 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Book Show on this very warm Saturday evening, 8 p.m. here in Puerto Rico, 79.7 degrees Fahrenheit inside my studio. Eight conditioning is out. My eight conditioning unit that cools this part of the apartment, the condo, just stopped working today, just stopped working. So it's hot. I'm not usually doing shows when it's 80 in the room. So I don't know, I don't know. My wife suggested I cancel the show today because of the horrific working conditions. But here I am, in spite of everything, going at it, going at it, and trying to contribute to your day. So thanks for joining me. We have a, well, we're going to talk about a couple of things. I want to talk about, I did a debate, kind of debate, interview this afternoon in the heat with Econboy. Econboy, I think is his name on YouTube. So he is an economic YouTuber who does economic stuff. And we talked about the welfare states. I want to give you some impressions about that. And just the general challenge of debating, speaking to a pragmatist, and what do you do? How do you handle that? Econboy, yes, you can find him on YouTube. And then, although we did the debate on Discord and streamed it in YouTube, I didn't quite understand that. And I didn't think there was anybody on Discord. It was, I was confused. And then, yeah, we'll talk about some article I read today about reversing aging. The government all excited to live to be 150. Still working on that. The Benjamin Button Effect. Anyway, we'll talk about the work of, what's his first name? Sinclair, I forget his second name. Anyway, of Sinclair and kind of what he's doing and the prospects for that. So that should be fun. But first, I want to talk quickly about something that is not trending on Twitter. Before we get that, I want to remind everybody that Super Chat is on. You can support the show using the Super Chat, either by straight supporting the show or by asking a question. There we go. Chali starts us off with $20. And you can use the Super Chat to do that, Chali. He says, just so you're an econ boy, it was a good conversation. You crushed him nicely and politely. Yeah, I thought it was pretty good. And I thought I had all the right comebacks, both moral and economic. But we'll get to that in a little bit. $20 gets priority. I've got my Super Chat tracker version 3 that puts all the $20 questions in one column and all of the others in the other column. And that way I can prioritize those questions. But of course, you can also use this just to support the show. You can ask questions. The show is enhanced by your questions. We have a much better show that way. And of course, you are supporting the show so we can keep going and keep doing. What is it? Four shows a week, pretty much most weeks when I'm not traveling. So we will see how that all goes. Tomorrow, by the way, the show will be at 2 PM East Coast time, 2 PM East Coast time. Catherine, Action Jackson, if you guys are listening, interested. 2 PM East Coast time tomorrow, we'll have the show. And we'll see the rest of the week. The rest of the week depends on when I travel to Boston and when I'm home. I'm hoping that tomorrow the air conditioning will not be fixed. But I'm hoping that by Monday it will be fixed. So the Monday or Tuesday shows will have a cooler air, cooler atmosphere, which would be nice. Yeah, good question, Scott. Let's see. Anything else? Administrative? Just remind everybody you can support the show monthly on Patreon, bookshow.com, slash support on Patreon. Patreon's getting better. Patreon's getting better. A lot of you left Patreon a long time ago. But if you want to just make it simple and easy to support the show, you can go on Patreon. You can support it there. Yeah, particularly those of you who are not live and who don't use the super chat, it's a great way to help support what we do here and to provide value for value. And then there's also those of you who don't like Patreon, they're subscribed to our locals. Of course, most people use the runbookshow.com slash support. All right, so what wasn't trending today on Twitter? At least I didn't see it trending on Twitter and I was on Twitter a few times. What is today an anniversary of? An important anniversary and I think an important anniversary that'll go down in history as important for liberty and the fight for freedom. And I don't know if some of you know this because I sort of mentioned in the chat earlier. No, it wasn't Midway, it wasn't the Six Day War. I don't think so, although it's close. Sometime now in June, I think it's a Six Day War. But no, I wasn't thinking Midway, I wasn't thinking Six Day War. Something more, in some ways, more significant, more horrific, more negative, more sad, and something that has definitely shaped the country's future and present. Yeah, Tiananmen Square. 33 years ago, Deng Cha Peng ordered the tanks into Tiananmen Square and not only bringing the tanks in but ordered the troops, the soldiers to fire on the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of students. We remember it as Tiananmen Square, but really it's much more than Tiananmen Square. There were crowds of young students seeking greater freedom, seeking greater democracy, seeking a greater state in the future, standing for liberty. There were hundreds of thousands of such young people all over China. They were in all the major cities and some of the smallest cities in China. We only know Tiananmen Square because that's where there were some journalists. We know Tiananmen Square because of the famous pictures of Tank Man, but what is interesting is we have very little photographs of the slaughter that followed. We have no real first-hand detailed accounts of the massacres that the Chinese soldiers inflicted on their own people, the thousands, maybe the tens of thousands. We don't even know how many people died that day in the days that followed as the Chinese regime decided in the name of one party rule, in the name of the greater good, in the name of the common good, in the name of Chinese nationalism and Chinese greatness to crush, to crush the spirit, the dream and the lives of young Chinese students. Again, thousands, if not tens of thousands, died that day. More than that, I mean, not more than that, but on top of that, I literally think the spirit of a whole generation of Chinese was crushed, the liberty, the freedom movement, in whatever terminology they thought of it, to whatever extent they believed it could grow, disappeared from China or went underground, it continued to be held by intellectuals here and there that were allowed to speak sometimes, but as a movement, as a movement, certainly as a mass movement, Chinaman Square destroyed the movement for freedom and the movement for liberty in China. What is interesting is that China bans all discussions of it. It does not teach it as schools. When you talk to young Chinese today and you mentioned Chinaman Square, you will get a quizzical look from them. They have no idea what you are talking about. They do not know it even happened. Never mind what happened and how many people died. It has been wiped from the history books. If you remember the Hong Kong liberty movement, the Hong Kong demonstrations, many of them were focused around the commemoration of Chinaman Square in years past when people were arrested, when such commemorations were banned by the Chinese government and the students in Hong Kong went out into the streets in spite of that. Well, even that now is finished. There were no commemorations in Hong Kong or at least none with any numbers. At this time this year the Chinese government have a complete grip on Hong Kong. There are no demonstrations. There are no commemorations. Hopefully many of the people who did not get arrested by the Chinese who are not sitting today in jail from the Hong Kong demonstrations, hopefully many of them have escaped Hong Kong, maybe in Taiwan, in Singapore, in Canada, in UK, one of the great moral travesties is that the United States did not open its doors to refugees from Hong Kong. Many of the Chinaman Square young people managed to escape, many of the Chinese living today who are older, this was 1989, so 33 years ago, many of the 50-something year old Chinese people who have been living in the United States since the early 1990s maybe. Many of those young, many of those people, if you ask them, they were part of the Chinaman Square attempt at bringing more freedom and liberty to China and they gave up afterwards and many of them escaped to the west, emigrated to the west, went to school in the west, stayed here, did not want to go back to China because of what had happened on that horrific day. The tank man, remember