 Now it works. The radical fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Euroneum. All right, everybody. Welcome to your own book show on this Sunday afternoon. I have no idea why I scheduled this right now. I mean, Germany is playing Spain. This is like Germany is playing Spain. This could be the finals of the World Cup. I mean, this could be, anyway, this is going to be a great game and join in with you guys. Let's see, Jennifer, can we mute? I think that'll, that'll be good. Yes. There was a little bit of, a little bit of sound there. All right. Thanks everybody for joining today is a, we haven't had one of these Q&A. We haven't had one of these ask me anything and hang out with contributor shows in a while. I think it's simultaneously translating on my screen. How is that? How is it doing that? That's pretty cool. I can see simultaneous translation on YouTube. It's like the fraction of the second YouTube is behind lagging behind me speaking. It is putting up everything I'm saying. Pretty good. Wow. All right. You've switched closed captions on. I've switched closed captions on, but I've never noticed. Obviously, I've never, how do I switch it off? It says unavailable CC is unavailable and it's doing it. Maybe zoom is providing it. Let's see if zooms. A participant has enabled closed captioning. So I know it's not me. I have no idea. Anyway, I think it's cool. So fine. Let's see. We've got one more panelist. Let me add him to a list. I think he's going to join now. Yes. All right. So, so we haven't done one of these in a while because I've been traveling so much. It's been crazy. We'll do one more in December kind of to wrap up the year. You, we're going to go through the panelists and have them each ask a question. We'll do as many rounds as we can. The eight today, which is a lot relatively speaking. Also take super chat questions. Just, I don't know if this will motivate you or not for the super chat, but I'll just note that with this close to November being the best super chat month ever. It's, it's not that far. So I think we make our goal this time and we do okay in the newsy shows. Early this week, we will beat the net. We will beat our best ever. So, I don't know if that's a motivation or not, but it is for me anyway. So, please use the super chat to ask questions. And there, Michael's starting us off. That's good. Follow Michael's lead but add more zeros to to the number to the dollar amount. All right, let's let's get rolling. I think my wife promised to give keep me updated on the game. If there are any goals. I'll just assume it's zero zero otherwise. But she's definitely rooting for Spain as am I. So, All right, let us get started. I think we've got, yeah, we've got eight. Oh, we've got two more God. I don't know if we're going to have any time. You know, because we've got so many. We got 10 panelists. I don't think we've had 10 panelists in a long time. So that's great. All right. Good. I mean, there should be a lot more because we have a lot more than 10 $25 or more contributors we can easily, I think they're easily 100 or so. So, this is a, this is, this is good. All right. Let's start with why you're on first. Okie dokie. I'm a few weeks ago. Someone raised the issue of property rights on Mars or the moon for that matter. And you suggested using the homestead act as a model, which made sense to me and just for everyone's benefited. As it started in 1862, when the government said that they would grant title to government owned or operated land. There may be originally 160 acres to any citizen who didn't raise arms against the United States, and who would guarantee to develop the land. And that seems sensible, not only for Mars and any planet, any planet, but also for currently held government land that shouldn't be government, government owned. And but then you added something which threw me. You said something like, and by the way the same principle applies to current title, people who currently have titled property, if they don't do something with it, they lose their ownership. And I thought, whoa, whoa, whoa. And I thought, well, I, as much as it makes sense for Linda currently essentially no one owns. If I were to buy some land or indeed a property or building and let it go to weed and not do anything, it's my property. Slavery may not like it. As long as I'm not have an open up a plant that kills animals and you have the stench of roadkill or animal kill. It's mine, or I might be holding it for my children or whatever is my property, and people that don't like it and get together and buy it from me. So, is it similar in a slight way to what slavery was of course a hideous crime. Even when it wasn't a crime was still a crime. But slaves today, not slaves today but you know descendants descendants descendants of slaves can claim retribution or whatever the term is. The land I bought the person who sold to me had the right to sell it to me, and I had the right to buy it. So I'm sure you can help me out. So it's, it's a tricky question and I don't I don't know that have a definitive answer to it but think of think of the fact that rights, right to right to actions that is the freedom to act. So the property is the freedom to act to to attain and to maintain to keep your property. And I think there is a valid concept there that if you stop acting to maintain it if you abandon it, if, if you never come and see it if it's, you know, from, you never give it any attention nothing, right. If you put people squat on it, you wouldn't even know theoretically, and at some point you lose the title to the land, I think that's actually in the law in the United States today. I mean something I would need to check. I think a Google search would probably, we could probably figure that out. There's some, there's some, you know, particularly if, if it's completely abandoned property, and it's run down, and it is, it's creating a real hazard in the community in a particular neighborhood. And again, I think the law today recognizes that at some point, maybe, maybe after notifying you, hey, we're about to take your land or something unless you do something about it. I think there is something called a man abandonment or something like that, where abandoned property is no longer yours. So, whether that is objective or not, I think it is, but I haven't given it a huge amount of thought you would have to really think it through. But, but I do think that, you know, values require. So a value is something you act to gain or keep act on the line act right so and write a freedoms of action on the line action. So it's not writes are not writes so much to things, but to maintain those things to keep those things. And if you've given up keeping that thing if you're not pursuing it if you if it's just out there. I'm not sure it's yours anymore. I'm not sure the government would then protect your protect your right to it. I mean, if I were to spend a few million dollars for a piece of Manhattan, which is really improbable that I would do that and then let it just go to ruin. I mean, the trade I mean, the only way you would actually do that go to ruin is if you didn't care. And if you didn't care about the property anymore and you didn't care about its value and you didn't care about it doing anything with it. You know, the time would have to be a long time it wouldn't be like five days you haven't done anything. If we get amount of time, and it would have to be some visible damage but again I haven't given a lot of thought we have to get a legal kind of a legal philosopher and and have him really think it through but I think those kind of laws on the books and I think they're on the books from a period where property rights was something that was thought about more so than today where I wouldn't trust anybody with laws about property rights today. Okay, thank you. Best I can do right now. All right, Nick. Thanks Roy. Okay. I wanted your thoughts on it's been six months since Alex has released his book. I mean we followed. I mean you talked to him a lot more than we do. I wanted your take on what kind of an influence he's had on two levels one on the obvious climate issue. And second on just the overall culture of terms of thinking in terms of do you think he's made. I mean conservatives love them on altruistic grounds. You know, it's ironic. You know what I mean they embrace them because. Sure. So I just I just wanted your initial take because you talked to more on those two levels. So I don't think I've talked to Alex since the book came out. I mean I don't think so maybe maybe I have but I don't think I have. I don't talk to him regularly with friends but you were both super busy. You know, it's hard to measure these kind of things but you know obviously he's being cited a lot a lot I see activity on on Twitter all the time. He is being interviewed by a huge number of interviewers. He's getting the word out there. He's got a lot of haters that's always a good sign when people hate your guts that's that's a good sign I think more people hate Alex and hate me. So, you know, that's that's that's quite an achievement in life. And so my, I suspect, although I don't have evidence of proof that he's having quite an impact he's having an impact certainly on a certain part of the political spectrum he's having impact on people who are open minded about these things. He's, you know, I think at the margin he is changing some people's minds particularly young people. I think though the biggest impact he's having, and this will have a longer term impact on the world at large is on the industry itself, I think on entrepreneurs on smaller oil and gas companies who now have kind of a moral backbone who now have an actual defense and they can cite something and they could share the book with employees and so and I think that is the primary impact that is having these are, and now these are often very influential people but I think he just did, he was about to do a big debate at the University of Texas in Austin. Maybe he did it a few weeks ago with with with one of the professors there. And I think that was very well attended and I think that resonated. So he's, he's traveling around the country he's doing a lot of work he's doing tons of interviews. I'm disappointed Lex Friedman hasn't hasn't had him on yet. And doesn't look like he's going to have him on for some reason I don't know why I'm disappointed that Logan Joe Rogan hasn't had him on, even though he's had people on who cite Alex he hasn't had Alex I think it goes more to the, to the idea that Joe Rogan doesn't want to interview objectivists on principle. So, so that might be the issue. So, I, you know, these are the kind of I so I don't know. So I think he's having an impact. The big guys have an interview them he's done a lot with Tucker Carlson he's done a lot of people on the right, because he feeds a particular political agenda that they have. He will have influence on any Republican administration that comes into governance that that you'll have real influence. So whoever wins, who's a Republican in the White House, Alex will have an influence on the part of an energy and the kind of regulations they do or the deregulations they do, which is which is really really good. So he will have real influence on policy, if Republicans when he obviously won't have any influence on policy with Democrats so that's all I know I don't know numbers I don't know how well the book is selling although I suspect it's selling well. And, yeah, I mean, friend opposite lex asked, Bjorn Lomborg and another guest about Alex's views. Lex certainly knows about him at least. Lex certainly knows about Alex. Lex knows about Alex. From a long long time ago, their paths crossed on a personal level. So Lex does know Alex he knows of Alex's intellectual work. In a sense, Lex has been following Alex for for, you know, well over 10 years. He knows of his work even from the work Alex did with me way back so Lex is a way of Alex I hope he has him on the fact that he asked Bjorn Lomborg about him I assume Bjorn said good things about Alex. I assume the other guest also said good things about Alex so hopefully Alex will be on Lex at some point I saw that Lex just did a debate on his show on climate change. I just pointed that Alex was not one part of that debate that would have been that would have been good. Alright, thanks Nick. We'll have to have Alex on the show again and then you can ask that question to Alex directly. I think that'll be that'll be good. Let's see Adam. Have you seen the Korean TV series. How much landing on you. I started watching it. I saw like three episodes and I couldn't get into it. I know a lot of people like it. I couldn't I couldn't really get into it. Because they made the North Korean peasants way too happy and and and and positive and I don't know it just there was something about it that I just did not like very much they did you know the I couldn't really hook me into the only Korean shows that really hooked me up in the historical dramas. I have not found any one of the current ones that I have. Okay, have you also tried it the one class. I have not that's on my list so it's been highly recommended by a number of people. So that's definitely on my list to watch. I'll try it. Okay, in general. What do you think of the use of derivative ideas in art because crash landing on you is essentially the character parallel to Dagny crashing not into the a utopia but into an anti utopia and there are many specific elements like she decides that life is worth living and hearing the sonata composed by the male protagonist. I think it's I I mean from the little I saw the show, it seems reaching to me because she is flaky. You know, one of the I assume one of the things