to trade with anybody and to produce and create and build and make and trade freely, you know, our quality of life, our standard of living grows constantly because the human mind, human reason is endless. There is no limit to our ability to think and produce and create new, better, wonderful things. Better mousetraps constantly. We're constantly raising our own standard of living. We're constantly raising the standard of living of those who trade with us. And the people who I think are particularly valued in a capitalist society are the people who are the most productive. That is, create the most values. Whether those values are spiritual values or material values, it is the value creation and the trading of values that make those values accessible to all of us and enhance our lives. And to see the geniuses of production, the genius of production in the arts, the geniuses was a production. In business, the genius of production in any realm, they are the real heroes because they are the people who really change the world. They're the people who make the world a better place for all of us. So to me, the Steve Jobs's of the world, the, you know, Elon Musk's potentially, but certainly the Jeff Bezos of the world, they're the people who we should be tomorrow celebrating. And it's not just them. It's the amazing developers who build the real estate projects that we all live in and enjoy and thrive in. It's the people who are out there in agriculture making better and better and better food for us all to eat that is less expensive and more nutritious and more delicious. It's the great chefs at the great restaurants that we go to that enhance our lives that are really good at what they do. And that's what differentiates them from everybody else. They're really good at what they do. They're the real heroes of our life. They go unthought about primarily because we tend to think that, yeah, we paid them. I paid Bezos, I used Amazon, I paid the check, I pay with the credit card, he gets the money. What more does he need? Well, it's not what he needs, it's what you need. What you need is an understanding of how much value you're getting relative to how much value you're paying, you're getting much more than you're paying. And that's true of any great achievement out there. I've, you know, I've been reading this book, Chip Wars, and it's stunning. It's stunning what's just happened over the last, I don't know, 20, 30 years. We all take our iPhones for granted, but this is an amazing achievement. The number of chips in this thing, I don't know, there are four, five, six chips in here. Each one of those chips has billions of transistors. The ability to produce those chips, to get them into phone this size, to manage the heat, to manage the heat, to make it easy to use, to integrate it with software, and with a screen that's touchable. Now, one of those steps is easy. I mean, I've been reading about the chips themselves, and the chips themselves are stunningly difficult to produce. And, you know, we buy, every year, we buy another generation of computer. Every year, we buy another generation of iPhone. We just assume they're gonna be faster. We assume they're gonna be better. We assume they're gonna be, in some cases, smaller, flatter, thinner, or whatever. And yet, the amount of brain power, the amount of thinking, the amount of genius in producing, in production, is just out of this world. It's hard to actually explain. I mean, I've been reading, today I was reading about the most modern chips. So Moore's Law basically predicted you could get double the transistors on a chip every two years, I think. You could double it, so it's exponential. This is how we got to millions and billions of transistors on a chip. And, but at Intel, they realized that with existing technology they had, this is 30 years ago, this is in the 90s, they realized that they were gonna hit a brick wall, that there was a limit with existing technology to Moore's Law. At some point, they wouldn't be able to do this. Continue. That is your computer, at some point, would not be faster. It would just, it would be stagnation. It wasn't even, they would slow down the ability to progress. At some point, that technology could not make chips faster, better, cheaper, smaller. And somebody came up with the idea of using extreme ultraviolet light, which is impossible. As of 30 years ago, impossible. But Intel decided to invest 200 million dollars in figuring it out. Over the following 30 years, they spent $4 billion. But it's not just them, many companies around the world spend billions and billions of dollars. Not in competing with one another, but actually working with one another. And ultimately, one company, ASML in Holland, in the Netherlands, actually landed up being the company that integrated all this knowledge, that bought all the players together, that took it all and actually produces the equipment that is gonna make, that is making and going to make the next generation of chips and gonna make it possible for Moore's Law to continue. And ASML is this amazing company that nobody's ever heard of. And yet, ASML right now makes the world possible. It makes every next generation of chips being faster, being better, being smaller, being cooler possible because they're the only company in the world that produces the equipment that can make, that uses extreme ultraviolet light to make electronic chips. Now, yeah, I mean, you guys all know Intel, AMD, Intel and AMD are way behind the curve. The real production of chips actually happens in South Korea, in T, T something, something, something. But everybody uses ASML's equipment. They couldn't produce the chips without it. All AMD does is design chips. It doesn't produce chips anymore. Yes, TSMC, thank you. TSMC is the company in Taiwan, a company in Taiwan built by a, China is a great story about production and immigration and the critical nature of immigration. The guy who made, who built TSMC, which today is by far the largest producer of chips in the world, it fabricates chips. That's what it does in Taiwan. Intel still produces some chips, but most companies outside of TSMC and Samsung basically design chips, but the actual production of chips happens in TSMC. And that company was built by a guy named Chang, who was born in China. Parents escaped the communists to Hong Kong. Ultimately went to school in the United States, got a job at Texas Instruments, was crucial, one of the key people in the early innovations around chip manufacturing at Texas Instruments. And it was a very, very senior guy at Texas Instruments, left TI when he was passed over