tank man, the man who stood in front of the tank, daring it to run him over, trying to appeal to the soldiers, after all, you're Chinese, we're Chinese, what are you doing? You're really going to kill us. Well, the tank man actually survived Chinaman Square and is rumored to be living in Taiwan, kind of underground, changed his name, fearful of the Chinese government finding him and killing him. So incredible bravery by the tank man, but incredibly bravely I'd say by those students who knew there was a very high probability that the Chinese central government would not let them get away with what they got away with, not let them demonstrate. For weeks, days, weeks, they were in the square for a very long time and it's only when Deng Xiaoping realized that there was no way to negotiate, there was no, they demanded compromises he was not willing to provide and that they would not just go home, that all the pressure put on them, the threats did not work, that the only way to stop them, the only way for the Chinese communist government to maintain one-party rule was to actually inflict the kind of violence that was inflicted in Tiananmen. So Deng Xiaoping, in spite of doing many good things for China, starting in 1978 when he became kind of the leader and until his death really, in spite of liberating much of the economy and in spite of allowing certain level of freedom, a lot of freedom economically and some political freedom, his hands and his legacy will always be tainted by the blood he shed that day, 33 years ago. I mean he also has a lot to pay for the sins of being Mao Tung's right-hand man during much of Mao's rule over China so it's not that he, that he was a good guy always, he was a bad guy who turned pragmatic, semi-good guy who then in Tiananmen Square manifested itself as the bad guy and then returns as kind of more pragmatic, good guy afterwards. A lot of blood on Deng Xiaoping's hands, a lot of blood on those Chinese soldiers' hands, a lot of blood on the generals who went along and the other party members who went along with it, unforgivable. I think, I think it'll go down in Chinese history as a dark black day. I think one day, one day and I'm convinced this day will come when China is a free country, one day when China is indeed a country that celebrates freedom, capitalism, individualism, this will be one of the darkest days, this will be remembered as, as, as a, for the courage of the young people who are there and for the cowardice and the evil of the people who unleashed the violence on them. So my thoughts go out to the, to the, the, the people of China who've kept the flame of liberty alive, the people of China who still fight for that liberty. My thoughts go out to the people who lost family members that day and to the survivors, to all the students who demonstrated and who survived that day. Hopefully, hopefully some of you will see a better China. It's not heading in the right direction right now, but maybe that'll be a catalyst, maybe that will be a catalyst to a renewed liberty movement in, in China. All right, so Cheminat Square 33 years. Let's see, before we talk about the debate, Michael has a $50 question. Well, Michael usually has a bunch of five, ten, twenty dollar questions, but he's just jumped in with the $50. So let's see what this is. Oh, he says he totally agrees with Harper, but I don't know what, which, which one, right? Harper Campbell says, I assume this is it, so Michael, if it's not the one, Harper Campbell says, I'm going to be so upset if I have to live in this crappy mixed economy for the rest of my life, and then everything becomes perfect after I die. And then Michael says, I totally agree with Harper. My professor called the Iron Render sociopath in class, when really it's the conventional philosophy is pushing the propel sociopath to the top. Should I have challenged my professor or kept quiet to preserve my grade? So first, I don't, I don't get it, Harper. There's a sense into which why are you going to be upset today about something that's going to happen after you die? I mean, that makes no sense to me. No sense. Right? It makes no sense to be upset today about things that are not going to happen. They're not going to happen. They're just a fact. And they will happen one day. That's also pretty much a fact. I mean, the only thing you should be concerned about is given the world, given what you can do in the we, how do you make and live the best life that you can possibly live? To fantasize you, a, a, a, a lasvic capitalist society, you'd be upset because you don't get to live in it. What's the point? It's, it's a waste of energy and effort and upset-ness, whatever that is, whatever that word means you'll be And, and there's a sense in which you should be, see my perspective is the opposite. I am thrilled by the fact that these ideas will win one day. I'm thrilled by the fact that my kids, my grandkids, some of you, some of your kids will live to see liberty and freedom and objectivism and reason and rationality and, and egoism win. I mean, isn't that so cool to imagine such a, now, if syncing Clair at, at, I think he's at Harvard, if syncing Clair reverses aging, then maybe Hopper, Hi-Hop-Hop Campbell, you will see that day. Maybe I will too. Maybe Michael will join us. You guys are young. I don't know Hop-Hop Campbell how old you are, but Michael I think is young. I'm not, but if we can reverse aging, then I, I can be 20 again. God, can you imagine me being 20? Can you imagine having the knowledge I have? The, the, the abilities that I have and having the body, the knowledge, sorry, having the, the body, the energy that a 20-year-old has, God, I mean, that would be pretty amazing. And having, and having the, the, what do you call it, the long-term perspective, which is what I miss, the long-term perspective of a 20-year-old, being able to plan 40 years out, right, for a lifetime, right? It's hard to plan 40 years out when you get to my age. So wow, you know, yeah, having the wisdom of a 60-year-old and a body of a 20-year-old, I could, I could go with that. So, you know, we'll get to the, the, the reversing aging thing, but I'm, I'm totally cool with that. Michael said, should I have challenged my professor, I kept quiet to preserve my grade. I mean, it depends. I, I don't know how evil is this professor, how nasty would he be in terms of reprisals, how important is a grade in this particular topic. All of those are relevant. So there is no dogma, there is no duty to behave in a particular way in class, generally, one should fight for your values. But only when the pain inflicted on you is in proportion to what you might achieve by fighting for those values. And if you're, if the fight is futile, or if the pain inflicted on you because of the fight is too big, then yeah, just keep quiet and, and, and get your grade and, and then, you know, hand your classmates copies of Atlas Shrugged after class. So you have to balance it all out in terms of consequences, cost, and, and part of the cost is not standing up for principle, right, I mean, that is part of the cost. But, you know, you're not, you don't have a moral obligation to hurt yourself in order to promote the cause. That would be altruism. That would be living on a duty, living on a, on a duty premise, duty premise. Landon says, we can't reverse aging yet, Chomsky's still alive. You know what? I, I'm willing for Chomsky to live forever if I can live forever too. See, I don't, I don't begrudge Chomsky to live his miserable, pathetic, horrible life. That's fine. I can't continue it indefinitely as long as I get to live my amazing life indefinitely. So again, I'm an egoist. I'm not about resentment of other people as much as I'm an egoist. Jeff says, go, oilers go. I don't even know who the oilers are. I guess it's hockey because it's the only other sport going on right now, the basketball. By the way, did you guys see the first game? Did you guys see what happened in the Celtics, Celtics, um, um, Wario's game? I mean, did you see the fourth quarter? Man, that was, uh, that was pretty amazing. And my Celtics pulled it out. They, they did it and they won after being down by 12 points, going into the fourth quarter. They just, that was one of the best quarters, a basketball I've ever seen. I play. And Apollo Zeus was trying to convince me that while the show was going on, they were already losing basically. It's very, very nasty Apollo. I mean, really, um, all right, let's see. Let's, uh, we'll get to Ashton and we'll get to your question a little later. Same with philosophical zombie hunter. Uh, we'll get to that one when we talk about the debate. What we'll get, we're talking about the debate now. Uh, so