 fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rocks. This is the Iran Brook Show. All right, everybody, welcome to Iran Brook Show on this Sunday afternoon. Thanks everybody for joining me and being willing to spend your Sunday with me. Jonathan, thank you, I appreciate the support. All right, today we're going to be talking about Elon Musk. We're going to be looking at about 10 minutes from a half-an-hour interview he did for the Wall Street Journal. This interview is making the rounds. Different people are spliced it up in different ways. Anyway, we'll be looking at that. Elon Musk seems to have said a lot of interesting things in that debate. I can actually talk today. And it'll be great. We'll comment on it. We'll have fun with it. He's a character. We'll comment on his haircut. And we will do that. And then we'll also follow up on yesterday's conversation about individualism. There's some things that I wanted to say that still need to be said. And so we will do that. We will do that. That is a follow-up and a follow-up of my debate with Yoram Khazani, a video of which should be available this week. So as soon as it's available, of course, I will let you all know. Boom, bang, boom. What is boom, bang, boom? You guys lost me. All right, if you would like to help the show grow, share it right now. Click on the best of share button. And you can put it on your Twitter feed and just let people know, hey, Iran's live right now. And he's going to be talking about Elon Musk. And that's always fun and interesting for people to do. Just to give you a heads up on Monday, we will have Don Watkins join the program. We'll be talking with Don about his writing career. We'll be talking about writing, generally fiction, nonfiction writing, what it takes, about his mystery book. It should be a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to that. And of course, Don will be available for any kind of questions that you might have. So if you have any questions for Don Watkins, the co-author, my co-author on most of my books, then yes, that he'll be available on, did I say Monday? It's Tuesday, Tuesday at 8 p.m., I think that's right. Let me just check for you so I'm not, I'm not confusing. Yeah, it's the 14th. So it's Tuesday. We'll have Don Watkins on. Yes, I'm confirming that. It'll be at 7 p.m. eastern time, 7 p.m. eastern time. I'll be interviewing Don to talk about this. All right. And we do have on Saturday the 18th, we'll be hosting a private event. I don't know, 10, 20 people. It's a small event on how to defeat socialism. If you are interested in that, you can register on uranbookshow.com. And I think it's $100, but that will be, we will be doing that next Saturday at 2 p.m. eastern time. There'll also be a show I think that day. But anyway, if you're interested in a kind of a private gathering on how to defeat socialism, we'll be doing that on the 18th. All right. Any other housekeeping notes? Anybody? Yes, of course. Don't forget, you can use the super chat to ask questions. I see Bradley, Jonathan and Brian have already started on that. Thank you guys. We really appreciate it. You can use that feature to ask any questions and of course to support the show. You can also support the show on uranbookshow.com slash support, patreon and subscribe star. And as I think I said yesterday, I am looking for a sponsor who would sponsor the Iran rules series. I'm moving into the future. So somebody who would become a regular supporter of that series. I'm looking for a sponsor. If anybody out there is interested in willing to do it. All right. So let's jump in with Elon Musk. I think you all know Elon. He of course made his original wealth with PayPal, which he founded a co-founded Pinatillo and sold for, I think it was one and a half billion dollars or maybe that was his take on it. But it was a significant, a significant amount. And of course today is the CEO of, or has founded and is a major shareholder and CEO of some of these companies, but a CEO of Tesla, which also includes a solar city of space acts of, I forget, but the tunnel company and the brain link company. And I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but a bunch of other companies anyway. He was invited to do this interview. This is a big Wall Street Journal conference. The audience is CEOs. The conference was being held in Washington DC. And you will see Elon Musk is on video and Elon is actually in, you know, Elon is actually on in his plans in Austin, Texas. So another Austin connection. Elon is at their facility that's not yet open, but on the verge of being opened in Austin, Texas. And you can see in the background, if you look carefully, you can see some cars. You can see people walking around. But that is kind of the look and feel of the Tesla mega factory in Austin, Texas, east of the city. It's a huge boon for real estate if you're in east of the city. Travis, thank you, really appreciate the support. And let's see. So we're going to get started. Let me switch to this. You've got the screen. We've got everything. Everybody's in line. Don't forget. You can use the super chat to ask questions. $20 each. The goal is to get to $600. I don't have Catherine. It looks like I don't have Ali. I don't have action Jackson. So we're going to have to try to keep track of this ourselves. Shali, thank you. But, you know, we will do so with about 45 bucks right now, maybe 50. And the goal is $600 over the next hour and a half. Who knows? Maybe we'll go two hours. It a large extent will depend on the questions you guys asked. All right. Here is Elon Musk. Here we go. Everyone is talking about the infrastructure plan and the bill. And I wanted to ask you say tomorrow you get a phone call from Joe Biden. And he says, I think that's unlikely, but sure. He has said some not positive things about Joe Biden. So Joe Biden's unlikely to call. So it's nice to see a little bit of a sense of humor there. The other piece of sense of humor is that haircut go figure. He could have come to say before you go into television. But, you know, I shouldn't complain. I, you know, when you're a billionaire, when you're the richest guy on the planet, maybe on some days, and then you can afford to have whatever healthcare you want when you go on, on video with the Wall Street Journal. But by the way, this video is somebody edited it. It was nice because they've edited out all the parts that I wanted to talk about. You can find the interview, the whole interview itself. A 30 minute interview, 30 plus, I think, on the Wall Street Journal YouTube channel. This, they kind of pieced it out. Unfortunately, it does have background music and it has this yellow tint to it. But you can see in the background, the car, you can see the factory, you can see how lit it is. It's kind of actually cool. In the original video, it's much wider and it's much clearer. It's not quite as yellow, so it's a lot better. But anyway, this was more efficient because they've already spliced and cut it in terms of what I would like to talk about. Here we go. You know, he just gives you a call and he says, you know, I haven't been talking a lot about Tesla lately, but you know, what do you need from this bill? What are your needs? What do you answer him? I mean, to be totally frank, I don't know if we, at least no one in Tesla has actually brought up whether they care about this bill or not. I think if this bill happened or didn't happen, I don't know. We don't think about it at all, really. Okay. Well, one of the reasons they don't think about it at all is because, well, I mean, we'll talk about this, but the bill is clearly going to help Musk's competitors and it's going to not help him because he's been too successful with electric cars so he's not going to get any of the tax subsidies that are going to go to his competitors. And, you know, so, yeah, it really has very little relevance in that sense for Elon Musk, but the rest of what he has to say about this is interesting. It might be better. Honestly, notice how shocked she is. She's like, really? You have nothing to say about this? It might be better if the bill doesn't pass because we've spent so much money, you know, it's like the federal budget deficit is insane. You know, it's like $3 trillion. Federal expenditures are $7 trillion. Federal revenue is $4 trillion. That's a $3 trillion difference. And if this was a company, it'd be a $3 trillion loss. So I don't know if we should be adding to that loss. That seems pretty crazy. Something's got to give. You can't just spend $3 trillion more than your own every year and expect, you know, don't expect something bad to happen. I mean, good for Elon. I mean, almost nobody, nobody out there in the world, in the political world, in the business world, just out there, nobody is talking about the fact that the U.S. government is running these massive unprecedented deficits that, as he said, we don't know exactly what bad is going to happen, but we know that it's not sustainable. We know bad stuff is going to happen. Arguably, one of the consequences of these deficits, particularly right now, is the inflation we're starting to experience. But, you know, he is just saying it when, in the world out there, almost nobody says it. The other thing you recognize about Elon and if you've watched him over the last couple of years, he says stuff that other people are thinking and he just says it. Even though he's CEO of a publicly traded company and most CEOs of publicly traded companies are very cautious in terms of what they say, even though government regulation is a big part of his business and therefore a lot of CEOs are very careful in terms of not to antagonize the government and not to say things that might antagonize the administration, Elon Musk, to his credit, just says what he thinks. Sometimes it doesn't necessarily make any sense, some of his utterances, but in this case, he's absolutely right, he's courageous to say it, shouldn't be courageous to say it, because it really is just a statement of fact, but in the world in which we live, in which government and business are so interwound, in which government regulates controls, where government could penalize you so dramatically, it takes courage to tell the truth. And the other thing I like about what Elon is saying here is he's not pretending to know what the outcome is going to be. He's not saying interest rates will go up or economic growth will be lower or inflation will rise. He's just saying, if you run a government with a large deficit over and over and over again over time, bad stuff is going to happen. He's not pretending that he can predict what that stuff is and when it's going to happen, which is the right attitude to have. I think this is not good. And she's kind of shocked by the whole thing. I mean, she doesn't exactly know what to do with it. If I may elaborate on that, the deficit is more than 3 trillion when you look at the future obligations. So it's 7 trillion of current expenditures, but it's much more than that if you look at future obligations for social security, Medicare and so forth. And he's absolutely right. Of course, that's not really technically the deficit. That's not the annual deficit. You would have to say that that contributes to the aggregate, but absolutely 7 trillion deficits today. Sorry, 3 trillion of added deficits, 7 trillion of current spending. I can't remember what the total debt of the United States is right now. It's well over 20 trillion. It's well over 100% of GDP. But then if you add to that all the what we call unfunded liabilities, that is the gap between what social security is promising to pay people over the next 50 years and the taxes it collects. And if you do that in social security, that gap is there. It's relatively small, but the real gap is what Medicare is promising to pay over the next 