 It is interesting, but it is, yeah, these issues of work are complex and people mix up a lot of different things with it, a lot of different things. Maybe we'll talk about some of them as we go through the show. All right, so let's jump in. So one of the things this article illustrates or brings to forward, which is absolutely true, or I think it's true, is that PayPal, like Twitter, like to some extent Facebook, like many businesses, including MasterCard and Visa and certain banks and many other institutions out there. The argument is that Disney and others, are heavily influenced by the philosophy, by the moral perspective of the people who are engaged in the business. And as a consequence, many of their decisions are based on their moral political views rather than on what you'll call, quote, pure business arguments, so even as opposed to what seems to be their explicit mission statement. I have a problem with mission statements because I think that they tend to be, they tend to be, what do you call it, ambiguous and general and not always tied to reality, not always tied to the reality of the business and they ignore certain features. But so the idea is that PayPal, for example, has become what people consider today woke. That is, there are certain ideas, there are certain people, therefore, that are just unacceptable and therefore it is unacceptable to deal with them. It is unacceptable to trade with them. It's unacceptable to do business with them. And as a consequence, as a consequence, they drop them from the platform. So for example, if you are an advocate for a particular view of gender and not any advocate, but you're loud and maybe a little obnoxious, there is a chance, I don't know how much the chance is. I don't know that anybody's really done the research and really figured it out that somebody like PayPal will say, look, we don't wanna do business with you and as a consequence of that, we are pulling you off the platform and suddenly, if you're somebody like me who relies on PayPal for income, right? A lot of you are monthly subscribers, subscribers on PayPal and PayPal could tomorrow decide you're on, we don't wanna deal with you and I would lose contact with all of you. I would, they would stop collecting money from you. They would stop and as a consequence of my, it would be very, very difficult to do my business. I mean, the reality is, if I told you all, okay, everybody go to Patreon, I'd lose about 50% because 50% would drop off just out of inertia and it would really, really hurt my business, right? So businesses, we know that businesses are doing this. We know anecdotally, we know from articles and studies and newspapers and the media, we can see it. There was definitely an ideological bent to who businesses are willing to deal with and who are not and sometimes like in PayPal, that seems to go against their mission, PayPal's mission is to democratize financial services to ensure that everyone regardless of background and economic standing has access to affordable, convenient and secure products and services to take control of their financial lives. And, you know, it's, it says, it literally says everyone and yet we know that's not true. Everyone doesn't necessarily hold. Everyone doesn't include the people that for a variety of reasons, not because they're doing illegal activities necessarily, but for a variety of reasons, PayPal had decided that it is just not right for them to do business with these people. And, you know, this is related to cancel culture which is very similar, you know, it's, we don't wanna do business with certain people who hold certain views. And as a consequence, we're laying them off, we're firing them, we're boycotting them, whatever the case would be. And of course, Toyota taking them off their platform because of the opinions that they hold, because of the views that they hold. And we can see that in over and over and over again in a variety of different countries, you know. And of course, this imbuing of the values, the morality, the moral values of the people who work at a company and how the company is run or how the company deals with its customer, I think is inevitable. It's, how do you function otherwise? I mean, so Disney makes movies. Disney movies have a particular point of view that reflects the point of view of the creators and probably reflects the point of view of the creator's bosses, the people that they had. But how could it be otherwise? I mean, could Disney basically say, because every movie, for example, has a point of view, it doesn't have to be a political point of view, but it has a view about if it's any good, it has a view about life, the world, morality, it has a view about the world. It's, you know, if it's art, then it's a recreation of the metaphysical value judgments, which is a view of the world. You can't escape that. So every business has this. The idea that you can somehow separate the moral views about anything, really, and the way a business is run, the moral views of management, at the very least, of senior management, and the way the business is run is ludicrous. It's, and those moral views should be reflected in the mission statement, but they're typically not, because they don't want to, it seems exclusionary, even if they're going to be exclusionary. So the woke phenomena is a phenomenon which the moral views of a group of far out there leftists are being reflected in business decisions that are being made. And those business decisions, you don't have to do in PayPal's case and in