philosophical zombie hunter says the debate with econ boy was amazing. Debating pragmatists is always very hard. You can watch my debate with econ boy on, I think you can voice channel. I think it's up on his channel already. But if not, if you don't want to go to econ boys channel to watch the debate, uh, I will be putting it up on my channel, uh, maybe this week. So soon. So you'll be able to watch it, uh, watch it there. So I did do this debate with econ boy, um, on, um, uh, on his channel, uh, on, um, it's on YouTube, but we did it on discord. Uh, there was, um, there was, uh, you know, it was, I thought it was good in a sense that he was very respectful. He didn't speak over me. He didn't interrupt. He didn't yell. He's the opposite of Vosh and some of the other, uh, uh, weirdos that I've debated. Uh, he was actually let me speak. He didn't agree with me, but he let me speak. Um, he, uh, is confused, but what he, what really came out of, I think, the debate is how confused people are in the world today and how they're not really moved by any principles, it really except one. The only principle that anybody holds in the world in which we live is that morality demands that we help the poor. That's it. And that in the name of that morality, coercion is fine. There's nothing wrong with coercion. In the name of helping the poor. So Catherine, if you ask a question like that as part of the fan thing, my super chat tracker doesn't catch it and then it throws me off completely. Um, but, you know, uh, so even if it's just for $2, try to put the question into the, uh, into the, uh, super chat. It's okay. Apologies. So, uh, so it's, um, it's very difficult to debate them because everything they say is framed by this idea that we all agree that it's inherently obvious that there is no other possible option, but that helping the poor is a good thing and that we have to help the poor and it's a moral obligation and, and the way to help the poor is, uh, you know, if we have to use coercion to help the poor, that's okay. That's the only principle they hold. And then everything else is, does it help the poor? It doesn't help the poor. And they want to have their cake and eat it too. So they want economic growth, but helping the poor, of course, doesn't reduce economic growth. They won't admit to that because that is too upsetting and that's too much of a trade-offs. They don't want to believe that they are trade-offs. They want to hold, that they, they want to have their cake and eat it too. They can conceive of the idea that it's not my moral obligation to help the poor and it's not my moral obligation to help the poor. I might choose to help some poor. In my case, I would only choose to help ambitious poor, children maybe who are poor, but that's about it. I'm not going to help the white beating drunk ever. But they can't even conceive of that. Now, tourism has negated, has completely wiped out the possibility of doing that. Now, they're now quite willing to say, we should sacrifice people to help the poor. So the argument is, oh, come on, Iran. So, you know, they take 50% of your income. You make enough money. It doesn't hurt you to go and pay the poor a little bit, to help the poor a little bit. And yeah, you know, those Swedes and Danes, they live great on half their income. So what if they're taxed? It doesn't actually hurt them. So they won't come out and make altruism about self-sacrifice, which it really is about. They won't actually go out there and say, people should sacrifice. People should suffer. People should bleed. And the only thing that matters is, are you helping the poor? Now, again, they're not ideologues and they're not principled. They want to hold this idea that you can help the poor without sacrificing anybody. You can help the poor without hurting anybody. And they're tomorrow imperative to help the poor. And at the same time, they realize the economic growth helps the poor, maybe even more than welfare. So we shouldn't give up on economic growth. And of course, we can have economic growth in the welfare state. There's no contradiction there at all, at all. So it's sad to see. You know, he's obviously an intelligent guy. He's smart. And his idea was, yeah, economic growth is good, yes, capitalism is good. We'll get to capitalism in a minute. But we got to help the poor. So let's have a welfare state. And look, Denmark seems to be pretty good and Sweden seems to be pretty good. And yeah, maybe they're poor within the United States, but they have a better safety net. So what if they're poorer than the United States? I feel safer because if something happened to me, then I'll be bailed out by the state. And so I worry less. So I'm better off. So it's a really interesting mindset to have. And it's a typical mindset of a pragmatist who doesn't really believe in any fundamental principles. Now one of the things that, again, they want their cake and eat it too, is they want to believe that they're capitalists. They know, deep down or straight up, they know that capitalism is a good thing, that markets, freedom, lack of central planning, the price mechanism, price signals. That markets broadly and free markets are good things that they produce, economic growth, they produce wealth, they produce, they bring people out of poverty. They know all these things. So they're not willing to, quote, give up on capitalism because they think, they are for capitalism because they associate capitalism with, and then, you know, at one point he said, I'm not, I don't believe in central planning. But then later on he says, well, you know, rich people putting money in the saving account is not the most optimal use of that money when it could be used to help poor people rise up from poverty. Isn't that central planning? Isn't that you as a central planner deciding what the best use of this amount of money somebody else's money is? Isn't regulation central planning? Isn't pretty much, isn't government investment central planning which he is for? Isn't everything that the government does when it comes to economics, central planning? Of course it is. See he doesn't want complete central planning. So he wants this mixed economy. He wants to pretend that it's capitalism. And in order to pretend it, he has to basically never define capitalism and not really define capitalism. And again, have his cake and eat it too. I want, I don't believe in central planning, but a little bit of central planning is okay. I believe in capitalism, but not too much capitalism. And it's a mess. And it's hard to think through. It's hard to actually argue against because you're using terms that are not clear. So I encourage you to go watch the debate. I think you'll enjoy it. I think I did a pretty good job handling it given the circumstances. I tried to define my terms. I tried to go back to what is capitalism. I tried to call them on the altruism and talk about the morality of it. And I tried to talk about the damage that the welfare state does, not just economically because it reduces growth, but also the damage it does to the welfare recipient. I'm curious what you guys think. So I'm open to comments. If you go on Econboy's chat and comments and rebut some of the comments that are supporting him, but do it in a respectful way. Don't be assholes. Don't be jerks. Be nice, respectful, scientific, rational, use reason. I get it, Michael. It was the wrong hopper question. I will get to the right hopper question in a minute. So go to Econboy and do it there. It's Econboy, boy spelled B-O-I. One word, Econ, E-C-O-N-O, B-O-I. He's on YouTube, on his channel, and the debate I think should be there. And then, if not, as I said, I'll put it up on my channel soon. And yeah, I think it was really good. I think he was, yeah, he was as reasonable as you could be, but he's confused and mixed up and basically a status quo, mixed economy, left-leaning, Denmark-loving, Econboy, I guess. The video is unlisted. I assume he's going to list it soon. I'm not sure exactly why it's unlisted so far. But if not, I'll definitely be posting it on my channel soon. But again, I thought I did a good job, and if you're curious how to debate such a pragmatist, I think I modeled how to do it fairly well. All right, let's see. Let's do another super chat. We'll go back to Michael's, but let's do Hopper Collins in relation to that. Hopper Campbell. Sorry, Hopper Campbell. So Plato is brilliant. His blueprint is a way for sociopaths to wind up on top. He creates inversions of proper hierarchies in very sneaky ways. Yes, and I don't think that was Plato's intent. I don't think Plato was Ellsworth Tuhi who did this on purpose. I think Plato was, to the extent that you can be, in a sense, this is