50 years and the tax revenue from Medicare that rises up. Now you've got the equivalent of government debt, of cumulative government debt over the long run, in excess of 100 trillion dollars. That is what really is unsustainable. That is what will bankrupt this country and force this country to really change the way it functions, either by, through mass default, either by dramatic increases in how poor we are or by massive shrinking of government, which I think would be good, but the current world thinks would be a frigging disaster. But something is going to have to give at some point, how to tell exactly when, but at some point, and Elon is kind of giving us a little bit of a warning and the beauty about Elon Musk saying it is, if I say it, you know, maybe 5,000 people listen to what I say, you know, between the podcast and the video and everything else, when Elon Musk says it, millions and millions and millions of people listen to what he says. So in that sense, he is speaking truth to millions and millions of people and that's incredibly powerful and it's great to have somebody of Elon Musk's status as a celebrity really, speaking truth. And he has some credibility because he's Elon Musk, because of his history as a successful entrepreneur. Now, we'll get some of the other stuff he says in a minute, I'm not all, I'm not going to be super positive on Elon Musk throughout this, they're going to be points where I'm going to have to be quite critical. We're running this incredible deficit, someone's got to give, I don't know, this can't keep going. Well, Mitch McConnell said something similar, it wasn't too, not as extreme as you, but just, okay, so let's think this follow up question is, okay Elon, you don't think we need to spend anything on the infrastructure? If he says to you, what is the biggest improvement we can make to the US infrastructure? What do you say? I think we generally could have better airports, better highways, especially in cities that are congested, we've got to do something to deal with extreme traffic. This is very unusual for somebody to actually talk about extreme traffic. Environmentalists want to get rid of cars, they don't want to have to deal with extreme traffic. The city governments in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles and generally leftist cities, which is most cities, would like to find ways to get rid of cars. Even Austin, Texas, one of the reasons you're getting a lot of congested development, high rises, condos in downtown is because they're trying to drive people to come downtown. They don't want them in the suburbs. That's their solution to deal with traffic. If you look at big parts of LA, of San Francisco, even a place like Austin, there's very little construction of highways, there's very little improvement of highways, particularly around the downtowns, and nobody wants to talk about this. If you live in Southern California and you get stuck in traffic jams where it should take you 45 minutes and instead it takes you three hours, which often happened to me going from Orange County to LA, that's a big chunk of your life. The reason it's not being done is because nobody wants to solve this issue of traffic and Elon is suggesting, but the fact that he's willing to talk about it, and again the fact is that the environmentalists out there, our politicians, the people who can affect us, sadly our roads are not private, the people who can affect us have no interest in talking about this. I mean, if you really wanted an infrastructure bill, that's what it should be focused on, but of course it should be paid locally. I mean, California should solve California's infrastructure problems. Why should people in Kansas pay taxes in order to solve the infrastructure problems in California? All of these issues are local issues. They're not federal issues. Now it's true that the highways are quote federal. They shouldn't be. They should be given to the states and let the states fund them, which I think is some combination of double-decorating freeways and building tunnels. Double-decorating in tunnels? I mean, I always think about that when I'm on LA. How would you solve this problem? And it's obvious that what you need are express lanes that are double-deckers or express lanes that are tunnels. You don't need exits in every place, but you need one alternative is to have an express lane in one level and the off-ramps on another level. I mean, there's so many ways you could do this, and you got to put the civil engineers on it, but that's the only thing that you should be using really infrastructure on airports. Again, should be funded by the airlines. It should be funded by the airport authorities or you should sell the airports. Airports are easier to privatize and have competition between airports given that they serve as hubs that's not that hard to do and then have the airlines fund and we pay higher airfares in order to construct infrastructure, which makes sense. If you use it, you should pay for it. If you don't use it, somebody who doesn't fly shouldn't be taxed in order to pay for airports. This is why the best way to pay for infrastructure on highways is to use toll roads. And you don't even need to use toll roads anymore. You can just put a GPS track on every car in a sense, but for that you would have to secure the information and so on, but at least on the highways that would read and you would pay by use rather than everybody paying for the infrastructure whether they use it or not. If you don't do something we will be stuck in traffic forever. As autonomous vehicles come to the fore it's easier to drive without going through the pain of having to drive yourself which is absolutely coming and will be one of the biggest transformations ever in human civilization. There will be more cars on the road and the traffic will get much worse. Want to just stay a little bit more on the role of government you said at this conference. I'm not sure autonomous vehicles traffic becomes worse. I think autonomous vehicles potentially drive faster you get fewer accidents and they drive faster they're better people slowing down to look at an accident on the other side of the highway that causes traffic jams on your side of the highway won't happen cause autonomous cars won't slow down so the problem is going to be the real traffic nightmare is going to be the transition from when you've got both autonomous drivers and regular drivers on the road that is where you're going to get bogged down and that's where you're going to have problems but when you actually get close to 100% conversion to autonomous driving there should be a lot less traffic jams. Actually a year ago that you think government should really just be hands off when it comes to innovation though with this bill there is a lot of support for EVs and it could be the biggest change that we've seen about the country in terms of the infrastructure of EVs and it helps Tesla what do you think the role of government should be? I think the role of government should be that of like a referee but not a player on the field generally you know government should I think just try to get out of the way and not impede progress this is great again it's great to have somebody of his caliber and his status saying these things now I think he undermines it we'll see in a minute we'll cut it in the end because of the history of Tesla I think Tesla is very problematic in terms of the government not being a player in terms of the government just being a referee in terms of keeping hands off that is a real problem coming from the CEO of Tesla as we'll talk about in a little bit there's a general problem not just in the US but in most countries where the rules and regulations keep increasing every year rules and regulations are immortal they don't die occasionally you see some low with sunset provision but really otherwise the vast majority of rules and regulations live forever and so if more rules and regulations are applied every year and it just keeps growing and growing eventually it just takes longer and longer and it's harder to do things and there's not really an effective garbage collection system for removing rules and regulations yeah good for him all of this is good stuff and so the gradually this hardens the arteries of civilization where you're able to do less and less over time so I think government should be really trying hard to get rid of rules and regulations that perhaps had some merit at some point but don't have merit currently but there's very little effort in this direction this is a big problem but you know just going back to that infrastructure bill for a second because sometimes the criticism of Tesla is like hey Tesla gets all these subsidies but it's worth noting that for the vehicle purchase tax credit $7,500 Tesla stopped getting that like two years ago yeah so Tesla stopped getting the $7,500 tax credit in 2018 but Tesla got the $7,500 tax credit during the most important time in its life the early adoption period the period in which Tesla sold very few cars a period in which you know EV was an unproven technology a period in which buyers might have been hesitant to buy it a period in which Tesla's were generally very expensive basically Tesla got the $7,500 when it mattered today when it's producing tens of thousands of cars it matters less but would Tesla have survived as a company if it hadn't gotten the $7,500 credit when it mattered the most in its early years probably not but it's much more than that I mean this is where Elon Musk is not being honest in 2010 when Tesla was in dire straits and on the verge of bankruptcy the government gave it a $465 million loan from the government now that's not the government playing referee that's the government being a player on the field winner and loser but all of that is dwarfed by the fact that the government provides Tesla with carbon credits in other words what the government does is if your fleet generates less than a certain amount of carbon emissions as it's run the cars produce less than a certain amount of emissions they don't count the batteries they don't count the production of the car they only count the car as running then you get credits credits then you can sell to companies that need those credits in order to fulfill the regulatory requirements that every car company must have carbon emissions below a certain amount if they're below a certain amount they get credits but if they don't get credits they can buy the credits who do they buy the credits from from companies that get them from the government Tesla because it's all electric and therefore qualifies gets huge amounts of these credits and then what happens is that Chrysler General Motors, Ford other auto companies in Europe in Asia buy those credits from Tesla last year for example, I think it's the last year Tesla generated $500 million of tax credits guess what the profitability of Tesla was last year just a little under $500 million in other words without the tax credits Tesla would break even today or actually take a loss and this has been true forever without the tax credits Tesla would have never survived would have never had the capital to invest in their cars would have never been able to grow and would have never been profitable to this day it's not profitable net the carbon credits so yes they no longer get the $7500 credit you know why because the $7500 credit that the government gives is only to get you started right so once you I think produce more than 20,000 cars you don't get the tax credit anymore so Tesla has passed that it doesn't get it so the tax credit today is going to other manufacturers of EV cars, of electric cars that are producing small batches they're getting that advantage Tesla got when it was small so it would be very convenient for Tesla very convenient