 Fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. All right everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Sunday afternoon in the U.S. but it's getting late over here, 29.30 at night so thank you guys, thank you guys for joining. Hopefully we're getting some Europeans on. I mean we're doing this at convenient hours for Europeans relatively speaking. 9.30 still late but much better than 12.30 which is one o'clock where we're often broadcasting. All right welcome, I'm still in Barcelona. Barcelona is still an amazing city, I encourage everybody to visit. I was going to send somebody, somebody asked me, restaurant recommendations in Barcelona, right? Who was it? Oh, I know, John, John, John, John, okay, okay. All right, I need to remember that. Tonight I need to send him those restaurant recommendations. I told him to email me and he didn't. Oh, there's Trika from Valencia. I'm going to be in Valencia tomorrow and I'll see Trika tomorrow. And all right, so let's jump in with our topic today. And of course remind everybody, I don't think you need to remind her, but value for value if you enjoy the show, please show that by providing a value. And again the show is funded from, my time is funded from contributions by you. And so please consider making such a contribution. One of the ways you can do it is through the super chat and ask me questions which also provides content for the show and also orients to show towards what interests you rather than what just I want to talk about on any given day. So one of the great, one of the characteristics, put it this way, one of the characteristics of a pre-capitalist world, a characteristic of a pre-enlightened world is that, you know, to a large extent, my wife just turned off all the lights. So hopefully you like this dramatic look better than the previous one because she likes it so she's keeping it, all right. So the thing to categorize the pre-capitalist world is with a few exceptions, with exceptions of, you know, particular periods of time or exceptions of particular geniuses, for most people, for most people merit, ability, capability, hard work, didn't matter. What mattered predominantly in terms of the kind of work you had, what mattered predominantly in terms of the prospects for your economic success and the kind of life you were likely to live is who your family was, what your, quote, bloodline was, where you came from, what race you belonged to, who your parents were. That was the primary determinant of success of the kind of life you were going to live. And you could be a genius in a particular field, you could be brilliant, you could be passionate about it, and you would not be able to even enter the field if you were born of the wrong family at the wrong time in the wrong place. In other words, life in a pre-capitalist, certainly pre-enlightenment world, was determined predominantly by the luck of the draw, by the family you were born into and by, you know, and by the circumstances. Now yes, at the margin you could make a difference, more ambitious people, people with greater ability within a particular context could show themselves to be particularly good at something and succeed, but it was rare and very unusual. I mean, I tell the story of Leonardo da Vinci, because I think it's fascinating, you know, during the period in the Renaissance, when Leonardo da Vinci was born, men were basically did what their father did. Almost everybody did what their father did. There were some exceptions, and as I said, you know, if you saw extraordinary talent like Michelangelo did, and you happen to be in Florence, and they happen to be a patron of the arts like the Medici's were, and your father was open to this and willing to do it, you could be sent to work in sculpture, even though Michelangelo's father was not a sculptor. But for the most part, for 99% of the people, you did what your father did. You basically joined the guild your father belonged to. The extraordinary thing about, you know, that Leonardo is that he didn't, and that he led it up being what we consider Renaissance man and doing, all kinds of things, and super interesting things in living a super interesting life, and being an amazing world-changing artist, and being an engineer, and being a consultant to rulers, and being an engineer, and being an architect, and doing all kind of military engineer and military tactician, doing all these kind of things. And part of the question is, why? I mean, Leonardo da Vinci's father was a notary. Well, the reason is that Leonardo was a bastard. He was born out of wedlock so that he could not, indeed, become a notary. The guild would not accept him, because he was an illegitimate child. So in those days, you had to be an illegitimate child to have the freedom to pursue your talents, to pursue your skills, to pursue your particularly genius, to pursue your interests, your passions, your values. If Leonardo had been born a legitimate son of his father, who knows what would have happened now? One would like to believe that he would have expressed that genius anyway, and he'd broken out anyway. But he might not have. He might have been stuck being an otary. 99.9% of people were stuck being whatever was determined for them to be. Their life was, indeed, determined by their social context and by their genes, not so much by their genes in terms of dictating their behavior, but by their genes in terms of their heritage, in terms of who they were. Aristocrats, if you were born an aristocrat, you had one path of life, you were born a peasant, you had another path in life, you were born a blacksmith, you had another path in life. And one of the great achievements of capitalism is the shattering of that. Now, the shattering takes a long time and it doesn't happen all at once, but it is shattered. By the 19th century, it doesn't matter who you are born to. It doesn't matter what your family is, or at least it matters a lot less in places like England and certainly in America. It doesn't matter at all who you are born to. It's what you make of your life that matters. It's what you do with your talents and skills that matters. Think about the injustice of a system where your fate is basically determined by random luck. A system where your fate is determined not by your choices, not by your passion, by your energy, by what you focus on, but by things that are completely outside of your control. It's a deterministic world. It's a ugly world. It's a dark world. And it's a world in which those people with ability, those people with a genius, those people who could do extraordinary things, are completely stifled and limited and live shadows of lives because they never get to express their true ability. They never get to express what they're capable of. They're never able to live up to their full potential. How sad. And this is humanity for, you know, 100,000 years in the beginning of mankind until about 250 years ago. We were constrained and limited to, you know, what society was willing, what people in society, what our rulers were willing for us to do, and to the family from which we were born. And it's tragic and sad and horrible that people had to live these kind of lives. And yet, most of humanity, all of humanity, overwhelming majority of humanity lived exactly that type of life. Again, capitalism broke that. Suddenly, individuals were free to pursue their life they chose. They didn't need to ask permission. Their chains were broken. It didn't matter if you were born an aristocrat or a peasant. If you were good in math, you could become a mathematician. If you had an idea for a new product, you could become an entrepreneur. You could become a businessman. You could, you could, you still face, let's say in England, you still face some barriers if you weren't