Twitter's case in the, with regard to the opinions of the people they're dealing with. Is that in and of itself? Is that in and of itself wrong that they have opinions that, I mean, I don't think so. I mean, if you were running PayPal, would there be people you would not want to deal with? As a business, right? You're a business. Trying to be profitable, trying to maximize shareholder wealth, but you're trying to maximize shareholder wealth in the context of what? What is the context in which we're trying to maximize profit, we're trying to maximize shareholder wealth? If you hold a proper morality, what's the context for that? What the context of that is the creation of values, values that enhance human life. So context of any business is the creation of values. Indeed, the problem with a, let's say drugs were legal and you were selling, you were manufacturing, selling cocaine and to anybody who wanted it and willing to pay for it. I would phone upon you as a CEO of a cocaine company and you'd say, but wait a minute, I'm maximizing shareholder wealth. Everything is fine. No, it's not. You're not creating values, not in a pro-life sense, maybe in the sense of somebody wants it, yes. But in the sense of somebody wants it because they believe it will enhance their lives, no. You're not creating objective values, you're not creating life enhancing values, values that actually improve human life. And therefore your profit is, you know, it's not quite exploitative in the sense that people are still choosing to engage with you, but it is destructive. The product you're making, the product that you're selling, the product that you're trading is a product that is destroying human life. And therefore it is immoral, it shouldn't be illegal, it should be legal, but I think it would be immoral to work for the business that produces cocaine and sells it to people. So when we say profit maximization is the purpose of business, I don't take it as devoid of context. There's a context there and the context there is the profit made by the creation of values that are pro-human life. And what values those are, what your mission statement articulates, it articulates the particular values that you are producing that will create profit. And the particular values are what motivate the CEO to get into a particular business. He's passionate about media, so he starts a media company, but that media company makes money. That is the principle that guides most of its decisions in the context of creating values that enhance human life. So, but that context does create situations in which you would say, huh, so I'm running PayPal, it's time to see your people. And I discovered that there's a whole network of Islamists, people who advocate for the overthrow of Western governments in the establishment of a Islamic Caliphate. Maybe they're not tied directly to terrorists, but we know that Islamists, those ideas are often the inspiration, are the inspiration for many terrorists around the world that even though we don't know that they're tight to terrorists, they certainly might be tight to terrorists, we didn't know that these ideas inspire the terrorists. Would you really want to host a bunch of Islamists' accounts on PayPal, because you promised and you misjudged me, that did everyone? Well, no, I wouldn't. I mean, if one of my employees, I run a hedge fund, if I discovered one of my employees was a communist, I try to convince him to change his mind, but if I couldn't, I would fire them. If I discovered one of them was a Nazi, I would fire them, I would cancel them. So, and even though that employee might be super productive, even though that employee might be very difficult to replace, since communism and Nazism, I consider enemies, not just of me, but of human life, human progress, supporting communism and Nazism, and by employing somebody of those views, I think you're supporting it by allowing somebody of those views to have an account with you, you're supporting it if you trade with people like that. If I had a store and I knew somebody was a, I mean, a card member, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, I wouldn't want them in my store. I wouldn't trade with them, just as I would with a normal human being, because they are truly a threat to my life and to the existence of human life, anti-life. I mean, part of the problem with discrimination laws is it doesn't allow us to do that, it allows you to do it only if you're Christian and you don't happen to have, you don't happen to like gay people, so you can decide not to trade with gay people, but if you're, you know, it's not clear that you can discriminate in your store against points of view you don't like, although again, PayPal is doing it, Twitter is doing it. Well, we really disagree with when it comes to woke, when it comes to cancel culture, it's not the canceling, it's not the dropping people eliminating their accounts, blocking them from Twitter, it's the lack of any kind of standards, it's the lack of objective standards, and it's the application of a wrong morality, a morality that views as threatening and bad and the wrong people, and a morality that doesn't take into account human life, it takes into account the prevailing fashion of views, the prevailing stereo about certain threats, but it's not actually attuned to any moral principles. I mean, moral principles that are pro-life, that they reject the life standard. The problem is that we disagree about the standards, we disagree about the principles, we disagree about who