 Iran. Thank you. Low radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. Oh, right, everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Saturday, I guess it's February and I am in Puerto Rico today as I'll ask me anything and we've got our panel of supporters here to start us off kind of with questions. I'm a little slow today. I did my second shingles vaccine and I think I did the show right when I did my first shingles vaccine, but this one seems to be affecting me more than the first one. Maybe not. Maybe I just have a bad memory, which is fine. But definitely headaches, a little bit of body aches, no real fever, but anyway, I had it yesterday. Hopefully by tomorrow it'll be gone. And certainly, I've seen people with shingles, God, this is like a million times better than having shingles. So absolutely, if you're over, I think now the recommendation is over 50. If you had chickenpox, if you had chickenpox, then you've got the virus that causes shingles and at some point it wakes up and gives you the shingles, really, really, really unpleasant. So if you're over like 50, that's when it starts. Then go get a shingles vaccine, two shots, and you're done, I think, for life. You're likely to be getting shingles after that is pretty much zero, or very minimal. So, yeah, I'm pro-vax. I know I've just lost like thousands of subscribers, probably, and pro-science and pro-experts. And I'm anti-populism in everything. All right, let's get rolling. Those of you, I see a few of you on Twitter watching. If you want to ask a question, you actually have to move over to YouTube and use the Super Chat. The same is for those of you on Facebook, but we do have a usual setup. You can ask questions, but they cost you money. Anything from $2 to $500, you can ask as many questions as you want. And any topic that you want, particularly today, and any comment you want, the nice thing about the comments in the Super Chat is I read them. So even if you want to be obnoxious, I typically read anything that's in the comment section in the Super Chat section. So come on over to YouTube and participate and ask questions. All right, let's get started with our panel. Jennifer. Can you talk about the differences and similarities between cynicism and nihilism? Cynicism and nihilism. So to be cynical is to reject ideals, to be skeptical about any kind of ideals, to kind of trivialize principles and to reject principles, to not take things very seriously because who knows what will happen. Knowledge is impossible. I mean, certainty is impossible. So it's all probabilistic and it's all, but it's more than that. I can't take anything too seriously because I don't really know. I don't know anything with any kind of certainty. Nihilism is a lot worse, right? So a lot of cynics become nihilists because if they don't know anything, if they don't have certainty, if they don't take values seriously and principles seriously, if their values are shifting, then sometimes that will lead you to a point of hating and a point of resentment of other people's values or values more broadly of values in the culture and then kind of that resentment will lead you to a desire to destroy those values and to knock them down and to be destructive. So cynicism can lead to nihilism, but nihilism is much more about hate. It's much more about hatred of values, hatred of those principles, ideals. But the hate that drives you to want to smash them, the hate that drives you to want to destroy them, that's kind of nihilism. So there's a strong destructive element in it that does not necessarily exist if you're just being cynical. Again, I think almost everybody young today is cynical because if you look at all the TV shows from the Simpsons on, the driving factor is cynicism. It's to make fun of values and doubt them and question them and question everything and it's OK to question, but then you have to have answers and make question without answers. So everything is to be doubted and to be make fun of. And in terms of religion, there's nothing sacred. There's nothing worthwhile fighting for and worthwhile living for, really. So cynicism often leads to kind of a depression and suicidal tendencies because what's to live for? Yeah, when I was a kid, I used to think like I used to wonder, why don't the people, the adults, like they don't care about anything? That's the way I used to put it. Like, why doesn't anybody care about anything? Yeah, I think that's a great way to put it. Why don't they have values? Why don't they care about anything? Why don't they strive? Aren't they ambitious? And that's a great way to put it. Yeah. All right, thank you. Thanks, Jennifer. All right, Steve. Hey, so I came here to talk in Austin, which was amazing. I really hope you get to do that again many times. I should make that ask to everybody. So I'd like to do it again. I think we can raise money for me to travel around the country to do it. What I need right now are students, so people involved in organizations or alumni of universities or anybody who would like me to come and give the talk. So what I need is a place that provides a venue, an audience and, sadly, security. And if you can provide those three things, then I think we can get the funding to bring the talk to your campus. If you're not involved in a particular group or something like that, you might want to consider approaching some of the pro-Israel groups on campus. Groups that might have an interest in talk like this and show them the video that's online, see if they're interested. Again, I think we can arrange funding as long as those three things are taking care of. But I'd love to be able to do a campus tour of giving that talk. And thanks, Steve, for coming to the talk. I really appreciate that. We had the overwhelming number of people in the audience were supportive. There were quite a few objectivists there, but even more, I'd say, just people who were supportive of Israel. And that made the hostility of a minority of the people much easier to bear because you knew that there was a significant number of people there who were indeed supportive. All right, sorry, I'll catch you up. I know, we're here to make you look good. Towards the beginning of your talk, you were talking about the moral evaluation of different societies. I think the way you phrase it is that you don't have to go back in history to really understand who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. And there had been a part of it that was like immensely clarifying. I think that could be evergreen in the sense that you can apply that to so many different things. And there's a specific part of that I was interested if you had deeper thoughts on it, which is you briefly talked kind of about not labeling it as such, but like a culture's attitude toward violence against women. I guess that's the way I would point it. Like if we go back like 2000 years, right, when they say like they sacked the city, sacked as a euphemism for, hey, we went and raped and killed and enslaved everyone inside. And indeed, if you look at the way, you don't really need to know more about like Russian culture, at least for me in the 1940s, then certainly look at how the Russian army behaves as it moves through Eastern Europe. I kind of think the same thing here, like for me, like some of those jarring part of October 7th is just like the pictures of the real sexual violence. And people seeming indifference to that. Well, and it's, I mean, the two aspects of sexual violence. One is just the idea of treating human beings, specifically women, as nothing, as something to be used and thrown away. And of course that goes with just killing everybody, killing anybody, children, adults, young, old, doesn't matter threat, not a threat. They killed everybody. And so the first thing you notice is they do not value human life. They don't value other people's lives. And therefore, since they don't value human lives and women are a sexual object, then rape is kind of obvious, right? So, well, obvious other than the second point I'm going to make in a minute. But you start with they don't value human life. And that's true of, yeah, the Russian soldiers marching through Eastern Europe. It's true of many, many, many forces, armies in history, really to a large extent all of history, human beings have treated other human beings as if they were worthless as tools, as means to their own ends. And so you see that in Middle Ages, warfare, cities, when a conquering army comes through, they rape the women, they kill everybody. Protestants do this to Catholics. Catholics do this to Protestants. Muslims do it to Christians. Christians do it to Muslims. Muslims do it to Muslims. It's a view that human life matters not. Other people's human life matters not. And so that's one thing that illustrates. But the other thing that illustrates is a complete rejection of self-respect, self-esteem, self, your own life, the value of your own life. No self-respecting man, even if the opportunity was there, would rape a woman, would want to rape a woman, would desire to rape a woman. That would not be something that would be of any kind of value to them. It just would never cross their minds. It would not be something in a war in any other context. Rape is just not something that anybody who respects themselves would ever do. And that's true of certainly of any adult grabbing a woman. I mean, this is, I think Andrew makes this comment on the chat here. I think that's a reference to Trump, right? Anybody who talks about grabbing women the way Trump talked about grabbing women has no self-respect. Has no self-esteem, has no respect for sex and the meaning of sex and what sex can contribute to themselves and the pleasure of sex and the life reinforcing nature of sex. It's just a physical act. It's meaningless. It's animalistic. So they treat other people as animals. But that's primarily because they think of themselves as animals and they view themselves as animals and they don't have any kind of self-respect towards themselves. And I think that's what drives them. And if you see an army, look, there's always going to be some soldiers who behave like this. I'm sure as the American army went through Western Europe in World War II, there were soldiers who raped and they're horrible. But when an army uses rape as a tool or when rape is encouraged or when rape is, you know, people look aside. They don't care. They don't pay attention. They don't penalize the soldiers for it. Then it says something about that culture. In the American army, if the American troops had raped German women and had been caught, they wouldn't be tried for it. And I'm not saying it didn't happen. I'm not saying the officers turned the other, turned the way. But overall, as a culture, they wouldn't be tried for it. If in the Israeli army, there are soldiers who murder or rape or inflict gratuitous violence, they are, as a rule, tried for it. They're penalized for it because that is not acceptable behavior by a culture that has any kind of self-respect and values human life. So, yeah, I think just that behavior, just the willingness to rape, which almost always comes together with willingness to inflict gratuitous violence. I don't think I'm not sure rape is different other than it also says something about you as a man. It says something about you as a sexual being and how low you are by engaging in that rape. All of that says a huge amount about the culture, the morality of the culture, and is condemnable in and of itself, even if you know very little else about that culture. And of course, I talked about in the talk that this is a culture that also embraces honor killings and things like that. I mean, that is even more related to the fact that they think nothing of women are not of value and you know, if they misbehave in any kind of way, then off they go, then you kill them and you move on, even if it's your daughter or your sibling or your sister, their lives are insignificant and their sexual purity is more important than life itself, which is just sick when you think about the whole point of sex is to be life reinforcing. How could engaging in sex be a denial of your life? It's just everything's upside down. All right, thanks, Steve. Adam. Yes, I have several questions. One at a time. The one that I will start with has to do with how do you go about changing the political culture of a country that is under your military occupation? Now, we know how the United States did that in Germany and Japan, namely, we instituted a model of government that was very different from the existing political culture and was much closer to our own. Unfortunately, what I see with respect to Israel and the West Bank, is they're not doing that. Would you comment? Yeah, I mean, I think what you said is necessary, but not sufficient. That is, yes, once you occupy the country, you have to institute a political regime that is fundamentally pro rights, a pro individualistic political regime. It doesn't have to be an ideal, but it has to be close, and that's what America did in Japan and Germany. But even before that, step one is you have to defeat the enemy. And here, it will define defeat as the enemy has to accept that whatever it is that led them to initiate the violence against you was wrong, unacceptable, never do it again. They have to understand that that is what led to their suffering, to the death and destruction that they feel that it is on them, that they are the ones responsible for what has happened. As long as they still think that the old regime is a good regime, as long as they think that, oh, next time they could win, as long as they think that their goals were good goals, they wanted the right thing, they just didn't get it quite right, then even if you impose the right political regime, as soon as you leave, they'll shadow it and start over again. So you have to thoroughly dismantle and destroy not just the old regime, but also any kind of thinking that that regime had any efficaciousness and had any kind of value and should ever be pursued again. So if you do that, now that is not, and has never been pursued in the West Bank, the Palestinians have never been thoroughly defeated. By the way, part of the defeat is that the people defeating you say we have defeated you, and you in your culture, your system of government is no good, it's lousy, you need to change. Nobody in Israel says that to Palestinians, they haven't been properly defeated, they don't think they are defeated, which is the standard by which one determines whether somebody is being defeated or not. And on top of that, Israel, when it's in a position to do so, has not established the right kind of political regime in the West Bank and Gaza. The only thing that they have done, and