from the white families, if you didn't have the right accent, if you didn't go to the white schools. But the beauty of the 19th century is those barriers were starting to be shattered. They were breaking down slowly but systematically. And indeed, I'd say by the late 20th century, early 21st century, many, if not all of those barriers were gone. It's true that in the 19th century, if you were black, you still faced barriers well into the 20th century. That was true, but by the early part of the 21st century, those barriers were being shattered and broken down and gone. If you were a woman, suddenly you faced barriers throughout all of human history. You relegated a particular duty, a particular responsibility, and you couldn't deviate for that if you wanted a paint, if you wanted a right, if you wanted to be an engineer. Good luck. None of that was possible. Until in the 19th century, slowly this gets eroded, and in the 20th century it gets eroded fast, and one could argue that today those barriers don't exist on women. They can do whatever they want. They can pursue whatever values they want. And think about what a massive achievement that is, and to that extent, another reason not to be so dark about the world in which we live, if you're a woman, if you're black, if you're gay, in many respects has never been a better time to be alive. You've never had so much freedoms, but that's true of most of men as well. Particularly those of us who do not come from truly privileged families, the kind of privilege that aristocracy granted you. The last 250 years have been amazing, and even the end of the 20th century, early 21st century, it is truly amazing. And that is because we are treated as individuals, and therefore our abilities, our talents, our genius, our merit matters. And that has been a path for the last 200 years, 200 plus years that civilization has gone by. It has gone to valuing merit more and more. To where merit measured in a whole variety of different ways is ultimately determinant of success, of achievement, of what you do with your life. Ultimately all the idea of merit is the idea of individualism, the idea that you're rewarded based on your individual effort, talent, ability, merit. And then we each get to do what we want to do in life, the values that we want to pursue and benefit from the riches, hopefully that bestows on us or that we create and we achieve. And indeed over the last 250 years you've seen step by step by step barriers, the barriers of ability, the barriers of achievement for individuals to achieve and to live the lives based on their own standards have been shattered. And the old view of you are your genes, you are your heritage, you are your father, whatever your father did you have to do, you're determined by your sex, you know, if you're homosexual, you're out. All of those are gone or were gone. And while we were achieving with a lot of, again with a lot of challenges and a lot of inconsistencies granted, what was slowly being achieved was a true society of individual liberty and of people rising to whatever level they could achieve based on their own ability. A society of ability, a society that's celebrated and rewarded, ability. There's a story from the city of London. You know Wall Street is a good example of this, I mean, and we'll get the city of London. It used to be that Wall Street, you know, up until the 1980s, investment banks run by Jews, for example, were looked down upon. There were second class investment banks, they didn't count for as much. Well, that was shattered in the 1980s with Drexel Burnham and ultimately Goldman Sachs becoming the premier investment banks in the world. And taking out the kind of the old stuffy semi aristocratic, you know, white Protestant, I guess, ethic of Wall Street that celebrated particular people and admitted particular people. That was even more so in England. And if you go back to England, into the city in England, investment banking in England, investment banking is different than banking, it merges in acquisitions, it's advising companies, it's taking companies public. It's a very, very, used to be very, very stuffy old boys network, very male, very white and very in England having the right accent and wearing the right shoes and knowing and wearing the right tie and knowing, you know, and really having the right accent may be more important than anything. And if you didn't have one of those things, you just weren't part of the boys network, you weren't part of the club and you were never, you could never join kind of the inner circle of the city. Well, in 1970 Goldman Sachs opened an office in London, in the city of London and started hiring people based on only one criteria, only one criteria. And that criteria was ability. They hired, they didn't care what ratio they didn't care what your background was, they didn't care what neighborhood you grew up in, they didn't care what school you went to, they didn't care if you're a woman, oh man, okay, you're not. And over the next 20 years, you know, maybe 30 years, Goldman Sachs became the premier investment bank in London and in the world based on that and forced every other bank or most other banks in the city of London to change. And the city of London today is a very, very different place and if you go there you can see. And it's not because of anti-discrimination laws, it's because it's just not very profitable in a competitive market to not hire the most talented people. Goldman Sachs taught them that, broke them old, took their business away. And that's happened time and time and time again. You know, racism, sexism of all kinds are just not profitable. So we were getting close to a kind of world where, at least in business and in work, what really mattered in life, what really mattered was ability. Think of Silicon Valley, think of startups, think of that, the energy behind that and nobody cared where you came from, nobody cared what country you immigrated from, nobody cared again what color of your skin was or how you spoke or whether you spoke English at all. It was your ideas, it was your ability, it was your hard work. That's all that mattered. And Silicon Valley, I think, represented that more than any other place on planet Earth. And Wall Street caught up and the rest of the world really caught up to that. And then it seemed like the old devil from the pre-enlightenment, from pre-capitalism, it never dies. It always tries to resurrect it. It always is resurrected, it always comes back. And I think it doesn't die in, it always resurrects itself because it's never been actually philosophically, ideologically crushed, stomped upon, demolished, really, until I ran. And it always comes back whether it's, you know, to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability, right, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, right? To help with merit, you know, at least economic rewards, economic rewards should be distributed based on need. And socialism and Marxism has been alive and well and then undercurrent throughout. But indeed, it wasn't socialism and communism that eradicated the feudal and aristocracy-based and racist-based systems. It was capitalism that eradicated those. But it keeps coming back. Yes, we should treat people by their merit, we are told. But the outcome should be equal. That is, people should be able to exercise their merit. But they should not be rewarded based on their merit. They should be rewarded equally. Equality of outcome keeps sneaking back into the discussion. It certainly didn't in the 1960s with a new left, but it didn't really last because it didn't really have legs and people didn't really buy into it. And the 60s were a period in which there was a lot of talk and a lot of angst and a lot of attempts to bring