 No radical, fundamental principles of freedom, national self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Iran Book Show. All right, everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Tuesday evening. It is indeed a beautiful evening out there, at least here in Puerto Rico. I hope everybody else is having a great week. Sorry, we started a little late today, had some technical problems with getting my panelists on video. For some reason, it's not working. So we're going to stick with what we have, audio only for our panelists for today's Q&A, and we'll do fine. All right, let's see. So today, we're doing our usual Q&A. We're also taking Superchats. We've got Nick, Ahmed, Adam, and Daniel here. We'll see if anybody else joins, but for now we have those four. Of course, Superchat is open. Priority goes to those people who contribute $20, a question. $40 is good too, but contribute $20 a question. Jennifer says it's choppy. Let me know if you guys experiencing it. Choppy is video choppy. Is there something here? Video choppy, audio choppy. Hopefully, hopefully it is choppy. It's only the video. All right, let's get started. We've got a bunch of stuff. I'll just remind you just quick before we get started quickly. End of November today is the day's end of the month. I am looking for people to sponsor. Ewan rules shows. Ewan rules shows. I'll be doing a number of them. Hopefully, do a couple of them in December. If you would like to sponsor one of those videos, it's $1,000 a sponsorship. And I think we did at some point, like we got 10 people together to do $100 each. So we'll add that feature onto the website, youonbookshow.com, slash support. And hopefully, you guys will sponsor some Ewan rules for life videos. All right, let's jump in with Adam, who I think was online first, Adam. Okay, thank you. I have a suggestion that may spread your message worldwide more efficiently. Right now, you're broadcasting weekend during weekdays at four o'clock my time and eight o'clock your time. And for people working in industry, that's a very bad time. First of all, because there are many supervisors who like to set meetings for the late afternoon in the hope that people will want to go home and keep the meeting short. Good strategy. For those who don't have afternoon meetings, they very often have deliverables due the next morning and are hard at work. Now, in contrast, you have weekend shows at 11 o'clock my time. And for the main three U.S. time zones, that's 11 o'clock noon and one o'clock. And those are all good times for midday breaks for people who are working. In other words, you're expected to take a midday break. And those are the times that are compatible with most workplaces. So I have a suggestion, which is moving the weekday events to the middle of the day instead of four o'clock. So the multiple challenges with that. First, most people who listen to the show watch the show on YouTube and listen in the podcast and everything. Don't watch it live. So probably only 15% to 20% of people watch the show live. Most people watch it after the fact. So I don't know how much difference it's going to make if we shift the number of people watching live. It might, I don't know. I'm willing to try during the day. The problem is the during the day I'm working. You know, I've got and I don't have a mid afternoon break. There are days where that is possible, but there are days as long as the markets are open or as long as people are taking meetings. My days often sprinkled with meetings and to take a two hour block of that and do the show in the middle of the day would be tough. You know, I'm at experiment with that. I might do it a couple of times, see if it's true that people are willing to use their break to listen to you on Bookshow live. I have a feeling I'll pick up some Europeans who for them it'll be early evening and it'll be quite convenient for them. But I'm not sure how many people are actually willing in their break, lunch break to watch this on YouTube Live. But it might be with experiments, but I don't think my audience is going to grow dramatically to a large extent because as I said, most of my audience does not watch this live. Most of my audience, overwhelming majority of the audience, watches it after the fact. Yeah, I watch it after the fact very often because I don't know in advance whether you're going to be on or not. I know, I know. And what I was going to suggest next is that if you had links to the coming events on the Yaron Brook Show site, there is a website where you can make links to local time for forthcoming events. And if those links were always readily available on the Yaron Brook Show, you would get many more people participating in the Super Chat. And I hope that you won that because I very often would be doing Super Chat if I knew in advance that I was going to talk that particular day. I will try to give you guys more notice and to put it up on the Yaron Brook Show website when I know I'm going to do a show. I can tell you now, the next show will be on Thursday at 8 p.m., 8 p.m. Atlantic time, which is 7 p.m. Eastern time. Of course, the fact that everybody moved to daylight savings just confused the issue because the Atlantic time stayed at Atlantic time. Yeah, this site is very good about the one that's in chat. I posted the link. They're very good about keeping track of daylight savings time and other time zone changes. And the fact that you give us the time of the next show on your show doesn't cut it for everyone because not everyone can watch the show and take notes. Yeah, I will try to list it on the website. Yeah, I will try to list it on the website. And if you follow me on Twitter on Facebook, list it in advance on Facebook and Twitter as well. So I'll try to be more consistent with that going into next year. I mean, maybe we'll make that one of the new year's resolutions. Yaron becomes more predictable in terms of shows. I think that would definitely help the number of views and the number of super chats. At least have the link on the website. Okay. Now, if you really wanted more people to know about your shows in advance and be able to contribute to super chats, I am on the texting list of several groups that always send me a text to my cell phone before any event. And usually you can arrange that to be one hour before or 90 minutes before. And again, if I get a message on my cell phone, it buzzes. I know there's a message for me. I always check it within the hour. So I would always know when you're going to be up. Good. I will have many people look into using a texting app to do that. It's a good idea. Or making it possible for me to use it to be better to use it easily. Now, I have one additional suggestion. And I don't know whether it fits your agenda, but when you travel, sometimes you can't make a show. And those of us who would like to watch the shows regularly would love having credible substitutes. People like Greg Salmieri, for example. If you can get good people to fill in for you when you're not available, that would make things much more regular. That's a good idea. I like things to happen regularly. Yeah, that's a good idea. Let me that's a good idea. I'm going to I'm talking to Greg in a few days. Let me let me see what Greg thinks of it. Don Watkins is another one who I think Don might be up for it. So particularly if I give him some of the super chat money. Good. Good ideas. Thanks, Adam. Yeah, 2020. This is a good time to start thinking about how do we make this show bigger in 2022? All right, Nick, you're up next. Oops. Nick needs to unmute himself. Yes, he does. Maya, can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you now. Okay, good stuff. All right, so the sequel. What the question I wanted to ask is you've often said, when we're talking about capitalism and socialism, that the debate on which system produces the goods has already been settled. It's the moral argument that we're after. Now, when we say it's been settled 100 years ago, because you've said that, right? But by what standards are we talking about? It's been settled and going forward since then. How have those standards? How has it reinforced the standards in terms of whatever productivity, GDP, you know, I just want to know what are the right standards to judge? Well, I mean, the standards are human well-being. So what economic indicators are, you know what I mean? Because they'll want an economic indicator. The primary economic indicator is your eyes, right? So as I like to say, all you have to do is see Hong Kong and know that it's different than North Korea. All you have to do is look at that satellite picture between Hong Kong, between South Korea and North Korea and see the difference in quality of life. All you have to do is when the Berlin Wall comes down, walk into East Berlin and see the difference between East Berlin and West Berlin. So the first parameter is just you can see it. You can see richer, more successful, happier people with more choices and a more vibrant, engaging life. So I'd say that's kind of the first criteria of how to measure it. Beyond that, yeah. I mean, the standard economic measures, whether it's GDP per capita adjusted for cost of living, whether it's economic growth, whether it's measures of consumer spending and the richness of that spending, the extent of that spending, the variety of goods available. So whether it's numbers representing the amount of production that's being done per individual. So there are many, many, many numbers that you can look at. But you don't have to look at numbers because it's pretty self-evident. You can also look at things like the economic freedom index and compare that to a variety of different economic numbers and see that they're a correlation. But really, it really is, and this is the point I try to make, that if people were honest, all they would have to do is look at socialist countries and look at capitalist countries. While they might be confused about what is capitalism, what's relative freedom, how free is the country, what's the difference between the United States and Denmark, the difference between the United States and Venezuela, the difference between North and South Korea is kind of obvious. And at that level, it's almost self-evident. It's almost right in their face. And you can look at other measures like immigration, people tend to immigrate to capitalist countries or relatively free countries and away from relatively unfree countries. There's lots of lots of measures by which you can evaluate who has it better and who has it worse. Is there, okay, people vote with their feet. Is there specific immigration measures that measure in and out flows? Do you know what they are? I'm just curious. You can look it up, immigration and immigration. So the number of people coming in and the number of people going out. Okay. You know, what's his name? Wolf said at some point in my debate with him, more Americans go to France than French come to America. I mean, that's just not true. And if you had open borders, if you made it easy for people to travel, many, many more French would come to America than Americans go to France. We go on vacation. Very few Americans go to live there. Yeah. First of all, it's not GDP per capita. There are two adjustments that you need to make. First of all, you need to subtract government spending from the GDP because whatever part of the GDP is not spent by the government is the part that's available to individuals. So in a place like North Korea, it's artificial because the government takes almost entirely the whole GDP and leaves very little for individuals. Adam, that's