 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. Alright everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Friday. And in spite of what is written in the title for the show, oh wait, it shifted, it changed, I just corrected it. It is September 1. Sorry about the wrong date. On there, thank you, thank you Rob for as usual. Letting me know when I'm messing up the title. So yes, it is September 1. Wow, hard to believe we're already here. Let's see, we've got a lot to talk about today. Hard stop at 1 o'clock, so let's get right into it. Sivanos, thank you. Sivanos just did a stick of $20, so reminding you, you can ask questions, provide stickers, support the show in a variety of different ways. Thank you, thank you in advance to all the superchatters providing value for value. Let's see, Doomloop. Doomloop, are you familiar with the term Doomloop in San Francisco? Doomloop particularly applies to San Francisco. So the idea of a Doomloop is, you know, things are in, let's say, in a city like San Francisco, what you get is maybe you get a COVID and what happens with COVID is downtown shuts down and people start working remotely so they fulfill people going to downtown and that means that, you know, people start businesses in downtown, start closing and downtown deteriorates and maybe homeless people move in and as a consequence of that, now when people start opening up and wanting to come back to the office, they go, whoa, I don't want to go back to San Francisco downtown because the stores have closed and the homeless have come in so maybe we'll go somewhere else. And so that increases the stagnation of the downtown which causes more stuff to close down, more homeless to come in and fewer people to move in and fewer new people to move into the city and you get the spiral and it just gets worse and worse and worse and it's hard to break it because, and of course part of this is the fact that businesses move out, causes your tax revenue to go down and therefore you can't provide the infrastructure, you can't deal with a homeless problem, if you can't deal with a homeless problem then again more companies leave and on and on and on it goes and San Francisco is clearly experiencing this kind of doom loop particularly in its downtown and with companies leaving the city its tax revenues declining significantly, not only companies but of course individuals as well. And the explanation for this has been COVID, COVID caused this. COVID, that's what stimulated all this, that's what got it going, that's what caused this to all happen and there was an excellent article today in Pirate Wire which I've referred to you a number of times about how it wasn't COVID, it wasn't COVID. Indeed, the beginning of the San Francisco doom loop started two years before COVID in 2018 with a passage of something called Proposition C, Proposition C, Prop C. Prop C was hailed and fought for by the largest employer in San Francisco, the last technology employer in San Francisco, Salesforce, the CEO of Salesforce, Mark Binyoff. Mark Binyoff is known as the probably the most progressive, explicitly altruistic, explicitly guilt-ridden, explicitly pro every social leftist agenda item out there in the world. Mark Binyoff is part of that. He is the CEO, founder and CEO of Salesforce. He succeeded in spite of all that, which is a mystery. But he's all for social responsibility and DEI and everything, everything, right? Anyway, Mark Binyoff really fought for Prop C and what Prop C did was Prop C was going to, Prop C, the proposal was to double the revenue tax on companies based in San Francisco. So double the taxes on businesses, but explicitly use all the new available revenue for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to funnel it into a new department of homelessness and to solve the homeless problem. Prop C has raised about a billion dollars, a billion dollars for one city, San Francisco, to deal with one problem, the homeless problem, over the last five years. When Prop C was passed, a number of tech executives fought it, including Patrick Collison from Stripe and Jack Dorsey from Square, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. And it was fought even by the mayor. Even the mayor said this is a bad idea, but it passed anyway. And Mark Binyoff in the day it passed published this tweet, Prop C's victory means the homeless will have a home and help they truly need. Let the city come together in love for those who need it most. There was no finish line when it comes to helping the homeless. Thank you, amazing supporters of Prop C. So, homeless will have a home. Well, five years after the passage of Prop C, a billion dollars spent on homelessness, the homeless problem is bigger than ever in San Francisco. More homeless in the street, more problems, and indeed the homelessness is a big part of this doom loop, although another big factor of the doom loop and how it started was guess what happens when you dramatically raise taxes on businesses in your city. So even before COVID, in the years leading up to COVID, companies were already leaving San Francisco in large numbers and creating the so-called doom loop and creating the crunch of revenues