about this equality of outcome. And the welfare state was established as part of that. But at the end of the day, the world seemed to revert back to a system of respect for merit and the barriers coming down and Jim Crow being eliminated. Again, I think being eliminated more than anything by the marketplace, by business, by work, now unfortunately aided by affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws that actually I think have led us to a place today that undermines all the achievements we've made. But over the last 10 years, a particular evil form of this egalitarianism, this idea of equal outcome, but not really equal outcome. This idea though should not be, I mean this is insidious in ways that I don't think the 60s have imagined in ways that even Marx and the communists never really imagined. What we've seen over the last 10 years and call it extreme left, call it woke, call it in some forms a critical theory. But what we've seen in the last 10 years is this idea that, and really I blame this on social thinkers across the board because it comes not only from the post-moderns, it comes not only from the people you typically associate with critical theory and with post-modernism, not only from that standard philosophy, but it also comes from somebody like John Rawls. What our intellectuals have been teaching us and telling us now for decades and it finally I think culminated in a movement is that merit in a sense doesn't really exist, not really. That you didn't build that, you didn't earn that, you don't deserve that. What we've been told for decades is that we really have no free will, we really no control over our own minds, our own souls, our own abilities, our own choices, whether to work hard or not, whether to focus our mind or not, whether to specialize or not, whether to work hard at school or not. All of that is determined by our genes or our environment, but we as individuals have no say in it. And as a consequence, what does merit even mean? What does desert mean? Do you deserve what you have? Well, if you didn't build it, if you didn't make it, if you didn't create it, then there is no desert. All there is, we are told, is people in different conditions, social conditions dictated by society, the environment, the circumstances in which people are born into, that clearly all those circumstances, the environment is not equal, that some people are suffering and some people are not. Some people have it relatively easy and some people have it very, very hard. And that that can be right. And since we don't deserve the easy and we don't deserve making our lives easy, then it's wrong for us to have it easy while other people have it hard and it's not their fault that they have it hard. It's just that at every level, at every level we are told, at every level, this is all predetermined and predestined at every level, these are deterministic factors. And therefore, you don't deserve what you have for better or for worse. And it is our responsibility to, therefore, given altruism, given kind of the, you know, altruism is not even something anybody has to defend or ever talk about, it's just implicit and it's in the culture. It's, well, of course it's necessary to take those people who are not doing so well and help them and sacrifice to them and make them feel better and indeed they take it one step further. They take, you know, all bad ideas seem to have some kind of connection to Christianity, but, you know, this idea of the meek shall inhabit. There's virtue, the virtue is in the suffering, the virtue is in the meekness, the virtue is in the fact that you're not doing well. And therefore, we need to create an entire hierarchy of virtue where the people who have the least merit, the least ability, or have expressed that ability, at least, expressed that merit less, the people whose outcome is the worst, the people who are doing the worst are the most virtuous. They rise to the top. And the people who are successful and doing well in life and achieve something, they must be egoistic and they don't need, they obviously haven't sacrificed enough and they don't need to be sacrificed too, so they are obviously at the bottom of this period. They are the worst. They are the worst people. So virtue goes with suffering. The more suffering, the more virtue. And therefore they deserve the most. And this is really, you know, this intersectionality, which is, I think really to a large extent, at the heart of so much of all the different threads on the left today, this intersectionality is prominent everywhere and therefore we must sacrifice the able, we must destroy merit, we must raise people with no ability above those with ability, we must sacrifice the able to the people who are not able, we must sacrifice the people who have to the people who don't have. And what we are seeing now is a new, is the attempt, I think they're going to fail, but it's an attempt to elevate in your aristocracy, and aristocracy not based on, well, yes based on, and aristocracy based on bloodline, based on your ethnicity, based on your race, but also based on, I don't know, sexual orientation, based on how miserable you are, how much of a loser you are, based on some combination of all of these. And what we're seeing today is an attempt by the left, by, you know, the DEI officers in various corporations and at universities, and at universities in terms of faculty promotion, but also in terms of hiring, but in terms of students and who they accept, is the elevation of your bloodline, the elevation of how miserable you are above any kind of merit, success, above any kind of hard work, above any kind of ability. And it's the sacrifice, the complete sacrifice of the able to the unable, and we're very much reversing all the achievements of the last 250 years. We're just shifting the kind of aristocrats, we're trying to do a reconstitution of history. If the aristocrats used to be white, now they must be, you know, black and trans, but not successful, right? If you're black and successful, you don't count. You have to be black and a failure in trans. If you're black and trans and successful, it doesn't count. So really it's the elevation of failure over success. It's the elevation of lack of ability, over ability, the lack of merit, over merit. And there's a complete rejection of the concept of merit and the importance of merit. The elevation, Jennifer says the elevation of misery, the elevation of mediocrity, the elevation of zero of the nothing over the creed of the productive. And particularly if you have any kind of grasp of human history and really the fact that we all stand on the shoulders of very few in the context of eight, nine billion people, very few geniuses who have really changed and shaped the world. We stand on their shoulders. It's because of them that we have what we have. And yet we want to eliminate those geniuses, we want to take those geniuses and send them back to the field, send them back to the blacksmith shop, send them back to being notaries. And we want to elevate to the high place in our culture those that show nobility. So, and you can see this war on merit, on ability, on success, on achievement everywhere. I mean really you saw it in President Obama's, you didn't build that speech, but you see it in DEI standards. You see it in the fact that so many, in some major cities around the country, the best schools that have had stringent entry requirements, stringent entry requirements, right, stringent entry requirements into those schools, especially the science schools, especially the programs for particularly smart kids, those are being cut, those are being eliminated, those schools, the number of examples of these schools, one in Virginia, one in New York, one I think in San Francisco, where