for Tesla if none of its competitors got the benefits it got when it was started for example the $7500 credit actually Biden's bill increases that credit to $4500 an additional $4500 but only for the unions that used labor unions labor so union labor now of course I'm against that but note that Tesla does not use union labor so it does not qualify for this credit so of course you know at the very straightforward level Elon Musk benefits enormously from these laws and from these massive carbon credits that they get and you know tax incentives now I'm awful at tax incentives but for example Nevada and other states have given Tesla a bit at the end of the day you know, fine they're getting credits, they're getting tax credits, they're getting carbon credits that's the law in a sense within the system but for then Elon to say well we don't get any benefits anymore we don't get any tax credits anymore a little disingenuous a little disingenuous to say don't give any tax credits to our competitors when we got them for years I mean it would be nice if you at least acknowledge look we got them I'm sorry we got them we shouldn't have got them, the government should have never been involved but then he would have to say the reality is we wouldn't exist today if not for those tax credits this is where people like Elon it's very complicated it's very hard to know how to think about them on the one hand heroic and positive and says a lot of good things and says the right things role of government, other things we'll get to but then he he kind of in a sense is dishonest about what Tesla is really has been all about whereas everyone else I think except for GM still gets the $7500 tax credit but there's a reason for that once you produce more than X number of cars you don't get any more so it's there to get you started so you got it when you got started GM got it when they got started but since those two companies are producing enough cars now now that tax credit is going to all the other people who are in that position and yet you want that to go away really is that really your stance now that you established because you benefited from all those government favors all of our sales this year and last year were had nothing to do with the tax credit but common credit because we've made so many electric cars Tesla has made roughly two thirds of all the electric cars in the United States true I'm not sure most people are aware of that and how much of that would have been possible without so Tesla's made basically twice as many electric vehicles as the rest of industry combined and we don't need the $7500 tax credit that's right once you reach a certain size you don't need the tax credit anymore now you're big enough you know you can you dominate the market but it's curious that once you're big enough that you're not getting the tax credit anyway now you're advocating for its rejection I'm curious if anybody knows if Elon Musk was arguing pre-2018 maybe 2012, 14, 16 was he arguing then that we should get rid of this credit $7500 credit I doubt it I would say honestly I would just can this whole bill don't pass it that's my recommendation what about the support though for the charging this is the best part do we need support for gas stations that's the best answer he gave do we need support for gas stations it's what I mentioned when I analyzed the infrastructure bill and a lot of the money is going to for these charging stations and I talked about the fact that why do you need them there's a profit motive in that once you get enough of that to cause and we're getting there why wouldn't gas stations add them on ultimately they would replace the gas stations why do you need government to intervene build the original gas stations I mean Elon Musk gets it but when it comes to actually benefiting from it he's eager to jump into it and maybe even lobby for it when he's the direct beneficiary when he has the ability to step back and take a look and evaluate without it impacting his actual business then he gets it he really does so there's no need for this support for charging delete it delete I'm literally saying get rid of all subsidies he's literally saying get rid of all subsidies and I commend him for saying that I commend him for saying that I wish more CEOs would say that I wish everybody in the industry would say that but it's much easier to say that after you don't get the subsidies anymore but also for oil and gas and that's kind of cheating because also for oil and gas oil and gas don't get subsidies I hear this all the time but they get their equipment written off in terms of taxes and things like that so does every other business there might be some favorable treatment of certain types of arrangements for the oil and gas industry but yeah let's get rid of all subsidies let's get rid of all deductions from corporate taxes and make it really really simple really really straightforward so the tax code cannot be manipulated or how about what I've always advocated for which is basically zero corporate tax and then there's no way to game the system and so I just wish he had done this when he was the direct beneficiary of the subsidy which he's talking about now is Elon Musk for getting rid of the carbon credit which generates half a billion dollars in revenue for his company I don't know I doubt it I haven't heard anything about it does he consider that a subsidy maybe I hope so I hope that's what he includes with let's get rid of all subsidies if you think about also how this affects your competitors does that impact how some of your view on this maybe they need it I don't know but I think just generally I'm in favor of deleting subsidies when we started Tesla there were no EV subsidies at all and gasoline was super cheap we did not anticipate any subsidies that came later it came late at key points in Tesla's development the $75 tax credit came as a result not of Tesla activity but of General Motors lobbying for it I would just say just delete them all there's some other good things in this bill some would argue a lot of money you're marked for R&D would you want to put that towards something alright we're going to move on from the bill because I think we get what you're saying in general we should just if you don't cut government spending something really bad is going to happen this is crazy our spending is so far in excess of revenue it's insane you could zero out all billionaires in the country this is almost like anti-billionaire BS well if you zero out that's pretty cool for a billionaire that says there's a lot of anti-billionaire BS I mean there you go that's the kind of courage that we need to see more businessmen have that's the kind of not equivocating that we need to see more billionaires have it's only when businessmen stand up and say the kind of things Elon Musk is saying right now that the world is going to change and I'm encouraged by his willingness to say it disappointed that he's not willing to fully admit the world government played all these subsidies played in Tesla's own development I'd like to see him analyze that and prove me wrong and show me that it didn't have a big impact on the development but good for him for standing up against the attacks on billionaires good for him for standing up for all of this all the billionaires you still wouldn't sold the deficit I'll ask you another question around the billionaire BS say tomorrow you get the phone call from President Biden we elect you to Congress somehow this happens you're now working on tax bills you're working on tax policy how do you tax someone like you how do you tax billion first of all I pay a lot of tax my marginal tax rate is like 15% so that's not trivial and then obviously there's like asset based taxes the sales tax and everything else there's also the estate tax and generally I think the estate tax is a good tax like if you think of assets beyond a certain level that are far beyond let's say somebody's ability to consume then at some point really what you're doing is capital allocations so so he just said well tax is a good tax you could say that the wealth tax is one of the least destructive taxes but a good tax this is a good tax as we know again consistency would be great but this point he's about to make and let me rewind this just a tad because just to capture the full context this point he's about to make about capital allocation is really really good again from an economic perspective I wish he had some more context for it but this is a really really good point he makes about taxing it's a point I've made many many times and what happens when you tax the rich the so-called rich let's say somebody's ability to consume then at some point really what you're doing is capital allocation so you're not it's not money for personal expenditures it's what you're doing is capital allocation and it does not make sense to take the job of capital allocation away from people who have demonstrated great skill in capital allocation and give it to an entity that has demonstrated very skill in capital allocation which is the government I mean this is the point he's making right what do rich people do with their money beyond the point of consumption beyond what they can consume there's only so much you can consume what do rich people actually do what do wealthy people actually do with their money well they save it the equivalent of save what does that mean it means they invest it they allocate capital they invest in startups and businesses they put it into their own business they allocate capital in the economy rich people don't have a vote with all their cash sitting in it like Scrooge McDuck did in the cartoons right they actually have all this capital invested in businesses allocated to businesses and what he's saying is when you tax that money when you tax the the Bezos the Bill Gates of the world what you're really doing is taking money from the smartest best capital allocators in the world from people who understand business understand innovation understand progress and give it to an incompetent pathetic entity government that has proven to be really really bad at allocating capital why would you do that if you care about economic growth again from the economic dimension right you can think of the government essentially as a corporation in the limit the government is simply the biggest corporation with a monopoly on violence there's a problem with viewing government as a corporation which I'd love to get into with Elon Musk someday but he's right the government has the monopoly over the use of violence that's what makes it government but given that it does so many other things do you want to give the entity with a monopoly over the use of violence of force the ability to do all these other things and where you have no recourse can you explain that last part how much money do you want to give that entity exactly last part quickly I want to move on to some product stuff I can talk for a bit longer if you'd like he's enjoying this if you're worried about getting through other questions but I hear we have nobody else joining us at this conference government is a corporation in the limit it is the most corporate thing it is maximum corporation but it's also monopoly and also it's the only one that's allowed legally to do violence why would you want to give a corporation with no competition that can't even really go bankrupt more money it's not just that I think the government shouldn't exist or that they're not good things that the government can do or things that are necessary for the government to do so I'm not somebody who is sort of an extreme libertarian I mean that's I don't know what an extreme libertarian is he's not an anarchist which is good he could be more about a limited government than he is it looks like in terms of our billionaires he's about