true. But that needs a lot to convince people to do. And the fact is that if you just look at GDP per capita and you don't subtract government spending, you get the same result. It's still true that if you just look at GDP per capita, the United States is South Korea substantially richer than North Korea because the fact is that the only way for the government to spend money is to extract it from private enterprise, which has to create it in a sense. It has to produce it. Therefore, that consumption captures something that is real even though it's not optimal and it's not ideal and there is a sense of which is double counting. So GDP per capita did go up in the United States during 1942 as the standard of living in the U.S. went down when we entered World War II, but GDP still went up. So it's not a great measure, but over time, over the long run, it still reflects the difference between freer societies and unfree societies. It's not technically the right measure. I agree with you, Adam. But to get to the technically right measure, you would have to do more than just subtract government spending because there are other factors that have to be brought into bear. GDP doesn't capture a lot of the production that gets done. It only measures it at one step. It doesn't measure the multiple steps of production, the value added if you will through production. So it's not a very good measure period, but it's still a measure that's highly correlated with economic freedom. Although if you make a second adjustment and adjust the denominator for cost of living, which- That's why I say PPP adjusted. When I say PPP adjusted, that's what it means. It's to adjust for the purchasing power parity. So to adjust for the purchasing power, which is the cost of living in a sense. And that's why when you look at GDP per capita and compare countries, you want to make the cost of living adjustment, which you can find online. If you look GDP per capita, PPP, you'll get the PPP adjusted GDP per capita. What you really need is a production measure, a measure of production of goods and services. And there is none. The Fed reports not GDP. I forget the name of the measure, but a measure that's actually better than GDP, but it still includes government consumption, government spending. So it's not perfect. There is no one number that is perfect in the sense economists have yet to develop that number. And I would like to add that it's been known not just for a hundred years, but for 200 years, because even Marx and Wright in the Communist Manifesto lists all the ways in which capitalism has made life better for people. Absolutely. And certainly Adam Smith understood it and knew it even though he was just at the very, very, very beginning of capitalism and was laying down some of the foundations. The theory at least was all known. All right. Let's see, Daniel. Thanks, Ron. Have you heard of something that I guess is called the trial penalty? I was reading a story about parents who cheated to help their kids get into school, the UCLA, by having someone else take the test. And there were like 35 sets of parents. Those that would forget what the word is, say that they're guilty, would get very light penalties. Several of them just got probation and those that actually did get jail terms, it was like three to five months. Anyone who fought the system who said, no, I think this is wrong. I did not actually commit the crime you're claiming. They're charged with other things as well, such as conspiracy, and they're looking at 20 years if they're found guilty. And so they're calling this the trial penalty. And I just don't see where it's very just, right? I mean, either the people who are just getting probation are getting off too easy for the crime committed, or the people that are fighting the system saying, no, I'm innocent and I'm going to fight this, they're being punished for fighting for their innocence. I think you're absolutely right. I think it's ridiculous if that is the difference. Slap on a wrist versus 20 years in jail, that's ridiculous. You know what these parents committed is far, I don't think 20 years is the right penalty for fraud. They fought at the university primarily. And the point is, look, if they're lying, you can get them for projury, and then there are additional penalties for projury. But yeah, our justice system is geared towards not going to court. It's geared towards settling. It's geared towards incentivizing people to admit or to settle or to come to some kind of deal with the government so that the government doesn't have to actually engage in a trial. And the more exaggerated they make these penalties, the more people are going to likely to just confess and get it over with then fight it, because the risk if you fight it is, of course, if you lose and you go to jail for a long time. So I think it's part of the system's way of disincentivizing people to actually fight it, which is not healthy and not good. I'm not sure how you solve the problem, but you've got to get judges who are willing not to buy into this and not to buy into prosecutors trying to relieve themselves of the amount of trials they have to prosecute. You have to get judges who are not willing to go for 20 years for a case of fraud and not willing to accept all these additional charges. I can understand being willing to give somebody a lighter sentence when they acknowledge that they committed a crime that shows repentance, that shows maybe that they understand that they did something wrong, but not if it's the difference between zero and 20 years in jail. That's ridiculous. I think so. And a friend suggested that district attorneys, prosecutors, want basically a perfect trial record. And so they're also incentivized to try to make sure the only ones that go into court, they can win. Once they're going to win. Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think you're right. I think it is. They do have that incentive. I think there's probably all kind of external incentives linked to that, linked to having a perfect trial record. Yeah, I mean, there's a whole literature called Public Choice, which discusses the incentives of government officials in various roles and in various positions. And it's really interesting and really fascinating. We assume that government employees are there for the common good and they have incentives are somehow up pure. And because they're not self-interested, we know that that doesn't work and we know that that's not true and we know that self-interest is not a negative, but a positive. Thank you. Thanks, Daniel. All right, Emmett. Hi, Aaron. So I and my son's mom have decided to homeschool him this year and he's been at that for several months now. And he's able to work ahead and is pretty much almost done with his grade for the year. And I do what I'm sitting around, basically playing video games for the rest of the school year. So I've started him working on the Eight Great Plays series by Dr. Peacoff. And he's almost 14. So he's about the right age to start being able to think of that. He's a little late on the advanced side. So I just want to... I don't know about Montevana. You might want to screen Montevana first. Okay, okay. Well, we're starting with Antigone. So we'll start at the beginning, right? So just wondering if you have any tips and tricks on presenting that, teaching it, going over that with him. Are there good resources that I might look at? I mean, other than Leonard's course, I don't know of good resources around the plays. I'm sure there's a vast literature that Leonard uses. And there's the book now, The Eight Great Plays. You might want to check out the book version of his lectures. And the book might have resources with every play, resources he used in order to prepare his lectures. Because I remember that when he did the lectures, I heard them live at the time, he would cite different books or analyses of the plays that different authors had that were valuable to him. So in certain translations that he found more useful than others. So you might want to look at the book version of The Eight Great Plays and pull off of there whatever resources Leonard Picoff used. I think that would be super useful, super helpful. Okay, great. Thank you. And then beyond that, I'm trying to think of the plays. Probably the play that would be most difficult for 14-year-old that is monophonic just because it's a play about sex in many respects or about what sex means between a husband and wife, what sex means for a man and a woman. There's no sex in the play, but it's all about the implications of maybe he has had sex, who she had sex with, is this guy demanding that? Isn't he demanding it? And a lot of it is nuanced around that. So that's the only play. The others are just plays of immense value significance and where the 14-year-old can really can really comprehend the values at stake is hard to tell. But this is the kind of course that's good to do at 14 and maybe then again to repeat at 17, 18. Right, cool. Thank you. Thank you. Adam, you have your hand up. Yes, having homeschooled two teenagers, I have a suggestion. Again, I don't know what things are like in other states, but in California, a 16-year-old can take the proficiency exam and go straight to the university at 16. Yep. So if you happen to have time, it could be advantageous to just let your kid advance ahead in everything. Yeah, and then just take the proficiency exam and go to college. Yes, I know another kid who did that and it's a great way to not waste their time, in a sense, with the regular process that is involved. Yeah, I'm definitely thinking along those lines. So thank you. Yeah, sure. All right, let's see. We'll do a super chat question. Let me encourage everybody to do the $20 super chat questions. Those are the ones I'll take first. And this is your opportunity to ask questions, also opportunity to support the show. So jump in with any questions you might have. Brian asks, I'm looking for more reading recommendations that would be good resources to guide my progress in the field of finance. So I'm reading Jonathan Honing's book, Price is Primary and Loving It. You know, a lot of the reading I would recommend is probably going to be contradictory to some of what Jonathan is writing, but maybe consistent with what you're reading with Jonathan, I would definitely recommend a random walk down Wall Street. I've recommended that in the past. I'd recommend the books by, you know, on the flip side of that, I'd recommend the books by the former portfolio manager of Magellan Fund, the Fidelity Magellan Fund, whose name I cannot remember right now, but a slip of mind. I would also, just as background, I would get a finance textbook. I would definitely get a just a straight finance textbook off the whatever. You can find a used textbook somewhere. Some of it's useful. Some of it's not, but it's good to get some of the language done. It's good to get some of the definitions done. It's good to get some of the equations down. It's good to understand. Peter Lynch, thank you, Scott. Peter Lynch, Peter Lynch is good. Bogle from Vanguard is also good on investment, but Peter Lynch's books are good about investing in things you understand, about investing in fundamentals. I'd also recommend listening to my objective investing course, which you can find on the Einwand Institute bookstore website. I'd probably revise it today if I was doing it, but I think 80% of it is right, or maybe even 90% of it is right. So I think you'd probably get a lot out of it. I did, I think, in 1998 or taped in in 1998. So objective investing, which is on the Einwand Institute bookstore