still the birth of philosophy. They're still thinking these ideas through. They're just trying to figure them out. Where does knowledge come from? Where does truth come from? What is truth? Hard questions, not obvious. Nobody gets it right, really, until Inrand, so that's 2,500 years after Plato. So obviously, not easy. So I don't associate Plato with the evil consequences of this as much as I do somebody like Emmanuel Kantu, who definitely should have known better given when he was writing. Plato was brilliant. Plato was brilliant, and he gave brilliant, if wrong, answers to the fundamental questions the philosophy asks, and he tried to answer all those fundamental questions. So Plato was indeed brilliant, and I don't know, I don't know what the technical definition of sociopath is, because I don't know if, you know, is it a sociopath, psychopath. What Plato has done is he has legitimized the idea that certain people are better at running your life than you are, choosing your values than you are, and that it's okay morally to have somebody else dictate to you how to live your life. In that sense, Plato, you know, as he calls him, he's the advocate of the philosopher king, of somebody who has knowledge of the truth, has knowledge of the world of forms, has the revelation of what is right and what is good and what is just, and as a consequence can dictate your life for you, and he believes that those philosopher kings, at least by some interpretations, should be the ones running your life. And I think that has really, and that truth is not discovered by a process of reasoning from reality, but truth is discovered through a process of revelation from another dimension, and that opens up a whole can of words, including Christianity and the stranglehold it has on our society. Michael just says that he agrees with that, and tells us a story about his professor who thinks Ayn Rand is a sociopath when really it is Plato who makes that possible. Yeah, he makes possible the existence of people who think that they know better than you, think they know how to run your life, and I have to say in the 21st century that it is much more evil than it was in 500 BC or whenever Plato lived 400 BC. It's much more evil today, given our knowledge, given our experience, given everything that's happened in the world, and what we know about the human race, and given the enlightenment, and everything else. It's much more evil to hold that view now than it was back then. Temperature in the room has gone up to 82. By the way, my air conditioning is broken, so I have no AC right now in my office. Humidity is staying low, I'm not sure why, but humidity is staying low, but it's hot in here. All right, let's see, okay, we'll do one more super chat question because Ashton put 50 bucks behind it. By the way, I think I posted it, we're under $200, so we're $425 from our target, so Catherine, you got to get going in riling these people up and getting them excited and getting them to support the show. Okay, Ashton asks, I unfortunately believe that the war in Ukraine is going to last years. Where the wars start, people always seem to think it's going to be quick. Famous quote, war will be over by Christmas. History has shown that wars tend to last long and stay bloody. It depends, I mean Israel's experience is primarily with short wars, I guess that's my experience because I grew up in Israel with war. I don't think that wars necessarily, particularly in the modern era, have to be fast, but it's already 100 days, and I agree with you, it's not going to be, it's not a six day war, it's not a one month war, it already isn't and it's going to be suddenly the rest of this year and probably well into 2023, if not longer. It's already, I believe it will be bloody, it will continue to be, but it is bleeding the Russians and I do think that at some point it will turn into a war of attrition rather than an ongoing war of advancing forces. As a war of attrition, I think it will be a lot less bloody and a lot fewer civilians and it will be a lot less expensive. I just don't think that Russia can afford for this war to go on for very long. I think Ukraine, the only reason Ukraine can afford it is because the West is not only supplying them with weapons, but supplying them with money. Nobody is really supplying Russia with money, although it still is managing to sell its oil and gas all over the world and that brings in money, but the rest of the Russian economy is desperate and is struggling. Russia is struggling to find new accrues to come and fight in this war. As is Ukraine, there is a certain point at which there's just not enough young people to send to die, particularly in a country like Russia which has an elderly population and a shrinking population and I do think that once Ukraine gets the superior weapons from the West, it will manage to push Russia back quite a bit, whether it pushes them out completely is hard to tell. There's also a question of how long Putin's going to live, the rumors that he has cancer, there's rumors that he's already foiled one assassination attempt. Who knows if there are others in the cards. So it's probably going to be a long war in spite of the fact that I think Ukraine is winning. That's definitely going to be a bloody one as I said nobody's going to win, not really. Everybody's a loser from it. Well the ruben hasn't fallen because of oil and gas, because as long as the West keeps buying oil and gas, the Russian Central Bank can continue to prop up the rubble using the dollars that it gets and one of the reasons that Putin was so insistent on trying to get West to buy oil and gas with rubles is because that would be a direct way in which he could prop up the rubble. Right now it's more difficult for the Central Bank to prop up the rubble but they are doing it because of the oil and gas revenues that they have but all they have to do is buy rubles. Central Bank, all it has to do is use dollars to buy rubles and as long as they continue to do that, the value of the rubble will stay relatively high relative to other currencies but it's completely artificial and they are capital controls. You can tell it's artificial because Russia has imposed capital controls in Russia. I bet you the rubble is not quite as strong if you go into the Russian black market. In the official market it's strong. In the black market, I bet you anything, it's quite weak. So no, the Russian economy is struggling as any economy would be when it's become as isolated as the Russian economy is. And we know that a lot of Russian consumption and a lot of Russian supply chain starts in the West and the West is not supplying those goods anymore to Russia. And you know the standard of living in Russia and the quality of life in Russia is collapsing. So while the rubble is holding up against foreign currencies again because of the manipulation of the Russian central bank, the rubble buys less and less within Russia. Within Russia it's buying less and less. So there is high inflation in Russia that is lowering the standard of living of Russians. All right, let's see. All right, so a little bit of good news, at least from my perspective. I've seen stories about this and I've seen this guy's books being advertised. I think I bought it, I haven't read it yet, but I've bought the book. And that is this idea that we now have the technology to at least make mice be younger. That is at least certain organs within the mouse. So the scientist by the name of Sinclair at Harvard says we now we know that when we reverse the age of an organ like the brain in a mouse, the disease of aging then go away. That is disease of aging related to the brain. Memory comes back, there is no more dementia. If you do that in muscles, muscle capabilities. So the way he frames it, aging is the fundamental disease, the underlying disease that really facilitates or makes possible all other diseases. A cancer is a disease of aging. Dementia is a disease of aging. Many, you know, heart disease is a disease of aging. These are not diseases suffered by the young. These are diseases that as our cells, as our bodies age, they become susceptible to. If we can reverse the process of aging, if we can revitalize the cells in the various parts of the body, we can get rid of disease. And we could get rid of the things that kill us. So in his lab, we had two mice. One mouse is the same age, you know, in terms of the clock, I guess. But one mouse is the picture of youth and one mouse is gray and feeble. The brother and sister, they're born in the same litter, so they're twins, in a sense. And the only difference is that ones, genes, were altered to age faster. So they age faster. Now, the argument he makes is