she's going to learn in North Korea is to value her life more because because in South Korea her life was shallow and and kind of in a sense she was she was just a marketing flaky type of person. You know, which is the opposite of Dagny, but look, I'm all for derivative art. I think to the extent that it hooks into a set of values that people can identify to recognize so that it doesn't turn it into a little culty thing it to the extent that it is that can it be universalized. I have no problem with those kind of things I wonder, you know, you have to be careful with derivative stuff that you're not interpreting things that are not there but yeah I mean if people want to make references to other works of art and it works and it's a good and it's at a good level. I have no problem with that if it serves the purpose of the artwork. Thank you. Jennifer. Thanks, Adam. Do you think pragmatism is more common than rationalism. And do you think it might be. It's worse because if you're rationalist at least you're thinking about principles and that's in some level. It's hard to tell what's worse because I mean rationalist the principles are divorced from realities they could be really bad principles and it might cause you to do really really bad things. So I don't know what's worse. I think it's hard to say what's worse. They're both bad. It depends on how consistently you apply each one of them. So the extent to which you are pragmatist how deep it goes how wide it goes in your life and in your behavior and in the way you treat the world I think it's almost impossible to be a complete pragmatist in every aspect of your life but some people try. And I think the same is true of rationalism it depends how deep it goes. It depends how consistent somebody is and how open people on both sides of this to being corrected by reality right be being learning from mistakes learning from others. So I don't think it's it's possible to really identify one is worse than the other I think it really is depends on the individual and depends on the circumstance dependence on how how consistently one applies that these bad ideas. You think pragmatism is more common. I don't question pragmatism is more common at some level I don't I you know it's only up to a point that people can actually live as pragmatists, but at some level yeah I see pragmatism is easier because you don't have to hold anything just do whatever. And, and, and you kind of guided by the emotion and maybe a little bit of thought and some mixture of the two. So pragmatism is is is much more common in the culture. So, thanks Jennifer. Alright Andrew. Hey, Ron. Hey Andrew. How are you? I'm good. Good. Something is showing in the screen. New York is back I can see New York in the back. Yeah. Okay. So, is there a distortion in the screen I'm sorry if there is, I could turn it off. There's something here, like a finger or something. I don't know. Ah, there. That's my finger finger something like a finger and it turns out to be a finger. And they say they say you know the sense is enough valid. That's not as bad as when I was in a mediation. The other day and my foot was showing on the screen. I think your foot to be in a zoom call. That is there's something wrong on that one. But I don't know. Okay, so I think your commentary on the Iranian protest was superb. Thank you. Very powerful, emotionally. I think that we live in an age where there are a lot of exaggerated outrageous and exaggerated outrage over everything. But outrage over a real injustice. There's nothing like that. You know, and funny thing is we live in a culture where there's no outrage about a real injustice. There's lots of outrage about lots of different things. There's a lot of outrage about a real injustice. When a real injustice happens, nobody says anything. That's that's more upsetting than anything. Yep. And it came through, you know, in your commentary and it was genuine and very powerful. So thank you for doing it. And, you know, So I could go a couple of different directions. Let me let me ask you this. That's that's how I would put it. But you could say the media or whatever subdivision of the stability one, if they wanted to build that story up. Of the Iranian protests. They could. And it would make a huge difference. You know, whether it's politicians, the media, whatever. Yes, it could turn the tide there. And what's clear is I wouldn't say they're not doing it at all. There's some, but it's very, it's muted. And it's not going to turn the tide there ultimately because it's too muted. What is your analysis as to, I mean, is there morality that is interfering? They have the choice to select. Do we turn dial this up to 10? Do we leave it on three or whatever and what, what's your analysis as to why the choice is being made to be muted? I mean, I really think it's kind of a moral relativism where the West is super afraid morally to judge other countries generally, because outside of the West, they can judge each other. That's fine. But to judge somebody from out of the West is very colonial. It's very, you know, who are you, you know, who are you to judge? It's a different culture. This is, this is the outcome multiculturalism. It's the outcome of the, the egalitarian view regarding culture. It's the outcome of years of being told, you evil colonialists, you, you know, brought this upon yourself, you brought this upon the world. But this is more relativism. You know, look at the national conservatives, right? If you read the national conservatives, it's muted. I think I can't hear you in other words. If you look at the national conservatives, if you remember, you had that little manifesto of this. Well, a key part of that manifesto was we can't judge other countries. There are no universal values. You know, every country makes its own choices. Every country has its own regime. Every country deals with problems its own way. And who are we to judge? Even on the rate, even I say, where they claim not to be moral relativists, where they claim that they believe in, in, I don't know, freedom or whatever, or they believe in absolute values. They completely fold when it's a different culture. It's a different people. It's somebody else. So I think it's our moral relativism. Who are we to judge? You know, they don't judge the Saudis. They don't judge the Africans. They don't judge, they don't judge the Venezuelans. And, and here, I mean, I, you know, I commented on the fact that these girls were running over and knocking down the, the, the turbans of the, of the moolahs, which I thought was pretty cool. And somebody said, Oh, that's so disrespectful to their religion. I mean, that's the comment that you get from kind of the right, right? How can you disrespect religion in that way? Not every moolah is a, is a murdering, you know, deserves it. So yeah, it's, it's the outcome of, of egalitarianism and moral, moral relativism. And, and again, then, and the guilt, the guilt associated with colonialism, the guilt that, that they have absorbed. Good question, Andrew. Thanks. All right. Yes. So in the fountain, her drug says something along the lines of I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build. Yep. And as much as I love that uncompromising spirit, I struggle to practice it myself because of just having to, like, you know, all the thoughts about rising costs of living and saving for healthcare emergencies and family responsibilities and retirement, right? So do you have any tips on how should one go about balancing this? Because I know it's important to not be compromising. That helps me retain the passion in my career. But since it's not being executed perfectly, I just want to take corrective measures and see if I can do more about it. Yes. Yes. I mean, I think that that, that insistence on, on principle, that uncompromising attitude, I mean, think about it this way. First of all, it's not on the one hand, you say it's, it risks financial ruin, it risks family, it risks all these other things. On the other hand, if, if, if you are compromising your integrity, you're not going to be whole with yourself and that's going to risk your family. That's going to risk your mood. That's going to risk your happiness. That's going to risk all these things that have an impact on the things that you love and the things that you care about. So the challenge is, is to be as compromising as is feasible given the world in which we live and, and, and given the circumstances in which we find ourselves. So nobody suggests that you should starve. And so me, if you have kids, you're in a different position than if you don't have kids. And depending on the particular profession you're in, you might have control over decisions regarding, you know, if you're an employee versus if you're an owner, those are going to be different. So within, you know, within the context of your life, you have to find a way to be as uncompromising as possible and to, to, to, to, to, to, to move in that, you know, keep moving in that direction and, and keep building up that muscle, right? It's, it's like a muscle, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, because it's so, it's so easy in a sense, tempting. So, and so emotionally, so it's easy and tempting to compromise. And it's mostly satisfying in a short run sometimes to compromise, but there are long-term costs which you have to hold. And this is the importance of principles to help you hold those. So it's hard to give advice without a lot of concrete, but, but it's, it's, it's, you've got to find that there are balance within your life on how far you can take this and how far you can go. Rourke was not married, he didn't have kids. You know, he had the confidence and the knowledge that he could, that he could survive no matter what, he could make money no matter what, even if it meant to be in the quarry, he could do something, you know, you could argue that, you know, you could argue that we live in times where it may be in certain circumstances where it's much harder to find jobs because of the mixed economy. It's, it's, it's, you know, the, the, the regulatory state, all these other things limit your ability to be an entrepreneur. So, so there are lots of reasons why you can compromise, but be careful you're not rationalizing, be careful you're not creating excuses. Right. So, so the thing is to really analyze it and figure out objectively how, you know, the extent to which you can not compromise and, and, and, and to which you create a real, build a real hierarchy of values and make sure you're never giving up a higher value for lower value. I mean, that's the real, the real thing. It's, it's never get up, give up a higher value for lower value. And that's, that's never sacrificed. And the more you have explicitly worked out your hierarchy of values, the easier that will be because you'll know exactly why you're doing what you're doing. Right. Yeah. Thanks. Sure. It's just, you know, like we think of the metaphysical and the man made, but some of these man made things are so tight because of government regulation that it almost feels metaphysical like this. They are. And sometimes they are metaphysical in the sense that you have no control over them. So there's a sense in which they're metaphysical and there's a, there's a, there's a sense in which it's not just government. It's also the fact that we live in a world where it was surrounded by irrationality. And that's also has to be taken into account what is possible and what is not within a world in which there's a ton of, a ton of irrationality. Right. Thank you. Ian. Hey, you're on. Hey. So I found your, your discussion, your review of chip lore really interesting. Partly because I actually worked in the semiconductor and semiconductor industry from, from 1997 to 2015. Oh, wow. Okay. So, so it's before some of these things we're talking about like extreme ultraviolet. That's, that's just cutting edge today. Yeah. But they started investing in it. Intel started investing in the, in, in, in about 97, you know, in the mid, it's been 30 years. Yeah. People have been talking about it for a long time because they've known. And I, I have the book on hold at the library. So soon as I can get a copy, I will read it because I'm interested to see if it covers things that I know about or, or completely different things because it's very, varied industry. It covers the history. So it's, it's, but, but of course the histories, as you know, there's so many companies. It's so varied. There's so many different chip manufacturers, but it does cover the, the, the, I mean, one of the things I enjoyed about the, the book is that it's got a hero that's, that's the way he's doing it. So, you know, what he's doing today is he's just like, he's doing a lot of shopping under, you know, he loves the entrepreneurs. Right. And he Grove and Chang and these guys, he clearly has this very more. He really has this positive view of them. The guys who started micron semiconductor up in Idaho, right. In Boise, Idaho. I mean, he has a certain admiration for that, but he doesn't cover. Yeah, and it's also really interesting because there's a lot of interesting business stuff that goes on. Like even aside from the technology, there's just a lot of innovation and interesting stuff. And so this, I don't know if we're going to get a question out of this. We'll see. It might just be a commentary, but one thing I found really interesting having, I moved to Silicon Valley from Canada in 97 and then lived there. I still live in Oakland, but I do software now, but it was interesting to see the transition from the Valley because when I moved there, the Valley was still very hardware focused. It was Cisco and Hewlett Packard and Sun. Those were the companies