website, Einwand bookstore. So I think those are some of the resources. I think in my objective investing course, I'll also give some other book recommendations in terms of investing. All right, Michael asks another $20 question. What is history, but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race? Well, I don't think that's exactly what history is. History is really the story how you can flip it, right? History is the story of how Aristotle and Plato have shaped Western civilization. So how ideas shape the human experience, how ideas shape what happens. Politicians remember just products of the ideas of their time and politicians only get away with squandering blood and treasure of the human race because we let them get away with it. So this idea of blaming politicians for everything, I think is wrong and nonsensical and in places where it gives way too much power to politicians. We are to blame. The voters, the culture, the people who participate, you know, in a non-democracy is just the people out there who don't revolt, who don't question, who don't challenge and in that sense again, what really shapes human history are not politicians, they're not the serfs, they're not the aristocrats, they're not the soldiers, they're not the generals. The people who really shape history are the professors and to a large extent that's why they can get away with the evil that they get away with because nobody knows them. Nobody goes to these universities and studies their ideas and evaluates them and measures them, attests them. How many people out there know that it's philosophy that shapes life, that shapes history, that shapes politicians, that shapes wars and economic policy? Almost nobody does and therefore almost nobody blames them and they can get away with it, they can keep doing it and nobody challenges their own ideas as a consequence and nobody really or very few people think about, oh, what do ideas do I believe in and how are those ideas destroying the world? That's not on the table and as long as we continue blaming politicians for our problems that will not be on the table. I mean, one of the ways you'll know that the world is getting better, that we're starting to move in the right direction is when we stop blaming politicians and we start talking about philosophical ideas, when we start challenging conventional philosophical ideas when it's popular in the culture to debate ethics and epistemology and maybe one of the better signs that we're seeing on YouTube is the interest in philosophical ideas, although it's still by either tiniest and tiniest of minorities but I'm hopeful that that will over time grow and over time there will be more and more and more people interested in questions like is there free will and what is the proper morality by which to live, which by the way is a question that makes no sense if you don't believe in free will and therefore what is the correct political system we should live on that. When people start asking and engaging and interested in those kind of questions rather than the latest grievances against Trump or Biden or whoever, that's when you'll know the culture's changed and the culture shifted and maybe we're moving in the right direction towards more freedom and more liberty. All right Dave asks and these all $20 questions that's why I'm taking the first if you want to ask questions $20 questions is the way to go and today is a ask me anything so you can really ask anything. Dave asks what gives me hope is that we have a history throughout the 20th century of descent towards an ascent away from complete breakdown. Yes I think there is that tension between collectivism and individualism and that tension continues. It happened throughout the 20th century. We had two big substantial movements that were collectivist both failed miserably, both landed up in poverty, destruction, bloodshed and horrors, human horrors. And you know that's what we're up against and we keep rejecting those on the precipice of adopting them. We seem to reject them. The challenge that we face, the challenge that we face during the 20th century and the challenge we've always faced in a sense is while we seem to be able to at the very last minute in a sense reject pure evil and consistent collectivism, what we don't do is adopt the opposite. That is, and this is the importance of philosophy, this is what altruism does is we are hampered and restrained and don't really adopt individualism consistently. So we're constantly moving from on the precipice of adopting collectivism as a complete system, communism, fascism, whatever, to a mixed economy, to back towards almost adopting collectivism consistently, to a mixed economy. A mixed economy here is a mixture of collectivism and individualism and we're not willing to go beyond that mixed economy towards more individualism, all the way towards individualism, even if we're not going to be 100% consistent individualism close to that. We're not willing to go to that close to that 100% individualism. That is what the real resistance is, a resistance to individualism. I think most people out there, even the socialist kids, if you actually ask them, do you want to live in a communist dictatorship, 95% of them would say no. And if they, as they grow up, if they're faced with the opportunity of embracing a communist dictatorship, they would say no. So, you know, that's where we probably won't go for it. And if you ask anybody, well, do you want a religious, what do you call it, religious dictatorship in America? Again, almost everybody would say no. But what they're not willing to say yes to is lasific capitalism. What they're not willing to say yes to is capitalism, fully, is individualism, full-fledged individualism. And, you know, one of the few minutes says, how did Hong Kong do it? Hong Kong got away with it because, out of inertia, because a governor, the governor of Hong Kong set it up that way post-World War II and it was successful and there was very little forces arguing against it and the British kind of forgot it and abandoned it and left it. And this UK has great been turned towards socialism. Hong Kong, because it had just one pro-freedom governor, basically sustained that freedom. And then it was too successful to kill, you know, killing the goose that lays the golden egg is done all the time and is being done right now by China to Hong Kong. But it's done slowly. It's not done all at once. And the U.S., over the last 100 plus years, is slowly crept away from capitalism because nobody wants to kill it all at once. Nobody wants to kill it all at once. Sina Ruto says, Yuan, please debate Robert Reich, please. I mean, we've got this challenge out. I don't know if you guys have seen it, but there's this website out there that makes these challenges for debates and they've got a challenge out for me to debate Robert Reich. I've agreed, but Reich is not. And they've actually raised money for this challenge. And the money I think right now is, I don't know what the dollar amount is, but they give the money to charity. And the money now is 4,000 meals to poor people. 4,000 meals, if Reich agrees to debate me, 4,000 people will get a meal. And that's how it's presented to Robert Reich, who claims to care about the poor. And he has not agreed. So I have long, long agreed to that debate. He has not. There's no way I can force him to debate me. So I can only debate people who agree to debate me and I can only debate people if there's a venue that agrees to host that debate. So that's a situation. As you know, I will be debating Yoram Chazoni next week at the University of Texas in Austin. And I'm really looking forward to that debate. That should be really good. It's conservatism versus individualism, which is a perfect title because it captures everything that needs to be captured. And it's an opportunity both to talk about conservatism more broadly and Yoram Chazoni's focus on nationalist conservatism and nationalism more broadly. So it's really collectivism versus individualism. So it's a perfect topic and it's hopefully to be a good debate. I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it. So I'll be in Austin next week for that debate. All right, let's go back to our panel and then we'll go back to some of the $20 questions that are piling up. We'll definitely get to answer all of those. All right, let's see, Adam, you go first. You got to unmute. Scott, I'll get to your question, but it's not a $20 question. So it's going to be, it's going to have to wait for a while. Adam, go ahead. Okay, I'm looking forward to your debates. Again, as soon as any one of them is scheduled, please post the link to the Yaron Brookshaw website. There is a tab on the Yaron Brookshaw website saying events and it's been posted there for a long time now. I don't know if it's going to be live streamed. So when I find out if it's going to be live streamed, I will post a link. Okay, and if it's live streamed, please use the website that I posted in chat or some equivalent so that everyone will have it in their local time. Sounds good. Thank you. Okay, thanks. Let's see, Nick, unmute. I don't know what's going on. There you go, I got you. You know, I was interested in your interaction with, I find him interesting, Daniel Hanna, when you were in the UK. You know, he's well versed, he speaks three languages, born in Peru, very international, free trade type of guy. Very charismatic. And you said you talked to him in terms of trying to convey the message that we've already won the economic argument when it comes to capitalism free trade. It's the moral. And you said he, you know, he's an intellectual. I mean, what kind of pushback did you get? What were his arguments back or was he just, it was this case of being evasive? No, he agrees. So he agrees. He says, yes, it's absolutely the moral case for capitalism. And we need to make them all case for capitalism on the grounds of altruism. Okay, so that's what I'll say. That's what that's what I'll have to book say. I mean, 10 years ago, nobody was talking about the moral case for capitalism. I put that on the table and created a buzz around it. Since then, everybody's talking about the moral case for capitalism, but their view of the moral case for capitalism is altruism. We need to, we need to find ways to explain to people that capitalism is really good for the poor and capitalism is really good for the least able. And it's not about success. And hey, we need to violate some of the principles of capitalism in order to redistribute a little bit of wealth because that's what morality demands. So what happens when you say my moral case for capitalism revolves around egoism? They say that's a huge mistake. Egoism is evil. People won't understand it. People will think that you're talking about all this, they'll think about how they view capitalism, which is exploitative and so on. Yeah, but when you come back and say, well, you might as well- They don't, you see, Nick, people don't think that egoism is a morality. They think that egoism is the negation of morality. Their view is morality equals altruism. It's not the way people hold it in the culture and the way most thinkers hold it in the culture is. There is such a thing as morality. Morality equals altruism. And everything that's not altruistic isn't moral. So they can conceive of a moral case for capitalism that's not altruistic. So, Mike, when you bring it to their attention, at least they've heard the argument before they haven't even considered the argument. You know what I mean? So that's the first step. Yeah, absolutely. And primarily going after young people