as good as he gets in terms of those who are willing to actually go on camber and talk about this stuff and thinks the government should not do anything I just think we should minimize what the government does because the government's efficiency at spending is just going to be lower than a competitive commercial company but by a lot that's perfect, well said come back to your world the workload at Tesla is quite a lot and I know now you could regain the chairman position have you thought about that your title and your position there right now it's interesting these titles there's actually only three titles that actually mean anything for a corporation it's president, secretary and treasurer and technically they could be the same person and all these other titles are just basically made up so CEO is made up title CFO is made up title don't mean anything I think a room of CEOs I mean he's not right that they don't mean anything he's kind of being flippant but it's okay it's always fun to watch they don't mean anything from a legal corporate entity perspective but they mean something a lot because they're contracts there's a as a CEO you have a contract with the board with the company that gives you certain authorities and certain responsibilities so it's bogus to say if you have a corporation incorporated documents you only have those three titles president, treasurer, secretary those are the only titles that exist any more than you go to a middle manager and make him a director of research that's meaningless no it means something it means something now you know he's being Elon Musk this is where he gets a little flippant and a little ridiculous it was like obviously just somebody's marketing experiment so so I guess I'll be more direct are you considering stepping down as CEO would you transfer chairman and think about being chief product officer I mean since CEO title doesn't matter I changed my title to techno king he's techno king and by the way this is a formal SEC filing I'm legally a formal whatever techno king I just did that as kind of like a joke because just a joke that these titles don't mean a lot you can see what is actually legally necessary if you fill out the form for creating a secorp and then you'll see as president, treasurer and secretary I need a director too but that's basically it and then all these other chief whatever officer are basically just made up alright so ended on that fun note Elon Musk being Elon Musk and he is now techno king of he's not the CEO he's the techno king of Tesla it would be interesting to study his management style and see what actually has happens within the business I don't think the BS titles I mean firstly because of regulations the CEO has to sign off on financial statements so the CFO the CFO has all kinds of liabilities I you can joke and kid around about this stuff but it's just not true you need certain titles somebody has to be responsible for marketing there is such a thing as chief marketing officer and they do take on the responsibility of things like that so you know when you're positioned as that you are as Elon Musk is you can poo poo these things but for most companies a lot of these things are crucial it is a good interview it was a fun interview a lot of good positive things were said I wish Musk would just come clean on his view on all the subsidies that he got it would be good to have a little PowerPoint presentation where he showed us that he didn't matter and Tesla would have been fine without the government loan in 2010 and without all the different subsidies and without the tax credits and without the carbon credits I doubt he can do it because I don't think it's true I think he built his company based on those and wouldn't have survived if not for those but it's still great to see a CEO come out and talk about government spending the way he did it's great to see a CEO come out and state that there should be no subsidies even if he's not consistent applying that to his own company it's great that that gets into the debate and that gets out there into the culture and that we start discussing these kind of issues so I want to see many, many more CEOs do that I'd like to see a lot more CEOs interact the way Elon Musk does with the world and it would be good again if they were more straight up and didn't carry the baggage that Elon Musk carries unfortunately he does because I mean it's not even the fact that it's not just Tesla SolarCity benefits enormously from all kinds of government regulations, controls, tax credits all kinds of things like that that are created so it's very, very hard when Musk says these things to take him completely seriously and indeed I saw a video of Zach Ria who's like a CNN CNBC I'm not sure calling him on it but I'm saying he's a hypocrite he's too open to that and yet I still enjoy hearing it said still enjoy hearing it said alright and remember Elon Musk has done some other pretty exciting things remember when he told California that he was not shutting down his plant in spite of the lockdowns that he was going to continue working and if they wanted to come and shut him down and arrest everybody there and he was going to be in the factory they would arrest him as well and by the way he was going to move the entire factory to Texas if this was the attitude they had that was brilliant that was perfect that is exactly what businessman should have done during the COVID lockdown you don't get to tell us what essential workers are we get to decide what we think is essential or not if our workers want to work if we want to employ them it's good for Elon Musk for doing that and then Michael who reminds us of the time that was it Michael let's see who did that yes no it was Shay Shay Lavey who said have you seen the incredible shake their fist at the sky tweet yes that was a great tweet and that's why I'm not going to read it accurately because I don't have it up in front of me but basically when they talked about the launching of satellites for internet connection all over the world part of what SpaceX is doing is launching thousands of satellites into space they will all be linked, all be connected and all be providing ubiquitous internet connection on the entire world and somebody asked Elon Musk what about the local regulators how will they regulate the internet if everything is going if you're doing a direct link between the phone of somebody in China or the phone of somebody in Africa and the satellite above him how are the regulators going to do it what are the regulators going to do how are they going to control this and Elon Musk said well they can shake their fists at the sky and that is that actually I think that tweet let me see if I can find it it's got to be the best tweet ever it's definitely the best thing Elon Musk ever said and it might be the best tweet anybody's ever had because it's so it's so just it reflects exactly that it reflects that the alternative is to be a mystic the alternative is shaking the fist we developed the technology you have to be a witch doctor there's no way to control it once you do that unfortunately I can't really find it's not going to be easy for me to find that tweet oops that's not what I wanted to do it's not going to be particularly easy to find the tweet but we'll see if I can find it because it was very succinct, it was very good and yeah this is this is the tweet so he says our satellites launching in the next few months have inter-satellite laser links so no local download download needed probably active in 4 to 6 months this was written in September 1 Michael Sheets writes how does transmitting into a country without the local download work on the regulatory side oh my god what are we going to do how's the regulations going to work and his answer is they can shake their fist at the sky I mean it doesn't get any better than that in terms of tweets in my view alright let's see let's see where we go from here we've got a bunch of we've got a bunch of super chat questions so we're going to take those we are way behind on the super chat so we're at like 140 when the goal for every one of these shows is $600 so I'm hoping you guys chime in with some $20, $50 $100 super chat questions show your support for the show it's value for value we have a lot of people watching now live maybe some new people watching first of all like the show before you leave but also show your support for the show using the super chat feature that exists here you can ask a question using it or you can just make a contribution either way I very much appreciate it we've got quite a bit to catch up if we're going to make this $600 goal alright let's take a few of the super chat questions $20 and above questions and then we will get back to we'll get back to the topic at hand which we're going to move to which is individualism Bradley says Elon Musk seems like a rational reality oriented person most of the time I think he would like you if you got chance to sit down with him maybe you could move him in an objective direction and it would grow your show enormously yeah I'd love to sit down with Elon Musk anybody out there have a connection to Elon Musk get him on the line and we could do an interview that would be amazing if we could make that happen I don't know how to get a hold of Elon Musk but I will whether I can I will try to get a hold of him so that we can make that happen because I think it would be really really cool alright I'm going to take these $220 questions that are not related and then we'll jump into well we've got three but we'll jump into the issue of individualism and its connection to conservatism Bradley says I might be able to build a unicorn company this will increase my self-esteem from the productive virtue but I am new to objectiveism warrior like integrity and independence to withstand public exposure any advice please it's an interesting question the way it's phrased look if you can build a unicorn company you're not you don't build a unicorn company in order to gain self-esteem building a unicorn company will raise your self-esteem but I suspect that in order to build it you already have to have some substantial self-esteem in order to manage to navigate to do to work hard and to do the things that you will need to do in order to build a unicorn you already have to have a lot of self-esteem and it will benefit your self-esteem and it will make you money it will change the world it will make you happier you have fulfilled the goal that's why you should do it if you're worried about whether you can withstand and whether you can cope and whether you can live with the public exposure and whether you have the integrity and independence to keep your wits about you as the poem IF says when you're in the line light then those are things you need to work on those are things you need to think about there's no way to gain the objective as virtues without thinking about them and trying to integrate them into your life what you have to convince yourself and you have to integrate into you is the fact that integrity and independence are crucial to your own happiness crucial to your own well-being that indeed you will suffer if you don't have them particularly when you're in the line light that is what you have to build into your own psychology and into your own value structure the importance of integrity and independence what they mean how to apply them well vis-a-vis the world out there no matter whether you have public exposure or not if you lack integrity and independence even if you don't build a unicorn company you will sell yourself short and you will not be as happy as you could be you will not achieve your goals in life so integrity and independence are crucial to achieving your goals in life they're crucial to achieving happiness in life they're as crucial as building a unicorn