this is typical of the West, they think that the right political regime is democracy, and they institutionalize democracy, in other words, they institutionalize a vote. So there was a vote about who should rule the West Bank in Gaza, Hamas won, Palestinian Authority didn't like that. There was a civil war, Hamas won the civil war in Gaza, Palestinian Authority won the civil war in West Bank. So Hamas ruled Gaza, Palestinian Authority ruled the West Bank, and since then there'd be no elections. But Israel brought them democracy, established the right system of government superficially. So it has to be the proper system of government thought through, not just the superficialities of what a proper system of government looks like, like voting. So you have to thoroughly defeat the enemy, then you have to make it clear to them that they were thoroughly defeated, and that their system sucks. I think that's the technical term. And then you have to present it with an alternative, an alternative constitution, an alternative political system that they have to abide by, at least for a period. And Israel has none in it. So I'd like to extend that to the government of Israel itself, because from my knowledge of Israeli entrepreneurs and businessmen, they can rise only so far before the Israel, some bureaucrat in the Israeli government has the power to make them either accept a system of chronic patronage or leave the country and go to the United States. So I don't think that's true. My experience does not bode that out. I know a lot of very, very successful entrepreneurs in Israel that have run big companies or sold their companies, done American companies and become billionaires or have received nine figure sales who have not gone through that kind of process with the government. You can certainly apply this principle to the Israeli government. The Israeli government is far from perfect. It is not particularly a good government. It is about as good as, I don't know, the French government, which is not particularly good or any other European government. You can certainly apply that to Israel. But there's a fundamental difference between a basically free country, a basically civilized country and one that is not. Israel is free enough so that there's no justification of invading it, particularly no justification of invading it by a country that's, you know, the United States is not dramatically freer than Israel. The United States is not dramatically treat its entrepreneurs better than the entrepreneurs in Israel. So does it have protectionism? Sure. Does it have cronyism? A lot more than the United States. But, you know, but is it significantly worse than the US or Europe? I don't think so. I think it's in the same ballpark. So the third part of it is looking at the median, equalized disposable income, which I think is the best way of measuring how well people are doing in a given country. When my family left Poland and we went to Israel in 1956, 55, 56, Israel was way ahead of Poland, which was still communist and essentially unable to rebuild itself after World War II, even 10 years later, because of the kind of political system it had. However, since 1990 and the fall of communism, Poland went up at the highest rate in Europe right now. There are just three places behind the British. They're just behind the British Spain and Estonia, which is another post-communist country that has gone way up, while Israel is still behind an interestingly growing at only the rate that Japan is, which is another very cronyist, centrally managed economy. Now, Poland is very heavily Catholic, although more Thomas than Augustinian, but still very much its politics are essentially taken from the Akton Institute. So would you comment on why Israel isn't growing any faster than this? Because it refuses to liberalize its economy. It refuses to actually become a freer market. It has way too much cronyism. It has a lot of import and export barriers and all kinds of restrictions. I think what Poland has going forward, one of the things that Poland has going forward is the fact that it's part of the EU. So it has this amazing free trade deal with a big chunk of most of Europe, not all of Europe, but most of Europe. I think that's a huge advantage for any European country. It has liberalized significantly, and it obviously has. I don't know how they rank in terms of economic freedom, but my guess is that Poland would rank higher than Israel on the measures of economic freedom that exist out there. But yeah, good for Poland. Israel is this is, I've been complaining about Bibi Netanyahu for 30 years, and one of the big reasons has been the fact that he has been Prime Minister basically for the last 17, 18 years, and there's been very, very, very little liberalization of the Israeli economy so that this median equivalence disposal income has not gone up anywhere near enough. As a consequence of that, while it is true that in terms of technology innovation, in terms of billionaires, in terms of technology that's changing the world, Israel is probably second only to the United States. Maybe there's another country that's above Israel, but the people at the top in Israel have contributed more in terms of productive productivity than any other country. The economy as a whole is not benefited from it as much as you'd expect because of the lack of liberalization of the rest of the economy. High tech like in the United States is relatively free. Everything else is not. I actually think Israel has more unicorns than the UK. I think it has more unicorns than Sweden. Certainly on a per capita basis, it might have more unicorns in terms of tech companies that have changed the world than the United States. In that sense, Israel is way ahead, but in a way as to benefit the median household, that needs a lot more freedom at the median household that is at every level of Israeli production and not just at the top. That requires significant change. It's similar to Japan. It has a few unbelievably successful companies and entrepreneurs. Every one of those big companies were once entrepreneurial. And it's stuck. It doesn't generate that kind of wealth anymore and it doesn't generate that kind of wealth across society because it is so crony and it is such a rigid economy. All right. Thank you, Adam. Andrew has his hand up. Go ahead, Andrew. Yeah. I just wanted to react to one of your comment that the victor in war needs to lay claim to the victory and how it seems that the US government, these strikes against Iran proxies are doing the opposite in this statement of saying, we don't want conflict with Iran. Yeah. I mean, exactly. This is why you can't win. And not only that, but the United States has said every time it goes to war, we don't want victory over the Iraqis. We want to bring Iraqis freedom. It's all for them. We don't want victory over them. That would mean we're better than them somehow. We just want to liberate them from this evil guy, Saddam Hussein. We don't want a victory in Afghanistan. We just want to help them out a little bit. So we fight wars without thinking about victory or Vietnam war. Who are we going to have victory over, the Viet Cong? Were we really going to war with North Vietnam to have victory over North Vietnam? Would it be a completely different war if that had happened? But yeah, I mean, that is the big problem. And Israel doesn't go to war to have victory over the Palestinians or victory over Hezbollah. And as long as it doesn't do that, it's not going to win. You can't win if you're not aiming for victory. And we're not. Nobody seems to be. Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. All right. Let's see. Where did Amlan go? Hi. Oh, there he is. Okay. Yep. All right. So it's probably a question you've answered before at some point, but I don't recall what your answer was. What is the proper role of parental authority for minors related to things like abortion, gender transition, and stuff like that? So, I mean, if we take abortion as a first example, I mean, obviously, if you're, let's say, a 14-year-old girl, I'm thinking of that case in Texas not too long ago. Should the parents be notified? Do they have a say? What's the proper role in a proper society? In a proper society, parents get to make those decisions. You know, until the child is an adult, unless, and every society should have this mechanism in place, child should have the option to go to a court and to say, I am old enough to be able to make this decision. For these reasons, I do not want to involve my parents or I want you to overrule the parents. Are you relevant to this decision? And I'm adult enough or they're really just fanatics and I'm not or whatever, and be able to overrule the parents. But for that, you would have to go to some kind of magistrate, some kind of court, and actually argue for it. So, what would be the objective criteria that the judges would be using to make that decision? I think how rational the child was, and the extent to which this was a reversible or irreversible decision, the extent to which the parents fear was that they would be irrational with regard to this, and yet the child would be the one bearing the cost over the long run. So, pregnancy is a perfect one. The child bears the price of having a child, bears that for the rest of their life. If the parent is some religious fanatic, they're not rational about it. I think a court should approve and let the child be able to make a decision for themselves. So, you wouldn't carve out abortion as a kind of an automatic where the child can make that decision. Because, I mean, the gender transition I can understand, that's now the reversibility of that is much more difficult than yes. I mean, in a way, abortion is not reversible, but it's reversible for the mother, for the child. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that I would make it an exception. You know, it's a real challenge once you start making exceptions that I have to think, okay, what else? Let's say there was some surgery, there was, I don't know, for health and the child wanted it and the parents didn't because there's some religious fanatic. Still, is that different than abortion? Is that the same? I'd have to think it through, but it might be, you'd have to think about all the different cases where this could come up. Is abortion that different? Does it justify this? I mean, if a child is nine, like there was this case of this girl that was nine and pregnant, and the state would not perform an abortion, this was a country of which state this was, and she had to go to another state to get the abortion. She was raped by the mother's boyfriend, something like that. I don't know what process she went through, but how does a nine-year-old make a decision? How can it? Is the assumption, if she goes in front of a judge, that the parents, this is in a sense, the parents are not in a position to make a decision for her, and then a judge makes the decision, or she can make the decision. I mean, the decision is obvious, a nine-year-old should have an abortion. But you need to involve some things up, because the parents have some rights. So you have to be able to have some process by which you are circumventing whatever the rights the parents have, and you're saying, nope, not in this case. You do not have rights. You're not thinking about the well-being of the child. You are biased because you're religious or because you're an abortion rater or whatever. There has to be a process to override completely nutty parents when it comes to something like this. If the life of the woman child is in danger, a judge should be able to make these decisions. So a judge should be involved if the parents are being irrational. Okay, thanks. I just think having a judge involved gives it objectivity in terms of parental rights and doesn't just assume, well, if we don't like what the parents are doing, we can override it. There has to be some kind of, because unless we're willing to say, okay, parents have a say in the children in these things up until the age of 12, and then after they're 12, it shrinks, which is I think the way you parent, but I'm not sure the way the state should intervene in it. I think it's too detailed. I think it's okay. Thanks. I'm like, Ryan. Hi. I'm reading The Fountainhead again. It's five years ago. I read it and I've reached this scene. I'm having trouble with. And it's just a general question about this scene where Rourke is working for Snite. He finally got this job. He's after a period of time going around looking for employment and Austin Heller has been shown into the drafting room and he sees the first rendition of his new home. And he basically tells Snite that he doesn't like it and that there's something missing and Rourke is standing there next to this happening. And after a while, after a time, he basically springs into action and uses his pencil to just destroy this watercolor painting and redraw it in his vision. And the first time I read this scene, I mean, five years ago, I remember like, no, like, are you crazy? Why are you doing this? This is insane. And I'm reading it now and I'm thinking, wow, he's taking a huge risk, right? I mean, he's essentially putting his life on the line, not physically, but like his whole career on the line, taking this huge risk, still a calculated risk, because the way she writes it, he's listening to the conversation, he's waiting for his moment. And it makes me think of different moments in my life and even recently where it's like these moments can just pass you by if you're not focused, if you're not engaged with what's going on around you. And I'm wondering if you have any experiences or you've reached this moment ever in your life where it was like you knew you had to take a risk, it was big, but based on your values and your life, you had basically no other choice, you had to do it. I mean, I think that says, yes, I don't know if it was quite as dramatic as... That's fiction, right? Yeah. But I can imagine that fiction happening in reality because it kind of architect, it kind of lends itself to that because you can kind of scribble something, you know, you can... But yes, I mean, the problem is thinking of examples. Yeah, that might be too difficult on the spot. Sorry. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of decisions, choices that I've made in my life. As I said, I've had lots of careers that involve just going along a path that I didn't expect and was different than what I expected and then engage risk, whether it was getting a PhD, which I did not expect I would ever do, taking the job at the Institute and giving up a career in finance, things like that or in a meeting pivoting around a, I don't know, fundraising proposal to take it a sense of risk by saying, hey, what about this? Just feeding off of maybe some nuanced comment that somebody said and you go, huh, he seems interested in something else. Let me see if I can jump in and steer him towards that with the potential of alienating somebody. Do you think that these sorts of moments are at a premium these days because our culture is really fearful of everything, offending people, saying the wrong thing, putting yourself out there? I mean, couldn't things be just so much more dynamic and exciting if people were more willing to do this? Absolutely. I mean, there's no question about that. You know, there's still pockets of our culture where this kind of behavior still exists. And I think that that's what makes them dynamic. So this is why Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley. I don't think Silicon Valley today is quite like Silicon Valley 20, 30 years ago. I think even there it has been somewhat, you know, less of that dynamism exists. But yeah, wherever you find a place which is dynamic, which is exciting, it's a place where people are taking risk. It's a place where people are going out on a limb experimenting, doing things, failing, rising up again. Those are the places and wherever you see companies that are incredibly successful, it's people within those companies that have been doing that. They've done that. There's just no other way to be succeed. And so it still exists. It's just, you know, it should be in everything that we do in every place that we go in every type of industry. And sadly, it's more, it's narrow. It's in particular places and particular industries and particular times. And it's not, it's not the entire culture. It's hard to imagine, I think what it would be like to live in a culture like that. I mean, we haven't really had a culture like that since probably the 19th century or the early part of the 20th century. Even in the post World War Two America, there was already this built in risk aversion is built in parts of in parts of America, already the beginnings of cronyism and beginnings of welfare, statism and entitlements and those things are starting to creep in. The last time the culture was completely go for it was probably pre World War One and maybe in the 1920s in America. But yeah. So you coming to the United States was quite a leap. I mean, moving halfway around the world and leaving every huge risk, huge risk. And most, you know, significant numbers of people went back to Europe because they didn't make it. People never talk about that. The number of Italians and Irish. So the only people who didn't go back to Europe were the Jews because they knew what would happen to them if they went back to Europe, right? They had no way to go back to, but almost everybody else had some way to go back to and only a certain percentage of people who came to America made it because it was risky. Risk means some people fail and some people did fail and many of the people who failed went back. And I think that also in some ways engineered, I mean, it was a self-selection bias we have in America, right? In America, the people who stayed were the people who were willing to continue to take on risk. It was particularly back then, right? So it's a reinforcement mechanism. The failures or the people not willing to take on risk left and didn't continue to be here. So it definitely self-reinforced itself through the 19th century. And that's why I think America has done better than the rest of the world because it has more momentum from that attitude that is really lacking in the rest of the world. And they never had a 19th century like we did in England to some extent, some countries to some extent, but never quite on the scale that we did. All right. Thanks, Ryan. Matthew. Hey, Ron. Hey. So I was getting back to Israel a little bit here. Yeah. As far as the United States and education, right? So I think it was, for me, 7th or 8th grade, they taught us about the Holocaust and we read it, that there is a rank and it did all that. And I'm assuming that's kind of how it is nationally. Maybe I'm ignorant on that. I guess, is that too young? What would be the right age to start that in the cynical society? Would you bother teaching it at all? Because it's kind of a both that timeframe, right? Is when I started hearing all the slurs and all the, you know, all the other side, right? And all the racism crept into the school and my class, I guess, right? So I guess, what's your understanding of how it's taught and how could or should it be better? Yeah, I don't know how it's taught. I don't have familiarity with the way it's taught in American schools. I didn't go, I only spent two years in American school system. And history is not exactly the strength of an American school system. They don't teach a lot of history. It's not required much, get maybe a year of American history, but not much more. And the Holocaust should be taught in the context of the history of Western civilization, which America is an important part of. And therefore, it should be in the context of learning the history of the world that is relevant for the United States. That should be taught in middle school, then again, in high school, you know, maybe at a different level of depth. I fear that the way the Holocaust is probably taught is it's taught from the perspective of look at how human beings can be, look at the horrors inflicted on the Jews. Isn't this just horrific? Remember this? This is not how you should treat other people. And there isn't kind of a broader historical perspective on even when it comes to the Holocaust, anti-Semitism over the centuries, you know, millennia of kind of nationalism and the rise of nationalism in Europe, and what it meant vis-a-vis the Holocaust, right, is suddenly you've got Jews in a place that is turning more and more and more into an ethnocentric nationalistic place like Germany or the rest of Europe, where it suddenly became very, very important that you were a German or a Pole or a Czech or a Frenchman or a Spaniard or whatever, and the rise of nationalism. So, you know, put aside kind of the philosophical causes of the Holocaust, which maybe are for older kids, but I certainly think are possible for high school kids. Certainly historical causation, historical links, connections, you know, because you study, I think, I studied in history, the rise of nationalism in Europe, to link that nationalism to the Holocaust, to link that nationalism to anti-Semitism, to explain what's unique about the Jews in Europe. I don't know that that's done and that should be done and needs to be done. The Holocaust, just in and of itself, is too much of a, I don't know what would be the right word, too much of a victim, again, kind of a focus on the victim and kind of an attitude of Jews as victims, rather than putting into the, and the Nazis are evil and that's it. But what about, what about the pogroms in Russia and the pogroms in Ukraine and the pogroms in Poland? What about the corporation of the Hungarians and the Czechs and everybody else with the Holocaust and the fact that they all wanted to get rid of their Jews and in a sense, thank the Germans for doing the job for them. What about, you know, I don't think that's a perspective people take. The perspective is Nazis evil, Jews victim, horrible, you should know because this horrible thing happened in the world. Let's go on to the next lesson, right? And that's, you don't learn anything that way. It means nothing and it isolates the evil of the Nazis too much in the context of the Holocaust. Right? And I think something I realized as you were talking there is, you know, that young age that we were taught that seventh, eighth grade, it was like that, right? It's, here's these Jews, they're hiding, here's the Germans, they're, they're looking for them, right? And, and there was no at that point in my education, there was no real focus or injection of a hero, right? So you had, you had this clash going on, cat and mouse, but they didn't finish up the lesson with showing how the Germans, you know, got handled, I guess, and how the rest of the world, you know, really made that impact. Yeah. I mean, I think the Holocaust needs to be taught in the context of the history of Western Civ, which I think is crucial to teach. And in that context, there should be a section, a segment of the discussion of, you know, maybe two classes on anti-Semitism, maybe in previous classes leading up to this, and then as part of the discussion of World War II and its meaning and its consequence, and the section on the Holocaust be linked to previous sections on nationalism and anti-Semitism, because you can't understand it otherwise. And you do people in all service because they just don't know and people don't know. The, the, the extensive hatred of Jews that goes back 2000 years, how it's been a part of the culture in the West for those 2008 years and, you know, how it constantly expressed itself in different ways over that period. And, you know, the Nazis just systematized it and did it on an industrial scale. But they, they did it with the cooperation of many, many, many Europeans. And, and they did it more effectively and more efficiently, but the phenomena was always there and always there for a very long time. Thank you. I think it's Andrew's left. Is that right? Andrew, are you muted or? There you go. I'm here. So taking history, trying to draw on your historical knowledge. Plato was a huge achievement in the sense of systematizing knowledge and Aristotle built on Plato's achievement and made philosophy much more rational. And then, I think, I guess it's a little loose in my mind how to formulate this question. But my question is basically like, why do you think that that knowledge didn't continue building in a straight line? Like, we, I think objectivism's broad view of history is that we needed Aquinas to come back and revive Aristotle. But kind of where did Aristotelianism go in the meantime? Or prior to that? I mean, you're really challenging my knowledge of history. You know, I know history well as compared to many other people, but I'm far from being historian. But I think here, if you think about when Aristotle, Aristotle came too late in a sense. He is at the tail end of Greece, particularly of Athens. So Athens is a decline, right? Aristotle teaches who? He teaches Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great is a dictator, an authoritarian megalomaniac who wants to conquer the world and sets out to not just his father, I think, conquered Greece. So Aristotle is already writing when Athens is already under the rule of the Macedonians, if I remember right. And, you know, then he tutors Alexander, and Alexander then sets off to conquer the world. And the greatness of Greece by that point is over. It's in decline because they have gone from relative political freedom, you know, a culture based on primarily on trade, city states where some of the city states are really, really good, some are not, but the ones that are good are good, to now a part of an authoritarian empire. And then of course soon after that the Romans come in and they're very quickly moved from the state of a republic to a state of an authoritarian dictatorship as well. And therefore there's no, the culture's shifting and the culture's shifting away from Greek philosophy. And what is there is much more attracted to Plato because Plato is much more consistent with empire building, much more consistent with the kind of cynicism that comes from defeat, that comes from Athens being crushed. And remember, it loses the Panapoleon wars against Sparta and then the, you know, Macedonia rises. I think I've got my history right. Anyway, all of this is happening and there's a real negative mood that falls on Greece and ultimately infects that negativity, infects the Romans. And the Romans to a large extent, many of the Romans are just waiting for the Roman Empire to disappear because just a matter of time. Because look, Greece fell and histories like this and, you know, virtue doesn't get rewarded and so on. And so it's just too late. It really is. The peak of Greek civilization is funnily enough before Aristotle is so, this is the thing. There's this art and culture change before the philosophy does. So Greece embraces great art, great culture, even great politics before the great philosophers arise. The same thing happened in Europe really, put aside the politics, but certainly art and culture are changing. Science is even changing before really the Enlightenment happens. And the Enlightenment is some ways is, you know, it's not as late as Aristotle is, but it's, it's later to, it's certainly too little. It's certainly too little. So I think that's the issue. I think Plato is far more attractive to the culture that inherits, not Greece even, that inherits Athens than is Aristotle. You know, Aristotle's remnants, you know, the main Aristotelian school following all the mayhem in Greece is in Alexandria. But it is already, but it is heavily influenced by the Neoplatonists and it's already struggling with Rome and then it has to struggle with Christianity and those forces are just stronger and they're all influenced by Plato. You know, also, Aristotle is wrong in a lot of things and that created a lot of challenges both philosophically, scientifically, for those who followed, who wanted to be Aristotelians, but kept crashing against the things he was wrong about and weren't brilliant enough to fix them. And the way they tried to fix it, again, from my understanding, is by turning to Plato to find the solutions for the things they couldn't understand or couldn't get right or couldn't quite straighten out in Aristotle. So they just kept bringing in more Plato and the culture became overwhelmingly Neoplatonic. Plato and remember, Plato's school kept going after, as did Aristotle's, but Plato's school, I think, was just more dynamic, more exciting, more and more with the times, with the culture. And Ayn Rand might be too late. I mean, imagine if Ayn Rand had come, if it's even possible, in 1776, if she was there during the Enlightenment and solving all the big questions the Enlightenment was asking, then maybe the whole history of everything would be different. But she comes in the 20th century, she writes in the post-World War II era, the arguably, it's already over, people giving up on capitalism and on individualism by then, and it's hard to resurrect once people have given up on it. Yeah, I'm not sure if it's rationalistic, but I somehow think of it as these battles need to be fought over time and need to manifest over time and... They do. They do. Check out The Cave in the Light, the book. Really good book. I've read it twice, second time I listened to it and