people were trying to emulate and people were trying to do hardware startups. Yep. And then over that time period, you saw the rise of particularly Google, Google was the first one, and then Facebook and then Twitter and the Valley changed to being San Francisco focused, being software focused. And as we're seeing now with the Twitter stuff, it's really not clear if all those companies were really adding that much value, like how value, and then even you get the next generation, you get the door dashes and the Ubers that have done nothing, but they're still not profitable to this day. And it's an interesting change. And we'll see if it can come back from that because the people who came up under the software mindset are more like SPF, where clearly, you know, they're very technological technically focused, but they have this contempt for business. Like I think SPF didn't have accounting in his business because he's like, why would I do accounting? That's like what old people do. Right. I think that's right. And that's, that's a story I think that still needs to be told to change this mental shift from, you know, because hardware takes a lot, a lot of planning, right? It takes like five, 10 years before you have even a product or software. You put something up in AWS, you've got something released to a billion people tomorrow. And it's, I think it really depends on the kind of software, right? So I think, I think the shift towards social media and the value of social media, that's a big deal, of course, and, and, and, and I think you're right in the sense that there's a certain superficiality there, there's a certain, you know, the value added is less obvious. Although I think social media is valuable. Google might be a different story and, and Google does a lot of different things, including heavy investment in AI, where a lot of different industries will benefit from. And I also think the other part of software is that all hardware needs software and, and, and, you know, some of the most successful companies right now in Silicon Valley are the three companies that design, that the right software for chip manufacturing, right? For, for chip design. So the chip design cadence, and I forget the other two are some of the most successful and they're incredibly valuable because there are only three of them. It's like they really don't have that much competition in terms of providing the tools for people to design chips. And then there's, there's, I know Amazon highest huge numbers of programmers not to program their shopping carts. I think that's mostly done and they can keep refining it, but really to program their hardware, Alexa, although you could argue Alexa's only lost money. Alexa's never made money. So that's, and that's hardware. So the Amazon's really never made money on hardware, though it keeps trying and I think will continue to try to make hardware. So I don't know that it's the difference between software and hardware. I think it's, I think it's the shift. And this comes across a little bit in the book, but I think having talked, you know, I used to know one of the founders of, one of the founders of Sequoia Capital, Don Valentine, a legend in Silicon Valley. The guy you, you know, basically handed the first veggie capital check to Steve Jobs and was on the board of Apple and was on the board of a lot of these, a lot of companies, including Amazon and others. Anyway, he was, he became, we became friendly. He was a big Iron Man fan and we became friendly over the years. And I used to go once a year to Silicon Valley, sit down in Sequoia offices and have an hour or two, just conversation with Don Valentine. Sometimes he wouldn't be a check. Sometimes he didn't, but we always had a great conversation. And he complained about this and that is a shift in Silicon Valley that happened sometime in the 2000s. And I don't know when exactly. And this is true of Intel as well. And the shift was from engineers to MBAs. The shift was from people, from entrepreneurs who really got the business, got that, got that, got the product and the business to people who were more about the business and the product was secondary. And in that, in a sense, that's a flip side because the MBA is very much focused on accounting, right? But they overemphasized accounting. And what's happened, I think, is a backlash to that of those MBAs. We're just doing in the crypto space, we're just doing our thing. We're pseudo engineers, right? We're the thing. But if you think about Intel and the decline of Intel and how Intel is really lost over the last, I don't know, five, six, seven years or maybe longer, it's that shift from the Andy Grove mentality from the, you know, Andy Grove was a businessman. But firstly, he was an engineer. And he was a brilliant engineer, but then he was even more brilliant as a businessman. And I think that's been lost. Steve Jobs was maybe never an engineer, but he got engineering in a deep sense. He got the product in a deep sense and then was a phenomenal marketing person, a phenomenal product design person. Sequoia Capital used to be former engineers. It was founded by people coming out of Fairchild, right? Fairchild Semi, that's who founded Sequoia. It became a place where all the partners were MBAs, which is business guys and didn't have that deep knowledge, love and understanding of the software or the hardware, but from an engineering perspective, if you will. So that might be the difference. I, you know, it's hard for me to say, but that seems to be more of a common thread across what I've seen in Silicon Valley over the years. So one possible counter example to that that you might find interesting is if you look up a guy named Hawk Tan, H-O-C-K-T-A-N, who was a private equity guy who when Agilent spun off their semiconductor group, which used to be pathetic when we competed with them, it was like, oh, they're competing with us, don't worry about it. Spun them off, took them private. And from a business standpoint, turn them around. You have the point that they bought the company that I used to work at. But when we didn't consider them competitors and they are in the custom Silicon space, the ASIC space, as we call it. He then took over Broadcom and that company is the killer. They're the dominant. They're the gorilla in that field now. In fact, to the point that U.S. government will not let them merge with certain people, will not let them do certain things because they are the big dog. And a lot of what he did was actually refactoring the balance sheet and the income statement. So if we classify this as this other thing, it makes us look a lot better to our investors and how he runs the business internally. I mean, I could talk about it for hours. Yeah, no, we can have a conversation about this forever because I'm really fascinated because I've just read the book. But let me just say, absolutely. I mean, there are always going to be exceptions. And look, the more mature businesses and you could argue semiconductors pretty mature, the more you need business, man. The more you need people who can restructure, the more you need private equity, the more you need kind of leverage buyout stuff, the more you need that. You can't do that at a very early stage. You need the business to be mature, to be able to do that. So look, you need the business guys and you need the engineers. I do notice, though, and I think, again, Intel is a good example that there was a generation shift and we lost it. And certainly I agree with you about crypto. Crypto is arrogant. There's an arrogance there about business. There's an arrogance there about technology more broadly. I mean, think about it, most of these crypto billionaires make money off of people exchanging crypto, not off of doing anything, not off of crypto actually being used for purpose acts because we don't have a purpose for most crypto yet, but off of just exchanging them and taking a fee off of the exchange. So there's not much there. There's not a lot of there there, unfortunately. But yeah, it's a fascinating topic. And as you said, the industry is very varied and there's a lot of interesting stories within it. There are a lot of great, I mean, the other thing is there are a lot of great entrepreneurs that created this industry. I mean, Broadcom was created by great entrepreneur way back and as was Qualcomm and so many of these Silicon companies. Anyway, let me know what you think of the book once you read it. I think you'll enjoy it. All right, Deborah. Thank you, Aaron. Hey. One quick follow up about the Iran, the silence about Iran that I can't remember who was asking. I think Andrew, there's an episode of the daily objective with Nicos Satiracophilos dedicated to this. Oh, my God, you're the first person ever who actually has pronounced his name. Nicos won't even pronounce his name. So I'm very impressed. Well, thank you. Anyway, episode 609 from October 18th. If the questioner is interested in hearing a longer exposition of that, it's consistent with what you said, but it's just longer. It's got more and he looks at it from the perspective of the conservatives. Why are they silent? Why are the liberals silent? And why are the libertarians silent? And he's kind of gives reasons for all those. So yeah, I enjoyed it. So my comment is, well, kind of a question and comment. I'm taking a course on goal setting in Jean Moroney's thinking lab. And really appreciate, Jean, what she has to offer in the thinking lab. I was really glad you had her on your show because that's how I got inspired to check it out. And I've been having amazing results with the thinking lab, but that's an aside. Just wanted to do some justice to Jean. She was talking about taking goals seriously and she used the phrase embrace reality when talking about acknowledging the full context, including obstacles and so forth. That really jumped out at me as she said, embrace reality as opposed to face or accept or endure. So I made that comment. I said, I love that you said embrace reality instead of something like face or accept. It's framing it as a realm of values and so forth. She agreed she said that's important. I later had the insight that I think that calling, using that phrase embrace reality versus face it or accept it, that that is fundamentally, captures the distinction between a value oriented mindset and a threat oriented mindset. Fundamentally, if you're embracing reality or you're seeing this world full of values that you can go after or create. Fundamentally, if you say I face reality, it's like there's something kind of terrible and I'm going to rip my teeth and bare it and like man up and face it. So what do you think? Do you think that's a good impact? I agree completely. I think you're absolutely right. I'll have to watch the words I use from now on. But yes, I think that's right. It's the difference between a benevolent view of the world and a malevolent view of the world. If a benevolent view says, well, reality is mine. I'm in reality, reality is my friend. Reality is, it's reality. What else is there? Right? This is great. Nothing. Yeah, exactly. And versus, uh-oh, what choice do I have? I have to, there's only realities I have to face it. But I know, but that has that malevolent tinge of I have no choice and it's going to do something bad and there's something negative associated with it. So it's definitely the difference between a benevolent view of the world and a malevolent view of the world. And, you know, you are part of the world. The world is open to you. You have amazing opportunities. Embrace reality. Embrace life. Yeah. Yeah. Makes me happy just to say it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No. Words are, thank you. Words are, yeah. Yes, they do. Very much. And they matter inside your head too, in the sense that you now can integrate them and it sharpens your view of the world. It sharpens, if you're benevolent already, it'll make you, you know, it'll concretize it even more for you. It makes thinking more efficient and better and more meaningful and more value laden, more value oriented. So absolutely. Cool. Thanks, Debra. All right, Blake. Cool. Thanks, Huron. I've been listening since 2016. I originally saw you on Rubin and hundreds of hours. Can't quite put into words like how much you've met in my life. So thank you. Thank you. Haven't been able to connect like this. So pretty cool to be here. Yeah. I have so many questions, but I'll just start with one. I have been getting into art, you know, per your influence. Just purchased my first kind of painting that you would consider arts. It's the School of Athens wanted to kind of get your feelings analysis towards that piece. Yeah. I mean, it's a beautiful piece. It's a piece that's incredibly meaningful. I highly encourage if you ever have a chance in life to go to the Vatican Museum and see it in real life because no poster does it justice, partially because of the size of it. Right. It's actually a painting on a wall. It's a, what do they call paintings on walls? Anyway, but it's big. It's got size to it. So in size matters in art. It's also the impact it has on you and the emotional resonance it has. It's a beautiful painting. It's beautiful painting aesthetically. It's beautifully symmetric. It's got this, it uses both the arch to focus your, it uses the arch and the light coming in from behind the arch to focus your attention on the two characters in the middle, Plato and Aristotle. They're both beautifully offset against fresco. Thank you. It's a fresco offset against the, and then because of the arch, your eyes then are drawn and they're all, you know, it's an arch and a pyramid. People are then, in the picture kind of form a pyramid, which is an aesthetic, it's a tool used by