company and indeed if you have them they will help you build that unicorn company you have to convince yourself that that is true and you have to work on it how do you do that you do that by thinking about it by living it by reading about it re-read the best example for this re-read the fountain head and if you haven't read the fountain head read the fountain head and read the scene where Howard Walk gives up a lot of money to build a building and walks away from it because he thinks would destroy the integrity of his creation read about the reasoning behind his blowing up the building but maybe more important than that read about going to the quarry and what that does to his soul and how it keeps his soul intact so I would reread the fountain head and then work on it think through various scenarios convince yourself not in an official way but in a way connected to reality that having that kind of integrity having the kind of independence that Howard Walk has will actually benefit you in every aspect of your life Geoffrey says too much to do at the restaurant to listen live hopefully you'll do a show Monday or Tuesday yes Tuesday at 7pm East Coast time Geoffrey so catch up with you then I know Saturday this time of day is prep at the restaurant and there's just no way talk about productive work and as tempted as he is to listen to me productive work calls as it should theme master thank you for the support I really appreciate it so badly I hope that helps Iran's rules for living I think should help but mainly the fountain head virtue of selfishness read opal the section on integrity independence and their importance read and then integrate think about them integrate them into all your other values into your life experience Andrew brings this to let's do Lee and then we'll do Andrew how you're on any tips for cultivating a deep and healthy appreciation of art for example promoting a stronger emotional response recognizing false premises in one's evaluation you know that's a big topic it's a big topic which I intend to do a future rules for living on so so I'm not going to cover it with as much as the topic demands but that is definitely a topic I want to do a whole show on it deserves a whole show and I've promised I think in the past to do shows on this and I will this December do a whole show on cultivating a deeper and healthy appreciation of art but I would say that you need two things one is expose yourself to it you're not going to get an appreciation without exposing yourself to it and that means not just browsing the internet for a bunch of photos of artwork that means serious contemplation and serious immersion with the art don't look at pictures of sculpture go to a museum and try to stand in front of a sculpture and see what you see in it and what it does to you it requires real introspection while you're observing the art it requires time and effort so immerse yourself in a particular art form music, classical music in particular is another opportunity for doing that paintings and sculpture you kind of have to go to an exhibit read a novel and really immerse yourself in the experience of doing it don't do it don't listen on tape while you're driving or listen on tape while you're taking a walk or listen on tape while you're having a conversation with three other people try to really invest the time to focus on the experience so that's one second learn a little bit about the art form about the artist, about the history, about the context and maybe take some art appreciation classes I think that's pretty good art appreciation classes I took some on classical music in my 20s I've taken some art appreciation classes they're pretty good as long as they stay away from so-called modern art or modern non-art they're pretty good, you'll learn a lot so take those classes, I'll teach you how to look how to appreciate, how to examine how to take it in what to focus on and I will talk about that on the show that I will do on art appreciation I will talk a little bit about that as well so but don't shy away from picking up an art appreciation book doing something on the learning company finding some YouTube videos on art appreciation definitely highly recommended as part of kind of the path to getting into it alright, Andrew asks let's just get us into a little bit about into the topic of individualism Andrew says when conservatives claim that marriage is impractical without duty why do you think they exclude romantic love? presumably some are loving marriages yet think men would ditch their wives impulsively absent ethical edicts so I don't think they're excluding a romantic love to kind of say it they think romantic love is conditional on their sense of duty that they will undermine their romantic love by without you know they would just jump on the woman in the bar the good looking woman in the bar that Ben Shapiro likes to raise they would jump at the opportunity of going and having sex with her jeopardize their entire marriage relationship for doing that and the only reason they don't do it is out of some sense of duty Yom Khazani talked a lot about marriage to work right is a process of honoring in a sense as some form of duty and of course honoring your spouse is of course an essential part of a healthy marriage imagine if you didn't have respect for your wife if you didn't honor your spouse but is it a duty or is it a precondition for the love the reason you love the person is because you respect them admire them and therefore honor them but you see conservatives have a really hard time with human emotions conservatives believe particularly the Christian version they believe that we are all born of sin we're all sinners this is the whole idea of original sin we're all open to temptation all the time we cannot hold on to values we cannot be consistent we cannot have integrity and as a consequence there's no way we can stay married because temptation is just everywhere and the only way to stay married is in a sense to provide some external motivation you'll go to hell if you get a divorce that's a good one or you've got to do it because it's your duty and morality is about duty so conservatives about let's stick to tradition why? because it's tradition because it's your duty to do it and therefore they have a particular view of marriage that is focused and oriented around duty loving marriages but they also know themselves and they know that they are sinful and can be sinful and will be sinful if they had the opportunity and therefore they have to have some external force call it a duty about morality to keep them in check or God is watching but it's not just God it's sometimes just this content view of duty this is what makes conservatism and religion and this whole moral tradition so unappealing I want a rational reason why should I stick with my wife I don't think it's that hard to figure out a rational reason assuming your wife represents a value to you but they you're on basically said this they don't really believe reason it's applicable to these areas in life I mean his view of reason is a content view of reason his view of reason is that reason is detached from reality reason is not a guide to action certainly not a guide to morality so because of original sin because of the view of morality as a series of duties a series of commandments cannot conceive of rational self interest they cannot conceive of reason towards the good let's say marriage is good can conceive of that marriage actually be guided by rational self interest there has to be a duty associated with it now the other aspect of this is that some of their marriages suck some of their marriages don't have love anymore are not romantic anymore are not a significant value to them anymore and many of them feel a duty to stick with it now I'm not talking about kind of the responsibility to your long-term values to try to work things out and try to make it work and to make sure that's not you know you're not going through a rough patch and this is really a the long-term value and so on I'm talking about a marriage is clearly not working and people stick with it out of a sense of duty and that's unbelievably destructive to them and to everybody involved and that's what conservatism leads to particularly forms of conservatism of religion which don't believe in divorce like conservative Judaism or Catholicism Scot says and then I'll get to some more stuff I want to say about individualism and I will say here that this is the last super chat question so we're way behind our super chat 175 a goal is again 600 so we're way way behind and we're really gone for both in an hour if anybody wants to support the show and show support for the show this is important that we get to these goals because it's what keeps the show going it's how it's what I live off of in a sense right it's the payment for the show so value for value so I hope some of you will consider supporting the show and my support but also right here on the super chat it has a certain benefit of the immediacy of it and the pleasure of just doing it right now and I know some of you don't like me asking but we're way behind right now so if you like these shows I'd appreciate you showing the support for them you know if somebody came in with two 300 bucks to get us really to what we need to be that would be terrific alright Scott says I'm glad you like Yoram but he's the intellectual force behind national conservatism is it possible they're not as bad as you thought no I mean they're much worse than Yoram is in many respects because I think Yoram is the represents a certain version of national conservatism that is not necessarily the dominant one but Yoram's version of national conservatism is really really really really really really bad and you have to be able to separate here between the fact that the individuals quite individuals might be good people might be nice people might be people you like hanging out with but they have terrible ideas and I think that if Yoram's ideas about national conservatism Yoram believes that the state should have religion as its mandate that the United States should be a Christian nation that Christianity should be taught in schools Yoram believes that Yoram believes that we should slow down growth in many aspects of technology because it's too disruptive that we should break up all the big tech companies that we should use the government to impact culture I mean Yoram probably believes that we should reverse certainly Roe vs Wade if not him then the others certainly do but also gay marriage Yoram you know the national conservative agenda agenda is horrific for an individualist like me it's not a little bit bad it's it's you know about as bad as you can imagine about as bad as you can imagine and when you bring in the Catholics who are yes whose ideas are worse than Yoram's it's a disaster and of course in a movement that actually is going to have impact on the United States and Europe it's the Catholics who are going to have the impact it's the Catholics of the intellectuals it's the Catholics who represent Christianity that is the majority religion it's the Catholics who are going to dominate and as a consequence it's not it's not even close in terms of how bad they are these ideas are the enemy of everything I believe the founding fathers represented they're the enemy of liberty of freedom of individualism of everything that I stand for and they're not in that sense better than the left now I think Yoram has a little bit more appreciation for markets appreciation for individualism but even he wants to regulate markets wants to control markets when he thinks and it came out in the debate when he thinks they have gone awry where they don't fit with his vision of where the country should be heading with his ideals for what America should happen he is fine with