if you can alter the genes to make them go faster, to age faster, why can't you alter them to age slower? But more than that. In 2007, a Japanese scientist by the name of Dr. Shinya Yamanaka managed to reprogram human adult skin cells to behave like embryonic or pluripotent stem cells. In other words, they were capable of developing into any cell in the body. In other words, in a sense, he made them young again. He made them so that they started over. He won the Nobel Prize for their discovery. Now, the problem was when you switch back, when you did this to cells, they lost their identity, some muscle cells became blank cells that could become anything. And the real challenge is to turn a muscle cell into an embryonic cell that's going to turn into a muscle cell. So, and that is what they've now succeeded in doing. In a study published in 2016, and I'm reading from a story in CNN of all places. In a study published in 2016 by researchers at Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, they showed that you could reduce the sign of aging, could be expunged, in genetically aged mice that were exposed for a short time to the fact as Yamanaka discovered can do, can cause the cell to reverse, to become a stem cell, basically. And they could do this without erasing the cell's identity. Now, the problem with what they did in 2016 is it turned out that they could do this for a short time, but then the cells became cancerous. And created cancer tumors, so of course, that was bad. But what's happened now is that in Sinclair's lab, geneticists by the name of Yuncheng Lu, obviously Chinese, that's a very Chinese name, has managed now to do the same thing without the cancer cell developing, without the harmful effects. So he takes these factors and he puts it into a virus, a harmless virus, and he uses the virus to deliver these factors to the cells. In this case, he did it to a mouse's, an old mouse's eyes, and it's pretty amazing. They switch on, I'm not going to get into the technicalities, I don't really understand them, but they switch on the genes, and it's really cool. The eyes become younger. So you can actually turn certain cells in mice backwards, and backwards in age, and you can make yourself, you can make those cells younger. Now the question is, can you do the same thing with human beings? And more than that, can you do the same thing with the whole body? And that's the next step in the research, is not just to take one set of cells, not to tell muscle cells, or eye cells, or brain cells, but all cells. And can you do that with the body in general? And that's, I guess, the next step to work on with mice. And then the challenge is to do it with human beings, to do the research in human beings. I found this interesting that Sinclair says that it's going to be years before human trials are finished, I think it's going to be years before they even start. Because they need to get permission to do the human trials. They need to be done, and it could take years to do them. They need to be finished, they need to be analyzed. If they're safe and successful, they need to be scaled. And all of that needs to go in front of the FDA to get a stamp of approval, on only then will we get this. So here's what Hopper Campbell, you should be mad about. You should be mad about the fact that the technology might exist in your lifetime. Or let me put it differently, the technology is very likely to exist in your lifetime. Maybe it would even exist today, if not for the FDA, if not for the bureaucracy, and the risk aversion, and the slowness, and everything else that's associated with the FDA. The FDA. Whoa, Troy. Troy has been on a supportive rampage recently. Thank you, Troy. Really, really, really appreciate that. That takes us basically to within $36 of a goal. So Troy just gave $500 Australian dollars. So that's really fantastic. So it's exciting. It's amazing. It's depressing that we've created bureaucratic entities to make this science, this technology that will allow us to live for a long, long time so difficult to attain. Now, Sinclair has some advice about how you can extend your life anyway. I don't know if this is good advice, bad advice. I mean, he's a scientist, but I read so many conflicting things about the science. But here's his top tips in this article. Focus on plans for food. I don't do that enough. I certainly don't. Eat less often. So he's one of the believers in fasting and doing a lot of fasting. I don't fast. I'm not good at fasting. I don't fast. Just get sufficient sleep. I'm bad at that. So the first three, I'm not good at. Lose your breath for 10 minutes, three times a week by exercising to maintain your muscle mass. I do do that. I probably do more than 10 minutes, three times a week. Don't sweat the small stuff. I'm probably fairly good at that. And I have a good social group. Yeah, you're my social group. How better of a social group can you get than you guys? So that's some of his advice. He has more specific advice about certain supplements that he recommends taking that he think can really extend human life today. Again, very hard to tell. You know, he takes vitamin D and K2. I have a little vitamin D, K2 pill that I take every day. He also takes a baby aspen daily. I don't do that. He takes a gram of resveratol. I've heard good things about resveratol. You know, maybe it's worth doing. I don't know. Not a doctor. I have no idea. He takes one gram of metformin. Mix things about metformin. Again, he's a supporter, but some people are not very enthusiastic about it. And then he takes a gram of NMN, nitrotinimidmononucleotide. Again, I don't know if to recommend it or not, but those are the things he takes as supplements. But he's big. Sinclair is very, very big on fasting. I am not. I do not do well on fasting. My brain needs food. My brain needs calories. I need to feel satisfied in my stomach to be able to NAD IV drip going. What's an NAD IV drip? I don't know what NAD IV drip going. All right. Just thought I'd give you some good news about the prospects for living a very long time. All right. Let's see. John says, given survival rate of 25-year-old man is 99.8 to 8 percent if everyone maintained health at that age, indefinitely, then 50 percent would live to age 390 years. I mean, that's amazing. I have no idea how to evaluate that. I, you know, whether that's true or not. I just don't know. I don't know how to evaluate it. Sorry. But I do believe that if one of the most important things we can do is start whatever, whatever regime lands up being good for your health, starting at young, starting at young, makes a huge difference. The longer you wait, the more difficult it becomes. So, oh, I'd love to live to be 350. If you live, if you live a healthy life, if you're healthy, that would be amazing. I hate the idea of death. And I mean, what I hate about death is, like, I'm in the middle of a novel and you want me to just stop? You want me to just walk away? You know, I'm not going to see the end. I'm not going to see what happens to all these paths, all these things that are going on. I want to see what happens. I want 100 years of glorious. I want 350 years of glorious. All right. Ashton asks, let's say you have the body of Hitler and the mind you have right now. It's 1933 and your Nazi party has taken power. And then the Reichstag just burned down and you as Hitler got absolute power. What are you doing differently to get Germany out of economic ruin? Wow, that's a bizarre question. I mean, I wouldn't be, none of that could have happened, right? All of that isn't a possibility because if I had my mind, it doesn't matter what body I have, I wouldn't be taking power. I wouldn't have taken power. I wouldn't be taking power. I wouldn't give those speeches. I wouldn't be popular. I, you know, nothing would have happened. Ashton Jackson says, I would resign, right? But I think your question is, can you get the economy going without becoming a fascist? And the answer is absolutely yes. I mean, you do exactly what I would do in any country. And I don't know in detail the structure of the German economy in 1933. But basically I would put the German currency on a gold standard. I would, you know, cut, do you remember, Germany is the original welfare state. Germany is the first welfare state. Germany, you know, had a lot of controls over its business, controls over its industry. I would get rid of all controls. I would start phasing out all welfare. And I would encourage entrepreneurship. Not encourage them, but encourage them in my speeches. In my, you know, I would encourage people to become entrepreneurs, to create jobs, to build businesses, to hire people. So I would do the exact opposite of Hitler, which