the entry requirements are now, no, anybody can come in. And of course that means that the standard will drop to mediocre. And where are those incredibly talented, gifted kids going to go? Nobody cares. Maybe their parents, but nobody cares. Nobody in the culture cares. And by the way, Scott's going to be very upset at me, by the way, while this is an agenda driven by the left, this is not an agenda that the right is against. I mean the right's populism is anti-elitism. It's anti-experts. It's anti, you know, the people who've achieved. It's hatred of Silicon Valley. It's hatred of Success in Wall Street. It's hatred of, you know, I don't know, doctors who actually know what they're talking about, immunologists, it's hatred of people who've actually achieved stuff at the top. It's not a political system today is anti-achievement. It's anti-people at the top. It's anti-success. It's anti-ceos. It's anti-merit. But think about the schools. I mean this is driven by the left, but the left has created this situation where the right is now abandoned expertise. Expertise is bad. We don't need experts. All we need is YouTube. So the populist right is latched on to the anti-merit agenda. And what you get is a country in which expertise, merit, success, ability, achievement don't count anymore. Everybody left and right wants to break up big tech. Everybody left and right wants to, you know, attack Silicon Valley, even though that's where merit has expressed itself more than any other place in the United States over the last 50 years. So what we have today is a real, you know, a real... Scott says each expert should be judged individually. Yeah, by people like Scott who have immensibility at judging experts, I'm sure, in astrophysics, in medicine, in a whole variety of fields, you know, a whole variety of fields. You know, we don't need specialization, God forbid, we don't need experts in specialization. What we need is everybody to know everything. Would that be a wonderful world? But it is, we are, you know, and the left is pushing us towards a world of pre-enlightenment, just different types of discrimination, different types of aristocracy, different types of privilege. But what's uniform and what unites the pre-enlightenment with the world today, what unites them, is the rejection of the individual, the rejection of free will, the rejection of ability, the rejection of individual ability and the rejection of the idea that individuals have the right, the moral right to benefit from their own success and to benefit from the rewards of that success and that nobody has a right to those rewards and nobody has a right to take them from them and nobody has a right to demand sacrifice. Because nobody, you know, the enlightenment for a moment there kind of embraced that almost egoistic morality but not quite, it embraced an almost capitalist economic system but not quite. And over the last 20 years we've seen an erosion both in that capitalist system and in the morality and a return to kind of the altruism and a return to the determinism of the Middle Ages. The amazing thing is that we're living through this real crossroads right now where in so many parts of our world, in so many parts of our lives in spite of the efforts of the woken, in spite of the efforts of populism, merit is respected. Science is looked up to. Technology is admired. Success is admired. People could still achieve but we've broken down the barriers to women and to blacks and minorities and to just people who are different and people who look different and speak different and do different. There's never been, you know, we've broken down the barriers to poor people rising up, although we've created new ones, one of the great tragedies of the welfare state. And yet just at this time close to declaring victory over old aristocracies and over old systems of privilege, of real privilege, the woke left wants us to return to that world, wants to take us backwards, wants to eviscerate 250 years of massive, unbelievable success. The only period in human history where there's been any success, they want us to pay for sins of hundreds of years ago, they want us to pay for perceived sins of today and they want their egalitarian utopia at all costs. And we know how egalitarian utopias end. They end in death and destruction. So now is the time to fight against it. Now is the time to fight for merit. Now is the time to fight for success. Now is the time to fight for free will. Now is the time to fight for achievement, for individual achievement, for morality of individual achievement and economy of individual achievement. Because if we lose it, if we don't fight for it, who will? And to fight for it, we need to, again, we need to fight for free will. We need to fight for egoism, for your right to your own life and to your own values and to the product of your own work and we need to fight for political freedom. And if you miss out on any one of those, you cannot win the battle and the war that we face. But it is pretty amazing how primitive, how primitive, and how, you know, reactionary the left is in terms of what kind of world it is seeking. And as we, who are the true progressives, we who are the truly trying to move the world in the right direction. All right. That is my spiel on the war on merit and its importance and why you should be fighting on it. There's only one way to fight bad ideas and that's with good ideas. You don't change the world through politics. You don't change the world. Politics is just the derivative of the ideas that in the culture and the only way for us to change the culture, the only way to change the politics, the only way to change the world is by fighting for the right ideas. All right. I'm going to go to your super chat questions now. Just a reminder that, yeah, we have a goal, $650 for the super chat. So hopefully you guys will participate. It's a way of value for value, but also a way for you to ask questions and a way for you to shape the show. I do have one from Clark that is just right along, in a sense, right along the theme of today's show. So I'm going to, even though it's not a $20 one, I will start with that. Have you heard the Tony of Merit by Michael Sandel from Harvard offer content and Professor Sandel portrays himself as this wise and measured philosophy, even really he's a vicious egalitarian. Well, the thing about Sandel is, is that he is indeed kind of a middle of the world. He presents himself and I think is not particularly radical. He is one of the most, maybe the most popular teachers of philosophy in the world today. His Harvard lectures are attended by hundreds and they're viewed by hundreds of thousands on the internet. He maybe is currently the most influential philosopher just in terms of teaching, not in terms of maybe, I don't think it's necessarily an original thinker, but in terms of actually teaching, he might be the most influential philosophy teacher out there. And yet Sandel can escape the logic of the things he believes in, even though he tries not to be radical, he doesn't want to be radical and in his many respects he's not a radical. But he can escape the fact that he is, that he does not really believe in free will, not fully, that he believes we are product of our environment and that we can't really escape that or if we're not product of the environment, we're products of our genes. And again, this goes back to John Walls and it has, I'm sure, a far more distant history than that, but at least in modern philosophical terms, this is Walls. To a large extent, all of this is a consequence of Walls and Walls, of course, made egalitarianism mainstream. Walls made egalitarianism respectable in academia. Walls is like among libertarians, among people on the right, people on the left. Walls, by some