who are not quite as committed intellectually to altruism. Okay. That's why you go for young people. Yeah, and I'm curious furthermore with Daniel Hanna. What do you think of his ambitions? What do you think, or his think tanks or his... I like Daniel Hanna. I mean, he's intelligent. He's one of the best speakers I know. He's very good at telling stories. He's smart. His think tank is a free trade think tank, which is really needed right now because there's so much anti-free trade views. So I'm a big fan of Daniel Hanna, and I wish more people in the conservative movement were like Daniel Hanna rather than like, you know, fill in the blank. Does he have political ambitions still? I don't think so, but I don't know. I think one of the things he realizes is that he is in, particularly in the Trump era of the right, that he is in the smallest of minorities right now. Okay, so he's just content where he is, because I know he was part of the European Union. I mean, who knows? I don't know him well enough to say he's content where it is, but I don't think his expectation is that, in the short run, he is going to be a leading political figure. He did get a lordship, so he is now in the House of Lords. For whatever that is worth. He is now, I forgot to call him Lord Hanna, which I guess I was supposed to. But then I'm not big on protocol, I'm in Israeli. All right, Daniel, luckily I've never been invited to Buckingham Palace. Probably wouldn't go if I wasn't there. Well, you're probably not going to happen now. No. Early in November, the United Nations had COP26 on climate change. And one of the things I find particularly shocking about it is the argument that basically, well, everybody knows this is a problem. So we just have to do something. And in the Economist, Zannie Minton-Bettos, editor-in-chief wrote it this way. What's more, the science diplomacy, activism and public opinion that support cops make them the best mechanism in the world has to come to terms with a fundamental truth. The dream of a planet of almost 8 billion people, all living in material comfort will be unachievable if it is based on economy powered by coal, oil, and natural gas. Until that message sinks in, the task is to bring about bold, prompt action from willing countries in Europe and elsewhere that others cannot frustrate. Forget the science, just slap it to them. You know, I'm shocked that they're convinced, even without evidence, that we have to go, I don't know, not quite right to say back. It makes no sense that intelligent people, as I think the Economist writers are. It makes no sense that intelligent people like that can't see the complete, put aside, again, put aside the science, even if you agree with their science, can't see the unbelievable fallacy that is involved here. The idea, just in terms of science and in terms of economics, idea that you can go off fossil fuels fast enough to make a difference by the standard of their models and not suffer massively economically, is just voodoo. It's just wishful thinking. It's completely making stuff up. It has no connection to reality, zero. It's just not tenable. If you look at the Great Britain right now, they're going to struggle to warm the cities in winter this year and prices are going to go through the roof and they've got real problems and they're going to become more and more dependent on the Russians and all of that, all of that stuff. And yet they're sitting there at the Economist magazine and saying, no, we're still using too much fossil fuel. We need to use less. And what's the alternative? More windmills in the North Sea, which we've shown that the wind actually doesn't blow quite that much. More solar panels in one of the places on Earth that is most cloudy. And of course, solar panels don't work at night. And of course, the batteries to store the electricity so you can get it at night by their own standards, use more carbon to produce and to create than it does burning natural gas. So by every standard, by their own standards, by their own math, by their own science, by their own technology, by their own everything, they're completely out of liars or completely blinded by the need to fit in and say what's expected and be like everybody else and not get Greta to wag her finger at them. I mean, they admit that they're having problems because of this windmill policy. Yeah. Yet they say. We need more windmills. Let's keep going. Yeah, but this is, look, it's like politicians in America saying, yep, I mean, there's no question that if you think about it, the national debt is a drag on the economy. Let's increase it. You know, the national debt is unsustainable, but let's increase it. I mean, both Republicans and Democrats say that. Yes. Democrats were more centrist to think the national debt actually matters. So vote to spend more and more and more. Republicans who when they're in the opposition, think the national debt is a real problem. As soon as they get into power, spend more and raise the national debt. So the ability of people to completely evade reality in order to fit in or in order to sustain power or in order to satisfy their whims or in order to just, I don't know. It's hard for me to understand how a mind like that works. It's just infinite because here we have smart people that have to know that what the saying is complete nonsense. I mean, there was a really good op-ed somewhere. I think it might have been the most regional somewhere else, by I think the president of Kenya, Uganda, one of those African countries, basically saying, look people, if you force us to move to so-called renewable energy, or as Alex Epstein likes to call them, unreliable energy sources, we're going to stay poor forever. There's no way an African country can rise up from poverty using unreliables. This is the Africans telling them this. It doesn't matter. They just are blind to it. They don't want to hear it. They don't want to listen to it. They completely self-blued themselves completely in their quest. I don't know to what, to fit in, to follow the religion, I guess. It's a religion now, the religion of climate change, the religion of hatred of fossil fuels. And there must be voters within the UK who hate what's going on, but everyone supports that policy. So what do you do? I mean, it's not like you vote for the guy that says, hey, tear the windmills down and let's bring in all the clean coal we can. I think Brits was surprised that Boris Johnson was as far left as he was on these issues. And his whole party voted with him. So these are the conservatives who are bringing about the death of energy in the UK. The UK is becoming a net importer of energy from France, because the French, of all people, have the common sense, the decency to use nuclear power. And they have a surplus, and therefore they can export electricity to the UK. But it's some particularly efficient under the channel to export electricity, but that's actually what they're doing. So it's just bizarre. The Germans doubling up on, so they shut down the nuclear power plants, which caused them to have to restart coal power plants, all with the goal of going to windmills and solar panels. That resulted in increased CO2 emissions, not decreased. And they're doubling up on that. And the biggest op-poser of nuclear power in the world right now are the Germans, who just lived through a failed experiment. And every political party who ran for the German election recently was against using nuclear power. So it's like reality doesn't matter to these people. It has no standing in their mind. It's mind-boggling. There's just no reality. Facts don't matter. This is Plato on steroids in some politicized, weird, unnatural combination. You know, I don't know. It's just, it's bizarre. I cannot, really cannot explain it. I agree with you completely. All I can say is I know you may not have a lot to say. Bring Alex back again. It's a message that just isn't out there very much. Well, the next thing is, as Alex has pointed out, is there is an entire, seems to be an entire movement now, talking about this. A lot of people talking about nuclear. There are a lot of new authors talking about the impossibility of going, of getting rid of fossil fuels. So there are more authors that have picked up on the themes that Alex is proposing. There are more CEOs of relatively small oil companies and oil and gas companies who are standing up. There is an impact. It's just, you know, it's just tiny at this point relative to everything else. It's very difficult to compete with every school and every university and every intellectual and every politician. That's the real problem, right? They're training the kids before they have any idea what any of it means, the brainwashing them in effect to say, oh, you know, climate change is going to kill us. They're training kids to do two things. One is they're training them with bad ideas and they're training them not to think and that combination is pretty deadly. Thank you. Luckily kids don't listen to their teachers always. So there's always hope with kids. There is that hope, yes. Emmett, whose children, I'm sure, listen to everything he says. Everything. Yes. Everything I say. Where did we get the pills to do that? Yeah. So speaking of Alex Epstein, his new book is out and is available for pre-order. Oh, pre-order, yes. Pre-order. Pre-order. Pre-order of the book, yes. Yeah. Out in April, I think. Or February or something like that, yes. I think it was delayed because of some of these supply chain issues. For some reason it affecting books as well and I think it's going to be April. Okay. Well, so I'm wondering, have you had a chance to pre-read? Are you one of his early readers and are you going to have him on to discuss his new book? I'll definitely have him on to discuss his new book. I think we'll strategically plan it so that it has the biggest effect. Unfortunately, I don't have the kind of large audience that would have a big effect but I'm sure he'll want to do it probably before the book is published so we can get a lot of pre-orders because I think that makes a big difference to get the pre-orders. So we will do that. I have, I skimmed the book. He sent me a copy of the book. It was still rough. I mean, there were a lot of grammatical typos, things like that, but I don't do that kind of editing. So somebody else, I'm sure, will do the editing. But he wanted me to write a blog for the book, which I did. So I kind of skimmed it. We had more depth, a couple of the chapters. It's excellent. It's really, really good. It's more comprehensive, more all-encompassing than the previous book. Alex is very good at reframing the debate, reframing the argument, changing the way people think about these issues. And I think this book goes even further in trying to do that. He does not get bogged down in arguing the science, but really arguing, okay, even if you accept the science, what then? And I think he's very, very powerful doing that. And we need to win the, you know, before the book comes out, I'll have him on. We'll push the, we'll, I endorse the book completely. So I will be pushing the book as much as I can before it's published and after it's published so that we can get as big of an audience for it as possible. But the main thing is for him is to get the oil companies, to get some of the oil companies to buy large quantities and distribute to their employees and to, and to get it out there. That would be very cool. Yeah, thank you. Sure, thanks so much. All right, Shelley, thank you. Really appreciate the support. We've got a few $20 questions, so let me go through these. Let's see. Justin says there is a push