it was great, so you can just get an audio and listen to it. It's really, really worth it. Okay, thank you. Sure. All right, let's do four of these Michael questions on the Super Chat. Michael, of course, is a regular Super Chatter, maybe my biggest Super Chatter ever, just because he's so consistent and often a lot of money on the chats. He's probably got here a cumulative, well over $100 today. So thank you, Michael, for being such a part of the Iran Book Show. All right, Objectivism just makes sense on so many levels, connects so many dots. I don't understand why more people don't stop looking until they find a body of knowledge that provides the right answers, because they're not curious, because they're not searching, because they're not asking questions. You have to ask questions and don't have to get answers, and most people don't. They get the answers that the priest, teachers, parents give them, and they go with it, and they just accept it. Muslims and Muslims, Catholics and Catholics, Protestants and Protestants, they just go with it. The children are socialists, often socialists, and they don't question. It's a rare, it's rare that people actually question. It's a minority. And even when they question how far out of the realm of what's acceptable in society are they willing to venture out in order to get answers? And many people, and many people don't. One of them says, but why Iran? Why? At the end of the day, there is no answer to that question. Why? Why do some people question? Why do other people know? Because some people choose the question and other people don't. And there is no beyond that. Some people choose to engage their mind and to focus it and to keep it focused and keep it engaged, which means the question, because they want the facts, they want reality. And some people choose, for whatever reason, to only engage sometimes, the only questions sometimes, to only integrate sometimes. It's not about capabilities. It's about choice. It's not about, you know, your IQ. It's about, you know, your choices. And so I know that's a hard one, but it is. It's not about none of this is hard, not fundamentally, not live for yourself, live by the facts. That's not that hard. Yeah, the metaethics to understand it, intricacies of the metaethical argument, particularly compared to the lack of a metaethical argument for altruism, that's hard. But just to say to somebody, you really should live for yourself and hear the virtues. They kind of make sense. And yeah, I mean, you don't need an IQ of 120 for that. Never mind IQ of 140. So I don't think it's IQ. I don't think it's intelligence. I don't think it's, I think it is a choice that we make. Are we curious? Are we questioning? But all that boils down to, have we chosen to think? If you choose to think, you're going to be curious. If you choose to think, you're going to question because that's what thinking entails. Some people do, some people don't. And as you make the culture better, because some of what happens is some kids choose to think. And when they do and they ask the why, why, why, they get slapped down. They get knocked down. They get humiliated and they get put down and they stop doing it. They stop engaging. So the percentage of people who think in a good culture is much higher than the percentage of people who think in a bad culture. A culture that rewards asking, that rewards questioning, that rewards it is a culture of thinkers. But you can disincentivize somebody. You can actually make it painful for them and they will slowly shut down and they will stop engaging because the pain of engaging is too high. It's too high. So Michael, is life worth living in your 80s and 90s? Is flourishing possible? Well, it depends. I think it is. I think it can be, but it depends on you. It depends on what you do with your life, how healthy you are, how mentally capable you are. I mean, if you've got Alzheimer's in your 80s and 90s, at some point it is not worth living. At some point it's just too painful for you and for everybody around you. Certain cancers, if they're not curable, just not worth living. Some cures are so awful that it might not be worth getting the cure. You might be falling apart and it's not living. So it really depends. But I do know people in the 80s and 90s who are in good shape, whose mind is still working, and their life is certainly valuable. It's certainly a value for them to be living. They still work. They still pursue stuff. They still have relationships. They still enjoy life. So no, don't kill us all off before, once we cross 80, there's plenty of life to be had post 80. Part of what you need to think about as you're aging, I think that's a great term, as you're aging is what can I do in my 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s to make my 80s and 90s as good as they can be? And we know now that there's a lot you can do. You can treat yourself well, exercise and use your mind and exercise your brain and be engaged and active in the world and all of that. And that'll keep both your brain active, eat well, just live a healthy life. And that'll increase the probability that as you reach 80s and 90s, you will actually do well. So genetically, supposedly according to my last, genetic screening, I have the inclination to live beyond 90. I mean, that does not prevent cancer, heart disease or something else from killing me off in the meantime. But that's the general genetic inclination, more likely than not, my genes. But you have to work at it to make that 90 publishing. That doesn't happen automatically. That your genes won't provide. That means some exercise, that means some eating well, that means constant engagement of your mind. All right, Michael as well. Can you try and do a pro-Israel talk at Columbia University? The poor Hamas forces there are strong. I'd love to. I mean, I can't do a talk at university unless somebody invites me. I need a venue. I need an audience and I need security. Those three things. If you guys, if anybody out there lives in New York, if you have contacts in Columbia University, find a pro-Israel group on campus. Find anybody on campus. There's a very active Israeli professor on campus there. And you know, invite me. I'll come. And again, I can get the funding. I don't have any doubt that people will pay for me to go to Columbia to give that talk at Columbia, in particular Columbia, the home of so much of the anti-Israel professors and mentality. Because it's the home of, what's his name? I forget his name. So Said, God, I forget. I forgot his name. But one of the first guys to write about this. So yeah, that would be great. Let's do it. I'm on board. Let's just get me. And I'm on on board to do it everywhere. Berkeley, Columbia, anywhere where they'll have me. And again, they can provide a hall, students, an audience, and security. And they take security seriously. I'll be the Edward Said. Thank you, Frank. God, I can't remember. Edward Said was in Columbia. Edward Said is one of the people who really established the whole anti-colonialism idea. He's an Orientalist. And he really changed not just the study of Israel and the study of the Arab world, but he really changed attitudes of much of world culture. He is a big chunk of much of world culture. And what world culture has embraced this attitude, oppressed, oppressed, all of that is part of his work. And you can't understand a culture unless you're part of that culture. So if you're not a part of that culture, you can't write about a particular culture. You can't judge a particular culture. That's all Edward Said. Really bad guy. Michael says, many people are constantly seeking safety from risk. And it becomes a prison. America is so rich. It's possible to attempt living while avoiding risk, but it's not possible to avoid misery of avoiding risk. Yeah, that's absolutely right. You see that in Europe. Europe has a lot of wealth that it's accumulated over hundreds, thousands of years. And in many places in Europe, people are cruising off of that wealth instead of creating new wealth and growing and expanding and innovating. They're just cruising on what they have. And you see that in European stagnation. To some extent, that's true in Japan, but it's certainly true in Europe. In America, one of the advantages, we don't have old wealth, right? Oldest wealth is like 200 years old. Europe 200 years is like Nouveau Reich. It's like this is yesterday. But they stole. You go to Amsterdam or a lot of cities in Europe and you see people who are very wealthy. A lot of that is, they just inherited it. It just goes, there was so much there and the real estate is so valuable and they've just inherited it. And a lot of the wealth is not from dynamism and new creation. Thank you, Michael. Thank you for the support. Thanks for the questions. All right. We've got a lot of like $5, $10 questions. Let's make for now on, just because we're always limited on time in these. Questions, $20 questions. If you want to ask a question, make it $20 so that I can end on time here. Otherwise, we'll go for hours. All right. Let's start with Jennifer. I know in history that Christians have fought each other, you know, Catholics and Protestants and all that. And I know Muslims, Sunnis, and she I hate each other and all that. But was there ever in history where there was violence between different groups of Jews? So they don't remember ever reading anything about that. But maybe I'm just ignorant. I don't know. What's up? Well, what's that? No, but it's on mute. Oh, why? What's that? I can't, I can't, I can't understand what you're saying, Andrew. Anyway, violence between Jews. I mean, certainly, if you, you know, if you go back to when Jews had a state and were militarized, then yeah, a lot of violence between Jews back in the Old Testament, you know, Israel is carved up between the 13 different Jewish tribes. Each tribe gets a territory that they manage. There are conflicts between those tribes once in a while. They go to war against each other. At some point, it's basically carved into two after Solomon. Solomon is the last king of a united Jewish state. After Solomon, his son split Israel into two. One is called Israel. The other one is called Judea. And they don't like each other and they fight. And then at some point, I can't, I think it's the Babylonians or somebody conquers Israel, but doesn't conquer Judea. So the Israelites are spotted. And if you ever heard about the lost tribes of Israel, it's because the only, everybody today, every Jew today is assumed to be from the Judean tribe. And that the other 12 tribes, I think there were 13. The other 12 tribes were scattered by the Assyrians. And so not the Babylonians, the Assyrians. And the Assyrians were from basically Iraqis today. And you know, some speculation that the Jews in, I don't know, Ethiopia are part of the lost tribes of Israel or Yemen or whatever. Nobody really knows. But so yeah, there were conflicts. There were conflicts. And then there was conflict between Jews during the Romans, during the Greek occupation of Israel. And then during the Roman occupation of Israel, there were Jews who wanted to fight for independence and to kick the Romans or the Greeks out and establish their own state. And there were other Jews who said, look, life's pretty good. I mean, these Romans and these Greeks, they leave us alone for the most part. Yeah. So we, you know, we can't quite use the temple the way we'd like to. But who really cares? There's a lot of money in trading within the Roman Empire. And there's a lot of freedom that they give us. And there's value. And if we rebel, they'll just slaughter us anyway. They're much bigger, much stronger than us. And so there was a lot of conflict among them between those who wanted to keep having, I mean, Jews were passed on the Romans. And then on the, before that on the Greeks and then on the Romans, the Maccabees were, it was an uprising against, that's Hanukkah, was an uprising against the Greeks. I mean, I would take Greek culture over Jewish culture. So I would have been on the side of the Greeks, not on the side of the Maccabees. The Maccabees are pretty brutal authoritarians. And so I celebrate Hanukkah. I, you know, I view Hanukkah as a, you know, as a defeat. But, but then, yeah, so anyway, so yeah, I mean, every religion, I mean, it's, it's, what was it? There's always splinters. There's always disputes. There's always disagreements. Now after the Romans in 1970 AD, destroy the temple and exile the Jews, the Jews never have a, they never have a military, they never have a state. They never have the capacity to fight themselves. So at that point, they're just members of other places and they do whatever they can to survive. But they, you know, but, but they don't. And now they've got a state and they're fighting within the state now violently, but almost. I mean, it was close to civil war recently. So no, there's nothing unique about Jews that would prevent them from going after each other's throats in the right, in the right context. It's just that for 2000 years, there was no state, there was no army, there was no way for them to do it. Okay, thank you. All right, Matthew. Okay. First of all, I'd like to join the course and encourage you to watch Kidco. I had to own that to be a great movie. Watch it quite a bit when I was a child. Which movie was this? Kidco. I know you had a couple of people recommended on the chat the other day when you were talking about business movies. Yeah. And then I wanted to point out too that Google Android has been pushing people towards the YouTube music app instead of the Google podcast app for podcasts. And I'm noticing on there that several of the podcasts I watch, they have an option to like on there and yours does not. So I don't know where the disconnect is, but wanted to point that out to see if you could. So this is the Google app or the YouTube app? YouTube music. YouTube music. I don't even know that exists. Okay. You can listen to your own book show on YouTube music app. Correct. And then there's a way to like it on there. And I don't know if that helps likes for you. Do you know if when you listen to it on YouTube music app, if you get commercials? Yes, commercials. And if you are a member of the Iran book YouTube channel, does it not have commercials? I don't know. Okay. I'm trying to I'm trying to figure out how to do the podcast without commercials. We're going to do this the next month or so. We're going to create if anybody who's contributes a certain amount of money, you'll be able to get it. So we're trying to figure it out. Okay. Then I guess my question was going to be Donald Trump. Uh, seems to me that it's obvious that he is, you know, I guess what we would traditionally consider to be a