liberals, is considered a liberal. Walls, liberal in the classical liberal sense, Walls is considered like a good guy, even by people who might disagree with him. Walls has now really been confronted, who have not really been challenged, except on the left for not being as consistent with his own ideas as he should have been and therefore driving more consistently towards socialism politically. And Michael Sandela is clearly strongly influenced by Walls. But who isn't in political science today? I mean, maybe there's a handful of people, prominent people, who are not Walls in or not influenced by Walls. This idea that you don't deserve what you get, this idea again expressed so effectively, I think, by President Obama, that you didn't build that. This idea is dominant. It's dominant out there among intellectuals. It's not dominant among common people, but it's dominant among intellectuals. And Sandela is expressing that in an attorney of merit. He's reflecting that and he's considering that. And of course, you know, he can't escape his altruism and he can't escape his Wallsianism, if you will. And that's where he leads to, even though politically he would not consider himself a radical. Just like Walls did not consider himself a radical politically. But the implications of the theory are very radical and very destructive. All right, Raphael. Hi, Iran. In which situation would I need to open a company to do business in a free society? In which situation would I need to open a company to do business in a free society? And how it was like in the 19th century, thank you. I don't really understand the question, Raphael. The grammar's off. In which situation would I need to open a company? Oh, I see versus just doing business. Well, I think in almost every country today you need to register a business. You need to open a business. You have to have the business as that particular county. And almost dominantly, there are two reasons for that. One is taxation. That is, the state wants to know that you have a business so that it can follow and track your revenue and your income so that it can tax it. And it can tax it as a business. It can tax it as revenue to use an individual as income. It has a variety of different ways in which it can tax it. But it has to, the necessity to tax, suppose the necessity to tax, requires the necessity to open a formal business, to register that business, to keep accounts of that business and therefore to pay taxes on that business. So that's one. The second is, of course, regulatory. If you want to be an accountant, since we're talking about that, well, you have to have a license. You have to register as that accountant and somebody has to be able to supervise that. Somebody has to be able to tell. And that again requires you to form a business, to start a business and to register with the state so they can regulate it. They can determine whether you're legit, whether you're okay, whether you're following the quote, rules and doing it the way it's supposed to do. In a truly free society, where there are no taxes or where taxes are, I don't know, maybe consumption taxes or taxes are simplified dramatically in some way or another, you don't have to open a business in the sense of register business with the government. The government has no business in your business. The government does not need to know what you are doing or how you are making your income. The government doesn't regulate you. It doesn't control you. It doesn't require you to follow bookkeeping practices. It doesn't require you to do any particular thing. Depending on the particular way in which taxes are generated, I assume in a completely laissez-fait economy those taxes are voluntary, so they don't care how much money you make. They don't care where that money comes from. They don't monitor your bank accounts. They don't, you know, require you to file forms. There's just no need. You're free. You don't have to ask for permission, you know, to open a business. And indeed, one of the elements to go into determining how free a society is, is how easy it is to open a business in a particular country and how little the government interferes in your ability to open a business and interferes in your, or requires of you, how little the government requires of you in terms of forms and filing and all of that. So, yes, I think in the 19th century there was no need to formally register business until, you know, taxation entered the picture. And then, of course, the government wanted to know exactly what was going on. All right, Michael asks, one of your biggest assets is your mindset. And objectivism allows you to understand the world in order to achieve values, seeking confident mindset you will need to sustain yourself and then resist evil for your lifetime. I mean, I don't find this, you know, I get what you say. Yeah, I agree with what you're saying, but I don't find, I'm just going to pick on one little phrase here. I don't find the phrasing of resisting evil very helpful. It's not, I mean, it's very Christian again. It's very original sin. It's very the fall kind of attitude. It's not like there's a little devil on my shoulder, on my shoulder constantly whispering to me, you should kill that person. You should steal that. I mean, that's ridiculous. It's not like there's some evil tendency constantly saying, oh, you should evade. You really shouldn't be rational. There is no resisting evil. I don't view it as resisting evil. I don't resist evil. Evil has no presence in my life. Evil is a non-existing force. That's what Objectivism gives you. Evil is just not there. What happens if the guide to living your life is reason and rationality? If the issue is you should live rationally, then you're living rationally. And in what context is do I resist evil? Oh, now I'm not going to live rationally. Why would I ever think that? Why would I want that? Why would I desire that? Why would that ever come into my mind? And it doesn't. Not once you integrate Objectivism fully. There's not this temptation to use what's his name, Ben Shapiro. There's not that temptation to go sleep with every good-looking woman at the bar. Why? Why would I even go there? Why would my mind even go there? It just doesn't. I'm not constantly fighting my emotions because my emotions are lined. I'm not constantly suppressing them, putting them down. I don't know. We can't do that. That would be evil. This is what it means to live a rational life and to integrate your life around rational values is there is no temptation of evil. There are choices to be made. And there are options. It's not like the path is easy. There are no choices. There is just one way. But it's not like... It's choices within scope of the things that are open to you and the things that are available and the things that are rational. But it's not like, ooh, they're doing cocaine there. I wonder what that's like. I should go do cocaine. So resisting evil comes from a religious perspective that views good and evil as metaphysical forces in the world. And it comes from a Christian perspective that says we are all fallen. We are all constantly tempted by bad and by evil. And life is constantly resistance of those temptations. But that's nonsense. It's not what life is. Evil, by the way, is not a religious form. Not at all. Evil existed before religion, before Christianity was invented, before former religion was invented. Evil is a concept in morality that relates to, you know, moving against life, moving towards death. And evil in the objective context is about evasion. It's about not being rational. But there is no evil force in the world. There is no evil temptation in the world. And evil is not... Again, it would be like morality is a religious term. No. Not at all. There was morality before