for the city government that ultimately resulted in the inability to deal with infrastructure and the fact that companies are leaving, office buildings are empty, no revenue for restaurants and retailers in downtown and on and on and on you go, right? All started not by COVID, but started by increased taxes, by increased taxes, increasing taxes that were fought by many in the business community. But Mark Binyoff and those who supported Mark won the day and they got it passed. Now we can talk about homelessness and why homelessness is such a huge problem in San Francisco, but certainly one of the problems of homelessness in San Francisco, there are many, housing costs a big part of it, but there are many problems in San Francisco, but one big one is the fact that San Francisco, like Los Angeles, provides homeless people with housing, small houses, but houses. Guess what happens when you provide something for free? If you supply it for free, guess what happens to demand for something that's supplied for free? It increases. So what's happened in San Francisco is not only is the cost of housing in San Francisco very high and has caused, to some extent, homeless people in the Bay Area, but add to that the fact that now if you're homeless in San Francisco, down the road you will promise free housing and real housing in an actual apartment. Well, homeless people or marginally homeless people from all over the state, maybe all over the country are going to come to San Francisco and say, I'm here, where's my free apartment? The more stuff you offer for free, the more the demand for that free stuff is going to be there. So the homeless problems only increased in San Francisco. The more money is being poured into providing homes for homeless people. And these are not temporary homes. These are permanent homes. And therefore people are going to flock to San Francisco to inhabit those, even if it means not today and the future. And this means drug addicts from all over the country are going to come to San Francisco to get known only the free treatment and easy access to drugs, but also easy access to real estate. And the same is true of the mentally ill. So San Francisco becomes a magnet for homeless people from all over the country, certainly all over the state. And the billions or the hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from San Francisco businesses is poured into providing these homeless people with residences, but that mysteriously don't ever solve the homeless problem because the supply of homeless people never ends, never ends, keeps going. So you need a solution to the homeless problem. A solution to the homeless problem, even if you take into account strong government involvement in it, it would be quick and relatively cheap. And it would involve making sleeping on the streets in San Francisco illegal and providing temporary shelter, not housing, shelter of homeless people in the outskirts of the city in not very nice places, in not in places that offer easy access to drugs and basically not give them free stuff. Make it expensive to be homeless in San Francisco and you'll get less homeless people in San Francisco. Supply demand, incentives actually work. And you can provide treatment centers, you can provide a lot for the drug addicts and so on. You can provide a lot at literally a fraction, a fraction of what San Francisco is spending right now on homeless. By the way, all this money is being funneled through a whole variety of non-for-profits, non-for-profits who lobby for propositions, see a bunch of non-for-profits who are, you know, maybe they've got good intentions, maybe they don't, who knows, but who basically are living off of this massive tax revenue, the non-for-profits getting fed by tax revenue, by tax revenue. Note that the mayor of San Francisco is never for this. The progressive mayor of San Francisco is always against this. This is something that was brought and promoted by the non-for-profits and got massive support by Binyov and certain business leaders in the community. All right, zombies, zombies, zombies everywhere. We've talked a little bit about the potential for zombies in the U.S. economy and the challenge that's going to pose once these zombies start going bust because as interstates go up, they now can't really afford the debt that they've taken on at higher interstates. The only reason they've survived is because in a sense they were bailed out by government through lower interstates. Well, the zombie phenomena is not unique to America. It's not unique to the current situation. I mean, Japanese companies during the 1990s were held afloat through government policy by Japanese banks that made loans not based on the ability of the company that they were loaning the money to pay it back, but they were making loans to companies to sustain those companies as zombie companies who would then employ people. That is the mandate in Japan at the time was no unemployment. You cannot have unemployment. It has been this lasted for decades and banks were basically doing the government's bidding by keeping companies afloat to prevent unemployment and of course what that does, what does this do whenever you see