was to increase controls, increase regulations, and build up a war machine. I would take apart whatever war machine I had. Producing weapons is counterproductive. You know, once I made Germany rich, I would build weapons to protect myself from the Soviets. But 1933, I don't think the Soviets were a threat. So don't build weapons. Just allow markets to work. I would basically free up the German economy. Just like I would have freed up the US economy when the, you know, in 1933 to get out of the Great Depression. The exact opposite of what FDR did. James Taylor says, one of the reasons the Germans got as far as they did was because they were motivated by national pride after losing World War I. So badly, they wanted to make a comeback, whereas the Russian army is invading their little brother. Yeah, but Germany didn't get very far. I mean, very fine, what? In conquest that then got beaten back, in taking over a few countries for a few years. But in the vast scope of history, you know, Germany was beaten into pulp in, you know, five years. Five, a little bit more than that, five and a half years. It was beaten into a pulp. It lost massively. There's no question that, so Germany wasn't a success in any respect. There's not dementia in which you could say Nazi Germany was a success. Now they succeeded militarily for a while, for lots of reasons. They had, at the time, at the beginning of the war, they had the best equipment, military equipment in the world. The Russians at the beginning of the war have some of the worst military equipment in the world. The Germans at the time, there was a certain nationalistic, you know, motivation and winning feeds and winnings. So if Germany had not succeeded with the Blitzkrieg, if they had actually failed in their initial attempts, they would have collapsed immediately. They would not have been, they would have been like Russia today. They would have not. They couldn't sustain a war long-term. Morale wouldn't sustain. What sustained morale was that they looked like they were winning for a long time. The Germans had good generals, some good generals anyway, like the guy from North Africa who later was in France. But I don't know, you know, how much the soldier in the tank and it was, you know, there was a certain nationalist pride that was drilled into them that drove them to success. Rommel, thank you, that drove them to be motivated. But, you know, the motivation was shallow in the end because they didn't really believe in what Hitler believed in. At least a lot of them didn't. And to the extent that they did, that belief was irrational. It didn't sustain them. Let's see, let me just see if there are any related questions. Wouldn't it be better if we learn how to transplant a human brain into a cyborg instead of trying to find a way to extend lifespan of an imperfect, more fragile and aging human body? I doubt that that's going to work. I doubt that you could separate the human brain from the body and have it sustain itself. I, you know, we know today, for example, that there's massive ongoing communication between all kinds of parts of the body who feed information to the brain in ways that I'm not sure we understand enough or know enough or could predict yet to do it in a cyborg. You could do the opposite. You could take the parts of the body that are the hardest to replace, maybe, the hardest to rejuvenate and replace them with a robot, a cyborg. So you could build the, was it called the one billion dollar man, a million dollar man or whatever it was called? Certain parts of the body could become cyborg. And I really do believe that at the end of the day, what wins out is some computer-cyborg-human interaction. But chips in the brain or whatever. Six million dollar man, that's what it was called. But, you know, we'll see. We'll see what works. We'll see how it develops. We'll see, you know, what is the most efficient mechanisms. Right now, I kind of like my body. The other thing that you'd have a hard time with cyborg is getting the pleasure pain mechanisms right. Life is not worth living without pleasure. It's certainly not, I'm not sure life is worth living without sex. And I'm not sure cyborg could experience sex in the kind of integrated way in which sex is built into the human body. So I don't know if you could recreate a human orgasm. It's not just the chemicals in the brain. It is more than that. It's a physical sensation, not just a brain-induced sensation. So it's, I don't know. It doesn't seem possible to me that you could completely integrate it that way. It will be possible to download your brain's content into a brain computer interface, into a robot. Check out Newell link, Elon Musk company. No, I don't think it's ever going to be possible to download your brain's content into a brain computer. I think it's a misunderstanding of the brain content. I don't think your brain's content. I don't think who you are. I don't think that I, that you are, is zeros and ones and can be translated into zeros and ones. I think, you know, whoa. All right, Chaz Bhatt. Thank you. All right, we're blowing through the numbers right. This one I have to copy over so I don't forget. Wow, so Chaz Bhatt is giving $500 to review Star Trek, the motion picture. I think it's the original from 1979. I will do that. It'll be, it will be fun. All right, let's do it. There, copy, paste. Thank you. All right, so we're at, let me, let me post our dollar sum. We double, we've doubled our usual goal, right? This is great. So, so I don't think, I think there's something unique about biology that cannot be replicated in a computer. Now, one day we might be able to recreate biology. That is, we might be able to build a biological computer, in a sense. We might be able to create life, but life will not be a computer running on zeros and ones. Life will have chemistry and biology involved in it. And, and that is not a computer and that's on Newellink. Newellink is the ability of a chip to stimulate the brain and maybe one day to communicate directly with the brain. But that's that direction, not the other direction. You're not going to be able to download you into a computer. You might download specific things, memories, specific concretes, but not you. So, I'm skeptical and that's not what Newellink is. Michael says, have you been trying? He said Plato was not innocently getting things wrong as he was attempting to figure out the world, but he was a bad guy using people's lack of knowledge to subvert them. Harry is the philosopher. I am not. I will take, I will take Harry's word on that. It seems I give a lot of slack to, you know, pre-modern philosophers, ancient philosophers, because of our little experience, how little observations, cumulative observations they had had in the world out there. Okay, let's see. Scott asks, thoughts on the Mises Caucus taking over the Libertarian Party. So, as you know, well, you probably don't know, the Libertarian Party exists. It runs in presidential elections. It runs in some local elections. It's out there. It's active. The Libertarian Party is a conglomeration of all kinds of Libertarians. Libertarians from all different factions. Because Libertarianism is really not a, it's not a philosophy. It's kind of a broad, loosely defined political philosophy, but it's not even that because there are big, incredible disagreements among them. All kinds of people are within the Libertarian Party. They are anarchists. They are what are called left anarchists. Anarchists who are like Chomsky believe that ultimately everything will be kind of socialized under anarchy. They are right anarchists. This is the Mises Caucus. They believe in anarchy, but in the meantime, believes in nationalism. It leans racist. It's anti-immigration. It's supportive of the South and the Civil War. Again, it's very nationalistic while being anarchistic at the same time. Given what they call an alcohol capitalism as a contradiction in terms, why not go all the way, anarchy? Then there are the Libertarians who are anarchists, but lean left. They believe America is on social issues. They're much more aligned with the Democrats. Murray Rothbard went through a period where he thought the true alliance of the Libertarian Party was with the radical left. They're pro-legalizing drugs. They hate America, just like the Libertarians hate America. These Libertarians hate America. They think America is morally equal to Russia and Cuba and all these other awful countries. So they despise America. You can try to contradict what I'm saying about this if you want. Calling it slander doesn't make it wrong unless you want to provide evidence to the country. So there are these left-leaning who want an alignment with