religion and there certainly is morality after religion. Ragnar, thank you. Really appreciate the $20. Really appreciate... Yes, you guys can support the show through the Super Chat without asking a question if you don't want to ask a question just by using one of the stickers, which is what Ragnar of the desert did and to support the show. Hopper Campbell says, if slavery was unmeritocratic and ineffective economically, why did it last so long? Was it primarily psychological? People liked the rush it gave them to have complete power over other human beings. Well, because nothing was meritocratic and nothing was effective economically. You know, you basically had competing systems that were all ineffective and were all unmeritocratic. And it wasn't that there was this conception of capitalism, conception of freedom, conception of liberty just there and people rejected it. There was no conception. There was no... That was not a known idea. I mean, this is the... This is what I think it's so difficult to grasp unless you really have a good grasp of history. Freedom, liberty, merit... I don't like the term meritocrat... The value of merit, efficient economics, all of those are massive achievements. Massive achievements. For a million years since... I don't know how many... How long has homocipians roamed the earth? Hundreds of thousands of years. People have been basically unmerocratic and inefficient economically. They were efficient enough to get by and to survive and maybe to advance a teeny little bit. They were meritocratic enough to not die. But that's it. For a hundred, for all of human history, people's income didn't change. For all of human history, wealth didn't increase. I mean, again, with a few exceptions like Rome and Greece and Venice, but then it went away very quickly because people didn't value that or didn't learn the lessons or couldn't figure out what caused it. What made it more efficient? What made it more productive? What made us more wealthy? So it went away. It disappeared. But you have to really grasp this and how it's hard that it was just unknown. And there was no knowledge of an alternative system. That comes about in enlightenment. It comes about from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. It comes around and suddenly people figure it out. And once they figure it out, then wealth creation is fast. But they have to figure out what freedom is, its value, why merit is important and how to be economically efficient. Slave is inefficient. It's not kept on because it's primarily psychological. It's kept on because that's the way people want to live because some people want to have power over other people. Maybe that's psychological because some people actually view other people as beneath them, as inferior to them, ideologically. It's kept on because some people don't know that it's economically inefficient. They didn't read Adam Smith or didn't agree with Adam Smith when they read it. They didn't know. And the contrast was new. And they believed, if you read the Southerners who were defending slavery vis-a-vis the North, they believed the North was materialistic. A lot of what you hear today attacking capitalism for both right and left that it's materialistic, that it doesn't have a soul. They believed their way of life with slavery was somehow a superior way of life. And it's not just psychological. It's philosophical. They were heavily influenced by Hegel. These are ideas. So the world is not driven by psychology or economics. Primarily. It's driven by philosophical ideas and by people rationalizing not wanting to change by inertia. For hundreds of thousands of years, there was inertia. Not much change. Again, come and travel around the world. Go see the world. I mean, there are places still in the world that haven't changed. There are places in these places. Zero change. So we have to grasp the extent to which the last 250 years are this massive, unbelievable, incredible achievement. Otherwise, we're not preserved. Daniel says, do you think there is any value in undertaking an MBA degree even if their marketing is not good? Look, I mean, the primary value of getting an MBA degree is a diploma. That is, there are certain jobs, there are certain companies, there are certain places where you advance faster if you have it. The knowledge that you gain, I think ultimately is minimal, particularly in a day where they keep pounding this ESG and a lot of other nonsense that they provide. The people you meet. If you go to an MBA program, I highly recommend trying to go to one of the best, best not in terms of what they teach, best in terms of how they're ranked, partially because of the quality of the people you meet there and partially because the diploma is just worth more to employers after the fact and that's its primary value. So, you know, you should focus on that. But yeah, again, you can ignore the ESG nonsense. The question is, is there a lot else of value that they are teaching and it's questionable with MBA programs. So go if you need the diploma. Get a master's degree and some speciality if you want the knowledge. David asks, will the Fed end up having to buy all the good, long-term low-interest debt that the banks can't hold the maturity for liquidity reasons and can't sell without taking a loss? Well, no, I don't think so. I mean, the reality is that the banks can hold most of it for holding maturity. Banks have not yet been in mass forced to or market conditions have forced them to sell the held to maturity securities at a loss. And a lot of banks, even if they sold them at a loss, could still survive that. They're still solvent. Even if they book those losses, they can still survive. So, again, I think the banking crisis as a crisis across all banks is overstated. I think the market is overreacting. I think people are overpanicking. Now, there are fundamental problems inherent in the banking system and in the way banks are structured and particularly the way banks are regulated and nobody is talking about that inherent in the existence of the boss insurance but really inherent in the way banks are regulated. But nobody's talking about that. But the reality is that almost all the banks today should be able to survive what's going on right now. There is no massive bank run going on right now. There is primarily a run on in a sense people are selling bank stocks. But the fundamental business model in banking is not different today. And yes, they've taken some losses on bonds. And the losses were taken very fast because interest rates were raised very fast. But the losses are not such that they're going to drive every bank. Some banks would go bust if they were forced to sell all those bonds. But they're not forced to sell all those bonds. They're not forced to sell all those bonds. Primarily because there is no bank run right now and there's no reason for bank run given deposit insurance. I mean, there's a lot to say about the banking crisis but that's going to require a whole show and a different mindset. All right. Let me just remind everybody that Super Chat is a major way in which we fund this show and encourage people to use the Super Chat feature to support the Iran Book Show. But you can also support the show. Those of you who do not want to use Super Chat who are not listening live who don't have it available to them you can support the show on Patreon by becoming a monthly supporter or even doing just a one-time gift that's great. Or on PayPal through IranBookShow.com or on Subscribestar but I think most people are now doing Patreon and PayPal even locals. So please consider that. Again, you're buying my time prep and doing all this and then all the short videos that Christian puts together and everything else you know, you're basically paying for