artists to kind of draw your eyes to various parts. So you go down the line and you see these various figures. It's, I think, a piece of art that celebrates the intellect. It celebrates the influence of intellectuals. It celebrates philosophy, but broader than that, you know, it celebrates the intellect because you've got scientists there. You've got artists there. You've got people of letters there. You've got real intellectuals. And then just as a fun side, he kind of paints figures from his own world into it. So, you know, there's Michelangelo who represents, I forget who Michelangelo represents, but he's there. And there's Leonardo. So they kind of, you know, it's a fun painting if only to identify the different characters and who he's modeling them after. And so it's very inspiring. It's focused on the right thing. It's beautifully done. It's one of the great masterpieces of all time, just from a skills perspective. And, you know, Joseph says that Leonardo da Vinci represents Plato. Probably Leonardo da Vinci was considered like a neo-Platonist, although if you really read about Leonardo, Leonardo is not a Platonist, not in the sense I understand Plato. Leonardo is one of the real great heroes of history, one of the great achievers in history. So it celebrates all of that. So it's a real celebration of the intellect. And it's, I really enjoy that painting. Cool. Thanks, John. Sure. All right, Ian. Ian, right? Am I pronouncing that right? It's Yohan. Yohan? Yohan. Yohan. Okay, Yohan. Yes. Okay, Yohan. But close enough. What language? Romanian. But I'm a French-Canadian, so there is absolutely no relation between my first name and my ethnicity. So just my mother thought it was a beautiful name, so she named me that, but there is absolutely no... Why didn't she spell it with a Y then? Well, it's a funny story. Because my father was kind of theologist, so he had like a lot of Bible or related book in the house. And in one of the books, it was like the... I don't know how to call this in English, but it's like the chapter in the Bible that you wrote like John, Paul and whatnot. So one of them was called the chapter of Yohan. So she said, oh, that's a good name. So she named me after that. But there is absolutely no other reason than that. Sounds good. It's an interesting story anyway. Yeah. Well, yeah, because I asked her too, because it was so uncommon at that time. So yes. So for my question, it's a follow-up on the last month. So I'm bad with the gray area. So I'm getting good with black and white type of situation when it comes to objectives. But when it comes to more of the gray area, I'm having trouble. So I would like you to explain your thought process when you come to some situation when there is no clear good or bad. And that will help me to understand how to apply value and hierarchy in that situation. To give me an example. Yes, I was going for that. So last month, I asked you, it was about productivity. So I said to you, what's the difference between me going on a road trip and my car broke? And I need a phone to call. But the village I'm in don't want to help me. So I need to quote unquote steal one. So in that case, you said, yes, you could because you are a productive member and it is an emergency. And then I asked you, well, what about the homeless people who broke windows in the winter to stay warm and have meal? And you said, well, no, in that case, the homeless people is not productive. It's just like a parasite. So I understood that because that was also my conclusion. But where I'm struggling is where is the line? Where do we know as like an objectivist? When I'm not productive enough to justify like a act of force on someone else in like an emergency. So how do we like evaluate that? So it's very hard partially because emergencies are hard, right? So emergencies are, you know, we consider them emergencies because they're so unusual and so rare and it's hard to think it through. But partially it's a question of are you a rational human being and is the fact, for example, in this town that everybody around you is behaving irrationally and malevolently? And so that's an important part of the context, right? So if, on the other hand, you broke down and but you haven't showered in three days and you ragged and they're just being rational because you look like you might be a rapist and they just don't want to open the door and they, you know, they're just trying to protect themselves. Then this is the cost of you, in a sense, letting yourself go and being so ragged and in such a you're giving them an excuse not to help you, right? Versus what I took your example to be is they're being completely irrational and not helping me. I posed a threat to them. There's nothing I visibly can't. So it's a matter of taking into account the evidence that you have, the facts of the situation to the best of your ability, analyzing them, trying to figure out who is the rational and who is irrational, clearly in the homeless situation being homeless, you know, assuming nothing, you know, it's nothing horrible associated with this but being homeless is an irrational thing. You know, it's a consequence of really bad choices for the most part in people and there's just no excuse to put yourself in a position where you have to break into somebody's home in order to achieve heat, right? You have defaulted on the responsibility of life by doing that. So you bear the blame and the responsibility. So you have to kind of evaluate the context and the actual facts of the situation partially to think about who are the good guys here and who are the bad guys. And if there are no bad guys, then you have to think about how did I get myself in a situation where there are good guys around and yet I can't get any help. Maybe I've done something wrong and maybe I need to figure out how to fix it. So again, it's, I don't know if I'm answering your question, but it's not an issue of dealing with the gray. It's always an issue of taking in the facts as they are, being as objective as you can be about those facts and evaluating them based on your goals and based on your values and based on the context in which you find yourself. And it's very hard to do in the abstract. That's why you kind of need to work through examples and see what the issue, how this relates to particular issues. Does that make any sense? Yes, it cannot make sense. So let's just make a quick example. So I know like Ayn Rand said, if you like go to a desert island and there was someone there and they don't want you to be there. It's it's not logical. But at where does like the person on the island, assuming that it's a private island and it's really like his island, what would be like the extent of what the quote unquote should do for you and what you can expect him to do, like to like just quote unquote keep you alive. Yeah, but you see, this is the problem. We're trying to generalize from emergencies. You can't really generalize from emergencies. Emergencies are emergencies. That's why they call emergencies, a desert island. I assume if you don't go on to the desert island, you die. You know, then you do what you need to do in order to survive while minimizing the damage to other people, you know, the other person on the island because there's no reason to murder somebody for no, you know, unless you have to for self-defense. But so these are kind of like both scenarios, emergencies that you can't generalize from them. And there's no there's no clear right answer. I mean, if the option is, you know, they're called like both because the often the option is presented as either you die or he dies, right? You either throw him off the boat or he throws you off the boat or you throw him off the boat or you both die of starvation. There's no right answer. You just do whatever you do, right? There's no right answer to that. And committing suicide in that context is appropriate as well because, you know, you're in a position where you're going to have to kill a human being just to survive. That's a horrible position to be in. And you might decide, I don't want to live with that. And I'm going to commit suicide. It's all legit. So, you know, don't fret on like both scenarios. Don't fret over emergencies. They're not relevant to morality and they're not relevant to living because you're not going to learn really anything from them. They don't help you become a valuer. What you really need is to think about day to day things that happen to you and how you resolve those issues. There is no there's no principle to guide you on a lifeboat. There is no principle to guide you on a desert island. You do what you have to do to survive or not, right? Choosing not to survive is okay as well because it's such a horrible position to be in. There's no moral guidance for concentration camp. Could I add something to that? Ein Rand was asked a question after one of her Ford Hall forum talks, similar to this. Basically, it came down to would you kill an innocent person in order to save your own life? In case anyone's curious, her answer was no, but I imagine I would kill 10 of them to save my husband. So, yeah, I think but she did essentially say what you just said, that it's you can't really morality ends where a gun begins is what she said. And I suppose that would apply in a different way to the lifeboat. Yeah, I mean, there's a really good essay by Ein Rand, Ethics of Emergencies. It's in the virtue of selfishness essay two or three or four. I mean, it's right in the beginning of the book, relatively beginning book. I encourage you to read that, but I really don't think, I mean, you have to accept that that, I mean, we're trained in morality with trolley examples. Who do you kill? This guy or that guy, five people or 10 people, you know, all these kind of, that's not morality. That's just fantasy. And it's not a good use of thinking time in terms of thinking about morality. Okay, that makes sense. Thank you, Erron. Yeah, and I definitely read the essay because I, Well, I'm currently reading the virtue of selfishness. So it's right there. It's right in a relatively early in the book after the first essay. Okay. Good. All right. Thanks, Erron. All right. Let's do, I've got $120 question here. Maybe it's not a question. Maybe it's just a comment. Fred Harper says, Thanks for recommending John Bolton's book on working for Trump. We need Trump fans to read it. Haha. Yeah, right. Good luck with that. What a nightmare must be to work for him and care about your country at the same time. Yes. And what a nightmare would be to work for in any context. I mean, imagine a boss who is a complete pragmatist, a liar who will do anything, say anything, and I mean, imagine working for somebody like that in any context. There's truly, it's truly horrible and depressing. Let's see, I think that the, okay, so this is another one from Fred Harper. I think that the only thing to do in an emergency is to do your best. Yeah, but the best towards what is the real question, right? Do your best, but remember you will have to live with your actions and that's the key. If you did your best, hopefully you can heal from the trauma and not live in despair. Yes. And again, this is why I said I wouldn't kill an innocent person to save my life because you have to live with your, with the consequence of your actions. And it wouldn't be worth it to live with that idea, you know, in that fact with you. But, you know, if you do your best to avoid it and you end up yes, killing an innocent person in order to save your life, then you did your best and maybe you can live with it. So I think that's right. I think you do the best to make the outcome the more positive outcome it can be and you handle the consequence after the fact. You're on. Can I add something? Yeah, go ahead. A psychological point here that ran what she said, actually, was that she didn't, she wouldn't judge somebody making the decision of whether to kill someone or not. She didn't think she would in that circumstance. But I think it's an important point that when people bring up these emergency situations, part of that is that, you know, you're in a fear-based state in an emergency situation. And that's not the state to make ethical decisions and rational decisions in. And I think it just, it's positive. It shows Ram's emotional connectivity that she would recognize you're in a fear state. Yeah, but I think you have to be very careful there because there are a lot of fear states where it's still incumbent upon you to make a rational decision. Okay, let me put it this way then. Step back to your fear. I think the point she's making, let me just, the point she's making, if because it's such an impossible situation, because rationally no choice you make is right in a moral sense because morality is out the window, then yeah, you're probably going to just be guided by your emotion and that's the best you could do. Because there is no, you know, the more it's just a dead end intellectually. It's just a dead end rationally because the gun is at your head. So that you will function based on emotion. That's why she said she doesn't think she would kill the innocent, but she might because it depends on a lot of other factors and it depends on a particular, what happens in that kind of state. But you can't then say anytime you're in a fear state, an objective fear state, anything goes, right? That's not the standard. Yeah, sorry. I guess when I think emergency, something it's even extreme fear. It's panic state, you know. So I do think that that really clouds your rationality. The panics where it's an extreme emergency, but there is a right thing to do and a wrong thing to do. That is that the fact that there's something that you have to make a decision very