zombie companies, what it does is it takes away all the market discipline. It prevents companies that are not sustainable economically from going bankrupt. It's really, really, really important in a free market economy. Bank of Sea is a way to clean out the muck, to redeploy capital, to increase productivity by getting rid of the least productive businesses in the economy. So it is a great mechanism for reallocation of capital to its more productive uses and it's crucial. This economy which allows for bankruptcy, this is why the United States I think has done so well in spite of all the recessions and problems, economic problems, it's because we deal with it pretty quickly in spite of the government's bailouts and everything else. We allow companies to go bust. We allow reallocation of capital and reallocation of human resources. And that happens. It didn't let it happen. It went into this last several decades and has never really recovered from the crash of 1990 and the consequent, in a sense, government and bank bailouts. And so this is kind of background to the story of today which is an article by, I guess an economist who writes a lot about financial real estate economics up at Gupta. And he's writing about, look, something obviously is happening in the Chinese economy. A lot of people are trying to explain it. It's real estate. And some people saying it's a lack of consumption, kind of a Keynesian explanation of the motto. The government needs to stimulate more. The government needs to encourage people to consume more and offer more welfare. Maybe it's suppression of entrepreneurs, the tech sector, government intervention in the tech sector, suppressing the economy. And he says all of those explanations might have something to do with it. And he's, I think, most dismissive of the Keynesian motto justifiably. But he says there's one other factor that we have to take into account. And that is that China is an authoritarian regime. And authoritarian regimes do not allow companies to go bankrupt because companies that go bankrupt create unemployment and that creates instability and it suggests that the government doesn't know what it's doing and the government is in bad shape and the economy is in bad shape and that creates, you know, negativity in the economy and the governments don't allow the bankruptcy. So which union is like this? Communism generally is like this. And fascism is like this and Chinese fascism, I think, is the same way. He says the real problem in China is fundamentally a political problem which does not allow companies when they are no longer productive, when they are no longer making a profit to actually shut down, close down and have their resources reallocated. And he provides a bunch of graphs and economic arguments and graphs and extrapolations over this. And this is happening primarily in the state-owned sector, state-owned enterprises in the Chinese economy where the government has direct control but it's also happening in the private sector because like Japanese banks, Chinese banks are being instructed to keep private companies afloat through cheap loans and through loans that would never be made because they're too risky just to keep these companies going, zombie companies. So much of the state-owned enterprises, maybe a majority of state-owned enterprises and a significant number of them are zombies and quite a bit of the private sector are zombies. And the consequence of this is as you've seen over the last really 10 years a significant decline in the return on investment, the return on assets, the return on equity for these companies both in the state-owned and in the private sector really driven by this zombie phenomena, driven by government intervention, not allowing markets to clear. This is, I think, an important sentence from his review which I think is right on. He says, China's growth decline is fundamentally a political problem. Not one of inducing entrepreneurs to work harder but in the inability to enforce market discipline and allow the appropriate functioning of price signals. So this is kind of a Hyakian story of the market is not functioning, you're not getting prices. Of course, prices get distorted by zombie companies because they are willing to buy stuff even when it doesn't make sense for them to buy stuff at prices that it doesn't make sense. They constitute demand when they should be bust and there should be no demand for products. So zombie companies in America, in Japan, in China, in old communist countries always distort and provoke prices and allocation of capital and resources. And I agree completely that this is a massive, massive issue in China right now and one that is going to be very, very difficult for China to solve and this is why I've told you I'm so pessimistic about China because it's not clear how you solve this at all because of the politics. How do you solve this without freedom? The solution is, of course, free markets. The solution is getting government to back off from its involvement in the economy but that's unthinkable to a regime like China that is so authoritarian. All right, a few additional stories, a quick one on universities. You know, universities were