and funding with your contributions whether here in the Super Chat or your monthly contributions. Thank you to all of you. Thank you for showing your support and showing the value. I've got a few more Super Chats to go and then we'll call it a night. Daniel says, I love how you're on demystifies popular right wingers Andrew Tate, Tekka Carson, Ron DeSantis. Thanks, Daniel. Liam says do not really do not rely on compassion to get things done. We will all end up holding hands and starving together. Yeah, of course. You have to go and produce. You have to go and create. Rely on yourself and rely on productive ability. Compassion will get you nowhere when it comes to actually achieving anything in life. Liam writes protocol for its followers. Once capitalism has been fully abolished and there is no more food. We don't have a protocol for that. I mean at that point do what you can to survive. But let me just say, Liam the pessimism is strong today. It's not going to happen I don't think it's happening anytime soon. It's not going to happen in my life America is not Venezuela. We're not going to be reduced to Venezuela. And actually, if you go to Venezuela people are somehow surviving even in Venezuela. We're not seeing millions and millions of people dying of starvation. There is a huge amount of built up capital. There's a huge amount of built up knowledge. There's a huge reservoir of productive ability in America and the West. The West and America are not just going to collapse. Food is just not going to stop being available. People who are producing today are not just going to disappear or stop producing. I think it's much more likely the way into a slow period of stagnation and maybe ultimately decline but it's going to be slow. It's going to be slow because none of those forces are going to easy just going to disappear. In spite of everything I said about the left and the attack on merit and the attack of that the attack is there and they've got the tentacles in there and they're doing their damage but there's also resistance to it. There's also people standing up and resisting it to it. Corporate America, ultimately those companies are resisted will be more successful than those companies who don't. Investors will resist it. You're seeing that with ESG and ultimately over time I think this particular form of egalitarianism will be crushed. As I've told you I worry about what will replace it and I think that's going to come from the right but I don't think what will replace it will you having no food. You might have no freedom and you're likely to have no freedom before you have no food and you could still have an authoritarian state with food. James says if a fetus has no right to life because it's not individuated from its mother twin twins have a right to life even though they aren't individuated. Look I am not an expert on all the I don't know what do you call them all these special cases, marginal issues around these things you can come up with all kind of bizarre cases. Abortion in my view is very simple. You know until you are born you're not fully human an individual human being. And you know in the final trimester when you're viable you could make some argument about you know the morality of abortion before that I don't think you can make any cases. That is in the first trimester there's no case. Now conjoined twins are still individuated as two as a conjoined twin as a phenomena called a conjoined twin and they are separate from the mother. They are a separate entity with a separate life and a separate mechanism of digesting and a separate mechanism for observing the world and integrating facts about the world and then the question is can modern medicine separate them so they can live normal healthy lives on out. But they are still individuated they are still separate they are still separated and individuated in a bizarre unusual way but still individuated and it's still true. Look a fetus does not eat a fetus does not drink a fetus does nothing to sustain its own life. A baby does a baby does it drinks it has to swallow it has to absorb the liquids. It does all that a fetus doesn't all of that is done by the mother and then it's passed on through the bloodstream to the fetus but the fetus doesn't actually eat it doesn't drink it doesn't think it doesn't have those capabilities because it's not a separate human being and when it's separate when it's individuated it has rights and conjoint twins have rights. Now rights are tricky with conjoint twins which one of them has rights that they have rights together it's complicated but that doesn't mean it's not a reality it's still a reality it's just a reality that's borderline it's complicated and unsettling and so on but nobody thinks because they're conjoint there's no right to life oops, pressed the wrong button all right Andrew thank you Andrew, $50 really appreciate that we need a few more $50 AJ Soprano sorry is influenced by philosophy and his father's duplicity into becoming cynical, listless and ultimately suicidal life is absurd Camilla's God forgive you doesn't help how does Kantianism affect an attitude towards life whoa that's a big question glad you put $50 to it look monophilosophy that basically says we can't have principles we can't really induce knowledge from reality we can't really know what's happening what's happening and what is going to happen we don't know life could go in all kinds of directions and by the way morality morality is something religious religion as somebody said before evil is a religious concept morality is a monopoly so outside of morality once religion is gone so if the idea of God forgive you doesn't mean anything to you then you're outside of the realm of morality then for Soprano it's whatever goes I don't really understand why the effects that I'm getting that I'm not happy even though I'm successful in what I do killing people and being a good mafia also I don't understand why I can't be happy I don't understand why people don't like me I don't understand why I have these kind of relationships with people everything seems to be weird and absurd how do I make sense of all this because they're no principles they're no principles of human action of human behavior there's no guidance there's no morality so anything goes I'm trying to take care of my family I've been told by the world out there by people in the culture that family is everything maybe that's a content categorical imperative take care of your family and yet that's not enough I still am not happy I still don't know anything about the world out there I still can't cope I still can't figure it out so what contentism really does is it creates this massive uncertainty in your mind it creates this situation where nothing is solid nothing is certain world is absurd and it creates a world in which where are these categorical imperatives where is right and wrong where do I find it who's going to tell me what it is and it creates a real I think psychological and mental challenges and problems where everything is fluid and nothing is known and you don't know how to live your life and you can't differentiate between good and evil you have no concept of what evil is I mean you have some in a sense that everybody knows that killing another person is wrong but you don't know why it's wrong and if it's just a floating abstraction that's wrong so it doesn't really mean anything to you other than your life is horrible and that's I think what Kantian modern philosophy does to us it takes the ground from under our feet it basically mobilizes us and makes it impossible for us to act and it makes it impossible for us to achieve anything achieve our values or even identify our values our legitimate values and benefit from them and be happy for achieving them so it's