for CEO of TI, landed up being recruited for Taiwan. He never really lived in Taiwan, right? He's from mainland China, Hong Kong, recruited by the Taiwanese to come and start a chip industry in Taiwan. This is after he'd already started production of chips in Taiwan for TI years earlier, went over to Taiwan and well into his late 70s, was running TSMC and was basically crushing the competition and built the best, by far the best, chip fabrication company in the world and invented the whole idea of chip fabrication without design, that is fabricating chips for other people who actually design it. The whole story is this amazing story of this incredibly productive human being, he's not one of my heroes, this incredibly productive human being, immigrated, traveled all, did hopped around everywhere he was, was brilliant and it's not just that he was brilliant in terms of chip design, but he was brilliant in terms of business, he was brilliant in terms of production, he was brilliant in terms of engineering and integrating all of that. And he is, I don't think he's still there, but he's in his well into his 80s if he's still alive. I still haven't got to that chapter in the book where he leaves TSMC, but we'll get there soon. The book is not on him, the book is, I highly recommend this book called Chip War, the Chip War and it's by I think Chris Miller and it's a fantastic, fantastic book, I'm really, really enjoying it. Anyway, my point is production requires effort, requires integrating massive quantities of information, of knowledge, of resources, of people across the world. This extreme ultraviolet thing could have never been built without expertise from Germany, without expertise from the United States, without TSMC, without Intel, without some of the government labs that did basic science. I think the Livermore, something Livermore lab and other labs. I mean, without of course the company, the SML company in Holland, without experts from all over the world, just like the iPhone cannot be made without production facilities and people producing and people being productive in 50, 60 different countries, all being integrated into, you know, and all it says in the back here, it says some way, assembled in China, designed in the US. But what about the 5,000 steps in between? From design to assembly, a lot happens, including TSMC, actually building the chips, actually fabricating the chips. The chips are not fabricated in China, the chips are fabricated in Taiwan. Do you know, and this is just an interesting story, do you know who made the chips for the first iPhones? The first few generations of iPhones. Who fabricated the chips? Now at some point early on in the 2000s, Apple bought a chip design company with the idea that they would be designing their own chips, but who fabricated, but Apple doesn't fabricate its own chips. So who fabricated the chips for the first iPhones? Samsung, Samsung who then became Apple's largest competitor. It was an LSA, it was Samsung. The competitor of the iPhone. Capitalism is much more about cooperation, much more about integration, much more about harmony of interests than it is about competition. Now competition is crucial. When you don't have competition, bad things tend to happen. Ask IBM, well and ask Intel and ask the Japanese. But competition is not the essence of capitalism. The essence of capitalism is actually cooperation. The essence of capitalism is actually working together, integrating. So in capitalism, I mean capitalism in its pure form is an amazingly beautiful thing. And one of the great tragedies of the world in which we live in is the extent to which it is distorted, perverted by government control over money, by government money invested, by government distortions of the productive process by subsidies and all kinds of other favors. Although granted, TSMC probably wouldn't exist. Certainly wouldn't exist in a form that exists today. Maybe not, wouldn't exist in Taiwan. If not for government, for the Taiwanese government investing heavily, heavily, heavily in it when it was first founded. In capitalism, you are rewarded for your production. Not for your ability, not for your ability, not for your potential. Sometimes for the potential, short run, but not for the long run. Not for your, I don't know, ethnic group, sex, gender, whatever. Capitalism rewards you for what you produce. You could be the smartest, most talented, most amazing person in the world. You don't produce, you don't get paid. It's like basketball. We all get basketball. You can come out of college fully hyped and everything and you could get a great contract to start out with, but if you don't produce, if you decide, I'm not gonna work too hard. I'm not gonna make an effort or you get injured or whatever reason, you just don't produce. You're not gonna get paid. You're certainly not gonna get paid, which you could get paid if you did produce. So, as a consequence of this, because capitalism rewards production, nothing else, production. Capitalism in its proper form would not tolerate sexism. It would not tolerate racism. I mean, imagine if in a real free market, women, female lawyers were paid less than male lawyers, systematically and for no good reason. What would happen? Well, I would start a all female law firm. Pay them a little bit more than what they're being paid in the other firms and I'd have the best talent and I'd be paying them a little bit less, but then somebody else would pay them a little bit more and then competition would drive the price to be the same as that of men. Couldn't get away with it. Same with racism, same logic applies to racism. If there's a guy who happens to have the wrong color of skin, is being underpaid, then he'll go to somewhere else, better pay him a little bit more and if he still overproduces somebody else, he's gonna pay him a little bit more until he gets paid appropriate to his productive level. Irrespective of the color of his skin. Indeed, the solution to racism, sexism and all these problems is fundamentally production. The profit motive, trade, capitalism. And there's no limit to it and I'll end on this. There's really no limit to how much we can produce and trade. There's no limit to how wealthy we can become. There's no limit to economic growth. There's no limit to how successful we can be. People say, you know, people are too rich. What does too rich mean? There's no limit to how rich people could get. There's no limit to how many forms we can take. We can take the atoms in the universe and reformulate them. I guess my favorite part of David Deutsche's book, Something Infinity, my