hailed as the way you go get your degree and you immediately get a significant wage bump from 2000 to really 2015, maybe 2013. There was this massive increase in the premium that you got by having a university degree that is over somebody who only had a high school degree. People with universities degree got a significant bump up in their wages as a consequence. It stayed flat around 2015 until around, you know, 2018 and then that premium has started to decline. Now part of that decline is because the reality is that blue collar workers have actually seen a significant increase in their wages higher than college graduates have seen over the last six or so years. So you've seen a real bump, again, nobody talks about this but you've seen a real bump in non-college educated wages that has closed this gap. And by the way, this gap, this high school gap you can control for other aspects from skin color, for socioeconomic, for anything. It didn't matter. If you got a college degree, you earned significantly more and you still do. It's just that the gap shrunk a little bit not because college degrees, wages have come down but because blue collar job wages have come up which is interesting. Beyond that, though, just to note that universities are struggling. Universities have any cut back. Universities are closing or shutting their doors. And this is demographic. There's just fewer people seeking university degrees as the wage premium for university degrees declines fewer people will seek that already. Men seem to be dropping out of getting a college degree. Women dominate universities now or a majority at universities but you are seeing a significant decline or not a significant decline. You're seeing a decline in college attendance. So while some schools are expanding and growing, a lot of schools are shrinking. West Virginia University, the state school, the big state school in West Virginia is cutting programs, cutting faculty, cutting stuff because it's seeing enrollment shrink and you're probably going to see this enrollment shrinkage sweep across the United States partially because of demographics and partially because of the wage premium. There's just less of an advantage to spending all that time and going to university. All right, some good news. Over the last, I don't know, a few years, hard to tell when this exactly started, there's really been a movement called the yes in my backyard movement as a counter to the not in my backyard unit. And this is a movement that is dedicated to finding ways to lower the cost of housing, both as a solution to homelessness, but more importantly as a solution to just the rising cost of housing and the rising rents and the affordability crisis that so many Americans face because they can't afford homes. And as I've said, this is not an inflationary problem. It's not a problem of monetary inflation. This is a problem of lack of supply. And the lack of supply is primarily driven by zoning laws. Zoning laws that restrict building, they restrict building to single-family homes, they restrict the building of multifamily units, they restrict buildings in certain areas. And this movement has really started pushing significantly to dramatically increase the amount and availability of homes all over in a variety of different cities and not just in the United States. One of the prime examples for success of this is in Auckland, New Zealand. And some of this is multi-use building. Some of it is multifamily, but the main thing is just changing zoning and changing attitudes and building coalitions about let's build more housing units. Let's match the demand. Let's match the demand. And what's happened is that it's true that wealthy people are the ones who move into the new units that are created. But what that does is it makes available now used apartments or houses that they have moved out of. And those now, you get slightly, let's say, lower-income people moving into those that freeze up inventory at the lower end. So all the research shows that what all of this is doing, in spite of the fact that these new units are primarily for wealthier people. But there is, people hate this term, but there is a trickle-down effect that actually cause lower-income people to massively benefit from this as well, right, as well. So what you get is an effect across the entire spectrum. You get increase in supply across the entire income spectrum, housing spectrum, and housing is becoming more affordable. This has shown to have happened in a city-wide zoning in Auckland, New Zealand, which changed dramatically to encourage and increase construction. And what this has shown is it has dramatically increased availability, right? Now, you know, it's still new. So all the effects on rents and on everything else, but it really has already had some substantial positive effects. In the United States, the example given is out of Arlington, Virginia, where deals were cut, politics is messy, ugly, inappropriate, but this is what happens, deals were cut with a few non-in my backyard kind of neighborhoods in the city of Arlington and allowed them to preserve their little enclaves in exchange for them agreeing to allow for rezoning of other