Democrat, right? I mean, he registered as a Democrat. He held her own with Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein, spent and spent and spent. He solidified Obamacare as the law of the land did not lead the charge to repeal Obamacare being against tariffs. He's in my lifetime. I don't know if there's been anybody maybe Obama that's been better for the Democratic Party. I think what he's done better than Obama, as far as advancing the Democrats is that he's simultaneously destroyed the GOP. So I guess go ahead and talk about that for a minute. I mean, I think that's right. My only caveat there is, is that I'm not sure what it means to be a Democrat. That is, what are the features of a Democrat? Are they, you know, to spend? Well, Republicans have spent like there's no tomorrow forever. Is it to be anti-capitalism? Well, which Republican exactly was pro-capitalism at least since Ronald Reagan and even before that was Nixon pro-capitalism? Not really. So I think what's happened and Trump accelerated this, Trump really accelerated this, is that on many of the issues that we care about, there's no difference between the political parties anymore and Trump has made that even more so than it was earlier. So you could all, you know, even on, you say he solidified, he solidified Obamacare, but that's true of Richard Nixon solidified Medicaid and solidified, you know, and Eisenhower solidified Social Security. And every Republican who follows a Democrat solidifies what the Democrat did. The only thing Republicans have ever done, and Trump did this, so maybe he is a Republican, is cut taxes, right? That's the only thing Republicans are good for. They're literally not good for anything else. So, you know, it turns out Jimmy Carter did more deregulation than any Republican in modern history. So he was a Democrat, not a Republican. So it's not, it's not clear to me what it even means now to say he's a Democrat, but I agree he's on economic issues, he's left. But what does left mean? On economic issues, he's on every issue is a status. And a foreign policy, he's a compromiser. So he is a sellout on foreign policy, and a status on economic policy. And he has no respect for individual rights. And the only thing that limits his willingness to abuse rights is the fact that we have a legal system, the world, then you get away with it. And he's upset about that. That's why he admires Putin and Xi so much, because they get to do whatever the hell they want, and he can't. So yeah, I mean, I basically agree with you. I just don't know what it means anymore to call somebody a Democrat. Is G.D. Vance a Democrat? Well, no, because he's also religious, and he plays the part, and he's also anti-abortion, and he's also anti-all these things. But on every economic issue is a Democrat. There's no difference. This is why he can sponsor bills with Elizabeth Wong. Thank you. Adam. Yes, looking at the same table of median-equivalence disposable income, I see that South Korea now has a figure 50 percent larger than Japan, even though Korea used to be a colony or at least a vassal of Japan until liberated at the end of World War II. Now they've risen way, way above Japan. Also, in terms of cultural output, I see a lot of worthwhile music, television, computer games, and other very worthwhile artistic output from South Korea. Why do we have this big difference? And at this point, South Korea is something like half again as rich as Japan per capita. Yeah, I mean, per capita, South Korea and Japan, about the same. If you look at household disposable income per capita, they're equal. Yeah, but in terms of household income, I guess Japan has many retired people who are counted as households and that may be a part of the problem, but it's also equalized in terms of cost of living. Is it? I don't see a PPP adjustment to all of this. So let's say, let's say data in U.S. state dollars at current prices and current purchasing profitability. Okay, so it is adjusted for consumption, so cost of living. I mean, I think the reason is that Japan stagnated over the last 30 years, basically stagnated since 1991, and that has been the period in which Korea has grown exponentially. Sadly, I think Korea is entering a period of stagnation. So I'm not convinced this will continue for Korea because it embraced a lot of the bad economic policies that Japan did. But yeah, I mean, Korea has been, over the last 30 years, a formal dynamic, productive, innovative economy as society. I don't know that median income, disposable income, is the only other way to look at this. I'd have to look at a bunch of other statistics to be able to compare the two economies. But yeah, South Korea is dynamic. We know, because we've talked about this before, about the fantastic TV series. There's a romanticism in the TV series that doesn't exist in the West, in Western Arts, so there's something definitely very, very good going on in South Korean culture. And Japan, I think, has stagnated. I might turn around. The challenge it has now to turn around is that it is old now. South Korea is also getting old, but South Korea is getting old at a time where it's still on the upswing. Japan's getting old when it's flat, when it's completely stagnating. So there's more upside in the short run for South Korea. But unless the two systems change, unless South Korea and Japan move towards more free markets, they're going to have a hard time in the years to come. The demographics are awful. And of course, the statism, if it doesn't decline, it increases, and that'll slow down growth as well. And then finally, what was I going to say about something came to mind about South Korea and Japan? Yeah, I don't remember, but it was one other issue. I'll think of it in a minute probably, and then I'll come back to it. Okay, let me continue on something that I see as related, although you might not, which is that England abolished Serfdom in the 13th century. And then it started shooting ahead economically of the rest of Europe, which maintained Serfdom until the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Conquest. What do you think is the relation between technology, which is England essentially had to abolish Serfdom because they switched to the longbow, which could shoot right through a knight's armor. And so they had to free the peasants to be a fighting force. And the peasants actually stormed the king's court and demanded the abolition of Serfdom. And then England started rising economically at a very high rate. Yeah, I mean, I don't know enough of the history of England from the Middle Ages on to know exactly. England was not particularly rich at the time of Queen Elizabeth. This is well into the Renaissance. It was considered, it was not considered a power, Spain and France were the real powers. It only started rising in terms of relative wealth, I think later than that. But it could be all related to the end of feudalism. I mean, it likely is feudalism clearly holds you back. The richest country in Europe for in the 16th, 17th century was actually Holland. It wasn't England. The Dutch were the richest in Europe. And I think there are reasons for that that have to do with, again, the culture and the ideas that were prevalent in Holland coming out of the Middle Ages. It was far more of individualistic society than the rest of Europe. I think looking back and trying to find cause of relationships and what led exactly to what and who is exactly richer than whom is very difficult to do historically. So I don't think it's a one dimensional story. But certainly at some point, England takes off. But even when you get to the 17th, 18th century, France is rich. Why is France rich? France is still feudal in some ways. And yet it's still rich. So trying to explain these things, you have to take into account particularly given how primitive economies were, how fertile the land is and how difficult or easy it is to cultivate stuff and what is exactly going. Italy, of course, is non-existent because it's all city-states. So it's not a unity. So anything we do when we go back into history has to take into account a lot of different factors and the cause of relationships between what's going on and not easy to identify. But certainly any feudalism would in and of itself increase the incentives and motivations to become wealthier. I don't think it's enough. And it certainly wouldn't explain what happens later on. But it certainly gives a boost to the British economy at that point. Thank you, Adam. Umlan. Yeah, sorry about that. I was muted. Another history question, but a little bit more recent in the 20th century. One of the things that the right, and I say that in quotes, in the U.S. is always saying is that, you know, the Democrats are the racist party. They're the party of slavery, blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff. And the Democrat responses that, well, you know, that there was a switch that voters moved from the Democrat party. Primarily, I'm talking about Southern voters. And now they kind of overwhelmingly are Republican voters. So is that true? Or I mean, prima facie, it seems like it would be true because you seem to have a lot of the same kind of attitudes and things like that. But the Democrats are still obsessed with race. I mean, everybody seems to be obsessed with race now. So, you know, what? I just don't think it's helpful to even think in those terms. I mean, it's somewhat because it's interesting from an historical perspective, how political parties evolve and how they change their views on certain things. Those things are interesting. But it's not like because the Democrats used to be a racist party, then we should have hold that over them, right? What if they're not racist anymore? Now they're good guys, and they reject their past. So we should say, hey, cool, you changed your mind. That's a good thing. So I don't think we should burden the political parties with views they had 150 years ago. The Republicans are not, the Republican Party of Donald Trump is not the party of Lincoln. It's not the same thing. Yeah, sorry. I should explain. The reason I'm asking is more in terms of being able to respond to people when they raise this is not particularly I care that much as such. It's just, you know, when you're having discussions with people, not that I have them too often, you know, just to have an answer to it to say, well, no, but let's be yes or this is true or whatever, you know, it's only true that the the voters in as as even in 1960s, the voters who were racist and were against segregation and were Democrats in the 1960s, the senators who opposed segregation in the South were, you know, who no supported segregation, certainly were Democrats. So the Democrats were the racists coming into the 1960s. During the 1960s, they flipped partially as a result of the of the influence of Northern Democrats who were, you know, anti segregation and who post civil rights, partially because it was Democratic presidents who made the big move against racism, Kennedy and Truman. And partially because the Republicans, I mean, Nixon, I think they called it the Southern strategy, Nixon consciously went after the racists of the South, telling them the Democratic party has betrayed you will be on your side, right? Okay. So there's no question that that happened. And then, you know, so so there was a there was a clear strategy among Republicans to go after the disenchanted Southern whites who felt betrayed by the Democratic party. Okay, great. Thanks. Sure. Ryan. Yeah, I recently shared a short clip of Jordan Peterson basically saying that I mean, it's insane. He basically states that you can't have science without religion. I've been following him for quite some time. And I mean, my question, I guess, is do you think like he comes from a science background? So I mean, this is very shocking to me. I'm losing any kind of respect for him. I'm wondering like, is he just sold out to the wacky right? Or is he actually losing his way trying to be a philosopher? I'm wondering what's driving his just insane statements. He actually always believed this. So if you go back and watch his lectures from his good period, right? He says basically the same thing, just it's more disguised by mumbo by Jordan Peterson mumbo jumbo, which is very good at, you know, basically what he thinks is that you cannot attain certainty through reason. You cannot attain real knowledge through reason. He is a Platonist. Your senses, your empirical data, your reasoning capability and integration will not lead to truth. Truth is ultimately revealed. Truth ultimately is in some world of forms that needs some other leap of faith to get to. And that's the, in that sense, he's a complete Platonist. And in that sense, he is, you need religion in order to do that, that faith is what leaps. He's got a little bit of Continism, but he's, I think he's even more straight Platonist. So he's metaphysics, his problem and always be, if you go back to my critique of Jordan Peterson that I did, I know five years ago, I say this, his metaphysics is the problem. He's got a Platonic metaphysics. He does not believe in an objective reality that is knowable by the human mind. He just doesn't. And once you don't believe in that, any good thing you might say is an accident. And it is with him. It's because he's got certain intuitions because, you know, he's practiced psychology and he's interacted with people. And so he has certain intuitions about what's right and what's wrong that are pretty good. Like he's very good on lying, right? He has this great videos about not lying, the Pinocchio stuff. But everything else is tainted ultimately by, and even that is tainted in there, by his horrible metaphysics and epistemology. And you can't get away from that. Maybe what's happened is he's now saying it out loud in a more explicit way. But he's not selling out to Ben Shapiro because, to the daily wire or whatever, because his holding of it is much more philosophical. His, when he says religion, he doesn't mean what Ben Shapiro means by religion. He doesn't mean these ancient books with this writing and these commandments and you followed, you were a Yomica and you don't have sex before marriage and all of that. That's not Jordan Peterson at all. He believes in it more as a plateness, as a religion standing in for the world of forms that you somehow gain. You need faith in order to achieve certainty. You need faith in order to achieve knowledge. You cannot achieve knowledge without faith. That's the sense in which he means it all. It seems very dangerous. It is very dangerous. I mean, this is Hans and Plato who led us to every disaster in human history. Yeah, he is very dangerous. He's always been very dangerous. And again, if you go back to my videos