favorite part of the book is when he talks about the human capacity to take, in a sense, the atoms that are out there and reconfigure them into new things and recreate the world around us. And he has a great way of describing that and presenting that. But it's absolutely, it's, and what's this bring up the poor too? There are no poor. Not in a free world. What does poor even mean? Some people are going to be poorer than others but there's gonna be nobody who's poor. And not because anybody cares but because there is so much wealth and we are so productive. And if we get paid on that productivity that there is no such thing as poverty. Not in any kind of objective sense. The book is The Beginning of Infinity, thank you. Now, even though we don't live under capitalism, we don't live in complete freedom. We don't live in that kind of world. It is still true. And I know there's some objectivists who disagree with me about this but I think they're fundamentally wrong. There is massive innovation going on out there. The extreme ultraviolet chip making technology is just one example of it, but there are millions of them. There's fantastic innovation going out there. There's real wealth being produced. There are incredibly valuable new services being made possible and being provided to all of us. Amazon being a prime example of it. And yes, in a world that was completely free, maybe these particular innovations would look different. Maybe it would be different people producing them. I don't know. I doubt that. I think Jeff Bezos is Jeff Bezos, no matter what the world around him is. I think Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs, no matter what the Fed does. There is massive amounts of production going on in the world today. And people who claim, I mean, as even Peter Schiff does, that America produces nothing, I mean, don't know what they're talking about. Designing chips is more valuable in some cases than actually building them. And in a globalized world in which we can trade and which we can specialize, if America specialized in designing chips, Silicon Valley specializes in designing chips and Taiwan specializes in fabricating them and, you know, South Korea specializes in wafers. I mean, how amazing is that? Because the economies of scale and the efficiencies produced by that kind of specialization is hard to imagine. It's stunning. And then at the periphery of all these different things, there are geniuses who are working on things like extreme ultraviolet light or whatever and shrinking those chips to so small that it's hard to even imagine. It's hard to even contemplate how they could be so small and how they could be so powerful, and yet they are. I mean, people throw around the sizes of these chips, but what are those sizes actually mean? How small is that? It's unbelievable once you get into it, once you discover how small the microprocessors on this thing are. And how powerful they are relative, let's say to any computer in the past. And not to wonder, not to live in wonder of these things, not to wonder about them, to live in wonder of them, not to appreciate it, not to admire it, not to cherish it, not to love it, is what a loss in life. I mean, one of the great spiritual values that we have is to see how amazing the world around us is, to see what human beings can produce, what human beings can create, what human beings are capable of. It's just a wonderful, amazing world that we live in. And Thanksgiving is the holiday which we celebrate that, the productive talent, the productive achievement, the productive genius of the people who live in our world, the people who make the kind of lives that we all live possible and make much better lives much better than this possible. So have fun during Thanksgiving, enjoy it, celebrate not some mystical being putting the food on your table, but celebrate your own productive skills that have brought food to the table. Celebrate your own life. But in particular, give a moment of thought, give a moment of celebration, raise a glass of wine, or whatever it is that you're drinking. To the great innovators, the great producers, the great creators, the people that at every level have made our lives so phenomenal and amazing and rich. All right, happy Thanksgiving everybody. I hope you enjoy the holiday. Let's take some super chat questions. We don't have a lot for a holiday to celebrate productive. It seems I haven't been very productive today. Not as measured in dollars, at least. We're like, yeah, 550 short of our 650 goal. Come on, people. Yeah, we don't have a lot of people watching live, so maybe that's part of it. It is, after all, Thanksgiving Eve. And the topic I chose today is not political, so less viewership. Part of the challenges we face. Okay, Richard, I says, I agree on Turkey. I'm going to be staying home, traveling to meet my girlfriend on Friday in Chicago. What are some of your favorite restaurants in Chicago? Well, Chicago has the best restaurant in, best restaurant in the United States, which I think is Alinea, but it's super expensive and it's, you probably can't get a reservation. There are a lot of good restaurants in Daltown, Chicago. I mean, Charlotte used to be in Chicago. I mean, try to pass away and the restaurant's been closed for many years. But you know, I can't remember names right now, but there's a lot of good food in Chicago. There's some good kind of modern Mexican places that are really terrific. I couldn't tell you what intersection, although I can see the intersection. I can see where the restaurant is. But there's a great steakhouses. Great steakhouses in Chicago. So lots of good places to eat in Chicago. No shortage. All right, Andrew says, Lex Friedman asked Jordan Peterson if beauty was painful to him. Well, of course it's painful for Jordan Peterson. Paraphrasing Jordan Peterson's response. Yes, definitely. My analysis of the message of the statue as David is, you could be far more than you are, thoughts. Yeah, I mean, God, how that is painful. See, this is the sense of life. When I look at David, I look at, wow, the potential. The ability to be great, the striving to be great. And I've seen David a part of me. You know, I'm not pretentious enough to think of it as me, but a part of me. I strive to be that. I strive to be courageous. I strive to be strong in the face of adversity. I strive to have that kind of confidence. And it's something to strive towards, to achieve. It fills me with awe. It fills me with love. The capacity for human beings to be that beautiful and that great and achieve so much as David is clearly going to achieve. So it brings