areas. And as a consequence, you've seen significant increase in the building of multifamily units. And as a consequence, again, increase in housing, decrease in rents, decrease in costs of these properties. And maybe one of the places where this is primarily exciting is if you look at Minneapolis, Minneapolis, of course, we know from the riots of 2020, Minneapolis has seen significant housing reform, a whole variety of yes in my backyard measures to loosen up and eliminate zoning restrictions. As a consequence, rents are starting to go down slowly. Homeless problem in Minneapolis basically collapsed. Now it started collapsing in 2020 and people might say that maybe this is because of the riots, but no, this is a consequence of the additional housing being built. It's down from 2020 to 2021 to 2022. If you look at other cities during the same period of time, also significant upticks in homelessness and significant upticks in rents. So while rents in Minneapolis are down only a little bit, as compared to other cities that have seen significant increases, they are down on a relative basis by a significant amount. So what's really impactful here is when you start increasing the supply of housing, prices, rents, homelessness goes down. And now we have the numbers and we have the proof and we have the stats. All right, we've got a lot of questions. What happened to you guys today? This is great, but I need an end by 1 o'clock, so some of these questions might have to stick around until Monday or maybe tomorrow I can answer them. All right, quickly. As you probably read in the news, Ukraine has been taking the war to the Russians. And over the last few days, they have been attacking using drones, primarily using drones. They've been attacking Russia itself, not just here and there, an attack on Moscow and a building here and there, but all over Russia, South Russia, Moscow, Central Russia, and including the North, the Pskov Air Base, where they destroyed four large troop-carrying aircraft using drones. What's interesting is that the Ukrainians are now saying that the drones were not launched from Ukraine. These are not long-term missiles. These are not long-term drones. They were launched from Russia, which means Ukrainians have special forces teams inside Russia with drones that are launching drones and attacking Russia itself. This is great. This is good for the Ukrainians. They're making the Russians pay. They're making the Russians pay in their own homeland, which is exactly how you want to fight a war. You want to take it to your enemy. They're destroying significant amounts of infrastructure. I didn't talk about the way they did in Crimea, which is amazing, where they raided Crimea. They destroyed S-400 anti-aircraft batteries, special forces units came in by sea and created havoc within Crimea. They're basically showing the incompetence of the Russian system, not only to take Ukraine, but also to defend Russia itself. These, I think, are very, very positive developments. I'm not going to talk a lot. I'm not going to say much about this, but the other positive development is the fact that Ukrainians might have broken through the major defense line in southern Ukraine, the Russian defense line. We will see how this develops, but this could be the opening that they need to break through and to really start attacking the Russians from the rear. We'll see how that plays out, but it is potentially very exciting, not far from Robertin, or I forget the other town's name, but this is happening in the south of Ukraine and some of the maps I showed you last time, relevant here, but we'll talk about that more as that story develops, but it could be that in a few weeks we see a major Ukrainian move on the front of retaking territory. All right. Wow. Thank you, guys. Lots of questions. Let's jump in. David says, excellent advice on the FINRA test as metaphysical. Thank you. I moved to Texas from Seattle due to lockdowns and have found a lot of peace. That's excellent. But the abortion ban really bothers me and I'm thinking of leaving what to you. No, I understand it completely. I find that living in a place that is a theocracy, in a sense, a theocratic in the sense of an abortion ban and who knows what else would bug me, would be really, you know, yes, would be a concern. The challenge is when you move. I mean, Florida has an abortion ban and the whole south has an abortion ban. I mean, maybe Arizona, somewhere like Arizona, so it would bug me. Living in Austin is a little better because at least you know that the people around you are pro-abortion that while the ban still exists in Austin, at least the people that you're surrounded by are not theocrats. I would have a problem living in parts of Texas where you know that the people around you, all around. Las Vegas is not a bad place to live, although it is very, very hot in the summer, offensively felt. And it's quite cold in the winter. And it is a city dominated by gambling, which is by the casinos and that's just, I don't know. I find Las Vegas too much, too materialistic, too in your face. But yeah, if you can make it work for you, go for it. Michael says, you should absolutely have gone on Mike