central planners in a debate politicians will have to decide when to curb certain industries when to put on certain tariffs when to subsidize other industries in the name of the common good in the name of the national good which is for him more important than the individual's good now the debate turned out to be mostly about the value of individualism because he doesn't want to say those things you know he didn't want to debate his views because it would have got a lot more unpleasant because I would have had to be really be critical of his views and maybe at some point we'll debate his views more directly when it comes to specifics so one time he mentioned that the United States need to have industrial policy because of all the job losses because of China I laid into that if we had really discussed all of his views in detail it would have got it would have been a different debate it was the debate about individualism with the pluses and minuses that involved but this is I hope not the last time we debate I hope he's open to debating some more and having more discussions so that we can bring out those ideas and so I can illustrate to you guys how bad they really are if you believe in liberty if you believe in freedom if you believe in capitalism is the enemy not the only enemy but it's certainly an enemy of equal statue with some of our other enemies there is no area of agreement and those of you who are obsessed by the idea that the only enemy is the left and you think that you can cooperate with anybody as long as you beat the left you are the people who will be responsible when fascism comes about in this country fascism or right wing fascism because you will be the people who have sanctioned that those are the only two alternatives instead of forming a a coalition around the ideas of individualism to stand up to the fascist of the left and the fascist of the right to stand up against collectivism and stand for something but no I do not form coalitions around the evil the left with people who I think politically would bring about disasters that are equal to or close to equal to I don't care which band of collectivism was collectivism is evil collectivism will kill you slow fast will kill you in one way or kill you in another way it will kill this country I happen to think that this country does not form of collectivism but it doesn't matter whether we die here of communism I mean look I've said this so many times the only reason you know a Mussolini or a Hitler could rise up is because people like us bought into the idea that socialism was the enemy and we would fight it together and that's the whole story of white wing fascism coming about is it always rises up in opposition to communism it always rises up because the people are not fascists and are not communists and who fear communism align themselves with the fascists in order to fight the communists but guess who wins from that alliance guess who benefits from that alliance guess who benefits when the good compromises with evil only evil the good doesn't benefit yes you don't need communism you get an alternative way to die and we yeah but nobody's fight if you sanction sanction bad ideas you are no longer fighting for good ideas when you sanction bad ideas you've given up on the good ideas so yes we're a tiny minority but we are a tiny minority that needs to fight all our enemies all our enemies and all our enemies are fundamentally the same they're all collectivists they're all deep down subjectivists including the religionists all subjectivists in the end where do they get their truth from if not from their emotions so we are individualists and as individualists we fight collectivism we fight collectivists no matter what sheeps closing they wear no matter what they look like no matter what they claim to propose collectivism is the enemy always and everywhere and if you say no no no I'm gonna work with the collectivists who are less bad guess what they're not gonna stay less bad and once they implement their collectivism you're gonna be the first victim of that so I don't know I'm obviously this is a point I've been making for I don't know five six years now over and over and over again I'm obviously not communicating if everyone are not being convincing or you guys are not open to being convinced I don't know something something is amiss Jamie thank you for the support from Mexico really appreciate that Colin thank you yesterday's show was fantastic I appreciate that value for value I'm glad you enjoyed it Bonnie thank you really appreciate that we are I don't know we're still $400 short so I'm not sure maybe don't cause me to to get all depressed by inability to get to our targets alright let's see where do we I want to talk more about individualism one point I wanted to make because of a question yesterday and I didn't say enough about it I think and that is about what is essentially individualism is individualism a moral point or is it individualism a political point and I think I think it's important here it's important to get this right and by the way I highly recommend if you want to understand the issues that we're talking about politically one of the really cool books that have come out that have come out in recent time was textbook on Americanism that Jonathan Honing was responsible for for editing and there's a whole section there by I'm an individualism but then there's the whole book with lots of intellectuals writing essays that I think about individualism what is Americanism if not individualism that those are synonymous those are the same thing and in that Ein Rand writes in textbook of Americanism Ein Rand writes do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that individualist is a man who says I'll do as I please and everyone else expands and individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man his own and those of others note her focus on rights rights are a moral political concept individualism I think is a moral political concept it's a bridging concept it defines ultimately where you are politically it defines your focus your orientation what you're going to focus on politically but by calling it individualism you are linking it to a particular morality a morality that recognizes a sanctity of an individual a morality that recognizes your aim as a pursuit of happiness collectivism is the same thing it is a term that basically orient you towards politics a particular type of politics it doesn't tell you socialism fascism the particular type of collectivism you're going to be oriented towards but it presents it as the individual is subservient to the group politically we must place the group above the individual in one form or another and therefore in morality it comes from the idea that your purpose in life as an individual is to sacrifice to the group the group is more important than you she can see the integration of politics and morality and collectivism and individualism are these integrating concepts they are where capitalism doesn't orient you towards morality Americanism doesn't orient you towards morality socialism doesn't necessarily orient you towards morality neither does fascism collectivism does collectivism says it's immediate that the collectivism is superior that the collective is superior to the individual and somebody like Yorchazzone is going to say I don't know I value the individual individualism is good but the state is more important we need ultimately for the state to determine a path we need somebody to decide what we're going to do as a collective and he's a collectivist in essence in every sense so yeah some are more tolerant of individual freedom than others but at the end of the day the authority to determine how much freedom you should have is determined by the leadership the state the people responsible and I think one of the things the national conservatives want to do is give that leadership a lot of power much more power than the founding fathers wanted to give them so collectivism is the idea that the state is more important or the collective is more important than the individual and that and it indicates a direction in terms of politics a direction in terms of politics it doesn't give you the particulars and individualism in the same in a sense says the same thing just individualism there's only one manifestation of individualism there are many manifestations of collectivism and the one manifestation of individualism is capitalism right so in my view individualism and collectivism are the right political spectrum to think about collectivism is bad individualism is good you have some systems that are more collectivist some political system that are more individualistic but that's the spectrum the extent to which individual rights are protected the extent to which individual rights are respected so to quote Ein Rand same passage to read it again did I make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says I'll do as I please at anyone's else's expense and individualist is a man who recognizes the inalible individual rights of man his own and those of others and individualist is a man who says quote I will not run anyone's life nor let anyone run mine I will not rule nor be ruled I will not be master nor slave I will not sacrifice myself to anyone nor sacrifice anyone to myself that's Ein Rand out of textbook of Americanism which is in Jonathan Honing's new book and that formulation makes clear the foundation in which you build a political system so it doesn't tell you the specifics about how government should function and the distribution of power and checks and balances and any of that doesn't give you the details of the political system it gives you the foundational principle of the political system to protect individual rights well here's another quote from Ein Rand this one is from the essay on racism in the virtue of selfishness individualism of God's man every man as an independent sovereign entity who possesses an inalible right to his own life a right derived from his nature as a rational being individualism holds that a civilized society or any form of association corporation or peaceful coexistence among men can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights and that a group as such has no rights other than the individual rights of its members that's individualism that's a the foundations on which you build a political system a political system of individualism in contrast to the political system of collectivism which rejects individual rights and places the individual beneath if you will subservient to the group whatever the group happens to be whatever the group happens to the mechanism by which the group happens to make decisions for itself all right I have one one super chat question that's about it if you want to ask questions now's the time to do it otherwise I'll do this question and it will be done with it it will be done with the show that'll be the end of the show we are at around 270 bucks this will be one of the least successful fundraising shows we've ever done in terms of a super chat so it's been a long time since we haven't gotten at least 400 bucks on a show but anyway maybe Sunday afternoon is not a good time to do a show from a monetary perspective from other perspectives all right Adam writes so if you want to ask a question now's the time otherwise we'll answer this question and call it a day Adam asks is theocracy animated by the Marxist Catholic synthesis animated by the Marxist Catholic synthesis Catholics being the only intellectuals on that side advocating so much faster advancing so much faster than fighting socialism as such has become a waste of time um no because so Adam's basically saying look isn't on these national conservatives or theocrats generally advancing so fast that we should really maybe give up on fighting