out all the positives about my own life and all the positives about life in general and all the positive things I want to still achieve. And for Jordan Peterson, it brings out, well, what religion is supposed to bring out? How small am I? How nothing am I as compared to the grandeur of the David? What a low self-esteem one must have. What a low self-image one must have to think that in front of the David, that that be your response to the David. I missed out. I could have been David and I'm not. It sucks. I never lived up. I haven't lived up to my potential. That's sad. I mean, the main emotion Jordan Peterson's response evokes in me is sadness. It's sad. I'm sad for him. Sad for him. And this applies to the whole discussion about production. It's imagine if all of us worked around depressed constantly because we weren't Steve Jobs. You know, I'll never be Steve Jobs. Imagine if every employee at Apple was depressed because they weren't Steve Jobs and decided I can't live up to that, can't live up to it. I'm just gonna go huddle up in my parents' basement and nothing would ever be produced. Nothing would ever be created. Instead of taking the perspective of I wanna be the best that I can be. The best that is possible to me. That's what I wanna do. It's the only sane perspective. It's the only connected to reality perspective one can have. I wanna be something I cannot ever be. I wanna be something I wanna be my fantasy. Fantasies are not real. The best that you can be, that's what you need to strive to be. And I'm not jealous or envious or feel smaller because of giants. I feel bigger because of giants. I know how much they contribute to my life. And I know they're just contemplating them, just knowing they exist tells me how amazing human life can be. And even if I don't get to live completely that way, just knowing that that's possible makes my life better. Knowing that Steve Jobs is of the world are possible. Knowing that a Michelangelo exists. Knowing that a sculpture of David exists. That somebody created it. That somebody is capable of creating it. Makes my life immediately better. It's everything about an objective sense of the world. Everything about the objective's morality. Everything about the objective's view of life is the opposite of Jordan Peterson. Opposite of Jordan Peterson. We're not fellow travelers. We are the opposite. And I think there's one question about seeing something beautiful says it all about who and what he is. And beyond pitying him, beware of him. Beware of his influence. Beware that his sense of life, his sense of the world, his ethics is not contagious. Joe says, happy Thanksgiving, Yuan. And all the listeners, thank you. Joe, happy Thanksgiving to you as well. Kayfax says mashed potato money. Mashed potato, I don't eat mashed potatoes. It's cobs. Can't eat cobs. No cobs around me. So, thank you Kayfax. Richard, thanks for the recommendation. I'm not sure if you received my email with a poem but I sent $100 by PayPal. I think this should count towards the super heat, super heat goal. What's a super heat goal? I don't know what the super heat goal. But I did get the poem, thank you. I did get the email with $100, so thank you for that. And if I can find the poem, I will read it now. All right, so this is a poem Richard sent me to read online. Paid me $100 to read the poem. It's short, so I'm gonna read it now. Let's see if I can, I just need to blow up the text a little bit. Let's do this. And a copy pasted here. So I can blow up the text and I'll read it to you. It's a poem about a gentleman square. It's not exactly in the spirit of Thanksgiving, although it's in the spirit of freedom, certainly. But it is tragic, of course, but let's see, sorry. This is a song written by Philip Morgan about a gentleman square. A song was heard in China in the city of Beijing in the spring of 1989. You could hear the people sing. And it was the song of freedom that was ringing in the square. The people could feel the passion of the people gathered there for many nights and many days waiting in the square to build a better nation was the song that echoed there. For we are China's children. We love our native land, our brotherhood and freedom. We are joining hand in hand. That's really nice. I mean, it's tragic because the song seems to be ignoring what happened to them, right? Their failure and the brutality of the regime that crushed those kids destroyed their dream, destroyed their passion and prevented China from achieving greatness and achieving freedom and greatness ultimately. So yes, that is the poem. I'm curious if you wrote a follow-up after the Chinese crushed Tiananmen Square. All right, let's see. John, thank you for the $50, really, really appreciate it. Whoops, I shouldn't have done that. Oh, Adam says, thanks as always, Yuan. What about a leader's view of the productive versus what the unproductive deserve? I mean, the real damage is done by the intellectual leadership that we have. Our intellectuals don't understand production. They don't understand where it comes from. They think it is inevitable. I read, when I read environmentalists, they always say, well, technology will solve these problems. And, but technology is something that just happens. It, because they're anti-capitalist and they're anti the producers. So, and you see people like Richard Wolff and the socialists who think that even if you completely change society and dissolve all the incentive structures that exist today, production will still happen. Innovation will still happen. People will still innovate. Ingenious will still be there. We'll still have progress, even though you've taken out the whole scaffolding, the whole structure which production depends on. You've taken away the self-interested incentive, the self-interested motivation that results in that production because communists don't produce anything. So, our intellectual leaders just take production for granted. Now, the real nihilists among them wanna see people die, wanna see us poor, wanna see production destroyed, wanna see it all in ashes. But most of them, the non- nihilist ones are just either ignorant or vicious, evil because they just take it for granted but deep down they know it can't happen. And in that sense, they're ultimately nihilist themselves. Our political leaders, our political leaders don't know what production is. They've never produced anything in their lives. Almost all of them have never had real jobs before. They've certainly never really produced in any scale. They take again production for granted. They take the producers for granted. The producers for