from five, six years ago, it's exactly what I said. This guy's really, really dangerous. He might seem good, but he is unbelievably corrupting and he will corrupt people. And the ideas at the end, maybe he is basically a good guy, but the ideas at the end will embolden evil. He says in his talks, anybody could be a Nazi. Anybody could become a Nazi. And that's very revealing because that's just not true. Indeed, the reality is most Germans were not Nazis. Maybe they sanctioned Nazis, but most did not join the Nazi party. Most were not Nazis. Most of you asked them about their ideas were not. But he has this original sin view of humanity and it also comes from the same attitude, same attitude of faith and religion and the inability to achieve any kind of certainty or knowledge through reason. Very dangerous guy, very, very dangerous. So, Jeroen, you don't see, you don't view it as his Christianity is driving his Platonism, view it as the reverse. Absolutely the reverse. I think he is not a Christian. He's a Platonist. I think in moments and certainly in the past, he might even said he's an atheist, but I think that he has come to the conclusion that the only form his Platonism can take and make sense because of his whole view of archetypes and his view of history and his view of the Bible and stuff is through Christianity. I think he views Christianity as a way to understand and to a way to communicate his Platonism. But fundamentally, I think he's a kind of a Platonist. I don't think he's Christian and then he's trying to rationalize his Christianity. I think it's the other way around. I may be wrong, but that's my sense. And that's why when he's asked, do you believe in God, he can't quite give an answer because when his daughter's asked, she says absolutely he believes in God. But he can't answer because does Plato believe in God? I mean, yes, kind of maybe, and that's the sense in which John Peterson believes in God, in the kind of yes kind of, but not the traditional ordinary Judeo-Christian God that everybody else believes in. It's a kind of a different God, but it's a God that makes truth, truth. It's a God that makes certainty, certainty. It's a God without which you can't have truth or certainty, not the God of the necessarily of, this is how you should behave, this is what you should do, just heaven and hell and all, the whole construct. It's a much more philosophical, which I don't understand. So it's hard for me to communicate because it's so bizarre to me. All right, thanks Ryan. Steve. A quick reaction to the super chat about why just aren't people, why doesn't just like everyone get it? I mean, I came to Objectivism like a bit later, I was in my 30s, so I took Philosophy 101 in college and I set back my interest in philosophy a good 15 years. And like you have to like be willing to be a bit of an outsider in a lot of ways to adopt it and like realize its benefits, which I don't think, at least weren't obvious to me when I started this path. I have a question about Catholicism and you kind of talked about this before and maybe there's just no better answer. So like I was raised Catholic in like a pretty in a household that took like understanding Catholicism seriously, like and I'm looking at these like public intellectuals like converting to Catholicism and on your recommendation I'm listening to Christendom right now. And it's even wackier than like, like you just can't make up like like if you wrote it down like in a book no one will believe it. Like the formulation of like how the early church like starts to have these bizarre arguments. Like clearly these people are smart. Actually, I think Med Bayer did a talk on Augustine, which I thought was actually very helpful. It was excellent. It was very good. Yeah, really good. Like how like it has to be like complete evasion but like what do they get out of wanting to be Catholic? I think the advantage of being Catholic is it provides you with a system. Protestantism is too much and I think this is true. It's the reason as soon as Luther breaks away from Catholicism, Christianity shatters. Protestantism becomes a thousand sects because there's no dogma. There's no authority. There's no system. So anybody based on their own emotions sees God's fine God and has his own interpretation of the of the Bible and has his own sect and his own following. Literally, there are a thousand different types of Protestant that you can be today. And that's if you're an intellectual, that is super not satisfying. That's too subjective and all over the place. But what's the truth you want to ask yourself? What's what's real? And Protestantism cannot provide that. So if you if you believe in Christianity or you're looking at Christianity, if you're intellectual and if you're interested in finding a system, the Catholics are the only game in town. I mean, and they have it down because they've been doing it for 2000 years. So they have answers to every question. How many angels considered on the head of a pin? They've got an answer for that, right? Because they've been doing the math and they have a theory of angels. I mean, it's ridiculous, but they have a theory of angels. Christendom doesn't even get into that. They have theories about the relationship between angels and the relationship between angels and God and angels and people and how many angels considered on the head of a pin. So it's it's got this from anybody from the outside. It looks completely arbitrary and random and confusing and insane and crazy. But it has its own internal logic. These scholastics worked for hundreds of years to create this internal logic, completely floating, completely detached from reality, completely detached from common sense. But once you get into it, it'll suck you in because it's like conspiracy theories. And it is the ultimate of all conspiracy theories. And it's it's got this ultimate. It's got this complexity built in where you study every little detail and you study the different thinkers and how they interpreted the blood of Christ, turning from wine into blood and when you drink it in a church and communion, why that happens and what it means and how you're drinking real blood. And I mean, you can spend all your life just reading about that because there's so many people have written about it. So I think it's very attractive to two intellectuals who don't want to have to deal with reality, who don't want to have to deal with truth, who don't want to have to discover facts in the world and who want to just accept these floating abstractions and play around with them and then maybe apply them to the real world and think they're superior because they've got 2000 years of thinking, so-called thinking behind the conclusions about these things. And that's why these intellectuals all have very, very rigorous views about what should happen in the real world. But yeah, that's appeal. It's appeal is the rationalistic nature of it, the pretence of reason, whereas Protestantism doesn't have that pretence. How does someone go? Do you see people that are scientists that somehow start down this road? And to me, as someone who is raised Catholic, you're just like, guys, the Bible is pretty arbitrary. It involves politics, the Eastern Roman empires, how this gets put together. I can't put myself into the mind of that mentality because I have the opposite, right? And I think you do too because you've abandoned Catholicism. But what they start with as a scientist is doubt. Do we really understand what's going on? Do we really know what we know? They start with epistemological and metaphysical doubt, like Jordan Peterson, right? That kind of doubting of where does truth come from and how do I know? And then what would happen with all this doubt and morality? How do I know what's right morally and what should I live for? Where do I find meaning for variety of reasons? I don't find meaning in my work. I'm frustrated. There has to be something bigger. There has to be something more important. And then they start searching and Catholicism provides the most rigorous it'll attract. So the emotionalists will go to Protestantism and the rigorous rationalists will go to Catholicism. Well, I guess if it provides the ability to play with their abstractions, I can see how it would be attractive to someone like my freshman year philosophy professor. Yeah. And also very attractive to people who want to believe that there's a massive tradition here. I didn't just invent this. So if I say that this is true 2000 years of backing up and I can document it and look all these saints and all these really smart people. So people who are oriented towards an authoritarian mentality are also attracted to Catholicism. It lays it out. It's dogmatic. The dogma is there. You just need to embrace it. You need to find a way to embrace it. All right, guys. We're running late. Let's go Andrew. Yeah. A common topic among the mental health intellectuals is the loneliness crisis. It strikes me as a topic that is a lot of premises could be checked that underlie it. And the intellectual's answer for it is usually more interconnectedness between people and also interests me that there's more avenues than ever for interconnectedness these days. But there does seem to be a problem with loneliness. I just am not sure that they're diagnosing the causes correctly. So it was wondering your take on it in general. Like what do you think is missing from the discussion? Yeah. I mean, this is a lengthy discussion. I mean, there's questions about whether it's even true, right? How they aggregate the statistics, what they're looking for and whether it's changed over time or whether it's basically the same as it's always been. And then there's some question and then there's of course the question of why. And a lot of it, I think there is a crisis. There's a crisis of middle class, lower middle class life and loneliness maybe is a portion of it, but it also manifests itself in drug overdose, it manifests itself in suicide. It's a crisis that affects white males more than minority males, more than women. And I think it has to do with people's inability to deal with change. Society has changed quite a bit. Jobs have changed. Technologies have changed. The world of women has changed. The world of religion has changed. And there are a lot of people out there who don't know how to deal with that change. They want to live in a 50s America, even though they don't know what 50s America was like, but they want to live in what they think the 50s America was like. They want to live with some kind of consistent knowledge of what they think it looked like in the past. And that's gone. And the problem is that the intellectuals who should be guiding them, who should be helping them to, if you will assimilate into modern society and embrace modern society and be excited about modern society. And our politicians do the opposite. Instead of encouraging them to change, they encourage them to stay the same and they lie to them with, we'll bring the jobs back. We just need the right politician. And if the right politician is there, then the world will revert back to the 50s and everything will be the same as it was back then. Yeah, you're right. Social media is evil. We need to end social media. And if only you could get rid of Facebook, the world will go back to the way you think it is. Instead of being challenged, instead of being, yeah, challenged, they are being coddled. And by coddling them, they only become more miserable and more lonely. It's also with the breakup of families, there's more divorce with the breakup of religion. People have less community. They're all more alone. But again, they don't have the values or the tools or the energy to go seek new forms of association. But for that, you need intellectual leadership. You need intellectual leadership, encouraging them and emboldening them to think anew instead of just thinking to the past. That's my interpretation. But, you know, I think, I blame the intellectuals. And, you know, the intellectuals. Can I add one thing, your own? I think also it also raises the question of whether people are using association with others for the proper purpose. Well, probably not. But, you know, they were trying to replace self-esteem. I think that's right. But the source of it, of course, is lack of self-esteem. The source of all the problems we see is lack of self-esteem. And that's not surprising, given the culture that we have. Thanks, Andrew. All right, let's do these. Cook, do you think altruism motivates many of the supposed anti-war advocates? They demand Israel and Ukraine may compromise us for the sake of avoiding war. It's preferable to be morally altruistic victim than it is to win. Yeah, I think that's right. But I also think that altruism encourages us to hate the able, to hate the successful, to hate the rich, to hate the ones that progress. Altruism is part of the reason why we hate Israel, because it's strong. So Israel is a little different than Ukraine, because in Ukraine the argument is Russia is strong. But in Israel's case, we hate Israel because it's strong. We hate Ukraine because it's affiliated with the strong. It's affiliated with America. It's affiliated with Western Europe. So altruism is multi-dimensional in terms of how it affects how we deal with this. It's better to compromise. It's better to sell out, sell out. It's better to land up weaker. You're more noble. And you should never support the rich, the successful, the prosperous. And that's certainly true of Israel and why so many people hate America. They hate America because it's so successful and so rich. It's all driven by altruism. Shazmat said, if they existed today, which organization would you look upon more favorably? The People's Front of Judea or the Judean People's Front? I mean, it's obvious that it's a People's Front of Judea. And if you don't understand that difference, then you don't understand objectivism. And that is it. We're writing you off. That is a line from the life of Brian about schisms. And it reflects the attitude of in those days how schismatic the Jews were in the pre-Christian, pre-Jesus days, there were a lot of different Jewish sects. Thank you, Shazmat for the laugh. That was good. Skyla, I just rewatched your businessman in the movie show. I totally butchered the title patterns. Please pardon me. Now, how do you regard awards and award shows? What did I mean to think of such achievements and displays? I loved award shows. She particularly liked Oscars. She loved the elegance of it, the celebration of achievement, the celebration of success. I think she loved the seriousness in which people took it, the fact that they dressed up, that it was a night out, that it was a competition, that people were eager