socialism and just focus on fighting them because fighting socialism is a waste of time the real threat is coming from the right and I'd say no and the reason is that we don't know exactly how history is going to evolve in the future that's a wrong formulation we don't know what's going to happen in the future and the left has a huge advantage and the huge advantage is they control over the educational institutions they control over the um the universities the schools the intellectuals so I wouldn't write off I wouldn't write off the um the socialists because and the nihilists of the left because they have the commanding heights they have the commanding heights of um again the intellectual establishment they have the commanding heights of the universities they have the commanding heights of our school system they dominate the education of our children they dominate the media they dominate all of those aspects and as such you can never write them off you can never assume that they have lost as long as they command those commanding heights I can't assume that they have lost alright, Enric thank you Enric, really appreciate it thanks Adam for the question Thesti, thank you, really appreciate it let's see we've got Aime Battical says he's still gonna write a question he's typing the question so I'm waiting for him Simon Simon, thank you, really appreciate that okay John asked for $50, that's great so we're getting some traction here at the very last minute but we've still got a long way to go to make our numbers kind of work. John says, I just recently moved to Austin area and attended your debate with Yoram. I'm a long-time objectivist. Red Atlas Shrug does a UT student in 1964. Wow, wow. Well, great, I hope you enjoyed the debate. You didn't say in your comment whether you enjoyed the debate or not. I hope you did. And Austin's a great place. I'm glad you moved to Austin. I think we met at the debate. I think we said hello. So I'm sure we have met. But thank you. And thank you for the support. That's very generous, 50 bucks. That helps a lot. Thank you, Quint Wiccans from Canada. And I'm waiting for Imbotical. Imbotical, where are you? You're supposed to ask a question. And you're not asking it. Let's see if there's any kind of, I mean, if you want the book on individualism, the book on individualism is the fountainhead. The fountainhead is all about individualism, individualism in the soul of man. So the fountainhead's view of individualism is much more ethical. It's much more about living your life for yourself. It's some political. That's what the trial is about, right? It's about property rights and so on. But it's fundamentally ethical. It's about your life, your mind doing its thing. OK, we've got two questions here. And then we're probably going to call it a day. Although, again, we haven't even reached 400 bucks, which used to be our goal. In my age group, which, by the way, I'm only 21, I've noticed that so many people have contempt for their own existence. And I see this through the rise of environmentalism and socialism. What do you say? Well, I think environmentalism and socialism are rising because people have contempt. These are self-reinforcing kind of things. Environmentalism and socialism breed contempt, but they only find a fertile soil in which to breed, if you will, because people already feel contempt for their own life. That contempt, the contempt could be a consequence of Christian original sin. That contempt could be the consequence of a low self-esteem, the way you brought up, the conclusions you came to, the things that happened to you, the generated low self-esteem, and then the environmentalists and the socialists latch onto that. And you're guilty, if you're an environmentalist, you're guilty of being alive, you're destroying the planet, you're destroying nature, you're by your very existence are changing the world for the worst, according to environmentalism. And of course, as a socialism, if you're anything but the poorest of the poor, you're exploiting other people. And if you didn't, your parents did, and you are essentially a bad person just by your very existence, and both environmentalism, socialism preach that and advocate for that, so that reinforces this idea of self-contempt. But I absolutely agree with you, Colt. The only reason socialism and environmentalism can find a real place in the minds and hearts of your generation is because your generation lacks self-esteem and your generation lacks any kind of sense of their own self-worth. And that's what that contempt is. And part of it is that they're spoiled, that they don't know what it took to get the wealth that they kind of take for granted. They have their iPhones, they have their computers, they have the internet, and they think these are just metaphysically given, that they just plopped right in front of them, have no concept of what was necessary in order to create them, to make them. They have no sense of how poor people were before the rise of capitalism. They have no sense of what it's like to be poor in a third world country. Life is easy, it doesn't demand too much of them, the people around them don't demand too much of them, and they take it all for granted. And they never have gained the self-esteem that comes from understanding how changing the world around you is meaningful and important. All right, we have two more questions. So two more questions. And of course, you can continue to ask questions. But make them $20 or more questions, if you're going to ask now, because it is getting late. We've already gotten an hour and a half. So $20 or more, two more $20 question would actually get us the $400, which would be nice to get to that minimal number if we're not going to make it to $600. How do you get to someone who is irrational, a person who evades reality? How do you convince a person that doesn't accept facts or reason? You don't. You don't. The only way to convince anybody is to facts and reason. There's nothing else. You can manipulate them emotionally, and for a minute, they might accept what you say. But that'll be one concrete, one minute, one moment. And that's it. And this is where you have to accept, as I have, that I'm not going to convince a lot of people. There's some people that are just, I'm not going to convince. And indeed, more than that, it's a waste of my time to try to convince them. So it's a mistake to assume that you convince evaders. You can't. Now, maybe you can create some kind of cognitive dissonance or some kind of emotional response to a movie, to a book, or something like that. That shocks them to their senses and brings them back or brings them to a point of respecting facts and reason. But at the end, the only way to do it is through facts and reason. And maybe the role of emotions is to shock them into a realization of that. Thank you, guys. Andy and Enric have just got us over 400. Now, it's tempting to say we should go for 600, because we're at 440 something. So we might as well just go for the full 600 and call it a day. All right, where are we? Oh, let's take Andy, because that's $20. Enric, that is very generous. I really appreciate it. $49.99, which basically got us to $440. And there's Frank, who gives another $50 to get us to $489. So now we definitely should be going for 600. Some Koopa tires for the show. Thank you, Frank. Really appreciate it. So a lot of the regulars coming through. Andy, thank you, Andy. $20 question. Are state rights a valid concept? If the means is to protect individual rights more broadly, i.e. balancing branches of government but accepting local abuses, thinking about abortion as an example. No, I mean, I don't think state rights are a valid concept. I don't think you should think about it in terms of rights. In the protection of individual rights, it might make sense for states to be responsible for certain aspects of the law, to respond to a certain aspect of the protection of individual rights. But it's still true that they cannot legitimately, in the name of state rights, violate anybody's rights, which abortion would do. So let's say we said we're going to leave abortion to the states. And some states ban abortion. That is a rights violation and therefore would be wrong and therefore should not be tolerated by the federal government. Now there are issues where I think there are certain subtleties about whether something is a rights violation or not, or where within the context of not violating rights, but of protecting rights, there can be options. I don't know. Sentencing, sentencing a criminal for theft, 10 years versus 20 years. I don't think all states should have the same. I even think the death penalty probably should be left to the states, although I'm not pro-death penalty, but I think that's something that if you're really a murderer, you don't have a right not to be put to death. I don't think it's good practice to put them to death because of the risk of making a mistake. But it would be valid, I think, in the context of separation of powers to have, I don't know, certain definitions of murder. There's some variability there. It's not clear that there's one definition. Second-degree murder, third-degree murder, first-degree murder. The differences between those could be different states could have different ones. And it would be good to run experiments around that. There's a variety of things like that that I think different states can do differently. But if a state is clearly, unequivocally violating individual rights, as I think a ban on abortion would be, then it's the job of the federal government to say, no, you cannot do that. That's what the courts are for. That's a violation of the Constitution. And you say, but there's no right for abortion in the Constitution. And I say, there is. It's in the Ninth Amendment, which is that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are not the sum of all the rights that exist. That the non-enumerated rights still exist. And as an extension of the right to life, the right to abortion is certainly an extension of the right to life. And since there is a right to life, recognized in the Declaration of Independence, and every one of the founding fathers would have said, yes, there is a right to life, the right to abortion is just an extension of that right. Now I know I'm going to get 20 people unsubscribing to the show just because I said that. All right, let's see. Oh, we're getting some good questions suddenly. Try to make the question $20 or more at this point, because otherwise, I don't want to be here all day. Let's see. Jean asks, this morning my Christian friend brought breakfast for a homeless man outside of the restaurant we're at. We had a nice discussion about it afterwards. Curious what you do say in the situation. I'd ask him why. I'd basically ask him why he brought the breakfast. Well, motivate him to do that. And I'd be curious about whether you could come up with a rational answer. I mean, I could think of rational answers. If you think about Atlas Shrugged, Dagny at some point gets on the train and she encounters a bomb who is, what do you call it? What do they call it? Somebody who rides a train without paying? I forget, right? And he's hungry and she buys him a meal and sits down there talking to him. And so she doesn't just, what you'd expect of Dagny, was just to throw him off the train. Stop the train, get him off. We don't give rights for free. She knows, she has a certain understanding of the desperation of people. She's trying to understand that desperation. She's trying to understand what is going on in the world. And therefore, she is willing to sit down and converse with the person in order to gain that understanding. It's not about the name, story. Yeah, she finds a story, right? Hobo, yeah, Hobo was the word I was actually looking for. She finds it