them are explicitly, explicitly for many of them, they are, you know, sacrificial animals. They are the people to be sacrificed for the good of the state, for the good of the proletarian, for the good of the poor, for the good of somebody. So, it's super destructive and super depressing. You know, one of the most evil things I know of, this is why I hate Katie Porter so much, is when Congress brings in front of them all these great producers, CEOs, financiers, who come in front of them and are grilled by a bunch of ignoramuses, a bunch of losers, a bunch of leeches and mooches, a bunch of nobodies, grilling. The most productive people in the world, the people who make the modern world. And they're being grilled by nobodies, losers, not nobodies, worse than nobodies, leeches, and the opposite of Thanksgiving, right? And that to me is the most horrible thing in the world. And it horrifies me every time I see it. Every time I see it, it's pretentious. And it's Republicans and Democrats, particularly Democrats, but also Republicans, they jump in on this, they think they're smarter. No, they're much, much dumber in the most important aspect of life, production. Adam, thank you for sponsoring this, this, I think a super important topic, super valuable topic. Oh, let me just take Richard on the poem. He says, that was just the first lines. The rest of the song poem was much darker. I think there's something heroic in their struggle. Absolutely. Even if it was in vain, as in Lemmy's Robles, I think the sense of life conveyed as heroic. Yeah, no, absolutely. And absolutely, I think that this struggle is heroic. I mean, what are you gonna struggle for, if not for freedom and if not for liberty? And it's a selfish struggle, even if you fail, because who wants to live without it? Who wants to live as a slave? So it's a beautiful struggle. It's a noble struggle. You're right, as in Lemmy's Robles, as is all people who are oppressed and who fight to rise up against their oppressors. This is the story of Spartacus. So it's, yes, it's sad, tragic, but at the same time beautiful and noble and heroic, very heroic. So the people in Tiananmen Square were definitely amazing heroes. All right, I see there are quite a few Tiananmen poems. There are quite a few poems that were written for Tiananmen Square. Interesting. I wasn't, I really wasn't aware of that fact. There's a whole, I guess there's a whole book. Of poems for Tiananmen by Elixai and Liao Yiwu. It'd be interesting to read some of them. All right, let's see. Thank you, Richard. We are about halfway to our goal. Still about $335 remaining, so a little beyond, a little under halfway. All right, Michael says, why are some power lusters like Khazoni and Peterson more sympathetic to free markets than other power lusters and mystics like Paul Krugman? Or do you think Yoram and Jordan are only pretending to be sympathetic to markets? Yeah, I mean, I don't think when a rubber hits the road, when markets contradict something that they want from a collectivistic perspective that they would advocate for free markets. They just view, they have enough of an understanding of the world to know the free markets are the way they create some prosperity. They know that, they know enough history. And it's not like Paul Krugman's against free markets. Or Elizabeth Warren, they all claim to be pro-free markets. And there's not that much difference between Jordan Peterson, Yom Khazoni, and Paul Krugman when it comes to economics. There's Jordan Peterson is closer to Paul Krugman in economic policy than he is to me. Then Jordan Peterson is to me. I mean, we're the radicals. Nobody else is a radical. Yom Khazoni and Jordan Peterson are now radicals when it comes to economics, quite the contrary. But they do have an understanding that for their collectivistic endeavors, you need a marketer. One of the reasons they believe that central planning is bad is because they believe human beings are fundamentally flawed. The human beings are fundamentally bad. And therefore should never be granted the power that comes with central planning. That's their objective to central planning. It's, ooh, it gives too much power to flawed human beings. If human beings were angels, central planning would be fine. Iron Rand is very critical of that kind of conservative defense of capitalism, which is very prominent on the right, very featured on the right. And then I think a lot of them, though, think that the more modern National Conservatives and integralists believe that free markets can be improved. You want a market, and then you want a central planner, a really, really smart Catholic central planner who can manipulate the market in ways that the margin improve things, make them better. Park Krugman believes the same thing. He just believes that that central planner should have a little bit more power than Yom HaZoni, but it's just a matter of degree, whereas we believe there should be no central planning. That's a difference in kind. Again, I am further away from Jordan Peterson and Yom HaZoni than they are from Park Krugman. I would argue that they are from Karl Marx. Richard says, I started reading Steve Jobs's biography, fantastic book illustrating his heroic sense of life. I plan to stop chip war on audible soon thanks to the recommendation. If I prayed, I would thank God for Jobs and Bezos. Absolutely, absolutely. And many others, many, many, many, many, thousands, millions of productive people out there in the world. And when you read chip wars, you're thankful to Moore from Moore's Law and to Andy Grove and to the guys at Bell Labs who first created the superconductor and the guys who founded Fairchild Semiconductor and then, you know, all the rest, I forget the main guy's name, who helped both invent the first transistors and who founded the first company based on all of that. So, ah, his name is stuck in my mind. Anyway, there's so many heroes to the story. There's so many productive heroes. In every single industry, in every single industry out there, that's what's super amazing. It's not just one or two people, although one or two people stand out. Right, Richard says, some experts estimate that there were 100 million people who participated in the protests across China in 1989. The pathetic Bush senior response, the crackdown was one of his country, this country's blackest moments in modern times. I agree, absolutely. I mean, it should have been clear to the Chinese regime that the Western world will have nothing to do with it, given that they just killed tens of thousands of their own people, that that was a regime that we would not, you