the left. The left-leaning Libertarians tend to be woke. They tend to think that there's something right about critical race theory. They tend to think that America indeed is a racist country. And I tend to agree more with the left Libertarians than with the right Libertarians on the social issues. One thing the left Libertarians and the right Libertarians all agree on is they dislike America. They dislike America's past. They hate America's foreign policy. They refuse to defend America. And then you've got what you call moderate Libertarians. So kind of the people who've run in the past a few years for Libertarian presidency. The presidency and the Libertarian better. Oh well, we want to shrink government a little but we want to deregulate. We want to shrink the welfare state. We don't want to be too radical. We like to summon things in the left like some things in the right. And this is more the Republican Libertarians. The Libertarians within the Republican Party who are not anarchists but who are not too radical on limiting government. The Libertarian Party is a disaster. It's a mishmash. It's a conglomeration of all these different sects. I think the worst of all of them really is the Mises' Caucus. Now I have personal animosity towards the Mises' Caucus partially because they hate my guts and that's okay. But I despise them because they combine the worst elements of libertarianism, anarchy and the worst elements of the right. Nationalism, anti-immigration, xenophobia and at least for some of them elements of racism. And combine that nationalism in a funny kind of weird kind of way with anti-Americanism, hatred of America. And you can see this in the person they love is Hans Hoppe, HOPP, who believes that the ideal system of government is monarchy and who longs for the Middle Ages where we were all ruled by local monarchs evading completely the bloodshed and the horrible life conditions that people lived under. And monarchy, which is a disgusting form of government, a particularly disgusting form of government, a particularly horrific form of government that is just completely rife with violence. So I think the Mises' Caucus is the worst of all worlds. I can't think of anything really positive about it. Now what they're claiming is they're the principled libertarians. And if that's the case, and I'm not going to argue, if they're the principled libertarians then fine. I've never claimed to be a libertarian. I don't want the label. I don't want to be identified as a libertarian exactly because of that. Because if that's principled libertarianism, I don't want to have anything to do with it. I can somehow stomach the middle of the road libertarians. But once you get into anarchy, you know my position on anarchy. I think it's statism on steroids. I think it's a bloodshed and disaster and a dramatic decline in the quality instead of living. I think it's a hateful system of government. Well system, it's not a system of government. System, social system. I think it's a system that we lived under in a sense for most of human history. And it's about bloodshed and primitivism. So I can't think of anything much worse than anarchy to begin with. And then on top of that you have all the most horrific features of the new right. Kind of the nationalism. It just has to be small units. The anti-immigration, the borderline racism. So yeah, I have no sympathy for those people. I'm going to lose a lot of subscribers. Generally this month I've lost a lot of subscribers. I think abortion set the tone. And then since then I've just been losing people left and right. And I think right now I've probably lost a bunch of anarcho-capitalists who listen to the show and who are disgusted by what I have to say. And look, you know, I think one of the most damaging destructive figures in the liberty freedom movement, broadly speaking, it was Marui Wathboud. I think Marui Wathboud did an unbelievable amount of damage that we will suffer from for decades and decades to come. And the Mises Caucus, should we really call it, let me just say this. Yeah, Mises was anti-anarchy. Mises was anti-everything the Mises Caucus stands for. It should be called the Wathboud Caucus. The Mises Institute in Auburn should be called the Wathboud Institute or the Lou Rockwell Institute. It should certainly not be called the Mises Institute. It has nothing to do with Mises. Mises wasn't by any stretch in anarchists. He was anti-anarchy. He wrote about being an anti-anarchist. So I hate them for using Mises' name. So it's a disgrace. And that's the real, you know, violation of everything is the very fact that they use Mises' name and to justify these ideas. It's just hollow, just hollow. So it should be, if they called themselves the Wathboud Institute, at least I'd give them, you know, at least I'd give them, I'd say, okay, well, they're not at least frauds. But this is a fraud. This is a fraud. So the Libertarian political party was always a joke. Libertarian political party was always horrible and stupid and pathetic and disgusting and ridiculous. I never voted for a Libertarian candidate. I never would. I think they're a joke. The Mises caucus has just made them worse. Yeah, I mean, Dave Smith and Michael Miles are relieving. Michael Miles is not, you know, I don't know how much you take this stuff seriously. Dave Smith is a comic, you know, in person, a nice guy. But, you know, this is the anarchist, this is the anarchist anti-immigration, you know, conspiracy theory wing of the Libertarian group. And not a fan, not a fan, obviously. All right, Catherine says, if your bookcase behind you started to catch on fire, which two books would you save knowing it's hard to replace or that have the most value to you? Oh, God, I don't know. I mean, I was going to say it was shrugged and found head, but they can be easily replaced. Maybe, I mean, Opa, the one that I've got signed by Leonard. I mean, everything here can be replaced. There are probably some signed books back there, but I haven't thought about it. I don't know. And again, I think every single book out there back there. I mean, some of the old Iron Man books, just because they were my copies, it's the first time I read them, you know, they're mine in that sense. I'd probably grab a couple of the old Iron Man non-fiction books and whatever I have signed. So Ed says, did you see where the court in California proclaimed that bumblebees are fish? Really, the case was almond alliance of California versus fish and game commission. I saw headlines and I thought they were a joke. So this is real? I'll have to look into that. I thought it was a joke. So I just skipped over the articles. I'll have to look at what exactly is meant by that. Liam, I mean, of course it's California, so who knows. Liam Millis, not all adult poor people are white beating drunks. I know. That's what I said. I said I wouldn't support adult, you know, white beating drunks. So I guess you could, yes, I said something like I'd support kids. I won't support it. So I would be willing to support people who, you know, because of bad luck lost everything or people I know or people in my community that have had a string of bad things happened to them and have lost everything. Things like that is things I would support. You know, I'm not going to, and I'd support charities that did the research and made sure they didn't support the white beating drunks, I guess would be my answer. Oh, I didn't notice. We have, wow, today is an amazing day. We have Jeff with $79. So he says, reading ominous parallels now. Peacuff says, pragmatism accepts fully the volunteerist irrationality of the 19th century romanticists. The typical romanticist, however, openly dismissed reason in favor of feelings. I'm confused on the difference between romantic, with the romantic art we love. Oh, God, that's a big question. So you have to separate between the romantic, the philosophical romantic movement and the aesthetic romantic movement, the romantic, romantic art, although they're related, and I'll mention how they're related in a minute. The philosophical romantic movement was a movement that wanted man to go, it was really based, I think, on, I mean, Gator, Good, and Schiller, but it was really based on kind of Rousseau's vision of man going back to nature. Connecting with this emotion, reason, stifling emotion, and therefore stifling your connection to yourself, reason as repression, reason as detachment. And the romantic movement pushed in philosophy, pushed for connecting with emotion, connecting with your emotions, rejecting reason and living through your emotions. Now, what is the connection with romantic art? Romantic art as a negative, I'll first say what it is, as a negative