a hobo, right? And she actually engages in that conversation now. You know, if you say, look, you know, the people running this country are doing a disaster. There are a lot of people suffering for no fault of their own. Some of them have become homeless, which is all true by the way. And I feel bad for these people because they're the victims of the system. They're the victims of the mixed economy. They're the victims of, you know, the horrors of the last 20 presidents and what they brought to this country and Congress and politicians and the mayors of the cities. And to some extent at least some of these homeless people, it's not their fault. And it could be completely rational as a consequence to say, look, once in a while, buy them a breakfast, give them a few dollars as an expression of the fact that I recognize that, you know, this is just, there's certain unfairness in our society that really is there. And it really is there. Really is there. It's the idea that every person who's homeless, every person who's poor, it's their fault. It's not true in the world in which we live. They're the victims of collectivism. They're the victims of altruism. They're the victims of the mixed economy. Of collectivism. But it would be interesting the extent to which that might have been his rationale versus altruism, versus it's my moral duty. It's what I do. It's there, but for the grace of God, go I, right, kind of attitude. So there are a lot of different attitudes that you can get out of him that are interesting to discuss and debate that are really valuable. By the way, we're now only $40 short of our goal. So if we want to get a couple of $20 questions in, now is the perfect time to do it. I've got three more questions before we're done. So two more $20 questions in where we need to be. All right, Shay asks, the OEC trains an exchange generation of objectivist intellectuals. Should we also have support for the rising artist, businessman, inventors, others? I think the OEC does that as well, right? Not everybody who's gonna go with the OEC is going to become an intellectual. Many of you are gonna go to business. Some of you will become artists and inventors and other things. So I don't think the OEC, particularly the undergraduate portion of the OEC, should be viewed as exclusively objective intellectuals. One of its primary goals is to identify those budding rising intellectuals, to provide them with the education. And then once they finish the OEC, to get them into kind of our graduate program and to get them doing intellectual activities and then I train them in public speaking somebody trains them in more in even better writing and on and on and on the training goes. I mean, the training in a sense never ends. We can always learn. I always learn from interacting with intellectuals who know more than I do about objectivism. So the OEC is a broad educational program. Think of it as an undergraduate program. You're not just training intellectuals, but of the 50 you'll go into the program and I think the goal next year is to have 100 people start the program. That 100 is not gonna be 100 intellectuals. Of those, hopefully you can find 20 future intellectuals and those 20 would be rolled over into a graduate program. But the other 80 are going to do other things in life, including artists, businessmen, inventors. And if you just are interested in the philosophy are interested in making your life better because of the philosophy and you think you can apply that philosophy to your life better, to your business, to your ideas better in the future. You should apply to the OEC even if you're not gonna be and plan to be a professional intellectual. All right, we've got two last questions. Again, I remind you, we're $40 short so if $2.20 questions would be perfect right now. There's one, breathe. The left is great at using language to get an advantage, absolutely. The right is pathetic at it, absolutely. But then again, we're not the right. We're the individualists, separate from right and left. Right and left are both collectivists. We, not the right, should learn from success and get a right to hire a linguist. You say collectivist, but you mean anti-individualist or anti-freedom. No, I don't mean anti-individualist and anti-freedom. I mean collectivist. Now, collectivism is anti-individualist and is anti-freedom, but it's wrong to define a term as an anti-something. You got to define it as a positive, as what are they for? That's what gives them power. The left is not anti-individualistic. It's pro-collective, which means anti-individualist, but that's not, it's essential characteristic. So yeah, I'm happy to talk to a linguist and get advice from a linguist. And I think if you know anything about Leonard Peacock and have listened to his courses, Leonard is very linguistically oriented, if you will. Words really, really matter to him. The exact definitions of them and how to use them and how to use them effectively. So I, and I think that's true of Iron Man. So I think Iron Man and Leonard were very attuned to this. But you need to have good linguists. And it's, you know, at the end, the left doesn't win because of how they use language. They win because they find a way to link their language to what the culture already believes. So they capitalize, they capitalize on, for example, the altruism, the culture without calling it altruism. And we're not as good as capitalizing on the culture's virtues. All right, Jennifer, Brie and Jennifer's just gotten over, got us over the 600 bucks. So thank you, Brie. Thank you, Jennifer. Jennifer writes, in order to form a more perfect union in the constitution, I think means to base it on the correct ideas, not create a collective as you're implied. We talk about that in the interview with Lex Friedman. And my view is there is value to a union. Ayn Rand writes about this. There is value in unity. There is value in sharing the same objective and sharing the same values. But how do you form such a unity? You form such a unity over the idea of individualism. You form such a unity of the idea of individual rights. The country was unified around the idea of individualism, around the idea of fighting for and respecting and protecting the individual. That's what created the unity in America that created the greatest country in human history. It's not, the idea of a union, a perfect union, is not a collectivistic idea at all. It relates and indeed I don't think a mixed economy promotes unity, it promotes splitting up, splitting up. Enric Teller writes, recommend Brian Williams ending his career speech on state of the USA. He's not ending his career, he's ending his career at Fox. Good for him, I hope the better people leave Fox. Fox is a nest of hornets, has turned into that. You know, a couple of other good people, relatively good people left Fox recently. Jonah Goldberg, for example, and somebody else because Fox has become so nuttily national conservatives. It's a Tucker Carlson network and I wouldn't want to work for Tucker Carlson network but I will look at it, I like Brian Williams. All right, Frank says, who is your favorite intellectual character from the movie, individualist character from the movies? Oh, wow, other than Rourke, Ben Ho, Spartacus or even Dr. Frankenstein, individualist. Yeah, Spartacus certainly is. There are a lot, I mean, almost every hero to some extent is an individualist, I mean good hero, one who defines his own values. I'm trying, you know, questions like that need to be asked of me in advance because I don't have that kind of content readily available. The concrete's always hard for me to dig out like movie names and things like that. Yeah, I mean, I need to think about it. I put it aside, Frank, you know, I'll think about examples but almost every, you know, the sheriff in High Noon is clearly an individualist. I mean, everybody's against it. Everybody's against it. And he goes and he fights the bad guys by himself and he kills them and he wins. In spite of everybody telling him to run away, to escape, no, he uses his judgment to identify the fact that he must fight and he stands up to them and he fights. So, there's an individualist for you in a movie. It's High Noon. Aim Body Call. Do you support the Electoral College in an objective political system and why also why not rank choice voting? God, you know, I don't know. I don't know why not rank choice voting. I'd have to think it through. I don't think it's that important. Again, in an objective society, voting is not that important. There wouldn't be so much emphasis and you've got to vote and voting is your civic duty or all that stuff because voting wouldn't be that important. It would just be about the people in charge of protecting your rights. And yeah, there'd be some need to monitor them and replace them periodically. But it's not like life or death like it is today. I think Electoral College makes sense so that you don't get basically the heavily populated centers having an over-weighted voice versus the countryside. But I don't think it's crucial. I don't think any of these aspects are crucial. Also, Electoral College is a way to protect ourselves protect us from populism although it didn't help us with Donald Trump. So, I don't know and I don't think about it much because I don't think it's that important. It's not where my focus is. I think that this is again one of those things where you can have different countries in the world having individualistic political systems that have different styles of voting different ways of managing the division of powers and the separation of powers but all having limited government but in different capacities and different ways but all being focused on protecting individual rights and I think that would be a beautiful thing. Let's see what works best. Donna, thank you. I really appreciate the support. This is great. We've reached our goal and exceeded it. Okay, last question. Hallow asks, I recently shade your clip on the West losing manufacturing. We all need to clip our favorite short videos to upload and share short videos do well. Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. And there will be a short video from the debate on losing manufacturing because Yoham Khazani bought that up and it was one of my best segments of the debate because I get excited. When I get excited, I'm better. So that was one where I think Action Jackson will probably clip and put it up there and it's a good one to share. So yes, and if you know of clips from shows or clips from Q&As or clips from lectures that I've done that you would like to see turned into a short video, let me know and Action Jackson will do it. We have the capacity to do it and I'm sure he's always looking for ideas on how to do it so he doesn't have to do it all himself. All right, guys, thank you. This was great. Thank you for in the last half hour really pitching in and getting us to where we need to be and we didn't have one person who did all of it. We got a lot of you doing segments of it. I particularly thank you to Enric and Frank and John and Adam who all pitched in $50 each in the last 40 minutes or so. So we really appreciate that. Thank you for all the $20 supporters. We really appreciate that. Thanks for getting up to $600. Again, we have Don Watkins on the show on Tuesday. I think that's going to be a lot of fun. You know, I think Don and I banter pretty well and we'll talk about writing and what it takes to write and you can ask Don any questions that you want. We'll have a show on Thursday. We'll have a show on Saturday and Sunday next week. And yeah, have fun. Have a great week. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday and I will see you all soon. Don't forget to like the show before you leave and, of course, don't forget to become a monthly contributor at your own book.