know, have diplomatic relations with. We would not treat as a civilized country. We were not, they should have been kicked out of whatever international programs they were in and they would have to make some kind of, they would have to change dramatically. And instead, I don't know, Shockley, thank you, Shockley was the guy who, Shockley Semiconductor was the first really semiconductor company that was ever created and that was Shockley, but Shockley was a terrible manager, a great, great, great scientist and a great engineer and very arrogant, very sure of himself, but ultimately not a good manager, not a good entrepreneur and ended up being more of an academic and where he kind of belonged. So he did amazing research and helped promote the semiconductor and the transistor, but was not the guy who actually made it. The key people left Shockley and found a Fairchild and Fairchild, really, that company started the modern Silicon Valley. HP was the first Silicon Valley company, but Fairchild Conductor was the first semiconductor company in Silicon Valley and from it, you got Intel, from it, you got most of the venture capital community or the big venture capital firms of that time. I mean, it birthed, it birthed, yes, the modern Silicon Valley, Fairchild Semiconductor, but those are great stories and once you read them, you got to be thankful to all those people, amazing, amazing individuals. Richard says, my great aunts worked at Bell Labs working in software development back in the old days. She said it was incredible to be there at that time. Who and what are the most thankful for this? Who and what are you most thankful for this Christmas? This, thanks to you. Yes, I mean, Bell Labs, I read a book about Bell Labs, amazing place, amazing place. The innovation, the energy, the collaboration, the competition, the allowing the scientists to just explore and to try new things in spite of the fact that it was part of a semi-private company. It was under Bell Labs, under Bell AT&T really, which was a government-protected monopoly, but just the spirit of the place was pretty amazing. Look, I'm thankful to you guys. Thank you for helping me with making the Iran Book Show a success, something I can almost live off of, not quite yet, but we're slowly moving in that direction. And hopefully in 2023, we will cross the threshold of Iran Book Show being something that I can say, yes, this funds me, this finances me. I live off of the show. But we've come a long way to get there and there's still a way to go, but I'm convinced we will get there whether it's in 2023 or 2024. We will get to the point where this will be my source of income. This will be how I make my living, at least funding my day-to-day or my year-to-year. I'm thankful to my wife and to my, we're going to be married in February, we're going to marry in 40 years, and to everything she makes possible in my life. I'm thankful to all the people who produce stuff in the world, who make my life amazing. My, to the people who create all the stuff that's around me and all the stuff that I use and all the, I'm even thankful to the airlines and the hotels and the apps on my iPhone that make my travel possible, right? And relatively comfortable, relatively speaking, right? So, you know, I live, and you know, I have to say, I'm thankful to all the restaurateurs in Puerto Rico and around the world who survived COVID, who had a really, really hard time during COVID. They were shut down, they were locked out, they were prevented from doing their job and making a living during COVID, and yet they somehow got through it and here they are and they're back producing and make my life much better for their existence. So, you could go on and on and on, but that's some of the people I'm thankful to. Oops. Colt says, you're my second favorite political commentator. Who's your first? I'm curious who your first is. You can't say that without telling me who your first is. I don't always agree with you, but great at what you do. Tomorrow I'm going to have fun and remember the hard people put in, the hard work people put in so that we can have all the good things. Please accept this trade. Thank you Colt, really, really appreciate it. I am curious now who the number one is. Ben Shapiro? I'm curious who the number one commentator is. All right, and I want to be number one, so what can I do? Well, I'm not going to be number one. Obviously we disagree on some things. All right, let's see. Landon. All right. Any being that did not have to produce for survival could not have any value and therefore could not be happy like Mr. Mann had no any idea of God. Yeah, well, unless they didn't have free will, right? I mean, you know, so animals don't have to produce. And it's true they, you know, at some level they value and they can be happy, happy, but they can be satisfied or not satisfied. So, but yes, I, you know, you have to value comes from the, you know, values come from the fundamental, Ryan talks about this, the indestructible robot. If you could not die, if there was no possibility of going out of existence, if you didn't have to do stuff in order to exist, values would be meaningless to you. There would be no values you would, your life would have no meaning and you couldn't achieve happiness, but you wouldn't have any values. You would just be there, nothing. Jennifer says, you are my favorite commentator. Happy Thanksgiving, you're on. I appreciate it. Thank you, Jennifer. I'm still curious who Colt's number one commentator is. I wanna know. Ryan says, is arbitrage the same as production? When I was in high school, I could buy stuff cheap at the garage sales at Craigslist and resell in eBay. I often felt guilty for taking away good deals from locals. No, absolutely arbitrage is production. You're creating value for somebody, the person you're selling it to. You're buying it cheap. That person didn't have access to that thing that you're buying. Therefore they're buying it from you. You're probably selling it cheaper to them than they could have got anywhere else. So, you are absolutely arbitrage or what is it, resale or it's not, this is not pure arbitrage, what you're doing. But all of that is production. Indeed, finance is production. Scoping tickets is a form of arbitrage and is a form of production. So all of that is making stuff accessible to people who couldn't otherwise get it, couldn't otherwise make it. But finance is unbelievably productive even though 99.9% of the people don't see it, don't get it, don't understand it. Most financiers don't understand why they're productive. I wrote a book about it. You can read