to win and be acknowledged for real achievement, for real success. So she loved it. I like it. I think the Oscars today, I don't watch them anymore because they were far cry from what they were back then. Today, the comedy is, as I find mostly nihilistic, it's mostly making fun of them. The whole idea of achievement is kind of gone. Now, they have to be PC and woke and DEI and all this other stuff are brought in. Plus, the movie is not that good. So I find it less interesting and less. But I get what I ran was about. This is a celebration of human achievement. It's a celebration in a particular realm, in one particular aesthetic realm, which is the movies. And she loved the movies. I love the movies. And I think celebrating that is wonderful and fantastic. All right, Doug, how do you incorporate sardines? How do you incorporate sardines into your diet? Any sardine dishes, configurations to recommend? Also, have you any pizzeria recommendations? God. I eat them straight out of the can. I eat a lot of sardines. I buy Spanish sardines of the Moroccan sardines. I've had some Moroccan and Portuguese sardines. They're good as well. I have them. They have to be in olive oil, nothing else, just olive oil. And I think they're delicious just out of the can. So I don't put them on anything. I just open up a can and take a fork and eat them straight out. You have to be careful because it's super messy. It's super stinky. So you just have to eat them carefully and not destroy the entire environment in which you live. Sardines are great because they have a huge amount of protein. They also have lots of omega-3. So omega-3 and protein really crucial to our diets and they're there. They have the bones of the fish in them and you eat them. So you're also getting collagen. So you're getting very, very high densely nutritious food. Tuna is problematic because Tuna has mercury in it. So tuna has mercury and as a consequence, you have to be careful how much tuna you eat. You can eat some. I eat tuna, but I don't eat a lot of it. If I eat a lot of it, my mercury goes through the roof and I've had it tested. So I know that that exactly is what happened. Tuna has mercury, saltfish has mercury. Generally, big fish have mercury in them. Salmon does not and has very low levels and sardines don't have because the small fish, the little fish, don't have mercury. So you can eat as much sardines as you want and you don't have to worry, but definitely have to watch out for the mercury if you're eating tuna, if you're eating a lot of big fish. But pizzeria recommendations, I generally do not eat pizza as a rule. I eat the crust and the cheese and the oil and the super refined meats and the processed meats and all that. I generally don't eat, but there is a pizzeria here in San Juan that is truly exceptional. It's called Las Sancturia and it has a pizza called the Bitaroni and it uses beets instead of pepperoni and it's spectacular. It's really, really, really good and they slice the beets really thin and it's a little spicy and anyway, it's a really, really good pizza. I love that and generally, this pizzeria does a lot of really, really good pizzas that are kind of different and off, but I don't eat pizza often because I try to minimize the amount of simple carbs that I eat for whatever that's with. All right, let's do a few more and then maybe we'll do a quick round with the panel. Free trade question, say goods are produced by slave labor. Is it unethical to trade with these parties? Is trading with communist regimes different? No, I think it's the same. I don't think you should trade with slaves. I don't think you should trade with communists. It's not really trade because they're not willingly participating. It's one sided, but again, I think the embargo should be at the personal level. You should choose not to trade with them and it has to be communist. There are very few communist regimes today on planet earth. I don't consider the Chinese communist. I consider them more fascist than communist. It's different and one of the differences that the labor does receive a benefit from the, you can become a billion inch in China. So you actually benefit from the trade. The benefit of trade doesn't all go to the government like it does in communism. But yes, so I do not think you should trade with real communist, real fascist and slave labor. And that should be on the individual. Nate says, Johan, have you ever noticed, have you ever noticed commented on the platonic undertones of Keynesian economics comparing Plato's rule by philosopher King to policy makers? Yes, absolutely. I mean, the whole idea of centralized planning, the whole idea that you can model an economy out mathematically, the whole idea of you can generalize over everybody and there's somebody who knows what your utility is and what's good for you. All of that ultimately is the application of philosopher kingship, right? It all comes from a platonic perspective. It's not just Keynesian, but it's also much of classical economics where they think they can, you know, in a sense, model the entire economy through graphs and mathematics. Paul, what's transpiring today at the universities was procrastinated by Iron Man in her book, Capitalism and Unknown Ideal, chapter cashing in the student rebellion? Absolutely. This has been brewing since the 1960s. You can even argue it's been brewing since the turn of the century as Kantianism was brought into American universities. And the opposition had no answers to the modern philosophy. So absolutely. It's just a matter of the 60s, the hippies of the 60s becoming the professors and their children are what you see today. They're the professors of today and they're the grandchildren of the children of today. Akira Felix, do you think anti-trust is coming to social media? It's going to be a tough sell. They'll try. They're going to go after Google and Amazon first. I'll go after Apple. I don't know. Social media is fragmented somewhat, but they will try certainly on Facebook to go after anti-trust. I think they already have. They're trying to get Facebook to spin off WhatsApp. So it's already gone after social media. It's gone after Facebook. Nate, Iran, do you have any recommendations, book speakers on topics of free market, unregulated healthcare, and how it would reduce cost-improved quality? Yeah, God. John Goodman is pretty good. Ask these questions and I don't have. Send me an email. I'll try to put something together, but there is a bunch of good people out there. There are people like Cato Cannon and I forget the other guy's name who are good at Cato on this. There's an institute in San Francisco that's dedicated to privatizing healthcare. That's good on this. There's John Goodman. Yeah, there are quite a few good people on free market, unregulated healthcare. And in the future, there will be somebody at ARI at the Iran Institute who's also good on this. We've got a young intellectual interested in this field and is training to be the institute's spokesman on those issues. Michael, why can't people contemplate abstract thoughts? Well, because they choose not to think. It's not that they can't contemplate abstract thought. They choose to get to a certain level of abstraction and not go further. They have to be at some level of abstraction, but they choose not to go further than that. They choose not to advance. Iran has an excellent essay on that. I'm just reading it right now. It's called The Missing Link. And again, there's no real explanation of why do people not do it. All you have to know is they don't. You can't figure out why they don't do it because they choose not to. Free will is real. There's no cause for why, necessarily, for why people choose what they choose other than what they chose. Richard says, when I listen to podcasts on Patreon, they do not have commercials. I think Patreon will give you a channel for commercial free podcasts, which I would appreciate working on exactly that. It means that I have to upload it right now. The nice thing is I record the podcast channel live and it goes to speaker and it goes to all the Patreon. I would like to physically take the podcast and upload it onto Patreon. I'll do that if that's the solution, if that's the best solution, but it appears that that is the option we're looking at. And then if you subscribe to Patreon, if you pay $5 or whatever on Patreon, you get a commercial free podcast in the works. Michael is just a Trudeau communist. No, I just think he's a regular socialist. He's a lefty. Not every leftist is a communist. Communism is a particular form of leftism. I don't think Trudeau is working to, for government ownership of the means of production and complete equality across Canada. He's bad enough, but he's not quite a full-blown communist. Okay, Michael, did you know there's never been a school shooting in a school where teachers are allowed to carry? I did not know, but I don't know how many schools are allowed to carry. It could just be a statistical thing, but it's likely that you wouldn't have it. But how many schools? Is it two? Is it a hundred? Is it a thousand schools where teachers are allowed to carry? You've got to have the numbers in order to know whether that statistic is meaningful. And I'm not picking on it because it's likely that it is, but because I always pick on stats because people abuse statistics so much that it's important to think of them correctly. Michael, is there a justification for banning an activity that isn't the rights violation, but has a serious risk of leading to a right violation? No, no, not if it's just a risk of leading to something. If it's a threat, you haven't yet violated anybody's rights, but you're swerving on the road, you're driving like a maniac, then the threat that you post to other people is already a rights violation. So the serious risk is a rights violation if you could seem a bit right. If your behavior is dangerous, a serious risk in itself is a rights violation. So you have to think about that. It's always a rights violation. You can't stop something that's not a rights violation, but a risk of harm to somebody else can, if it's objective, be a rights violation in and of itself. That's why a threat, if I say, I'm going to shoot you and it's legit. I have a gun. People believe me. That's a rights violation. Just that, just by saying it. All right, Frank, what does me laze victory in ARG lower house mean? Well, he's one step closer to getting part of what he wants. But to get that victory, he has to put aside a lot of the more radical parts of his agenda, sadly. But it gives him something. Hopefully in the next election of parliament, he'll get more votes and in his site will have more power. It now goes to the other house. We'll see if he has to give up more in the second in the upper house, because he has even a smaller percentage of the members of that house on his site. So it's great news. It's closer to being official law. Not everything he wanted. Not everything I would want, but it's better than nothing. And it's moving in the right direction. All right, we're going to do a lightning round with our panel, but it has to be short questions. And I'll try to give short answers. We'll start with Jennifer. Okay, I'm done for today. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Jennifer. Matthew. Yeah, I guess I don't have anything prepared. But I've been watching the TV show Survivor a little bit. And I got to think in the other day, all these people talking philosophy that like to talk about what would you do on a desert island? Wouldn't it be great to see a show like Survivor put a bunch of them on a desert island so we can see what they would do? Yep. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Have a good day. You too. Adam. Two things. First of all, I do get your show without commercials by subscribing to YouTube Prime and being a member of the channel. And then you get a podcast? I haven't tried the podcast. This is strictly through YouTube. Okay, YouTube premium. The other thing I wanted to let you know is that I really admire Johnny Struge's latest microprocessor, which is now only in the Apple Air Mac Pro. But when it makes its way to portable devices, it will put real time AI right on the device so that you will be able, for example, to make a telephone call to somebody speaking a different language and have it translated in real time. Wow. Wow. The only bad thing is the software side of Apple, unlike the hardware side, is very reluctant to innovate and very difficult to make one's software comply with the requirements. That's why many apps appear on Android a year or so before they become available on Apple. Okay. All right. Thanks, Adam. Let's see. Who do we have? Amlan? Yeah. Okay. I'll look at my list and try to ask a faster question. Does fiduciary obligations essentially require companies to try to launch antitrust complaints against the competitors? Because if you don't, then does the board or shareholders say, hey, we could be doing this to protect? I mean, I don't think so. I think a lot of businessmen rationalize their own doing it by using that excuse. Okay. I don't think so because the fact is that when you launch antitrust suits against competitors, then they are going to do the same to you. The more successful you are, the more likely it is that you fall under the antitrust. You're creating an environment, particularly in the industry where this is going to happen, more so. So I think if you really take a long term broader perspective on it, then your fiduciary duty is not to encourage the antitrust bastards. But in the rotten culture that we have. Oh, yeah. So it does require it. Yeah. Well, that's how they think of it. I don't think it actually works in that way. So Mark Andreessen explains why he sicked antitrust on Microsoft is because, well, I mean, he was trying to maximize the wealth of Netscape and that was his duty responsibility. I think rationalization, I just think he realized he couldn't compete and he didn't have a business model that could compete. So he used this, right? Instead of speaking of a business model that could compete, he did this. So you couldn't have a case today where shareholders, let's say shareholders in Netscape had gone and launched a suit against Netscape. They're not doing what they need to do because they're not launching antitrust with that. Yeah, it's very good to a company for something they didn't do. Okay. Okay. Generally in corporate law, it's very difficult to sue somebody for something they didn't do. Okay. So we haven't fallen completely down to the abyss yet then. So there's still some sanity in that regard. Yes, absolutely. And corporate law is fairly good. Yeah. Given that this is in the headlines because this judge has