in Australia for Medicare levy surcharge for the unvaccinated. In a sense, I think this is positive because it may push our public health system into a user pay model. What do you think? I mean, it's, it's, I think it's wrong to single out only unvaccinated. I mean, if they're willing to levy a surcharge on obese people, people who are preexisting conditions, people who are, who don't exercise, people who have all the stuff, then I'd say, yes, it's a baby step towards a user kind of pay model. But if it's only the vaccinated, what it basically constituted is a tax on the unvaccinated. And I just read that some country is doing that. And I can't remember which country it was. I just read it today that there's a country out there that basically is going to find the unvaccinated. So basically tax, if you unvaccinated, you'll pay an extra tax or something like that. And I guess you won't be able to go to work and you won't be able to travel. And so I, you know, it's just horrific. It's just, you know, horrific. The extent and the extent of statism and the fact that it's really almost goes unchallenged. Yes, Greece, wonderful. And thank you. That's right. It was Greece. Greece is going to find the unvaccinated. It goes, you know, and a majority of the population supports this. If you put that up for referendum in almost every country, they would vote for. Penalizing unvaccinated, right? Throwing it out of work or whatever, you know, I'm all for private employers doing whatever they want to do and discriminating in any way they want, which of course most people find horrific because of the implications of that. But anyway, that's, yes, Australia is, I don't know what's going to happen with Australia after COVID. It just has proven to be such a status country and Australians to be such sheep. I thought the sheep were in New Zealand. Anyway, you know, complete sheep and going along with whatever the government is forcing down there. All right, Dave has asked kind of a series of $20 questions. And of course you can ask $20 questions on the super chat. We're at about $195 on the super chat. That's about $400 short of our goal of $600. So it would be great if we got a significant more $20 questions. Maybe a few $50, $100 questions, that'd be great. But I'll leave it, I'll leave it up to you guys. Dave asks, I think Republicans fleeing blue cities and states only concentrating the left in dense population centers. They'll continue to de-concentrate with even less opposition forces. I'm not sure I understand any of that. I think Republicans fleeing blue cities and states only concentrating the left in dense population centers. That's true. They'll continue to deconstruct with even less opposition forces. Maybe, I mean, it's going to be interesting to watch what happens in places like California. Again, in spite of the fact that a lot of people are leaving California, a lot of people are also moving to California. Net population is moving out. But I would say in spite of what you read and what you hear, most of the people moving out of California are people who are low income, people who can't afford to be there anymore. So what's happening is services in California, quality of the services is going to decline. But wealthy people are still moving to California. California is still incredibly productive, still where much of the innovation in this country and much of the creativity in this country is happening. It would take a long time for California to decline significantly, although you could argue it already has declined if you're not in certain parts of it, in certain areas. And the question is, when those people reach a precipice where things are really, really horrible, will they take a step back from the precipice? And I think all indications are the answers. Yes. What was the last election in California? I mean, it was 2020, it was November, a year from a year ago today, a year ago this month. And if you remember, California voted down all of the radical left's agenda. In spite of the fact that Republicans supposedly have left California and therefore all that's left in California are the leftists. California has voted down the entire left agenda. They wanted to bring back affirmative action. California voted affirmative action down. They wanted to raise taxes on the rich through some kind of gimmick on property taxes. California voted it down. I can't remember the other provisions. There was a few other provisions that California voted down that the left was all excited about. And I thought generally the 2020 election was a very good election. A lot of places, a lot of Democratic strongholds actually voted moving further to the left down. Again, this goes back to my point earlier, that people embrace a collectivist agenda up to a point and then they back off of it. Again, you saw that Northern Virginia, Northern Virginia, which is a huge leftist bastion with fewer and fewer Republicans all the time, voted overwhelmingly Republican in this year because they reached a precipice. The precipice in their case was critical race theory. But it's very hot. Americans are just not going to jump eagerly into complete state control. Incrementally, yes. But there's always a point in which they rebel and they step back. And that includes states that are very, very left like California. It just didn't go all the way when they had the opportunity to go all the way. Now we'll see how it evolves. We'll see what happens in the election of 2022. We'll see how it evolves in the future. We'll see what happens when the kids start studying CRT, critical race theory in their schools, kind of that interpretation of history. We'll see if Californians rebel like the Virginians because it's going to be worse in California. We'll see how far it'll go. But again, generally, I think that there is a point where people step back from the abyss. They don't leave. Again, the election of 2020, when the Republicans supposedly left went the Republicans way in terms of the ballot initiatives in California. The Californians did not adopt the crazy left agenda. So you overestimate the number of people who actually leave. Let's see, Dave Goodman, do you think cities will become unlivable in the next decade? Maybe we'll have a situation like Brazil where they'll have some nice gated communities surrounded by peasants and infrastructure poverty. No, I don't think that's going to happen in the next decade. I mean, it might happen over the longer run. But I've said this many, many times. Things get bad much slower than you expect them to get bad. In a country as rich, as wealthy, and as successful as the United States of America. I mean, I was in Manhattan in New York and Manhattan doesn't look like it's falling apart. It certainly looks depressed. Certainly the area around Midtown, which other office buildings are on where people are not going to work anymore. But once you go on into Upper East Side and Upper West Side or even the Lower East Side, where I went to the restaurant and people are out, people are engaged, people are, I just don't see the barbed wires, the crime and the favelas, the poverty that you see in a place like Brazil. It just doesn't exist in the United States in a large scale. You'll see ever-growing homeless tents in certain parts of the city and they'll be marginalized. But again, even there, as time goes on, you will see that even in leftist cities, they will try to marginalize those and push them out further out more and more and more. If you go to San Francisco, as dumpy as San Francisco is in terms of the homeless people, San Francisco is still vibrant and alive and people are moving in and real estate prices are going up and tech is still being created and startups are still being started and venture capital is still pouring money into it. If you haven't been to California or New York recently, and I know Dave, you live in New York, but it just is not as bad as you would imagine based on the stories and based on your expectation of a city who's been managed by de Blasio for the last eight years or ever long he's been there. It's just not falling apart. It's not good, but it's not falling apart. Median prices in California of homes are really, really high. Why? Because people want to live there. If people didn't want to live there, prices would tumble. Basic supply and demand. Dave says, I have a suspicion that Miami would look like LA or New York if it hadn't been for mass migration of freedom-loving Cubans and South Americans. No, no, Dave, you got it all wrong. South Americans don't love freedom. South Americans pollute freedom. They destroy freedom in America, which is why conservatives are idiots for lashing out at these people. Of course, I mean, I've said this all along, Latinos, the Latino immigrants have always been a potential source for conservative votes and for Republican votes. If the Republicans had cultivated them, and if the Republicans had not been so nasty to them, they were always going to be much more likely to be conservatives than to be rabid leftists. Ultimately, they left leftist places. So they left leftists, but more than that, they're entrepreneurial, they're hardworking, they have conservative values to the extent that those exist. Those mean something. Inflation is a mismatch of supply and demand. If you don't recognize that inflation is a mismatch of supply and demand, you don't understand economics. Demand exceeds supply. Prices go up. That's what happens. Now, the question is, why does demand exceed supply? It can exceed supply because in a particular good and real estate inflation is driven by the fact that demand exceeds supply. And when more people want to move into a neighborhood and there are no new homes in that neighborhood being built, but more people want to move in, prices in that neighborhood go up. Now, overall inflation across the entire economy goes up when the supply of money, which is the flip side of the demand for goods, goes up. That is, if the supply of money goes up, people have a lot more money and therefore they have a lot more money with which to demand goods, that raises prices across the entire economy. But inflation in real estate is not necessarily monetary. It could be just more people want the good. And indeed in America, that's exactly the case. We've got a shortage in the United States of about 10 million homes because what do you call it, family creations, a household creation, exceeds the number of homes being built. And when you have household creations exceeding the number of homes being built, you get prices going up. So you can make all kinds of claims about my knowledge, about all kinds of issues, and you can call me all kinds of names. But when it comes to economics, and most people don't understand California, particularly most people on the right have no concept of California. You don't understand California. And you don't understand prices of real estate if you think that what's causing price of real estate to go up is just the supply of money. Why aren't prices going up in Ohio? If it was just the supply of money, prices of real estate would go up in Ohio as well. They're not. Immigration is one of the ways you solve the real estate crisis because the only people who actually know how to build homes are those immigrants who come in from South America. Americans don't go for construction jobs. To actually build more homes, you need more immigrants. And to build more homes, you need to loosen building regulations, but you also need more construction workers. Right now, the United States has a massive shortage of workers. And that is also causing prices to go up. And