Knowles to give him pushback on Iron Man. It's not about him, it's about his audience. You can't brush aside opportunities like this or the movement would always remain small. No, that movement is not going to remain small. The people who watch Michael Knowles and watch and take him seriously are not the people I want. You know, I'd much rather go on Betcha Piro, I'd much rather go on a million other people than Michael Knowles. What he is pitching is barbarism. People who take his 12-20 statement seriously are not people open to our ideas. But yes, if I could go on a show to push back on Iron Man, sure. But the problem is that when he does these book reviews and people go on, there's no pushback on Iron Man. He pretends to be a fan and then he undermines it later. So that you come off as being ridiculous and idiot, associating with him because he's just a liar who just lies right in front of you. So, no, I would not go on Knowles. You know, there's a certain level of dishonesty. There's a certain level of scumbag-ness that I will not tolerate and I will not sanction. I will not go on him. And the fact that he works for Betcha Piro, it doesn't make, you know, Betcha Piro has got problems and he's bad, but I don't associate everything bad about Michael Knowles to everybody who works for him. I'd go on Jordan Peterson's show. I'd go on Ben Shapiro's show. I just think he is so dishonest and so just ugly that I will have nothing to do with him. John, thank you for your episode of Michael Knowles. He could always use, we could always use more videos like that and yours are best. Thanks, Iran. Thank you, John. $50, really appreciate that. And yeah, as I said, I will be your voice attacking the right and I will continue to do that. Michael says, why is it so hard for people to be consistent? I know a lot of people who like some of Iran's ideas but are unwilling to focus and think deeply enough to apply her ideas consistently and become excited enough to want to change the world. You know, it's hard to say why because it is a choice they make and they are not willing to embrace the radicalism. They're not willing to, let's say, turn their back on God and religion. They're not willing to turn their back on the community on their friends and associates. They're not brave. They're not courageous to truly embrace objectivism. Requires courage and, you know, and even to sustain it requires a lot of courage and that's why we see so many people, you know, having a hard time sustaining it and always looking to be popular and to be nice and to be friendly and to merge into some bigger group because they want that affirmation of the other. They want that affirmation of the broader world out there and they're not willing to really stand on principle on their own two feet. It's not easy and courage plays a big role. I mean, Ayn Rand always said, it wasn't that she was brilliant, of course she was, we all know that, but that she was extraordinarily honest. Michael says, our economy has degraded, the suicide rate has jumped, public health disorder and crime have exponentially increased. Will enough people come to the conclusion that Christian autocracy will put a stop to rapid decay? I think so. Now, let me say, I don't think we're in rapid decay. I don't buy the pessimism implied in that statement. I just don't see it. As I've said before, crime was significantly dramatically higher in the 70s and 80s. Filth, New York was a 10 times filthier in the 1970s. Decay existed back then, just like it exists right now. So yes, we're decaying, but it's not really as fast and as speedy and as obvious as I think you're implying. But yes, I think that that is the appeal of the M2, that is the appeal of the theocrats. Their appeal is we can fix it. Give us the authority. We will fix it. We have to do a little bit away with your freedoms to fix it, just like in order to clean New York, Mayor Giuliani had to basically do away with a lot of private property rights at the time and use a lot of city force in order to clean it up. They want to do it and they have, of course, the ban of heaven to march by. James says, Ayn Rand argues that if you are deprived of values, you can be severely damaged, even to the point of losing your desire to live. Remember to spend time to enjoy your life. Your life depends on it. Absolutely. So without positive reinforcement, without pleasure, without enjoyment, without spiritual material fuel, you will die in one form or another. That death might be slow over time. So always focus on the positives. Always focus on the things that you have under control. Always focus on finding values and finding things that bring you joy, bring you happiness, bring you satisfaction in life. It's those values that what make, that are meaningful in life, that what matters in life. Shahzad says, Does the LGBT community consider a person like Elliot Page to be now to be an ordinary cis-gendered male with all of the negative stigma that entails, does a form medically transition, lower one's intersectionality score? You know, I don't know. I mean, that would be interesting. If you fully transition, do you lower the score? I don't think so because I think you're still