destructive to everybody certainly it's destructive to somebody who's on a path of self-destruction like Tony Soprano I assume that's who you're talking about Soprano from the Sopranos Shasvat says why don't anti-abortion activists considered unfertilized eggs and sperm cells to be people they have just as much potential to become a person as the fertilized embryo don't they is it because it can be enforced I mean what about skin cells I mean I told you that this Japanese scientist now has been able to tell take skin cells of mice and genetically modify them to turn them into stem cells and then he triggers the stem cell to become an unfertilized egg and he can do this by the way even to skin cells for male mice talk about trans confusion transgender confusion and I mean our cells are alive they have DNA why is it okay to kill out skin cells I mean shouldn't people who get tattoos be put in prison for killing all those skin cells I don't know you can go on and on but why don't they well I mean think about it the Bible does say their masturbation is sinful because according to the Old Testament I don't know why the New Testament says it's sinful but in the Old Testament it says that you shouldn't waste it it's throwing it away it's wasting it it's wasting sperms so if you masturbate you're wasting it you're throwing it away so there's a sense in which they view sperm as a value because you shouldn't masturbate in order to anyway the whole thing is ridiculous but they you know is something that happens when an egg is fertilized that's unique that event has to happen in order for for a new human being to be created so I see why they use fertilization as the starting point it is the starting point of something look at the end of the day the real objection to abortion is an objection to sex I mean whenever I bring up the abortion issue it always boils down to particularly among men it always boils down to well she shouldn't have sex if she's not willing to have the baby she shouldn't have sex why didn't they use birth control of course they want to ban birth control and of course accidents happen even when you use birth control but it's always at the end of the day an issue of of an antagonism and a hatred of sex even among people who would deny that consciously and fiercely that they have any objection to sex it often boils down to that well you had sex you were irresponsible why is having sex irresponsible somebody's come out here against masturbation I mean it would take somebody in my chat to agree with the religious nuts about masturbation masturbation is wonderful how can masturbation damage anything god now they're against masturbation what else and that's not coming from the left this time this craziness alright alright we passed halfway mark just in case anybody's still interested and interested in willing and able to support the show okay let's see, good chat Harper Campbell says I think a majority of people today have a nihilistic element but it's not consistent and to the core of their being I think that's right, I think the cynicism represents that and it's a question of how deep it goes and how important it is envy is ultimately a nihilistic kind of attitude and to the extent that envy is popular and embraced by many people that's a sign of nihilism but yeah I think a lot of people have an element of nihilism whether it's a dominant element I said yesterday, I think very few allow it to dominate Harper says, do statists and the bad philosophers of history seek to make people cynical and passive no, I mean statists who explicitly power hungry seek seek to make people passive there's no question and they want people to depend on them because that's how they sustain their power but bad philosophers are just bad philosophers, they have bad ideas it's not that they're motivated necessarily by control of other people or other things I mean maybe some of the great geniuses the ones that are really evil have that element to them but I don't think they're motivated by something like that they're more motivated by maybe psychologically a hatred of reality or a fear of people a fear of reality but it's not like ooh, I want to make people cynical so I'm going to invent a philosophy that encourages them to be cynical that's not how it works they come out of a they come out of an attitude that is indeed an attitude that is indeed what do you call it consistent with what they think and why they think what they think why they're evading reality the way they're evading there are millions of psychological reasons why they could be doing that they all evade reality to some extent but that doesn't mean they have some other motive other than the psychological motive making the fear go away or wanting to live inside their own head or things like that but it's very few, particularly intellectuals who want to control other people there are some there are also twoies of the world and political leaders but among philosophers I don't think that's common if you go to philosophy departments around the country I don't think they're motivated by trying to make people passive and cynical I think they believe people should be passive and cynical because that's the appropriate way of living some of them anyway Louis asks I do remember a US president in a political event saying if you've got a business you didn't build that somebody else made that happen that was a direct attack on merit that was Obama that was Obama in I think 2014 maybe 2012 that was a famous famous speech by Obama and probably his best speech that best reflected his view of the world best articulated his perspective on life and very philosophical Catherine, if 26 people subscribed to your unbooked show through Patreon at $25 each would you be able to do the shows without needing super chat? 26 people so that I assume you've calculated that out to be 650 but you see that's one show so if every day and I do how many shows a month let's say 20 so you'd have to do 20 times 26 times 25 to cover all the shows so 26 times 25 would be one show without super chats but to get all the shows I do you'd have to get 520 people to do it and it's doable we have 34,000 subscribers so it's doable but you'd have to on top of what we have today and again we're trying to grow the show on top of that so but you could get a fundraiser going and get $650 in advance I would or a number of people doing it for one show with no super chat but I like the super chat partially because you get to ask questions and you get the shape of the show Daniel says did you not do a show yesterday because you were glued to watching the coronation I did do a show yesterday and in that show I expressed my very negative views on the monarchy and therefore on the coronation which is the whole phenomenon is abysmal but no I did not watch I've seen some pictures from the coronation other than that I've not read a story about it not watched any coverage of it I've not tracked it one bit alright thank you guys we've run out of questions and we've gone an hour and a half so that's pretty good thanks to all the super chatters who support the show on a regular basis and I'm looking forward to getting back home and to getting us back on a regular schedule although I'm traveling so much in the next few weeks, months that that's going to be difficult I will try to do shows this week from the various places where I am I'll update you as we go along those of you who can't catch the show live please consider supporting the show again on Patreon, SubscribeStar or you can become a subscriber or if you already are a subscriber please consider upping your contribution if you see value in it if you see value in what I do thanks everybody I will see you all maybe tomorrow we'll see what happens if not sometime this coming week