yet the demand for work is high. And that causes, that's because of printing of money, and that causes prices to go up. And one of the ways to solve this is to increase the number of workers. All right. And that requires immigration. Shaz, but John Galt said, fear of death is not a love of life. It will not give you the knowledge required to keep it. That's right. Is Voldemort an effective representative of this idea? Is JK Wallen in tune with Iron Man's sense of life? I mean, yes and no. There are aspects of Harry Potter that have that sense of life. And there's no question that this idea of fear of death is not the same as living. It's not the same as love of life. There are aspects of that in many stories and many novels. And there's an aspect of that in Harry Potter. Certainly the depiction of evil in Harry Potter is very effective. I think JK Wallen falls into the cliche of, unfortunately, of the hero having to be in a sense of Jesus-like character in the final book of Harry Potter. I mean, literally, he almost becomes a Jesus. He's almost resurrected. He has to sacrifice his life for everybody else. I mean, there's a certain Jesus element and a Christian element in it. But if you put that aside, and I think you can because there are a lot of good things. There's a lot of good things in the novel. And there are aspects of JK Wallen's sense of life that, yes, is a sense of life that is commensurate with a pro-life view of life. And JK Wallen seems to be a pretty heroic character, although I'm not allowed to say that because the right hates her because she's a leftist, a feminist, and the left hates her because she tries to be objective about trans. So she's hated by everybody. Okay, Kyle, and then we'll go to our panelists. Kyle says, I've read them, and one thing struck me as odd. Why are IDM1 societies so fragile and short-lived compared to M2 societies which seem to become a default for most cultures, longer lived and more difficult to change? So I think the reason is that D is unstable because it's fragmented. It doesn't allow unity and cohesion, and therefore it ultimately leads to tribalism and infighting and social breakdown. I think M is unstable because it's inconsistent, and ultimately the inconsistencies come about and M1 evolves into D1 and D2 which evolves into M2 or M1 evolves into M2. But inconsistencies, shallow inconsistencies, don't last, and this is the point I ran made. In a compromise between good and evil, evil is the only side with something to gain. So if you mix rationality with irrationality, what is going to be drained from the society is rationality. Irrationality, if legitimized, why even hold a little bit of rationality in there? Why even hold a little bit of I? So if M is a mixture of mysticism, of complete M2 and I, ultimately it has to go either to I or to M2. It's not sustainable. The real question and the challenge is why do I survive so long? And the reason I survive so long is because it's never had a proper manifestation. That is, the I has never been all the way. It's never been fully philosophically realized. Only I ran has that fully philosophical realization. So the idea is that an I based on I man's objectivism would last a long time, would be long lived. But an I in Greece with all the contradictions and the challenges that I was detailing in philosophy presented or an I in the Enlightenment where they weren't quite willing to give up on Christianity and weren't willing to give up on altruism, it's too mixed. It's not I all the way down. It's not integrated around reality and reason all the way down. And that's why it hasn't been stable in history. But the argument is it would be stable under objectivism. All right, I'm gonna do another round with a panel. This is I guess your last opportunity to ask super chat questions. We are at I don't know around what we had before. I don't know 200 something dollars. So we're not we're not a lot above 200, maybe 210, 220 bucks. You know, it would be nice of which leave at least got a $400 or $500. 600 is the goal. This would be one of the few shows in the last couple of months that hadn't received that many. But we must have not have a lot of viewers tonight for whatever reason. So maybe because I didn't advertise it a lot. Seems threats of constant wars killed I in Greece. Yeah, but in that sense, Aristotle probably came too late to prevent those wars too late to change the culture in a way that would have avoided Alexander. I think that's probably the case. All right, Adam. Okay, I just wanted to point out that the French still have an educational system based on the French enlightenment, which is not unmixed because it includes Rousseau. Yep. But in the sciences, it's excellent. And that's why the French have no clear power. And in spite of really bad economic policy, the French economy chugs along and does okay, even though they have some of the worst labor policies and some of the just bad economic policies through and through. But they do have a well educated population, at least parts of the population, the people in the cities. They have good scientists, they have businesses that actually do good work in spite of the bad economic policies. And in spite of all the challenges, the fact that they brought in a lot of young immigrants has also helped them economically, even if culturally, because the French so resist, what do you call it, assimilation. Culturally, it's going to be, it's really, really destructive to French society. All these Muslim immigrants, if the French embraced assimilation, France would be a very different place, a much better place and much more successful. I fear for the future of France, because of their unwillingness to assimilate. Now the French curriculum, especially in STEM disciplines, is available in the English language world as the International Baccalaureate Curriculum. Yeah, yeah, which are the best schools in America offer as an alternative to AP classes. And it's also available for homeschoolers. Yep. So, you know, education has a light at the end of the tunnel. Besides the Objectivist Curriculum, we have the International Baccalaureate, we have Singapore Math, Homeschooler can educate their kids using well-designed curricula at home that come from countries that don't have this influence of Russian education as the U.S. has. Yep, I agree. U.S. is way too influenced by the Prussians and way too influenced by Dewey, who of course was influenced by German philosophers. Okay, Nick. Okay, I'm on. I just want to touch again, Bill, done at the theme of inflation, because it's so in our face right now and it's just around the corner. Now, you made the point when you were talking about it earlier, it's not around the corner, it's here. It's here. It's here. That's what I'm trying to say. It's here and it's a much larger issue than it actually is because we all know how fraudulent the CPI index is in terms of it omits a whole bunch of stuff. Be careful there because I would argue that CPI is for the most part overstated inflation not understated. So, you have to be very careful with these things. It's not obvious. I've never heard that perspective, but maybe you can get into it one day. Now, what I wanted to, so you made the point now, there's, in terms of layers of inflation, number one, there's monetary inflation, which we all know it's from a macro, it affects everything, correct? You just made this point. But how do you measure it? Nobody knows how to measure it. Okay, so what I'm trying to, I'm trying to figure out all the layers of inflation. So this monetary, there's input inflation in terms of resources, wages, I guess, land, what other, what do you mean by inflation? Look, inflation doesn't mean prices going up. Yeah, you said supply and demand, right? So, because that's how inflation was being used when somebody said that, you know, house prices in California are going up. That's not inflation. That is, that is just prices going up. Inflation is primarily a monetary phenomena. Okay. It is a monetary phenomena that relates to the amount of money being created. The problem is that since 1971, when we went up Bretton Woods, we're unmoored to any standard. It's not clear even how to measure the amount of money being created. Nobody knows what the right measure is for money. We don't know really what the monetary inflation is. I don't think the Fed knows. I don't think anybody knows. We don't know what money is. I mean, is, you know, a lot of these tokens and a lot of these crypto are being used as money. They're being used as mediums of exchange. People are billionaires off of it. People are taking loans from the bank off of, you know, Bitcoin as collateral. So, you know, that's money that just came out of nowhere and be created. So, it's, it's, um... So, what's M2? M2 is just a measure, one measure of money that's not very useful. So, what's the right measure? And none of the traditional measures that Milton Friedman talks about, that they talked about in their old days mean anything anymore. My point is economists don't know what's going on in terms of monetary measure, monetary measures of money. I mean, I've made the claim that treasury bills could be viewed as money, right? And that's why when the Fed buys treasury bills and puts money out there into the economy, that that is, that that is, they're not actually increasing the money supply because they're taking out one form of money and exchanging it for another. This issue is super complicated, super complicated. And economists are falling over each other in terms of misapplying it and understanding how to do it. And that's why nobody's predictions have been right on this, nobody's. And, you know, it's hard. I think what happened during COVID is we got the equivalent of what has been called helicopter money. This is the first time, really, in American history where we mailed money to people's bank accounts. We, that's called helicopter money. Helicopters just drop money from the sky. Well, we drop money from the sky into people's bank accounts. And that's why you're seeing the current increase in prices across the entire economy. But you could argue there's been monetary inflation for a long time, but that monetary inflation has gone into things like asset prices, stock prices and things like that. So the CPI index that they just came up with, and the figure of 6.1 or whatever the number was, 6. whatever, right? Does it have any validity? It tells you that the basket of goods that they're measuring has gone up by 6.1%. And to the extent that you buy a basket of goods similar to that, your cost of living has gone up 6.1. But since I view one of us buys a different basket of goods, this is the problem with all aggregate measures in economics. Since every one of us buys a different basket of goods, in a sense, our cost of living is different. Your cost of living might have gone up 2%. Cost of living might have gone up 10%. Because I don't know, I consumed education a lot, or I consume healthcare a lot. It depends what you consume. But broadly, the CPI is a basket of goods that's supposed to be representative of the economy. To what extent is it a good representation of what's going on in the economy is debatable. So 6.1% is not bad. It's somewhere, you know, for some people it's a little less, for some people it's a little more. It's kind of an average. Real estate is typically not in that basket of goods. And when it is, in some measures, it's usually rent, not the literal price, but rent of course in the little price of real estate are highly correlated. It's problematic. How much education should be in the basket of goods, given