considered somewhat oppressed. So it probably lowers your score, but doesn't lower it so much as to make you fall cis-gender. I think it just lowers it somewhat, somewhat. Aya Mirkat says, Playing Witcher 3, occasionally seeing the war-torn peasant villages make me appreciate not living in 1220. Yes. Yes. I mean, there weren't monster monsters like in Witcher, but there were human monsters aplenty in 1220, destroying and flattening and just brutalizing humanity. So, yeah, nobody would want to live with a choice, would actually want to live in 1220. It's just, for Michael Knowles, it just shows how he hates modern life, how he finds modern life despicable. And it's not that he longs for living in the village, it's that he hates this. He's an idolist. Anybody who promotes 1220 is an idolist, and he's an idolist, and you can see that in his attitude to Ayn Rand, you can see that in his attitude towards modern architecture, you can see it as an attitude to any kind of individualism, he hates individualism. I didn't show the segment last night about his little thing about Halle Berry, but you can see him in his attitude towards divorce. How dare people divorce? How dare people put their own happiness at the forefront? How dare they pursue their own happiness? They are duty-bound, duty-committed to staying in the marriage, particularly if they're children. He is an idolist. J.J. Gries says, what's the book in Christianity you're reading? Is it Christendom by Peter? Yes, I think that is the book. I asked because I got my copy and look forward to getting into it. Yes, I find it super interesting. You know, it's very dense. It's a lot of detail because it's a real history book that's quite long. So it's very dense. I'll just give you an example of dense, big books. I just got this in the mail. It's ridiculous. This is by Jonathan Israel. I read other books by him. I really like him. But this is on the Dutch Republic. I'm probably going to talk in Amsterdam next year. And I want to read about the Dutch Republic. I bought it used because it's new. This cost 75 bucks. It's used. It's filthy and mocked up. But yeah, big books. Exciting and fun. All right. Hopefully I'll have the time to read that book. It's got. Michael says, have you ever been in the zone? Does this type of flow state mean you're flowing uninterrupted purely from subconscious? Well, I mean, it depends on what you play the zone to. It can also apply to thinking. It can also apply to being conscious where it's just easy for whatever it is. Your focus is intense and things are just coming easy, including your own thinking. So certainly you could be in the zone in basketball and that's certainly subconscious. But sometimes you're in a zone in something else or in public speaking. But sometimes it's your thinking. And things are just clicking. And sometimes your subconscious has done the work. You have done the integration. And you've got the focus. You've got the mental focus and you're rested and you're not stressed and you're rested and you're focused. And you can just make connections that are just surprising even to you. Michael says, is consciousness the only non-material phenomenon in the universe? What about gravity and magnetism? Well, that is a way too difficult a issue to describe. What does it mean to be a non-material phenomena? Magnetism is a consequence of material action. So certainly you have those, all kinds of phenomena like that that are consequence of the material, but not material in and of themselves. But then you've got the duality problem of waves and particles is something a wave and not a particle and not a wave. Well, they both all the time. Yeah, too, above my pay grade. Thoughts on Andy Putzner? Andy was a CEO of a fast food company. He was a big Iron Man fan. He was appointed secretary of something under the Trump administration. But I don't think he lasted very long. Secretary of labor maybe under the Trump administration but was going to do these master reforms. He's a free market guy generally. Iron Man fan, as I said. But Andy is very religious, which clouds his real appreciation of Iron Man. Andy is also a very anti-Iron Man's view of self-interest, which of course clouds his understanding of Iron Man. And yeah, so one of these, I've known a lot of these people, very, very successful businessmen inspired by Atlas Shrugged, love the books. Primarily is an attack on what they see as the left. But want to hold on to the religion and want to hold on to their altruism in spite of that. And therefore, they can only become fans of Iron Man up to a point beyond that. All right, chicken says, is your wife and children objectivist and how did you raise your kids? What would your thoughts be if they grew up to be social democrats, let's say? My wife is certainly an objectivist. My children, you know, I'd rather not say I'd rather not talk about my kids generally, let them live their lives. You know, I wouldn't be happy if they grew up to be social democrats and there's certain belief systems that if they had, I would cut them off. I would not be in their lives. So, you know, raising your kids is a very, very difficult challenge. It's a difficult challenge under