quickly in the face of fear doesn't make it the kind of lifeboat scenario that I think we're talking about necessarily. And I'm struggling to come up with an example, but I'm sure your company is going to go bankrupt. You're super fearful because the company could go bankrupt, wipe your wealth out completely. But it's not life or death, but you're feeling like it is, right? That the emotion is there as if it is. And yet there's a right thing to do, disclose the information to shareholders, and suffer the consequences, or a wrong thing to do, hide it all and run for South America or whatever. So you can't use the emotion as the basis to determine whether there's a right or wrong answer. Can I ask you this then maybe to clarify? How do you interpret Rand's statement, morality ends where a gun begins? That once force is introduced into the equation, whatever choice you make, you can't be morally blamed for it. Because you're outside the realm of choice. Outside the realm of choice. Your choices are out. And the same thing with the lifeboat scenario, there's no gun there. But in a sense, there's a metaphysical reality where there's no choices. You die, he dies, that's not a choice. That's kind of a dead end. It's a dead end from every perspective. There's no choice to pursue life in any kind of meaningful way. Yeah. All right, let's see. Let's do a quick round to, just because this is the way it appears on my screen. Let's start with Nick. Nick, are you there? Nick might have stepped out. Okay, let's go. Hold on, I'm there. I'm here. All right. Okay. I wanted to ask you about the, if Biden doesn't run, right? I wanted your opinion on Gavin Newsom and some of the leading Democrat, especially Gavin Newsom, but some of the leading Democratic prospects, including Gretchen Wetner from Michigan and Pete Butieg. But Gavin, I mean, he's a heavy environmentalist. He's trying to shove everything down. I mean, the reality is Gavin Newsom is like most politicians. He's about power. Yes, I think he's obviously a leftist, but he also governs California. So any Democrat who governs California is going to be more to the left than a Democrat who governs a different state, just because California is more to the left. So he has to appease his voters. So he is going to play it from the left. Is he a rabid progressive, rabid environmentalist, rabid everything else? If he was put in a position of national, where he has to appeal to the center, I think he's enough of a pragmatist in this context to probably govern from the center if he was elected. I might be wrong, but that's my general, that's my sense of him. You know, Michigan, I don't know much about her. I just know that she was awful during COVID. I think in California, the worst stuff over COVID was done at the local level, not so much at the state level. It didn't come down from Sacramento. It was done by localities. I think in Michigan, it came down from the state house, and she was pretty bad during COVID. So I think that that is a strike against her. Beyond that, I don't know much about her. Pete seems like a nice guy. You'd probably hang out and have a beer with Pete. I think he has a certain benevolence about him. It seems like he's pretty left, but again, he doesn't strike me as a crazy ideologue. He hasn't governed much. He governed what was a mayor of a little town, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. You know, he seems like the least dangerous of all of them. Maybe that's deceptive, but he just seems that way. He's like, what is he secretary of? He's secretary of something. Transportation. Transportation. Yeah, I mean, he's even got a boring job over there. I don't know what he's done as secretary of transportation. Of course, if they actually run and somebody says that Kobayashi says, Pete strikes me as that utterly incompetent and idiotic. Perfect. I mean, idiotic and incompetent is my criteria for the next president of the United States. I mean, I'm for gridlock and idiotic is pretty gridlock-y. So, you know, are we going to get, we're not going to get a good president, so we might as well get it for bad ones. So as long as they don't do anything, that's the point. So Pete's the best one according to you. You know, of the three, I think because he's the most incompetent, probably. Find out more about their actual views when they start running and it actually becomes a reality. Suppose he Gavin Newsom has said that he won't run if Biden ones. He promised to Biden that. But Biden's going to be 82. I can't, I don't think he's going to run. Maybe Biden promised him the VP slot. Maybe. Not to run. Who knows? Yeah. I mean, he replaced one in California with another, maybe, but hard to tell. She can't, she won't win. So I think Gavin has the best chance of winning. He comes from a big state. You could argue he's being quote successful by their standards. You know, we'll see next year is going to be a tough year for California because it'll be the first year in a long time where they'll have a deficit. You see, California does really, really, really well when the stock market goes up and the state government reaps the benefit of taxes from capital gains. When the stock market goes down like this year, California is going to hood budget wise. They will collect a lot less taxes from capital gains and a lot less taxes from IPOs, capital gains from IPOs than usual. So the state of California is going to have a hard time in the next few years. Gavin will probably get, you know, so we'll see how he's perceived in a year or so once they have to cut spending next year. Because California has a balanced budget amendments. They have to balance the budget. So he has to cut spending if they don't have enough revenue and doesn't look like they'll have enough revenue next year. Okay, thank you. But, you know, they're all, they're all horrible, right? I mean, they're all horrible. But it is, it is what it is. All right, let's see, Yash. So I saw one of your clips on Elon Musk's subjective rules on Twitter. Now I wonder if I tried to put myself in his position when the people don't want objective guidelines and, you know, like they're also emotion-driven. How does he make Twitter both profitable and have objective guidelines? I don't, I don't know. I mean, this is the problem. The problem is that, you know, he supposedly, and again, I don't have the data. I wish I had the data, but supposedly a lot of people are leaving Twitter right now, like Sam Harris has left Twitter and a lot of other people are leaving Twitter because he's opened it up. To supposedly more speech. So for a business perspective, it might turn out to be bad because, because a lot of people are leaving. On the other hand, if because there's more speech on, there'll be more controversy, it'll get more in the news, maybe more people will join. So I don't know how you, how you run that algorithm, right? You'd have to, you'd have to write an algorithm that figures out what's the right balance of speech versus the right balance of advertisers and everything else. In the short run, I think he's losing revenue because a lot of advertisers are refusing to join, right? And I think his arbitrariness about how he's opening things up is alienating a lot of people, like me and Sam Harris. I don't know if Sam Harris just left because Trump joined, was allowed, or Sam Harris left because of the arbitrariness, I don't know. I'd have to listen to Sam to find out. But it can't be good to follow no guideline principle. I'll do whatever the polls tell me or whatever I feel like. I think you have to go in there and test various levels of screening. So come up with some objective standards, see how they work. And at the end of the day, Twitter has to make money. There's no choice. Talk to the advertisers. See what they recommend in terms of the kind of screening that will bring them back. Talk to creators on YouTube. Take the top people who have over a million people and do a poll of them. They're the ones who count. The rest of the people don't count that much. It's the people who produce real content on YouTube. That matter the most. So I think that's how you would do it. But it really is a difficult business decision of how to balance these different things and how to figure them out and also make money at it. Yeah, he probably, I mean, I suspect he, even if he had some objective guidelines, I don't think he would be able to go all the way there. Like he'll have to bring the people along slowly, maybe. Yes, and you might have an experiment. You have to try different things. It's not like there's an absolute right answer to this question. It's a matter of testing the market. But it doesn't look like he's approaching this in the kind of systematic way you would have to do it. And I think maybe the problem started when he actually overpaid for Twitter to begin with. Yes, he definitely overpaid for Twitter. The stock market position, it's hard to come out of it. I'm just very hard because he does under pressure to pay interest every month. I mean, theoretically could buy out the debt holders. That would give him much more time. But I don't know that he's willing to put another $13 billion on the table to do that. So he's in a very difficult position. I don't envy the position he's in. Okay. Yuan says, I do think emergencies here is too loosely defined here. Yeah, it probably is. I mean, you'd have to look at Ayn Rand's definition. But I do think it's emergencies are life or death situations where there is no good choices. Where there are no positive choices available. They just aren't any. All right, let's see, Adam. I would like you to comment on the recalls in California. Although it was some time ago, I think it went completely against the state of the stereotype of California being crazy left because so many crazy left politicians got recalled by the voters. Yeah. So this was primarily in San Francisco. There was a series that the district attorney in San Francisco got recalled and then a number of members of the school board in San Francisco got recalled by voters. I think there were a number of issues here. While it is true that this goes somewhat against the view of California as crazy left, it doesn't go that much against that view. Because the fact is that the people recalled were really crazy left. I mean, they were way out there and they were voted in knowing that they were crazy left way out there. And then the people felt the consequences of the crazy left outcome. So what happened was crime went up dramatically in San Francisco to the point where property damage was not being prosecuted and you had those gangs breaking into stores and just running off of stuff and it became so people didn't care anymore. It hit people directly in the face. It wasn't something, it wasn't subtle. It wasn't something they could ignore. The same thing about with the homeless situation, the homeless situation got so outrageous in San Francisco that even leftists who typically are fine with homeless doing whatever they want couldn't live with that anymore. It really hit home. So the same thing happened with the school board. The school board was so wacky they were going to change the names. In the middle of COVID, the only thing they worried about the school board of San Francisco was changing the names of the schools, not opening them up, not getting kids back into school, not figuring out the right way to do that or the healthiest way to do that. But how do we change the name of the schools? And some of the schools were named after people I don't particularly like necessarily, like I don't know Senator Feinstein, but not people who actually would be at the core center of your claim against their racist, not to mention Thomas Jefferson and Lincoln. And I think there was even a, anyway, it was just absurd what they were trying to do. And just they disregard for the students and the uncaring attitude during COVID, I think really flipped parents. So that's one aspect. It really hit them in the face. That is, even though they're leftists, reality kind of struck them and they said, okay, I'm not willing to go that far. But then the other aspect of this is that a significant of the people who voted again to recall these people were from one community and that is the Asian community in San Francisco. And look Asians, I'm going to generalize here, but Asians typically are not crazy left, right? Crazy left people are usually educated white people, spoiled people. And it's interesting. It's minorities in San Francisco voted again to recall these people. Why? Because the rich white people send their kids to private schools. The minority parents can't afford to do that. The Asians can send their kids to private schools, but they can't stand the crime and they can't stand the homeless problem. And they're much more oriented towards reality. They're much more oriented towards facts. They're less bought into the ideology of the whole thing. And that community, the Asian community, I don't think is far left. I think they vote left because the Republicans alienate them for all kinds of reasons that I've talked about in the show, whether the attitude towards immigration or the attitude towards religion. And so the Asian vote generally is a vote that could easily flip from far left candidates, if those are the only ones running to moderate center-right candidates. It is not one that the Democrats should take for granted. But the Republicans are very good at alienating them. So in that sense, they're almost always Democratic. So California is pretty left. But when they go so far left as there's an existential backlash, reality bites back. People pay attention and they're not willing to accept that. Does having recall make voters less responsible on their first vote? Because you always know if the guy you voted for leads to bad results, you can recall him. Maybe. I don't know. It's hard to tell because I don't know how much people are thinking about recall, particularly before these latest recalls. There haven't been that many. There was the one Democratic governor that was recalled and Arnold Schwarzenegger won. But other than that big recall, I don't remember many happening. Also, we also had what do you call it? We had Gavin Newsom was now recalled. So that was disappointing. But it would have been good to have some good luck in California. But Grevin Newsom was now recalled. Also, the district attorney in Los Angeles who is very left. Very left. There was a recall attempt and it wasn't successful. I also take the fact that this businessman, who's a Democrat, didn't win the male race in Los Angeles as a sign that the fall left is pretty strong in California still. Because the woman he ran against is far more to the left than he is. I wish he would have won. I think he would have been good for Los Angeles. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Adam. All right. Let's see, Johan. Okay. I know part of the issue I will have with my next question is because I don't know the whole context. But it's from some of the last show you did about Elon Musk tweeting to the Russian chess player guy. It was in the context of Elon Musk had deployed the Starlink network. And he answered to the other guy, well, what did you do? And then you went on to say, well, it's not appropriate to say that and so on and so forth. So my question is, I don't know the guy. So I don't know what he's done. But for me, when someone is doing something like actual action, it weigh more on the issue than someone was just talking. So why did you say? Well, I don't buy that. I don't agree with that at all. Because Ayn Rand didn't do anything. She just talked. And so a lot of people say, why don't you run for office? That's doing, so it depends what you mean by do something. Talking is doing something. And talking is sometimes the most important thing one can do. And in many situations, talking is the most important thing one can do. So I don't consider action more important than speaking. I'm a speaker. So I consider speaking to be an action and as important as any action other people do, particularly political action. But look, what did Elon Musk do? The two things. One is, yes, he deployed Starlink and helped the Ukrainian people. Good for him. But then he spoke. And what he spoke was he said, Ukraine and Russia should sit down and cut a peace deal. And Ukraine should compromise with Russia and give Putin these things that Putin wants. Now he spoke. So he did a good thing when he gave the Starlink. And he did a bad thing in my due, because he was wrong, in what he spoke. Gary Kasparov, and he took the position kind of, we just need to live with Putin and we have to accommodate Putin and we have to compromise with Putin. Gary Kasparov, on the other hand, has for 20 years at least been criticizing Putin, being involved in demonstrating against Putin, writing up ads, doing podcasts, doing interviews, going on television, just blasting the world and explaining to them, why Putin is a bad guy, well before there was a war. When the war broke out, he went out and he supported Ukraine. Now he's not a gazillionaire like Elon Musk, because he can't write them a big check, but he provided them with a more backbone, with a more support, with riled up all the context that he had and made a big deal. I mean, and this is not a secret, right? Gary Kasparov is a well-known public intellectual. Also, maybe the greatest chess player who's ever lived or at least while he was alive, suddenly was the greatest chess player who had lived. So he's a well-known figure and he's a well-known figure, oppositional figure to Putin. Putin's, as threatened Gary Kasparov's life, they've had several attempts to try to kill him. Putin knows that people speaking out against him is more powerful than action and that's why he kills his opposition. He tries to poison and kill his opponents because he knows that speaking is important. So I don't think it's true to say that action is more important than words and Gary Kasparov's words were significant, meaningful, and in this context of what ultimately is not just a physical war but an intellectual war, whether one sanctions Putin or not, has been a hero. I think of him as a hero, standing up to authoritarian, standing up to dictator, putting his life at risk in order to defend freedom. Hey, you're wrong. And Musk just belittled him and you could say, well, maybe he was ignorant of all this, then he should have apologized and I doubt that Musk is ignorant of this, because he's too smart and well-read and he could have googled him. It's not that hard to find the information. Does that make sense? Yes, that makes sense because I understand what you're saying. It's just in my conception, I know it's not the same, but in my head it's more important someone like to do something than a thousand people pray for it. So I don't think that's right. I mean, I agree with you about praying because praying is useless, but the Berlin Wall fell to a large extent because of the moral support, because people spoke as much as anything else, as much as any action taken. It's because the people in the East got moral support from people in the West. And I think the world will change. We will achieve capitalism, not because anybody does anything, but because people will speak, people will write, people will fight an intellectual battle. The delivery of intellectual ideas is no less of a doing than writing a check or putting satellites into space. Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. I was also contemplating like the Iranian women and girls, also like they are speaking. That I understood. But since I didn't know what Gary Kasparov was doing, I couldn't like value his input. No, Gary Kasparov, I have to say, I've met Gary Kasparov once and followed him for years. Gary is one of the intellectual heroes out there. He's not an objectivist, but he's one of the good guys. He's definitely one of the good guys. And he's definitely a fight against authoritarianism and a fight against Putin's Russia, which places him in good standing. But also in America, he's been very good on politics in America. So he gets, he's a real freedom fighter. All right, thanks. Thanks, Johan. Blake, I have a question on the whole assessment. There's an echo, and it's really loud. See if you can change the mic settings somehow, or just speak. Am I speaking louder? Yeah, speaking stuff just better. But there's still this weird echo that comes across. But if you've got a short question, we can manage it. Okay, it's about who is in this. And here you are, one of you go to one other, and I'll try to set up my audio, and you can come back to me really quick. Okay, Deborah, or Debbie. Hey, you remembered my name. You got it right. Well, you know, on the screen it says Deborah. Always confuses me, so. Extra degree of difficulty. Here you go. So I had a methodological point or maybe question to rate. Sorry, my cat's not cooperating here. In relation to the question of cats. Yeah, the nature of cats. I think I got that one down pretty well. But no, this is about the concept of masculinity versus femininity. Okay. So, and I know that's a hot topic, so I hope I won't get you in trouble or me. My current understanding is that I think that I see a lot of people, and I don't know if this is true of you, so you can tell me if this is the way that you're looking at it. Empirically looking at how men have behaved historically and women have. And extrapolating something about the nature of masculinity or femininity from that. Do you agree that that's, would you say that's how you're approaching it? No, not exactly. Certainly I think that plays a factor, but one has to take into it. So I did a whole segment on this a while ago, you know. So one has to take into account when looking at history a couple of things. One is the way we made, the way we survived. So in history, physical strengths mattered historically, and it doesn't matter today. Right? So that's a big difference, right? So the roles of men and women were dictated, I think in the past, by the fact that the physical force mattered, that it had to be strong in order to survive. And so there was a division of labor. The men did certain things because of their physical strengths. Women did other things because they lacked that physical strength. We live in a world today where that doesn't matter. I think that's part of why, I said this, I think it's why a lot of these men, these men going their own way or incels or whatever, why they have such a hard time with women. Because suddenly, when you take out physical strength and it's all about the mind, in that sense, there's no difference. But part of the conception of the role of men and the role of men when came from a history where that made a big difference. You have to take that into account when thinking about women as doing the second. You have to take into account the fact that once there is an important role for physical strength, there's also suppression. Women were suppressed. Women's talents were suppressed. Men used that. So if you look at history, you have to come to the conclusion that women can't do art. They can't do art. They're no women artists in history. But then if you study it a little bit, you discover that women weren't allowed to do art. So yeah, of course women can't do art because they're not allowed to do it. They would suffer a real consequence if they tried to do it. When a few women did over history, here and there, I think, paint in the 19th century, maybe sculpt, they did very well. But they weren't allowed to. So you have to be careful not to generalize in that way from history. But on the other hand, once you take all of that into account, you can still say something about the differences between men and women. From history. But I don't think you can do that alone. I think the other parts, how else do you come up with the idea of differences between men and women? Sex matters. I think the actual activity of sex, the fact that the male penetrates the female, matters psychologically. I think it matters. And I think it conditions us. And it makes women, for example, more vulnerable. There is a vulnerability that is implied by being penetrated. So that has psychological impact on the differences between masculine and feminine. I think it was the other one I had. The fact that women have kids and have the capacity to have kids, whether they have them or not. That is, they have a certain biological infrastructure, if you will. Hormonal infrastructure and biological infrastructure that makes a difference. Having a period dealing with stuff makes them different. There's a certain challenge involved in them and men just don't have to face. And I think all of that, you have to integrate all of those ideas. The history, the physicality, the physical strength, the fact that intellectually we're equal, morally we're equal. But all these other things are not equal. Other things are different. What impact does that have on the kind of human being you are, on gender, if you will, on masculinity, femininity? So that's how I would derive it. And that's why I think that men evolved and have been oriented primarily towards, as Ayn Rand said, towards reality. Towards changing the world and they have the biology that gives them the confidence to charge into the world and start moving things around and start building. And women, to some extent, femininity based on Ayn Rand's definition, which I'm no expert on. More conditioned towards the man. Because of that history and the biology, the vulnerability the biology has given women. Now, again, the complexity is that the physical world matters less in the modern world and will matter less, even less in a hundred years from now. So how does that all play into this psychological difference between men and women? I don't have an answer. So I think there's different questions here. There's what explains psychological differences that we observe now and what is sort of metaphysically the distinction between the feminine and the masculine. And I think that the historical piece, that's man-made. It's a cultural context in which men and women behave. And of course, there's always some culture unless you're on a desert island. And so I think it's important to make that distinction. I tend to think about it more in terms of the physical differences, like what are the metaphysically different differences, like the hormones and the sexuality and the physical strength. Even there, though, it's a distribution, right? So there's some women out there that are stronger than some men or vice versa. Yeah, but these things are not determined by the outliers. They're determined by men and women. They're going to be determined by the more the mean or the median. Yes, yes. But look, you can dismiss the history only because part of the history is culture, but part of the history is a reflection of something biological. And that is the difference in strength. So that has to have a factor. It is a factor in determining the way we are oriented and what we are oriented towards. I don't think differences in biology and strength being an important one that's reflected historically, but I don't think differences in biology, differences in hormones and including hormones can be put aside. Now, exactly how they manifest themselves in expressing the difference between men and female is a question that's beyond my pay grade. I mean, it's more of a psychological question than anything