that some of us don't have kids anymore and therefore education is not relevant. The point is that there is no such thing for you, your cost of living has gone up by the CPI. But that's the problem with aggregate measures. It's a problem of statist economics. It's the problem of the government controlling money and controlling all these things. In a truly laissez-faire economy, prices would change. But there would be no aggregate concern about any of this. So what indicators do you look for when you make decision investment decisions in terms of trying to factor in inflation? I assume the market knows, I know less than the market does, and I am well-diversified. And I just put my money in a diversified basket of goods, and as long as I believe that the world is not going to hell, that basket of goods will probably do better than anything else that I have. So you're on defense? Yeah, I actively invest in my hedge fund, and there I don't make macroeconomic predictions. The people I know make macroeconomic predictions don't do well as investors. That's good to know. Yep. And I said that in my objective investment course in 1998. So you're better off focusing on the company bottom rather than trying to make the macro where we are in the cycle? Even there, I'm short as many companies as I'm long, so I don't spend that much time on any particular company. I don't want to go into my investment strategy, but my point is that I don't try to make big macroeconomic predictions. It's hard enough making micro predictions. It's almost impossible to make macro predictions. Now, Peter Schiff makes macro predictions all the time, and sometimes he's wrong, and sometimes he's right. And when he's right, he makes a lot of money, and when he's wrong, he makes a lot of money, because he's got a great business. I don't have that kind of business. He's a one-track pony. Maybe. I mean, I like Peter. We all like Peter, but his focus is on precious metals. Yes, and his focus is on precious metals. Therefore, he sees everything through the present inflation, and right now he's right about inflation. Although, if you look at gold, gold has not gone up that much. So one wonders what is really going on. I think understanding economics in a mixed economy is really, really, really, really difficult, and I don't know anybody who does it well. I've recommended some economists that I think do it well, like John Cochran, but I think even John Cochran, he's too smart to make predictions and to invest in those predictions. He's smart enough to have a blog where he makes predictions, but also smart enough not to put too much money on. So according to John, we're heading towards more inflation because of the extent to which we have debt and because of the helicopter money that we had. All right, let's see. Daniel. Well, it was back in October, but I wonder if, completely by accident, Trump actually did something that I agree with. He started a few things by accident that I agree with. Okay. Well, this one is that he started his own social media platform instead of threatening. Well, he did both. He threatened and started his own platform. Yeah, you're right. He did. But boy, it must have been a long path to get him there, but I was glad to see he finally off doing his own thing and get out of trying to force people to do what he wants. Yes. Let's hope it stays that way. Yeah. Yeah. That was my only comment, very quick. Thanks. Emmett. Emmett, you're- Yes, sorry about that. So I saw that the Merck drug was approved provisionally today and just- Oh, it was approved. The emergency committee recommended it, I see. Just wondering what- I know you've talked about both the drugs are coming from Merck and Pfizer a few times recently, but just wondering where that's- where it's going to go. I mean, are we going to be able to basically save people's lives entirely from those? What are your- what are your thoughts on that? Say that again. I'm sorry, I missed that. Say that again. Just what are your thoughts on those drugs in general and what kind of value do they represent? I mean, I think the game changes if they work as promised or if they work as advertised. I think the game changes. They have- Let me see. They have the capacity to reduce deaths dramatically, maybe close to zero. They have the ability to reduce hospitalizations by anywhere from 30 to 50%. That's a game changer. That takes away the whole flatten the curve. The drug itself flattens the curve completely. I mean, hospitalizations are ready down because of vaccines. Deaths are ready down because of vaccines and because of natural immunity. If now you add on top of that, these drugs basically COVID becomes a non-event. This is why it's unthinkable that they're not just rushing to approve these and get them out there. They're not very expensive. $700 for a dose. Insurance companies will pick that up with no problem. $700 is not that expensive. Again, insurance companies will cover it. I don't understand why the FDA and the others don't just approve it as quickly as possible and get it onto the market as quickly as possible and allow doctors to prescribe it and insurance companies pay for it so we can get over this ridiculous disease. I mean, I have been saying this- If I ever, I think we could have been over COVID over a year ago. I think we could have started vaccinations in May, June of last year of 2020. I think we could have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and we could have been well past this. Testing, tracing, isolating plus vaccines early would have done it. All of this is just unbelievable. Now we're prolonging it even further because they won't approve the drugs. It's unthinkable to me. Thank you. Sure. We're at $240. We'll see if anybody steps in and contributes something before we're done. We're almost done. I'm going to take one call from 917. Are we code? Are you there? Hey, you're on. It's Andrew. Hey, Andrew. How's it going? Pretty good. How are you? Good. Good. The conservatives, they're talking a lot these days about masculinity. Don't you think their concept of masculinity is rooted in fear when Josh Hawley talks about it? They associate it with fear of immigrants and fear of... Yeah, I think it's that, but I think it's deeper. If you look at BAP, it's interesting that they're going from masculinity because that's the big critique of Bronze Age perverts and others against the conservatives is that they're not masculine enough and his version of masculinity is anti-mind. That's, I think, the essence of their view of masculinity. The essence of their view of masculinity is anti-thinking, anti-mind, ultimately thinking, evaluating, judging is feminine to them and it is the physical, action-oriented, passion-driven, violence-emoting, which is what to them is the essence of masculinity. And, of course, that means you view one of things according to their view of masculinity, one of the things you learn about the world if you're in the Bronze Age, right? In the Bronze Age, the world is a zero-sum game. This is not capitalism. This is the Bronze Age. Everything land is finite, women are finite. It's all a struggle for resources and struggle for women, and therefore you kill or get killed. And the whole mentality that they have, which partially comes from their view of masculinity or maybe their view of masculinity comes from this, is a zero-sum world and that's where the fear comes from. That is immigrants are taking our jobs, they're taking our women, they're taking our resources. It's fear of look at CRT and everything like that. They're feminine. Why are they feminine? Because they're intellectual. They're thinkers. They should be denounced and rejected, not because of their bad ideas, but because of the way they are. You know, Tucker Carlson applauded when Chinese government made it illegal for effeminate men to be on television. What does it mean to be an effeminate man? It's a man that's not physical. It's not muscular. It's not in physical in the world. So it's the zero-sum mentality of the Middle Ages, of knights in shining armor who are fighting over, again, a given supply of land and a given supply of women, from which their view of masculinity has evolved. And in that sense they're barbarians and they're primitive and ultimately they're weak. They're weak because what drives his ideas, the problem is that even though they're weak, ultimately their ideas, when combined with religion, and you have to combine it with religion because otherwise they have nothing to stand on, is once you combine it with religion, they can provide a pretty powerful stance historically from which to oppress and suppress people and from which to control. So you know, that is... Can I just have a quick follow-up? Yep, sure. What do you think of the adage, better to be feared than loved? Well, I think it's barbaric. I think it's absolutely ridiculous. Better to be feared than loved is again, is all about a zero-sum fight for resources. In a life-or-death battle for resources and in that world, women are viewed as resources, then yeah, you better be feared than loved. Love doesn't give you anything but fear will allow you to gain resources without having to exert too much effort. But that's a sick world. That is a sick world. You want to be loved and to be feared is... In a capitalist society, to be feared is meaningless. That's what freedom is about. One of the things that freedom... This is why I always say objectivism is the philosophy of love. It's because capitalism is the system of love. It's a system that allows us to love. It's a system that in a sense leaves you free to pursue your values, to pursue your loves, to engage in love. You're not constantly struggling to survive. You have time for love and you have the ability to manifest that love. So no, fear is a negative emotion. Love is a positive emotion. Fear of you. Why should you be feared? I don't want to be feared. I want to be respected. I want to be only somebody people want to trade with. They don't trade with people they fear. It all presupposes a power struggle between people. Yeah, so now it comes to some view of the world. My gain is your loss. Conan the Barbarian, political philosophy. Thanks, Andrew. All right. These will be the final super chat questions unless you guys jump in and ask a super chat questions. You're welcome to do so, particularly if it's a high dollar question because we're way behind our goals today. I don't know what happened to you guys today. All right. Scott asks, asked a long time ago, he's been waiting patiently for this. I don't want you to give away any strategy, what strategy? But for Hazone, will you take on national conservatism or keep it to individualism versus conservatism? I don't think you can take on conservatism without taking on national conservatism. I think today, the loudest, most coherent voice advocating for conservatism are the national conservatism. And of course, Hazone is a national conservatism. So, so of course, I'll have to take on national conservatism as part of the individualism versus conservatism and it'll come from him that is in his defense of conservatism, the nationalism, the religion will come through. I mean, Hazone cannot defend conservatism without defending religion. He cannot defend conservatism without defending nationalism. So it will be part and parcel with my attack on his position and my defense of individualism as the counter. And you know, it's going to be interesting to see what examples he brings up, what issues he brings up. He seems to talk a lot about sex and about pornography and the evils of that and that is a manifestation of individualism. He