my book on why finance is productive. So, the moral case for finance, it's on Amazon. Colt says, but this has come Colt earlier, so he's not gonna answer my question yet. I'm still waiting for the answer. Colt says, we should be grateful for the good. It's sad that today people think they have a right to the goods and services, that someone else had to work hard to make. Healthcare and social media come to mind. Yes, absolutely. And remember, it's not that people work, it's not just the hardness of it. It's the fact that somebody created a value for you, whether they worked hard or whether it was easy for them. It's not relevant. What's relevant is that it's a value to you and somebody else created it. We tend to pretend to value hard work way too much. The issue is not the hard, the issue is the work, and the real issue is the value creation. Mollie Vallui, thank you. $100, really, really appreciate it. I think that's the largest today. Yes, that's the largest today. We got 50 from John, but that's fantastic, thank you. He says, thank you. Iran, appreciate all that you do, loving the daily news shows. Happy Thanksgiving. Really appreciate it. Mollie, there'll be another new show on Friday. No news show tomorrow. Joanna Bauer says, you are number one. Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving. Thank you, Joni. And don't forget, guys, that you become members of the Iran Book Show by clicking underneath as a membership button in YouTube. And next month, I will be doing a members-only show. I'm still deciding on the topic for the members-only show, but it will be live, you'll be able to watch it later, but it will be live and the chat will only be available. It will be live-only for members and chat-only for members. So I'm looking forward to doing that. That'll be fun, it'll be more intimate, and we can do a topic that maybe is not sexy and popular as everybody else, but something that maybe you guys like. Michael said, is what are the new innovations in ultraviolet light? This is extreme ultraviolet light, and the whole thing is producing extreme ultraviolet light is almost impossible. You need lasers that didn't exist, yet invent new types of lasers for materials that nobody thought could be manipulated in the way they were. You had to produce mirrors that are unthinkably precise and accurate. I think I read the description is, if the mirror, this is the amount of flaw in the mirror. If the mirror was the size of Germany, there would be one millimeter of flaw in a mirror the size of Germany. So an ordinary mirror, you can imagine the millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of the size of the flaw in the mirror would have to be. A machine that uses extreme ultraviolet light to produce chips is made from 100,000 different parts. Most of the parts didn't exist before this machine needed to be produced. A lot of it's from materials nobody knew how to manipulate just 10, 15, 20 years ago. Again, completely new lasers, lasers much more powerful than anything existed beforehand and just different from anything that existed beforehand. Just, the technology is just amazing. I don't know anything about it. All I'm telling you, I read in a book. So basically I don't know it, I could just mark back to you kind of what I read. But it gives you a sense of the scale of it that only one company in the world has managed to produce it. It has no competition. It owns the entire industry. It is in Denmark, but it needed hundreds of other companies participating in the project, trading with them. And it needed the best manufacturers in Germany, the best thinkers in America, the best chip manufacturers. I mean, the scale of this, it took 30 years, 30 years of the smartest people in the world to figure this out. Michael Sanders asked, will student loans be forgiven mostly or entirely over the next 20 years? It sure looks like it. It sure looks like it. One way or the other, it's likely. It's a political kind of football that both parties might try to capture because they think they could suck up to the voters, although I don't think it will actually work. Hoppa, friend Hoppa, thank you for the $20 and then a $20 question on top of that. Happy Thanksgiving. I am thankful for all of your hard work and the unique accessibility. It's fun being a fan, keep up the good work. Thank you, really appreciate it. And we're talking about accessibility. I was thinking of doing this and maybe this is something that we could replicate if it works well. How about, I'm gonna be in Denver in January and I'll have a free evening. How about doing a YBS gathering? YBS fans in the Colorado area and just kind of going out, going to a nice restaurant or a barbecue place or something casual but nice and just hanging out and doing like a super chat thing, but live. So anyway, I'm throwing that out there. If you guys live in Colorado and we'd be interested in participating in something like that, let me know. I'm gonna be thinking about it and thinking about how to get the word out and also how to organize it and how to put it all together. But maybe as I travel, we could do little YBS gatherings and I think that'll increase the bonding, increase the interest and maybe increase your interest in sharing the content and getting the word out there and bringing friends and maybe growing this platform, growing this thing. So I know some other people do this, other podcasters and stuff do this. It might be worth giving how much I travel. It might be worth as I travel trying to organize something like that. So we'll see. Even if it's just three people who come, it might be just worth it. I know a number of you off in Colorado, maybe you'd be willing to drive and come over if you don't live too far. All right, Michael says, I had a professor say Western pension systems are a successful implementation of universal basic income. Yeah, they're a pretty successful implementation, universal basic income for old people. What's the value of that? So it's a successful implementation of something that has no real value and that has massive costs. I mean the real value is old people don't have to think about money, they get money, but the cost is massive because the responsible old people could be richer than they are. The irresponsible rich people get a free ride off of the responsible ones and young people get to pay for all this. And therefore this standard of living gets diminished. Only $120 left to make it to our goal of 650. Only $120, so not bad at all. Could you do a reaction to one of Milton Friedman's Feed the Choose episodes showing where his defensive capitalism went