not, but we don't necessarily disagree about whether we should have that power or whether we should exercise that power. The other thing we disagree about is we disagree about the nature of profit, and this is why I added corporate social responsibility. And I still view the purpose of a business, I think what makes a business a business versus any other kind of enterprise versus any other kind of corporate endeavor is that a business makes money, that a business is in business to make money. By creating and trading values that enhance human life in one way or another. And that would ultimately guide my criteria for who I do business with and who I don't do business with. It's the standard of is this good for human life or isn't it good for human life? Is it good for this customer to thrive because me dealing with them will cause them to thrive, they're better off, not thrive, but it would cause them to be better than they would otherwise be. Or is it really horrific for human life for this particular customer to do well? And therefore ultimately, not the way I want to make money, want to be profitable. But the view today is the profit is at best a model and it was immoral. That the actual seeking a profit is something to be, there's something you have to do, there's no option, but what a business is really about, really about is some kind of model ideal above and beyond. You know how they say, you need a cause greater than yourself, you need something bigger, something outside. And there's a sense in which that's right, right? There's a sense in which our lives are not just about some kind of momentary satisfaction, right? Which is the caricature of self interest. We need something greater than that. We need something of a perspective on the whole of life. But we also value things like liberty and freedom and free speech and we value these things that are, but they're not greater than ourselves, they're not outside there. They're part of who we are, part of what we are to be self interested properly is to value really, really abstract things, really, really abstract ideas. Because that's what it means to live a conceptual life, that's what it means to be a human being. That's what it means to really value your life. It means to understand the relationship between liberty and my life, between free speech and my life, between, I don't know, capitalism and my life. So I'm willing to fight for capitalism. Is that an idea greater than myself? No. It's an idea, I don't know how to use that language. It's an idea of me, it's part of me, it's part of who I am, it's part of what my life constitutes. I understand the value of capitalism, to me I understand the value of liberty, to me I understand the value of all these things, all these abstract ideas to me. They're not greater than me, they are me. They are part of who I am. You are in a sense the values that you adopt, the values that you choose to pursue. It's part of what makes you who you are, it's part of what building and making a soul for yourself is, it's the choice of those values. So what though most people in business today demand is the equivalent of something greater than yourself. Something, the equivalent of something greater than profits which I, you know, profit to me is, I don't know, it's something like what self interest is to the individual, profit is to the business. Pursuit of profit, pursuit of self interest. You could even say pursuit of happiness. So they're looking for something beyond that, something greater than that, something external to that. And they view that as morality, right? Pursuit of profit just like pursuit of self interest. Well that's stuff you just do. That's, well you have to pursue your self interest to survive. But there has to be something greater than yourself, there has to be a moral, noble ideal. No, the moral, noble ideal is the pursuit of my life. The moral, noble ideas I view is the pursuit of profit correctly understood, right? In the right context as I just explained. But the look of something beyond that and corporate social responsibility I think is that. That is, yes you have to make a profit, we understand that, you have to, you know, you can't run up, you can't survive as a business, you've got contract, you have to pay people, you've got to make money, right? But what's really important is something else. It's some utilitarian function, it's some common good, it's some public interest, it's something. And of course those things are always amorphous, hard to put your fingers on, hard to actually explain. And therefore easily manipulative, manipulatable, easy to manipulate. What is the common good? What is in the public interest? What is social responsibility? What is the socially responsible thing to do? Well, it's what the latest, greatest, you know, theorists are telling us it is. It's what politically we deem as acceptable, morally and politically deem as acceptable. Today it's woke. To be woke is to be socially responsible. It's to eliminate those point of views that you find that a world finds supposedly offensive and bad and doing harm to people. And that's an expansive set of views. It's not just the communists and the Nazis. It's a lot of views. So they take on this mantle of corporate social responsibility which wasn't created for this. It was created to provide businesses with something greater than themselves. The whole notion was to provide corporations with a moral mission with something more important than mere profit. And as a consequence, it opened business up