will definitely argue that individualism is what the left is all about and that individualism means leftism, that the inevitable consequence of individualism is the left. He has argued in the past that the enlightenment led to postmodernism and to wokeism, that those are inevitable, that is an inevitable path. So it's likely that the debate will be very philosophical because I will defend the enlightenment and argue that the enlightenment did not lead to postmodernism, that it's the perversion of the enlightenment from Kant to Hegel to Schopenhauer to Marx and Nietzsche that result to Haydinger that resulted in what we are today and that all of those figures are anti-enlightenment figures and figures much more associated with him. Hegel ultimately is the ultimate nationalist. I mean nationalism is Hegelian and Hegel is anti-reason and at the left today is anti-individual. I mean if you look at the, I gave you some examples of the CRT woke speak code, you're supposed to be anti-individualism. If you advocate for individualism you need to be silenced. So it's going to be an interesting debate. I mean I'm curious to see how it evolves and I haven't yet solidified my strategy. I'll be working on it on the weekend, the debate is on Wednesday next week. I thought of doing a show on individualism to help me try to get my thoughts together on it and I might do that over the weekend we'll see but I'm not exactly sure what. I need to listen tomorrow and read more of Jorm's argument. I'll be doing that tomorrow and prepping over the weekend in terms of what I'm going to cover. It's not going to be my usual debate because I usually debate leftists. I never debate people on the right so this will be very interesting and very different and challenging. I think it'll be a real challenge. He's very smart. Let's get to be very clear. He's very smart. He's very knowledgeable. He's a philosopher. I'm a finance guy. He's a philosopher. He knows this stuff so it's not going to be easy. All right Brie, the COFISA actually blamed the FDA for the cure for COVID-19 not being available. I agree with the COFISA. He didn't call them sadistic ghouls but I'm okay with baby steps. The interviewer's in CNBC Squawk Box this morning. Excellent and he's absolutely right. They're absolutely sadistic ghouls. We have a cure for COVID and the FDA is twiddling their thumbs. They took a first step in approving it today. One of their committees in a vote of 13 to 10 voted for it so hopefully it'll be approved soon. Michael asked how was the left able to take over all the prosecutors offices in the country? Well they haven't taken all the prosecutors offices in the country. They've taken a few not all of them. I understand public defenders offices but DA offices typically were a public and stronghold. No, not in typically leftist. They've just gone even further to the left. They managed to do it the way they managed to do it all. They have ideas. They advocate for them and the public goes along and the public vote for them and they take advantage of low voter turnout. They see one of the things they did is that everybody says Soros got them in office. I mean Soros contributed to a lot of these prosecutors campaigns and what the left did because the left understands these things. What the left did is it focused on prosecutors. That is it put a lot of money into those campaigns versus a lot of money into other political campaigns. They focused on prosecutors because they knew how much power they had and that's why they have significant control over some of the biggest prosecutors offices in the country. But there's going to be a massive backlash against them and they're going to be thrown out of office. If you think people in California are embracing this all these gangs stealing stuff and from stores and prosecutors not prosecuting, you're wrong. California is going to vote out of office a lot of these prosecutors that they voted in. They will learn their lesson. Michael says will South Korea be the first objective of this country? I doubt it but I don't know. I have no idea. There's certain really good things about South Korea. They're really, really bad things about South Korea. Squid games being won. So hard to tell. Emmanuel asks I find it really hard to get into fiction despite multiple attempts with who go. Outside of Rand really don't find fiction a good use of my time. Any suggestions? I mean you got to know how to read who go. Like who goes 93 you got to skip like the long descriptions and just particularly on the first read and just go straight to the action. I think you'll enjoy it if you just accept that you skip all the descriptive parts and just go for it. You don't really have to start with a go, start with something exciting and fun. I'm trying to think of something in modern modern books. Pick up Don Watkins latest fiction and see if you enjoy that. I really enjoyed the Go with the Dragon tattoo a few years ago. Pick that up and see if that captures you and you can get through it and you enjoy it. Just the pleasure of it. You don't have to learn anything from it. Just the pleasure of reading. And then there's this author from the 19th century who's not like who go real deep but very heroic and fun Sabatini. Sabatini. I've got a bunch of his books here. Captain Blood is one of his stories and they're great stories. I mean Tolstoy is difficult. God Tolstoy is difficult. I mean don't start with Tolstoy. But take the lighter ones. Take lighter fiction and just get into the stories who go. It's hard particularly if you read all the Kalamit K is a good story. There are a lot of just good reads but don't feel like you have to read the classics particularly if you're not used to reading literature. Start with things that are later. Start with easier things and then slowly work up to who go. Mr. Muffin. How do you do research about a topic you're about to talk about and what makes you believe in that research? I mean the only way to do research is to try to get a wider way of facts. Try to get as close to the source as you can so that you can make it in valuation of the facts yourself. If you're relying on secondary sources try to get secondary sources from a variety of different points of view. Don't just stick to one and then integrate it with the rest of your knowledge. And if you've got a good base of knowledge and if you haven't then you have to work on it then you can usually spot things that just don't make sense because they don't integrate with other things. And you know the way I believe my research is that I do a lot of it and that I do it from all different perspectives. You know I don't trust partisan data. And like I was reading somebody the other day who has been pretty good in COVID sometimes. And then I was reading and I was looking at the statistics he was reporting. And he was reporting, I can't remember, X number of people are vaccinated in statewide. So I went to the data for statewide and he was wrong. Pretty significantly. So instead of 70% vaccination rate he was saying they were 90% vaccinated. So why did he do that? Why just not state the actual vaccination rate? And then the way again he was using statistics, the way he was dividing numbers it was just wrong. Now I'm not going to use him as a data source. He just made himself unreliable. I try to go like if somebody says Trump said X. Like there was the whole thing about what did Trump say about Charlottesville? Did he make them all equivalents? And people say Trump said X and Y and people showing bits of the speech and everything. So what I do is I get the actual video of the entire speech and I listen to it. And then because I can't always retain it, can't always remember it, I'll get a transcript and read it. And by the way, yes, Trump did make them all equivalency between the Nazis and everybody else there. It's in the transcript. It's quite clear. I mean he tried to backtrack it because half the time he doesn't know what he's talking about. But yes, he did make them all equivalency and you can see it when you read the transcript. So you can read different sections out of context. So I try whenever somebody says Biden said X, Trump said Y, Bush said Z. Okay, where did he say it? I try to get the video and listen to it. So that's how you do research. It's more and more difficult. It's harder and harder work. You have to do more and more of it because it's hard to trust any of the sources out there almost impossible to trust. Outside of names like, this is Daniel, like far outside of names, you seem to have a good memory when it comes to arguments, historical facts, etc. Any tips you've picked up, I get mad at myself when details like that slip. I mean, I know why I have it. I don't know how to get it, if that makes sense. So the reason I have that, I don't have memory for dates and names and, but I have memory for history and broad themes and sequences and causality. And the reason I have it, the reason I have it, is because I am a good integrator. This is my unique skill. My mind integrates stuff. It sees connections. So I associate, if I'm ever talking about, and this is why I can speak extra perenniously, I think well, because my mind is trained to go to the relevant facts because those relevant facts are filed in the right place and they're integrated with the different pieces of knowledge and the right philosophical ideas. So it's one's ability to integrate and everything you can do to integrate things. You hear a piece of news about what's going on, I don't know, in China and you ask yourself, okay, why is it going on China? What else do I know about China? And then you say, well, there are other countries where some of the things are going on. What's the similarities between those countries? How is those integrated? And is this similar to what was going on in the United States, you know, in Europe, in the Middle Ages and what was the, whatever philosophy is drawing like that? So it's constantly asking yourself these questions as you're reading the news, as you're reading about events. And that's what I think I do in a sense instinctually. It's not instinctually, but I do it automatically, I'm automatized. That ability to constantly connect things with other things, constantly connect my knowledge with other relevant knowledge and see them all as one integrated whole. So I can jump between places all the time. And that's what makes it possible for me to remember those things. It's not memory. I don't know how memory works physiologically, but it doesn't strike me as just memory. Memory is like the name. It's far away, something I have to grab it and get it. This is a whole chain. These are whole sequences that are filed somehow together and connected somehow together and are stimulated by certain ideas or certain things that are happening. All right. Cool. Thanks everybody. Thanks for the Superchatters. Thanks for all of you who support the show on a monthly basis. Please consider doing so. I am, as I said earlier, looking for sponsors for the, for the Iran rules show. So if you'd like to become a sponsor of the Iran rules for life shows, please let me know. It's $1,000 show sponsorship. I could easily do another 10. So if somebody wants to do 10 grand as a sponsorship for 10 shows, that would be great. Or just one or just start a campaign of 10 people putting in $100 for those. Again, those don't do very well in terms of viewership, but some of you seem to really, really like them and really, really value them. And it's to you, I guess I'm appealing to consider sponsoring them. All right. I will see you guys all on Thursday, 7 p.m. Eastern time. Bye everybody.