thrown out along Musk's compensation at Tesla and people are going crazy about this and they're saying it's Delaware law and it's Biden, which is all nonsense. It's just corporate law. Unless you actually go into the trial and you read the documents and you follow everything that was said and you figure out he might be right, the judge he might be wrong, but it's not nuts. It's not crazy. Okay. You know, what he did is part of corporate law is to protect minority shareholders. And the claim was that majority shareholders were voted for this, but they voted, they were lied to when that is that the board gave them misinformation about this. And the other part of it is that the board didn't negotiate with Musk. They just accept it. Now, those are questions of fact. Did they negotiate? Because from a fiduciary perspective, they should negotiate. So that's a question of fact today. And then did the vote reflect the reality of what was being voted on? Right. That's a question of fact. The law says that if they were deceived about what they were voting about, and they deceived about the process the board went through, then it's not legit. And so these are questions of facts that the judge ruled on. And ruling is not insane. I'm not sure it's right. It might still be wrong. Well, I mean, it would be interesting to see if Musk appeals it. Yeah. I mean, if Musk appeals it, I mean, with 56 billion on the line, I mean, if he feels that there's something wrong, then he's definitely... I am going to predict that he won't appeal it. Yeah. And I think the reason he won't appeal it is the only basis to appeal it, because this is the only basis on which he made a determination, is on the basis of fact. Right. Right is. And you can't appeal fact, right? So there's no jury here. The jury didn't determine fact. The judge did. But there's no... You can't appeal a factual issue. The judge is not going to sit through all the testimony. The judge made a decision. Now, if there's an issue of law, but I don't think there is, I think the law is pretty clear. If the fact says she presents them, she's right. Yeah. And I think, I still think, you know, Delaware's trying to... Delaware law tries to protect shareholders. And that's good. It's not a bad thing. Okay. Great. Thanks. I call it socialist because I didn't jump on the bandwagon of accusing this judge as being a puppet of Biden who wants to destroy Musk and Twitter. Yeah. Well, I appreciate your inputs on this, because my initial reaction when you did the story was like, what the hell? You know, like why, you know, it was a deal. It's a deal. Like, you know, the tough shit. And they bought us a fiduciary duty to cut a deal that's good for shareholders. Yeah. So they voted on it, but the argument is made. Again, I don't know if it's true or not. Yeah. The deal was misrepresented to them. Okay. And I don't know. That's it. Those are questions of fact. Great. Great. Thank you. Sure. Steve. This is a super interesting case in California right now where the state of California is seeing a drug company for not bringing a drug to market. Sooner or not. That's good. I'm going to be interesting. Big fan of getting ad free podcasts. You could basically charge me any price and I would probably pay it. Okay. Just one reaction to your David Goggins episode, especially when you're commenting on his, I guess, his obsession with suffering. If you, I consume other, not necessarily David, but like other former special forces guys, you know, content, specifically some stuff about leadership. I think that's a common thing that comes up where they really, because when you're in that world, it's so like part of it is being able to like go through stuff that sucks for so long and having like the toughness and endurance to do it. I do think they overemphasize emphasize it. But I don't know. I try and filter through some of some of that. I think they make it too much an end in itself. There is no question that sometimes to achieve ambitious goals, it sucks. You have to go through sucky stuff. You have to go through pain. It can be horrible and it can't be achieved otherwise. But the purpose is the achievement and the joy and the satisfaction of achieving a goal. And it's not the pain in and of itself. And I think there's too much in the military haven't been in the military that encourages you to embrace the suffering as an end in itself to embrace the challenge and the toughness as ends in itself rather than as means to an end. And they are projecting that into their civilian lives, unfortunately. Do you think there's any relation for that kind of attitude and maybe our soldiers and ability to stand up, like get themselves to a better situation in terms of like being a part of a war that we actually might win? No, I mean, I think that's more. I mean, certainly the altruistic methodology that's behind this and behind the fact that we can win is a same altruism. But I think, look, the soldiers can't stand up and object to it because they train not to and the whole system of the military is you follow orders and the people who make it in the military, the people who advance are the people who ultimately intellectually committed to this non winning strategy, because otherwise they're not allowed to advance. And it's a self perpetuating kind of system within the military. Thanks, Steve. Andrew. Andrew, Andrew, where are you? Sorry about that. No problem. So completely blanked on my question. You know what? I ask enough questions. Thank you for the opportunity. Okay. Thanks, Andrew. All right. Let me finalize these super chats that are left. Let me thank Wes. Wes just did $100. Thank you, Wes. We really appreciate that. John, just a 20. Thank you. And so let's jump into these super chats. Did people like Karl Marx and Kant reflect themselves in their ratings? I don't think so. I don't know exactly what that means, but I don't think that they're autobiographical in any kind of sense, other than, you know, they had certain influences on them as growing up that have affected in their writing like Karl Marx's hatred of Jews is something that I think you grew up with. But I don't know. I'm not sure. And I'm not sure exactly what the question means. Michael also, what breathing exercise do you do? Do you do to manage stress? I sometimes do like just a five minute deep breathing, regular deep breathing. Just five minutes. My watch will vibrate periodically, you know, on a regular schedule. So breathe and breathe out and it's vibrating and the whole idea is to focus your mind on the vibration and not to think of anything. I do that once or twice a day sometimes, not always. I often fall asleep when I do it. I'm not good with meditating. Anytime I've tried to meditate, I fall asleep. So I'm either awake or asleep. There's nothing in this meditative state for me. But it is relaxing just to let go and just focus on that vibration and you just get out of that more refreshed, I think at the end of it. Alright, Nate, how does one know that on a path to live the best life possible and determine if they are being morally ambitious enough as Iron Man? Put it, how does one strike a balance between leisure and work? I mean, there is no formula, guys. It just isn't, Nate. I mean, you just have to figure it out. It depends on you, your personality, your context, your life. And you have, I mean, morally ambitious means doing the best that you can do. And you have to figure out what that is. And you have to push yourself and you have to challenge yourself. And the same with leisure and work. How much leisure do you need? How important is it? And I think different people need different amounts of leisure in terms of having a healthy psychological life and having a healthy physical life. I mean, if you just exercise all day, you'll kill yourself because you need rest. You need to be able to have that rest period. So all of it is a consequence of introspection. Am I stopping work now because I really need to stop? Or am I stopping work now because I'm kind of lazy or I could do more, but do I need it? Is this deadline really, really important? Or isn't it? So you have to introspect about what's really motivating you to do what you're doing. Am I at my peak ability or could I give in more? Think about exercise when you're running. Could I run faster? Is there more juice there? Well, think about living life that way. Is there more juice there? Is there something more that I could give to this project, to this thing that I'm doing? And when do I need to rest up? When do I need to take some leisure time and just relax with it? Frank, how are your sons dealing with the anti-Israel protests? I haven't even talked to them about it. And they're not big into that topic. Michael, is interstellar travel possible? How do I know? I have no idea. That is a question for physicists. I am not a physicist. All I can say is I hope so. Michael says, Israel will prevail while the Palestinians are on their knees. They're not on their knees yet. I hope you're right. I'm not convinced. Michael, do we live in a parasitical police state? No, I don't think we're in a police state and it's not parasitical yet. Elements of a police state, element of parasites. But there's some good stuff. I mean, we haven't talked about, I did talk about throwing out the case of the FBI just opening up people's safety deposit box and confiscating the cash and doing all that. And that was overturned by a court. So we still have a court system that will not let the police just get away with whatever they want. Apollos says the contributions of John Rippett's objectivism. I think that many, he brought a sense of life and a joy and a passion to the movement that was crucial in a real, an emotional spirit, kind of a spirit to it, an excitement to it. I think he's working into intellectual history, oriented people. It's not just philosophy. We also need to know history and we need to know what happened. He was morally assertive, brought morality into his talks. It wasn't just, the talks were not, this is good, this is evil, but you got a sense that he really felt that this was evil, that it was completely integrated into his life and that the good was integrated. He also had, I think, a deep respect for the good and expressed that. So he had a strong sense of justice in that sense. So I think those are kind of on one foot and quickly those are some of the attributes that John brought to the objectivist movement. Matt, how did countries like Argentina and Israel reject socialism without rejecting altruism? Almost everybody who rejects socialism rejects it without altruism. It's the same as Eastern Europe. The same thing. You reject it because it didn't work. You don't reject it because it's morally offensive or you reject communism because it's morally offensive, but we can still do some altruism. We just shouldn't take it to an extreme. We just can't go all the way. We just need to mitigate some of its more negative effects. So you do it from a practical perspective, but that's the reason you never go all the way to capitalism. You only reject it a little bit. You only reject it partially. Rafael, what is the best argument for the infallibility of our senses? What prevents them from being prone to error? I think our survival. We could survive with their prone to error. I mean, it's our means by which we know reality. If they were prone to error, we'd be falling off cliffs, running into automobiles, eating an orange, and it turns out it's not an orange. It's poison ivy. I don't know. I mean, just think about the mayhem and destructiveness of what would happen, and it doesn't make any sense. And the other aspect of it is you can tell. You can confirm one sense with the other sense. You confirm it now scientifically that our senses are completely valid. They represent. They don't represent everything there is to say about what we do, because there's certain aspects of reality we can't observe. A bat can observe the echo of a thing, the airwaves or the sound waves that it emits. Fine, but what we observe is true. We don't observe everything. That is absolutely true. But we observe enough to survive. That's the whole point of evolution. For example, a hearing is not as good for certain sounds as a dog. But we don't need those sounds for our basic survival. And we can create instruments that now can identify those sounds to the extent that we need them in order to progress as human beings. Florida, are you familiar with Brian Johnson and the tech guy who says he's reversing it? Absolutely. I'm familiar with him. Everybody should be familiar with Brian Johnson. He's a freak. He's crazy. But he's doing this experiment that I think all of us can benefit from. He's basically dedicating his life to trying to see if he can live longer and if he can actually reverse aging. And everything he does every single day is documented. Everything he's done every single day is measured. The effects of it are measured. And all that is being tracked by scientists, by doctors. And you can track it on his website called Blueprint. You can see exactly what supplements he's taking, which ones he's abandoning, which ones he's adding, which ones his doctors think are working, which don't. You can see his diet, what he's eating, what he's not eating. Now, don't try to be Brian Johnson. It's insane to live that life. But he lives it and we might as well benefit from it. This whole video of his entire exercise routine, I mean, there's just a lot to learn from what he's doing without having to live that life, which is all-consuming. But it does look like in certain respects, he's reversing the effects of aging. And that is great. And now we have to figure out exactly how and why and how we can apply it to our own lives, which is not necessarily that easy. Paul Azuz says, favorite exercise machine. I don't know. I used elliptical a lot because that's how I do my kind of running, walking exercise. Yeah, I mean, I don't have a pull-up bar. I wish I had a pull-up bar. That's the one thing I miss in terms of exercise. Whenever I do pull-ups, it has a massive impact on me. It has huge benefits. I use a lot of free weights. I'd say they're elliptical because that's what I use almost every day. You're awesome, you're on the hex-hecto. I appreciate that. All right, we did it. And we didn't go over two and a half hours. That's two hours and 32 minutes. Not bad. All right, thank you. Thank you to our panelists. Thanks for asking great questions. Thanks to all the superchatters. Really, really, really appreciate your support. And I will see you all on Monday, Monday morning or Monday early afternoon or whatever for the news roundup. I'll see you all there. Thanks, guys. Have a great rest of your weekend. Bye. Bye, Iran. Take care. Bye.