to saying, okay, well, what should we do? What is the right goal we should pursue? Profit is not enough. We know that. So what moral goals should we pursue? Profit is a moral. Profit is just makes it possible for us to exist but then we have to pursue a moral purpose. And you know, then you can fill it in with different things. I think every decade, every decade, different things are gonna come in. Different things will fill it, depending on what's the particular views in the culture around us. And some businesses are most susceptible to this and others less susceptible to it but almost all of them are susceptible to it to some extent because how many of them are willing to stand up and say, I don't know, what was Microsoft mission? Microsoft mission was to put a computer on every desktop running Windows, right? So ultimately, you could say the purpose of Microsoft is maximize shareholder wealth by putting a computer on every desktop that running Windows because putting a computer on every desktop that runs Apple would not have served the profit maximization demand. So you don't say the maximize shareholder wealth and Microsoft was run with that as its intent. It was run to maximize shareholder wealth within that context of the pro-life values that entailed putting a computer on every desktop, believing that putting a computer on every desktop was good for people, was a value, was something that would promote human life, would further human life. And Microsoft I think is a good example of a company that later on probably gave lip service to the idea of corporate social responsibility, stakeholder capitalism, but never actually really did it. It did what it was required to do by law, but basically ran the company to make money, I think to a large extent, many of the companies, most of the companies in America today do that. But there are few where they take it seriously. They take it seriously partially because management, senior management would guide these companies and ultimately determines their direction, and take it seriously. They went to business schools, they got MBAs, they took classes in business ethics, they took classes and all this stuff, and they are serious about being ethical, being moral, running a company in a way that's consistent with ethics and morality. And what is ethics and morality? Well, right now it's woke. It's following the prescriptions of the intellectuals of the time. So none of this should be surprising. It's scary to someone like me because I could easily be categorized as one of the people that are doing, from their perspective, doing harm to the world and therefore they should drop me from PayPal and drop me from YouTube and drop me for whatever. So far, interestingly enough, that has not happened. Not because I'm careful about what I say I'm not, but because maybe because I'm not big enough, maybe because my views are not the kind of views and are certainly not presented in the kind of way that would offend to the extent that they would act. I think the latter is, I think it's a combination of both. I'm not big enough and my views and the way I present them is not offensive enough, right, from their perspective. But clearly, so what happens in business if you separate profit from morality, there are two possibilities that can happen. One is you become a total pragmatist and therefore morality is out the window and you just do what you need to do. And almost, not always, but often that leads to criminality. It leads to fraud. It's what happened in Enron and WorldCom and what happened. FTX is a little bit more complex, but it's ultimately pragmatism. Whatever, whatever works. I'm supposed to make money, whatever happens. You know, I need to make money. I'll just make money. I'll cut corners, I'll be short-term. Morality has nothing to do with profit. Everybody agrees on that. Sheldor's maximization is amoral. So morality's out and therefore I will become a pragmatist. The alternative is to say, Sheldor's maximization is amoral, but morality's still important. So I will guide how I run the company within certain boundaries as to not to affect making money too much but affect it somewhat. I will run the company in a way that expresses that morality. You see that, again, probably at Disney. You see that at PayPal. You see that, you saw that at Twitter. You're seeing it now in Twitter. I mean, what is it, learn, must do it. And you know, profit is okay. We'll keep the profit, but we'll try to apply morality. And then what you're doing is you're applying conventional morality to the circumstances and that's the mess you get. And then the other approach, which I think American business to a large extent has held in the past implicitly without knowing it, is to say, no. If I'm in a business that is enhancing human life, that is producing values to enhance human life, then profit is more. And indeed, pursuing profit is more. Pursuing life is more, is the context for morality, right? And I will then guide my company to maximize profit and what I want to make sure, and I will do it morally, that is I apply morality in how I run my business. I will treat people justly. I will treat with all my customers fairly. I'll be honest, I'm not gonna cut corners. I'm not gonna be a pragmatist, I'm gonna think long-term. I'm gonna think about how to produce these values in a way that will maximize wealth, but also that doesn't undermine the essence of the value creation. And yes, I will take action against threats, against people, organizations, entities that I