wrong when debating guests? I could do that, but of course, you know, reviewing videos, don't I charge money for that? I think I do. Anyway, I'll look, if there's a short segment, I can pull out of one of them that would be a good example. I'll do that. Michael says, will people 300 years ago look back on 300 years from now, you mean? Look back on us as we look back on the dark ages, they'll be in shock, people could live day to day in nihilistic, unpredictable mixed economies. I hope so. I hope so. Of course, life is still a million times better than it was 300 years ago. And I think at least they will see the differences that what they will think 300 years from now is, how did these people not appreciate the industrial revolution? How did these people not appreciate capitalism, not appreciate how they got to be so rich? How did these people, how come they didn't get it? And how did they, on the fact that they were so rich, how did they not see where they came from? That I think is what bewildered them more than anything else. Nathan says, were there more or less productive geniuses in Atlas Shrugged than there are in the real world? Less. Less. I think there are many productive geniuses in the real world. Now, another book I read was, and I forget the name of it right now, I think I talked, which was about the fintech revolution in China. And I mean, the productive geniuses in China, Jack Ma being one of them is amazing. So one of the things that Atlas Shrugged doesn't have is the global side of things. And the fact that they are productive geniuses, I mean, ASML is in Holland, is the globalization of productive genius, the globalization of liberty, of freedom, the globalization of bits and pieces of capitalism. But yes, even in America, there are lots of productive geniuses. And then there are lots of people revolutionizing the world. And Atlas Shrugged says, do you want YBS to be your full-time job? I'd like it to compensate me enough so that it could be my full-time job, yes. I'll send your book, Free Market Revolution, to sign for me, Iran. Please come to Des Moines, Iowa. I mean, Chicago is a city to attend a lecture. You know, Chicago, I often go to Chicago, so we could do one of these YBS fan gatherings in Chicago when I'm there. It's always better to sign a book in person because then you get the personal aspect of it. All right, it doesn't look like we made the 650 unless somebody wants to jump in with 120 bucks right now. But anyway, you guys have been great this month, so I cannot complain. Super Chat has been fantastic this month. We didn't have a lot of people live on today, so I completely understand it. Plus, I'm going now to two shows a day on some days, like today. And so this is great. I very much appreciate it. What about New York City? Yeah, I mean, I will be in New York City in January again. I expect after being Connecticut, we could do a gathering like this in New York City. So yes, I would like to do it all over the country, ultimately all over the world as I travel to get people, YBS fans to come to maybe my talks and maybe go out to dinner or do stuff like that. I mean, I'm not going to spend more time just for this, but if I'm there anyway, why not do it? K-Fax, thank you. K-Fax just brought us much, much closer to the target, $100, so we're now only $20 short. Somebody put in the $20, so we have a Thanksgiving that is right there at $6.50. Frank says, hard for me to be thankful. I had a job offer that was rescinded. That sucks. Sorry about that, Frank. Luckily, I accepted another job offer. Well, that's good that you had two job offers. That's something to be thankful. But will that last? I'm sure of what to do. We're heading into a very uncertain economic times. That is, there's no question about that. I understand you're angst, Frank, but in spite of all that, you live, we all live at a relatively high standard of living. In spite of all the uncertainty, we live in a pretty sweet world and that is worth being thankful for. Richard says, I think my $100 PayPal should count towards the Super Chat goals. Thankful for your unbroke. Thankful for my life and career. Thankful for more YBS. Thank you, Richard. Really, really appreciate that. We made the $650 right on the button, so with $5 to spare, so thank you all. Those of you who are not here to have to share in the fun of Super Chat, you can support the show by clicking on the applause button in YouTube and supporting it that way. But the best way to support the show is with a monthly subscription, you can do that on Patreon, subscribe to our locals or you're on bookshow.com slash support. And that is a great way to be a part of this thing that we're doing and it's a great way to support the show and make sure it continues and expands and we are expanding it. We're now doing almost every morning a show on the news. Tomorrow I'm taking the day off, but Friday we will be back. All right, everybody, have a great Thanksgiving, eat a ton of food, enjoy it, celebrate your own production, which you produce, celebrate the people that you love and the people around you, celebrate the great producers in our world and the great producers in history, celebrate Ayn Rand, who has brought these life-giving ideas to all of us and has changed our lives dramatically for the better. Thank you, you guys. Gene quickly says, thanks, Iran. Could you get the app that lets you select chat messages and display them on screen so we can see what questions you're answering? Well, I'll check, but why can't you see the questions I'm answering? Don't you see the chat? If you're on YouTube, you should be able to see the chat while I'm speaking. So I'll look into that and see how I can do that, but is there a way to project this onto my screen? Using OBS. Interesting question, I just don't know. All right, thanks, Gene. Thanks to all of you. I will see you on Friday. Have a great, great, great, wonderful Thanksgiving. There's Adam with another $50. This was a very productive discussion. Happy for the value I received by listening and in knowing so many others who had this topic. Happy Thanksgiving to all. And yes, of course. Thank you, Adam Campbell, for sponsoring today's show and making this possible. You've enhanced my November dramatically and I think you've enhanced all of the people who listened to the show today. You had some great questions lined up for me to respond to in your write-up and you had the idea for the topic. So thank you, Adam. Everybody applaud, Adam. Thank him. And again, I'll see you all. Have a great Thanksgiving, Adam. My best to your daughters and I'll see you all on Friday.