in this deposit. Romantic art as a negative in the sense of what it rejected. Romantic art is rejecting classical art. It's rejecting, which is associated, unfortunately, in people's minds with reason. It's rejecting rigid structure. It's rejecting rigid rules, sculpture in the classical art, how to have given proportions between, you know, the head and the torso and the legs and arms, and everything had to be proportional. The muscles had to be certain, everything. So what you get is very stifled, almost robotic sculptures that are cold. Although the great neoclassical sculptors are pretty amazing, but you do get a sense of they're frozen. And Greek sculptures are a little bit like this. So the romantic rebell against it, they want to be liberated. They want the sculptures to convey strong passions and emotions. They want them to be in movement. They want them to get away from the classical pose with its rigid rules. So the classicists in the late 18th century were rulebound. Lenopikov talks about this with regard to, in his eight great plays, with regard to, I think, Racine, the French playwright, and I mean, you wrote these magnificent plays, but they were structured in very rigid ways, certain things you were allowed to do, certain things you weren't allowed to do. And Racine was starting to push the envelope on that, but not quite. The romantic said, you know why? Why do I have to have, you know, three acts? Why can't there be five acts? Why do the characters have to be like this? Why can't they be like that? Why can't they, and you know, in everything, in poetry, in painting, in sculpture, in literature, and when you go to a great museum that has kind of a sense of the history of art, and you can see the classes, the neo-classicists of the 18th century, and then you see the romantics, you can tell the difference immediately. But so I think that movement to liberate from the stifling rules was a good one. And fortunately, they associated those rules with reason. So they viewed it as a rejection of reason, which is tragic and destructive. What actually is going on is, in order to convey great emotions in art, there has to be a cause for the emotion. The emotions have to be targeted at something. Well, what do we have strong emotions about? We have strong emotions about values. So romantic art is value laden. And what Rand identifies is because it's value laden, it implicitly, metaphysically, recognizes free will as essential because values are essential, chosen values are essential. That's why you're passionate about it. That's what you have strong emotions about. And therefore what they did through their art is convey the possibility of choice in human action. And therefore choice with regard to values and therefore valuing passionately. And romantic art is the art of free will. It is the art of values. It is the art of the passion and pursuit of values. And that's what Hugo does. And that's what Dostoevsky does, even though you might not agree with his values. And that's what Inran does. And that's what good and not that many sculpture and painting do. But of course, it's harder to see the pursuit of values and sculpture and painting because they're less conceptual. But it's they. You just have to learn the language. And that's what, in a sense, music does. But again, we don't have the language to quite express it. But in expressing our passions, in evoking such powerful emotions in us, which romantic music does, it suggests to us the pursuit of values, the achievements of values. And I think that's how we talk connected. I mean, that deserves a much longer, more full description, but that explanation. But that's the essence of it. And that's why romantic philosophy by bringing to the forward emotions was not a bad thing. What the bad thing was the rejection of reason and not understanding the relationship between reason and emotion. But because the art is so metaphysical, because it gets the metaphysical value judgment, by elevating emotions, what it's actually elevating is human values and human choices. Iron Man described herself, yes, Ed as a romantic realist. So she was a romantic. And I think a lot of the art of the, I think Hugo was a romantic realist. I think a lot of the art of the 19th century, not all of it, but a lot of it was romantic realism. All right. I don't know how interested you guys are on me doing shows on arts, art history and art and particular artists. If you are, let me know maybe some of your sponsor show on 19th century art or Renaissance art or the history of art, we can do a series of shows on the history of art if somebody wants to sponsor that. So let me know if you're interested in the sponsorship of shows on art. Ashton asks, wow, it's getting late. All right. Ashton asks, Marxist revolutionaries simply traded one life on another during the Bolshevik Revolution. Instead of one man, the czar owning the work of all the people and the communist government would have them believe all the people owned the work of all the people. Yes. I mean, there's no question that communism really fed off of the mythology of the time. Communism is very Christian in many regards. You know, it elevates the proletariat to where God is or it elevates the state or international Bolshevism to where God is or in its nationalistic version, it elevates the state to where God is. The people, the proletariat. And yes, the authoritarianism, the philosophy of king nature of it, you're just switching the czar for Stalin. You're just switching one philosopher king for another philosopher king to guide you. One happens to be bloodier than the other, but for the peasants of Russia, they were still expected to sacrifice. They were still nothing and nobodies. And basically communism basically leveraged Russian Orthodox religion and feudalism. Not so much feudalism, by then it wasn't completely feudal, but authoritarianism, the authoritarian nature of the culture and the religious nature of the culture to take over with their own form of mysticism and authoritarianism. So absolutely, Ashton, I agree. Liam asks, are government-run economies discredited even on the left? Is that some intellectual progress? Yeah, to some extent it's intellectual progress, but they still give government programs, government initiatives, government controls way too much credit, way, way, way too much credit. Frank says, the green mile narrator is 100 plus year old but healthy, yet he is wary and unhappy with long life. Can it be good to outlive your friends and family? Absolutely, you make new friends and, you know, you make new friends. Ask me when I'm 100 and I'll let you know. All right. Yeah, I mean, if somebody's willing to sponsor a art history kind of course at my level, which I think is your level, you know, so it's not, I'm not a world expert on these things, but, you know, bringing in kind of an objective perspective to it, that would be fun to do. So you can think about that and let me know if that's something you would like me to do. But it would have to be sponsored. All right guys, you're on book 100th birthday show. Absolutely, 150th birthday show. Why just 100? Absolutely. Onwards and upwards. Wow, we raised $1,351.12. Thank you, Catherine. You need to show up every show and thank you, Troy, for the amazing support you're providing regularly. It's fantastic. And thank you, Charles Watt, for pitching in $500 for a review of Star Trek. I will watch it. The first movie I have to watch, I guess probably tomorrow I'll watch it, is, you know, the airplane movie that's on right now. I have to watch part one so I can go to theater and watch Top Gun. I have to watch Top Gun tomorrow so I can go and watch it in a theater with my friend who is coming over next week. But I will watch Star Trek as a high priority next. All right, everybody. Hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, don't forget to like it before you leave. Only 70 thumbs up, even though we had a lot more people watching. So don't forget to like the show. It helps with the algorithm. And also share the show, if you can, on Twitter, Facebook, and other places like that. So let the world know that we exist. And if you like the show, let the world know that you like the show. We need to start growing subscriptions again. We need that. I thought we'd make $40,000 this month. I completely was wrong on that. I think somebody asked me when I thought I'd hit $40,000. And I said, by the end of June, completely wrong. But let's get back on a, you know, I keep losing the right wing, the people who think they're objectivist and who have right wing views. I keep losing those. All right, guys. I will see you tomorrow, 2 o'clock, 2 p.m. tomorrow. Have a great weekend.