else, I think, because I don't think it's philosophy. I think it's psychology and it's something that needs to be worked out. And I don't know that I trust anybody to work it out. I mean, the problem is that the field today is dominated by evolutionary psychologists determinists and therefore it's all kind of deterministic or by a certain type of feminist who reject all differences. Men and women exactly the same. I mean, that's absurd. So they can be exactly the same. So the question is, if they're not exactly the same, what are the differences? And then that's where I think the work needs to be done. May I ask you a loaded question, Yoram? Do you think that the men, the cultural commentators, and the politicians who are talking about masculinity the most and masculinity being under attack are, do they fit your standard for healthy masculinity? No, of course not. I think that most of the people who talk about masculinity being under attack are people who particularly these are people on the right and these are people who reject the role of reason and the role of the intellect and therefore want to hold on to an image of women as not able to survive without a man helping them out. So I think that that is an attempt to, and this is what I said whenever the show was a while back, I did the show, which I thought was interesting, is men are having, there are men out there that are having a hard time. I don't want to generalize, but there are a significant number of men out there that are having a hard time dealing with the fact that they can't just rely anymore on the fact that they are stronger, the fact that they are men to attract women that women now can take care of themselves because taking care of yourself now means using your mind and in using your mind women are not inferior to men in any respect and therefore they men don't know what to do with that. There are a bunch of men out there who just don't know what to do. They don't have the self-esteem to deal with an equal. They be taught that the male-female relationship, the essence of masculinity is superiority, is in a sense superiority in the dimension that matters, right? And the dimension that mattered a thousand years ago was strength, but that isn't relevant anymore. So now there's no dimension in which they're superior in any kind of sense and they can't handle that. And they don't have the self-esteem to deal with somebody who is their equal and they don't look for equals. And what do they do? They complain about women and they see this all the time. So they want to find an Asian woman from a culture where women are still supposed to be subservient. And that's their ideal. Their ideal is to find, and to me that's just bizarre, but it's, I think it's an indication of their weakness and their unwillingness and their lack of self-esteem. And that's the root of the advice a lot of girls at least used to get. I don't know if they still do now, but when I was young, don't let him see how smart you are because you won't get any dates. Don't let the boys see that you're smart. Yes. And that was a valid advice. If your goal is to get dates or whatever, it actually was right. Not right. You would get dates with not the kind of guys you'd actually want. Right, right. Totally not rational, but technically for that goal, because of that. Yes, but it's, yes, I mean, so my view is there are definitely differences, which is fantastic. I love the fact that there are differences. You know, men and women are not the same and it's why we respond, you know, across the sexes in the way we do. We're not asexual in that sense. We're not all whoever, right? We respond to particular sex. And the question, the interesting psychological question is, in what way are we different? And what if it is metaphysical and what if it metaphysical and says it's biological? And what is culture? And, but even when you take out the culture, I think we'll still be different. Yes, because we're physically different. We are. So then the question is, how does that express itself? And vulnerability, I do think is an issue, you know, in, you know, it's a certain type of vulnerability. But I don't, I think it's become less and less of an issue because, again, physical force, physical physicality becomes less and less important. Physical strength becomes less and less important. Physical is important. Physical strength is less and less important. But it is interesting. I mean, the whole field of how we respond sexually to one another, what do we respond to is, is all interesting. And it's, and what is wired? What is not wired? What is biological? What is chosen? Because of course, there's biological and cultural, but then there's also chosen. And what is chosen? What is not chosen? All of that is, I think, fascinating. And 100 years ago, we'll know a lot more than we do now, I hope if civilization survives. But it's not my field. Oh, the other area from which you can discover this stuff is introspection, right? You can introspect on what makes you feel feminine or what makes you feel masculine. And so I think if you look, history has some valid biology, certainly has culture. You want to understand culture in order to understand the history and then introspection. And those are the kind of things that one has to look at to figure this out. Thank you. I don't think I got into trouble. I don't think I got into trouble, but it's, it's a, it's a fascinating question. Yeah. And it's, it's, and it's, you know, we need to kind of add another genius like Ayn Rand in the area of psychology to solve a lot of these issues, because there are a lot of them. Well, I appreciate your willingness to talk about it. Not many people are for obvious reasons. But you will need to talk about anything, but yeah. Absolutely. Thanks Debbie. All right, Jennifer. Yeah. But sometimes people will say that you're, that you can overthink something. And I'm not sure if that's even valid, but do you think when they're saying that, they mean that if you quote overthink, you might start, I don't know how to pronounce this word catastrophizing or whatever. Is there any validity to that or not really? No, I don't think there's any validity to that. Of course, it's, it's, it's what they mean by thinking and what they mean by rational, but there is a, there is a valid area in life where overthinking is, is, is an issue. Or, you know, it's, it's, in those areas of life where you have practiced to automate, automatize something and you're not, you don't let that practice, that optimization kick in, you overthink it. If you play a sport like tennis, right, and you practice, practice, practice that serve and you know, you've got it down, your body has automatized the whole thing. You don't think about it. And then suddenly you get, oh, should I throw it this way? Should I throw it that way? Is my racket here? Is my, and you screwed up. You always are going to screw it up if you, once you start getting into that mode. So that's the sense in which I think that, that is legitimate sense in which you're overthinking. Once you've automatized something and you're, you're, you know, you've gotten really, really good at it and you've practiced it and it's down. And that's all you, you know, then don't think about it. Do it. But yes, I think in other senses, people say it's overthinking because it's a cop out in a sense, right? Either they're bad thinkers or they, they, they, they want somehow to validate their emotions. Yeah. And I just wanted to have real quick about doing and speaking or whatever, like Thomas Payne didn't actually fire a gun or anything, but what he did, just as much, yeah, if not more than the actual army did. Agree completely. Good. Thanks, Jennifer. All right. Let's see. Who hasn't had a second tone? Roy, how to keep track of all of you. There's so many of you today. Well, he keep track of me. A couple of quick comments and then my question. Clue comment. I think there's another valid use of overthinking. If there are two options available to you, I said, if I do this, then this. If I do that, then that. And when, if you really thought about it, you say, it really doesn't matter. You can even say, what do I feel like seeing now? There are the consequences. The difference in consequences are nil. And you're just, it's indecisiveness, I think is a detail. And with crash landing on you, I would have given up after the third episode also, but I didn't because it does develop pretty strongly. Now, a few weeks ago, Adam brought up the issue of the way trials and the jury system here. And we have someone representing the defense, someone representing the prosecution. And it's not a matter of getting to the truth, it's a matter of who makes the case better for a panel of McGeagy's from the street, even. Okay. Now, that's just something that actually I had started thinking about many decades ago. I immediately disagreed with conscription. So I wasn't in favor of compulsory jury duties. That was easy. And then with the travesty of the O.J. Simpson verdict and so many other verdicts where guilty people were sent to jail, no, innocent people were sent to jail, both sides of that, I realized, no, this is, that's the jury system, even if it were voluntary, is not the answer. So I had long ago concluded that a panel of, what was the word? Not jurists, but tribunal. They said, people said, well, if you were accused of something, wouldn't you want to go for a jury? I said, no, I'd rather go before tribunal are really brilliant people framed in the law. And so that's one part of it. The next part is, well, should there be some sort of safety valve in that, in case there's corruption among tribunals, should the accused be able to opt for a jury chosen from his or her peers? And I thought, probably, now, here's the best to the end. I'm still in favor of tribunal, in pretty much all cases, the size of the tribunal would depend on the seriousness of the crime. And I think the, it's quite possible that the repeal system, which we'll probably need some looking into, would provide enough of a safety, safety recourse, and you wouldn't need to have a regular jury system by peers. But I'm not sure and I'll shut up now. I'd love to hear what you think. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think Lenny Peacock after the OJ Simpson trial, had a, you know, made the comments of that he thinks that the French system, the European continental system was better. And that, in a sense, as a tribunal, but it's more, the whole system is oriented towards discovering the truth. That is, the prosecutor, the defense attorney and the judge work together to try to discover what actually happened rather than the American system where the only job of the, you know, the defense attorney is to defend. He lied, cheat, steal. I mean, in a sense, his duty is, and the prosecutor is to get a guilty verdict no matter what. And it's much more collaborative under the French system in terms of discovering what actually is the truth and then dealing with that. I don't know what kind of appeal system they have in France or in Germany or in Europe, maybe some of our European friends can tell us. But yes, you would have to have a very robust appeal system. I think the US has a pretty robust appeal system. Although, again, the appeal system in the US does not provide appeals. You can't appeal a question of fact. You can only appeal question of judgment or if facts were distorted or I guess if facts were not presented. So you can't really, you can't, I don't think you can question the jury's decision. You can question whether they got the relevant information and whether they were presented with the relevant information. So yes, I mean, I think it's, the American system, well, has evolved in a way as to become a circus. And I think the OJ Simpson trial showed that. And in that sense, we need to move towards a system that is more fact-oriented, more truth-oriented. How you do that exactly? What a system like that looks like. Is the French system the ideal? I don't know exactly. But certainly Lenny Pekoff came to the conclusion that the jury system was not a good system. Yeah, no, I also concluded that the defendant would still need a lawyer to represent him because and to help guide the tribunal, you couldn't expect the tribunal to do the research and what the elements of defense, what points the defense should make. So you needed someone representing the defendant and you had the district attorney or the prosecutor, as it is Europe, represent the government or the accusing party. Yeah, okay. I'm comfortable knowing there are a million details still to work out. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You need real legal philosophers to figure this out completely. Thanks, Roy. I appreciate it. Let's see, Blake, I think you're the last one I haven't done a second question with. Is the sound bearable? Bearable, still not quite right. Okay, my question is on homelessness. I know you've done a show on this. I actually live in Portland, spend a lot of time in San Francisco and Seattle. When you go around, it seems pretty clear it's not a housing issue in the city. You know, these 10 cities and drug dealers with backpacks, I mean, there's addicts running around like clearly like not just a house away from living a valuable life. Is there a free market solution here or like how do you clean up the city? Where do you move this population that's really kind of ruining the cities? Well, I mean, nothing's just a housing problem. Nothing's just an economic problem. They're all interconnected. Housing plays a role here because partially when people can't afford to live in a place, it's harder for them to get a job. Everything deteriorates. So the cost of living being as high as it is in a place like San Francisco makes everything worse and it makes whatever other issues are going on worse. So it's not the only cause, but I think it's an important cause of the problem and the issue. There's also a mental health issue and there's a, you know, so just as an aside, there's no homeless problem in Ohio. There's no homeless problem in Mississippi because everybody can pretty much afford a home, right? And now some of it is that the people who are going to be homeless travel to California because the weather's better, but I don't know the weather is that big of a determinant fact. I think it's mostly, you know, homelessness expresses itself in places that have high cost of living. That's a reality. That's empirically, I think we can see that. It's also a mental health issue and mental health is a cultural, partially cultural phenomena. So we live in a bad culture that I think encourages mental illness and I think facilitate mental illness. We also live in a culture that has this weird relationship with drugs and as a consequence, we don't invest enough in getting people off of drugs. We don't invest enough in cures for drug addiction, which I think would happen if we legalize drugs. So I think it's the illegality of drugs and the war on drugs make the homeless issue worse. So I certainly think lowering the cost of housing would make a big difference. I think respecting property rights would make a big difference, get them off the sidewalks. If they want to go out into the mountains above San Francisco, into the wilderness, let them live there, let them have these densities there, but they can't just occupy whole pavements and whole streets. That is just a massive property right violation and it just cannot be tolerated. And you have to deal with drugs and I think the best way to deal with drugs is to legalize them. And then beyond that, the freer world it is, the more healthier world it is, the fewer homeless there will be. But the things that we can actually act on right now is legalized drugs and lower the cost of housing and respect property rights. Those are the main things. I think Michael Schoenberger tries to make this point, giving a house to an addicted person leads not to the greatest result. Addiction seems like such a deep thing to turn around. How would you think that plays into the immediate solution? If that were true, and I don't think it's true, but if that were true, then all the energy would be about getting people off addiction and getting people off addiction. There are drugs today that will get you off of heroin addiction or whatever addiction, and you just pump those drugs into these neighborhoods and give it to people and get... So it can be addiction. I don't think addiction is the issue because people can get off addiction. We know that. But they either don't stay off or the focus is not on getting them off. So I know Michael Schoenberger, he makes a big deal out of mental health and we have to help them. But look, what's the prospect of a person like that if they don't have a home? What's the prospect of them finding a job if they don't have a home? And why does that home be maybe in San Francisco where they probably won't have a job? Why aren't they encouraged to leave San Francisco and go somewhere where there's a shortage of workers and where they can afford a home? A whole orientation is if a homeless person shows up in the streets in San Francisco, they belong in the streets of San Francisco and I have to take care of them over there. And instead of not accepting that they're in the streets and getting them off addiction and making it their responsibility to stay off addiction. So it's a matter of upholding the law when you don't uphold the law, property rights letting them just camp out in the street. When you don't uphold the law and when you don't insist on them getting off of their addiction or getting a job or whatever the standard is, you're only creating problems. I don't know if that came out right, but- Yeah, no, I think the other lines I think- You've got to deal with housing, you've got to deal with the property rights issue and you've got to deal with the drugs. You cannot on large scale deal with the psychological problems. There is no large scale psychological solution other than to get them out of San Francisco in some healthier culture, right? But for that you need to be willing to say you can't live in the street and I don't know people are willing to say that. Yeah, no, I think that's what I- Yeah, but Michael has this idea you can do treatment therapy on a large scale. I think he underestimates the problem of mental health if he thinks you can deal with it that way. You've got to deal with the underlying problems and that is the fact that people have lost faith that they can actually afford to live because of the cost of living, that they can sustain a job because they don't- and that has to do with housing and then the fact that they've lost- they think that they will always be on- what do you call it? They will always be on drugs and I don't think that's necessary. So I think you have to decimate all these different myths around what it means to be homeless and encourage self-responsibility and the only way to do that is to enforce it. Is there ever a point of no return for someone if they've been on drugs for so long? It's really like beyond their free will of turning their life around? They might be and then they'll just die. But there's no commitment. You can't penalize other people because this person has been so traumatized because of drugs. So there probably is a point of no return. But then I don't know if you institutionalize the person or you just keep them off the streets or what exactly you do. But a lot of these people are not at that point. A lot of them are young and a lot of it has to do with the fact that we don't treat drugs. We don't have remedies for drug addiction. Is there anybody who hasn't asked two questions? Do you consider my interjections questions? No. Okay. Then I haven't gotten my second one in yet. I think you'll last one. Yeah. So can I just ask you? You give Elon credit for offering Starlink to Ukraine. But how does it factor in that he offered that he threatened to revoke Starlink when Zelinsky criticized him? That he's a child in some deep way? Okay. I thought that was really disgraceful. Yeah. But that's, I mean, you see that. I've seen that more and more. The more is on Twitter, the more you see it. He's an emotion. There's something in him that's very emotionalistic. Yeah. He responds to things like a child. Let me ask you my real question, which is you've taken your audience and objectivist to task for not sharing objectivist content more. Yes. Why do you think that objectivists don't share content? I think because they lack the confidence to do it. They worry about being questioned about it. Many of them have the objectivism in the closet. They haven't come out as objectivists. They worry about their religious parents or their religious friends or their leftist parents or their leftist friends. I think for second-handed reasons, I think a lot of it is as to do a second-handedness that they're too worried about what other people think of them. And they're not quite willing to take it, to live with the consequences of admitting their philosophical tendencies, which to me is kind of funny because when I discovered objectivism, it's like all I could talk about to everybody and I fought with everybody and I alienated everyone. And now people are afraid to share a tweet. I mean, that's all I can think of because the quality is there. You don't have to share my stuff. I'm not complaining about sharing my stuff. Share an Iran. Every day, share an Iran video or a pick-off video. Just share a video randomly. Just go to the Iran website, pick Iran and Lenin pick-off. You don't want to share my stuff. That's fine. I'm not the standard. Share the really good stuff, the best stuff. And just every day, share it on social media. You never know who's going to see it. This is how worlds are changed. It just doesn't happen. Anyway, and a lot of objectivists want to be, there's a notion out there that sometimes gets revealed that unless you say it in your own words, you're being second-handed. You're being a Peter Keating by sharing somebody else's stuff. You have to put it in your own words to make it. And I see people rephrasing, you can do that, but also just put on rain stuff out there. She says it about as good as anybody, better than anybody actually. So anyway, thank you. So I think it's fear and a bit of leftover second-handedness. Can I just maybe give you one more interpretation that's a little more? I think also people, this goes to what you said about vulnerability, and I know it's kind of an overused term now, but I do think that particularly in emotionally repressed cultures like America, it's hard to show your values to people if you're afraid that they're going to reject the most important things to you. Yeah, I agree. I agree. It's why people don't put art on the wall. It's why people don't express themselves fully. I agree. So repressed cultures, people have a hard time showing their values and great points, and it's something people should work on. Your values, you should be proud of your values, proud of your values and fight for your values. And sharing on social media is a form of fighting for your values. That's what it is. People don't like to, I mean, I noticed that you go into people's homes and the art they have on the wall is blah. It's non-committal. So it's flowers or mountains, and not even the best and the most dramatic of the flowers and mountains. It's often or modern art, which doesn't say anything because it doesn't say anything. So it doesn't say anything about you. It's the least personal stuff you could have. And part of the shock I think that people have when they walk into my place is like the nudes everywhere. It's right in your face. My values, my love of humanity, of great human beings is right in your face. And you can't evade it, you can't escape it. And very few people are willing to put it out there like that. All right. I've got $150 question. Let's do this quickly. Wow, 2,050 minutes. There's an interesting trial scene in Idiocracy, which sheds light on the shortcomings of the American legal system in the future. Let me know if you change your mind about reviewing that. All right. I might download both movies and okay, we'll see. Now that you guys are saying so much about Idiocracy, I'll try to watch it and see what I think of it. Thank you for the $50, Shelsbot. Really appreciate it. Okay. We've got a few short questions. I'm going to do these really fast because I really have to go to dinner. Maybe objective is that too hard on themselves. We don't realize just how new we are as a movement. Yeah, we're very new, we're hard on ourselves, but we could do better. And as objectivist as a movement and every respect we could do much, much better. Michael says there's all kind of attendees get bigger every year. Not really, not in any significant, I mean, they're bigger now than they were 10 years ago, but not by a huge amount. There's a lot of turnover within a lot of new people, but it doesn't necessarily get bigger. Liam asks, will you be able to attire from all your other non-objectivist money making activities by the time you're 65 and only focus on these shows? That was my plan. COVID through a wrench in it, 2018 through a wrench in it. So I don't know. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. But these shows are getting to the point where I don't need to retire. I mean, if we can grow the monthly support for the show significantly, which I'm still hoping we do over the next, what is I got? Four more years until I'm 65. If we can grow it substantially, then I should be able to live off of that. So we'd be fine. Are these nihilistic intellectuals simply more sophisticated school shooters underlying rage as identical? Yes, but they repress that rage, so they're more thoughtful about it. But yes, basically, they have the same kind of rage inside of them. Stephen, what things do you read about Lord? Do you like the bulk conspiracy? I do. I don't always agree with the bulk conspiracy, but it's always written. It's understandable. I like that. I read some of the Cato legal scholars. They're pretty good. I read Adam Masoff when it comes to property rights. What else? Yeah, I mean, there's some legal scholars out there that I find interesting, depending on the topic. But when the Supreme Court stuff comes out, I try to read some of the commentators on that. Yeah, but bulk conspiracy is certainly one of the ones that I read. I like some of the, you know, Randy Barnett, I like some of the libertarian kind of scholars of law. I don't agree with them a lot of times, but I like them. There's a bunch of others that I think are very good. Thank you, Stephen. All right. Let's see. All right. I think we're done. Thanks, everybody. Thanks to our panelists. Good job. And we had a lot of you. You're not all there anymore, but there were 11, I think total, which was a lot. So I appreciate all your support, which makes you a panelist. So thank you for all the support that you guys give the primarily monthly supporters, $25 or more. Some of you give a lot more than $25 a month. So thank you for that. Thank you to all the superchatters. Thank you to everybody who's watching. And I will see you all tomorrow morning. At some point, I'll be doing the news show, probably 12 or probably 11 o'clock Eastern time, but we'll see in the morning. I think I've got a few things in the news that I want to talk about. So I'll see you all tomorrow. Bye, everybody. Bye, Ryan. Bye.