believe undermine human life, human values, human progress, because that's what I'm about. I'm about human life. I often say that businessmen, the billionaires make the world a better place. Yes, and that's not altruistic. They make the world a better place because, because there's huge egoistic reason to do that, but it's in the very nature of productive activity. What is productive activity? It's producing for, it's creating values for, not just you, but it's creating values for other people so you can trade with them and you make yourself better and you make them better and you're making the world a better place. So, if PayPal was run by, so I think American business implicitly for a long time ran that way, but look, American business has been a mishmash from the beginning, they were always pragmatists. And look, sometimes the pragmatists committed fraud. For many, many decades, the pragmatists basically built themselves empires at the expense of shareholders usually, but there were no mechanisms to really fix that and no mechanisms to adjust for that. So, a lot of them, you know, there was a huge conglomeration boom in the 1950s and 1960s, the errors that the left admired so much and yet these are the errors that created conglomates. They were super inefficient, but they produced vast wealth for management because management got compensated on things like sales and revenue growth and things like that, but not on profit, not on shareholder wealth. It's an innovation to tie managers incentives to shareholders, which I think they were in the old days under G. Now, part of this is caused by regulations and I could go, I could talk hours for the regulations that brought about the mismanagement of America. And part of this is also, so for example, we just saw this with Twitter. So Twitter is, Twitter does a bunch of things that do not make sense economically, do not make sense from business perspectives. They don't make money, they don't make significant money. And as a consequence of not making significant money, their share price drops. Let's say they make less money that they could potentially do because of business decisions that they make and some because of moderating decisions that they make. I don't know if that's the case, but let's assume that's the case. Fred Hopper, thank you, Len, thank you, theme master, thank you all supporting without actually asking a question. That's why I'm thanking them separately. So let's say, Twitter wasn't making money or didn't seem that it was on a path to make a lot of money for shareholders. It was involved in a lot of controversy, it was involved in a lot of moderation issues that caused people to leave and caused competition to rise and caused people generally to not exactly know what was going on in platform advertisers who were never really comfortable with it and it couldn't really make money. It didn't have a business model to really make money to be profitable. And the beauty of free markets is that if you're in a sideline and you see this and you say, I could do a better job. I could do a better job by what criteria? The criteria of maximizing shareholder well. And by that criteria also improving the way Twitter's run, improving whatever it is that is required to generate revenue by providing real values. So you buy the company, this is what Elon Musk did. Elon Musk took advantage of the fact that Twitter, now he overpaid because of when he made the bid, he made the bid before the NASDAQ collapsed, but Twitter stock was not doing well. So he could offer a premium to it and shareholders would say and management said, yeah, we have to sell it to him because he's offering a premium. That's in shareholders' interest and they sold it to him. She get this major shift. Why? Because somebody believed that they could do better than what current management was and current management had to go along with it because that was what was in shareholders' best interest. Now we'll see if Elon Musk has the solution. If he has, great, he'll make Twitter more profitable. He is now the shareholders, he'll make more money for himself. He'll probably take it public at some point and he will make Twitter more productive. He will make Twitter more usable. If Twitter becomes more profitable, I think Twitter will also, that will be a reflection of the fact that Twitter is better. We'll see if that actually happens. We'll see if that actually happens. All right. So I guess a couple of things and then we'll go on. This whole idea, the whole idea now of, the whole idea of everybody being, of the resentment towards canceling and cutting people off from PayPal and so on. I think it's important to understand that every business does that. The question is not whether you do that or not. The question is what are the criteria and those criteria are ultimately gonna be determined by your morality and by the morality of those running the business. And I think that a rational morality guiding a business in one in which we maximize, you maximize shareholder wealth in pursuit of human life enhancing values using justice, reason and justice as the virtues guiding in honesty. And I think the objective is virtues are very good when it comes to business. Using those virtues to guide your actions as a business. Because I think using those virtues to guide you will maximize shareholder wealth, certainly maximize shareholder wealth in the context of human flourishing. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. 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