any circumstances. It's a difficult challenge as an objectivist. I think the advice I would give is be rational, emphasize rationality, emphasize reason and thinking. Try not to be overly, you know, emotional and try to... But on the other hand, you can't treat them as rational beings when they're three, because they're not. They don't have that capacity yet. So balancing out at what age and how much responsibility to give them, try to give them as much independence as you possibly can so that they grow up to be independence. Let them think for themselves so that they grow up thinking for themselves. My challenge in raising them vis-à-vis objectivism is much different than your challenge, because I was living it in terms of what I do for a living and they heard objectivism all the time. Everywhere surrounded for good or for bad, 9-11 they would hear me do radio interviews while driving in the car talking about flattening Iran or whatever. So, you know, it's a much bigger challenge whereas I think most people can be much more thoughtful about how to introduce them to objectivism and how to introduce their ideas. My kids would just... had it, you know, in a sense... They were surrounded by it day in and day out and not just objectivism and quality philosophy but objectivism and quality political application probably not the healthiest thing in the world. Michael, do humans have no impulse or compulsion that isn't or can't be overcome with focused application of reason? I think that's right. I don't think they do. I think you can overcome it. The question is why, you know, do people have inherent impulses and compulsions? I think they do some extent. And it's not about overcoming. It's about controlling and orienting and focusing. And if you do that then those impulses and compulsions change to be healthy and to be consistent with your reason so that you're not fighting with it. You're not holding it back. You're actually, you know, you've actually aligned whatever emotions your impulse compulsion with your actual values and that's the real challenge and that's the real goal. Kim says, do you think government subsidizing college made it worthless or did employers just realize that just because someone went to college doesn't make them better workers? Well, first of all, it's not worthless, right? I mean, it's still true that if you get a college degree you're going to earn dramatically more money than if you don't get a college degree. College degrees still provide a premium. It's just that premium is not increasing. It's shrinking. And it's shrinking not because college wages, college graduate wages are coming down but because non-college are going up. But I do think government subsidizing college has made it less valuable. But I think the thing that's really made it less valuable are the ideas of college professors. I think the dominance of the left on college campuses, the radicalization of the left, that is a left becoming more wacky since the 1980s, let's say, has made it worse and a bunch of degrees in college that are worthless. And unfortunately, the bad stuff is now impacting STEM as well as the humanities. So I think it's the dominance of the left and the ever-growing dominance of the left that has made it worse. And of course, that, you could argue, is sustainable because of government funding. Ironman McCat says, I'm guessing if the game could convey the smell I'd appreciate it even more. Oh, in terms of yes. You couldn't survive. You would shut down the game. There would be no way you could actually play the game. We are so sensitive today to smell. And just imagine what the smells were like. No sewage flowing freely in the middle of the street. Animal, not just human. People, not bathing. Baiting, no soap, no bathing. You can't imagine the smell. You have no appreciation for how bad it could be. Andrew says, I feel bad for Noel's children if his kids want to be an artist. Is he told to be a welder or do exactly like his father does like in 1220? I doubt that Noel's raises his children on the basis of 1220. He doesn't live it. It's just his propaganda. It's just his nihilism manifest. I do feel sorry for his children, but I don't think he's consistent. He's consistent in any regard. I don't think he lives his ideas. All right. Thank you guys blew away the target. That is fantastic. Great way to start the month. Last month, by the way, was the best, was the best Super Chat month. Well, second best Super Chat month ever. Second or third. The only months that are better were the December month. I think certainly December 2022, where we had that $10,000 match, maybe December 2021, where we had a $5,000 match. But, you know, yeah, I mean, this is the best month we've ever had that is a normal month that doesn't have one of those great matches, matching gifts. By the way, if anybody wants to do a match for the upcoming new year for December 2023, let me know. Those are fun and exciting. And I don't have anybody matching yet. So if you'd like to do a match, let me know. Great. Thanks, everybody. I will see you all tomorrow, 3 p.m. Not sure what the topic will be, but tomorrow, 3 p.m. Have a great, fantastic weekend. Bye, everybody.